Well begun...

 Sanju spoke about Prakash Mama on the occasion of  Mama's Platinum Jubilee Celebration. How well and effectively he began, how wonderfully he summed up all of Mama's unique qualities! Indeed his three minutes long speech was wonderful. Well begun is indeed half done.

Yet Sanju's speech  was wonderful not only because it was well begun but also because it was well intentioned. That was why it sounded remarkable and genuine. The leaders' talks, for instance, are exceptionally well begun, well articulated, but the intentions behind them are hardly genial or genuine, and hence  the speeches are a problem in the end.

Look at the entire dialectics around the current Russian war, for example. Like the war, the speechifying, too, is extremely efficient, but hardly efficacious. That is, I suppose, because such delivery is neither human nor humane.

A war, for example, is terrible because its costs are human in the end. Humane they never are, moreover. When a soldier breathes his last in a war, for example, it is not just a man dying. 

He is somebody's son. His old parents, too, lose a lifetime when the body is home. Draped in whichever colours it might be, their universe is forever dark thenceforth. He is somebody's brother, somebody's best buddy. His children's future is forever dark henceforth. His better half would always be a half henceforth. An entire web of relationships is forever frozen in grief and loss from then on.

In other words, wars may or not begin well, but they never end well because the human(e) cost of a war is beyond any count. It was hence that the sixties were truly volatile. The student unrest, the feminist questioning of the status quo, the racial upheaval were all indeed earth shaking. Yet what uniquely defi(n)ed the decade were the gunny bags back from Vietnam.  

Especially because the war machinery now is horribly lethal, how one wishes no war ever began! However well begun it may appear to a power monger, be it Russia or China or its minions like our dear neighbour, for each and every one involved in it directly, and for millions like us suffering it indirectly, it is never going to end well.

Pratima@ revolutions never can truly emerge from the barrel of a gun!