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Words can be very hurtful, all kinds of words are a form of violence from one person to another, doing as they do intruding into another person’s privacy of living within himself or herself. So one must be proportionate in the use of words to the injustices that are thereby perpetrated upon the individual. One has the right to reply to any form of intrusion, verbal, physical or legal. It requires judgement based on awareness of the intentions of the perpetrator to determine for oneself what form of intrusion is taking place and so develop the right instruments to defend one’s raison d’etre for that moment only. It is not a permanent brain-conditioning state of mind that one has entered into that dictates what one does feel the next moment, for calmness of mind generates the knowledge and understanding of the situations one faces, so let the moment pass by. Time is the best healer, time is the best counsellor, as the English proverbs state.
To a Vaishnavist, there is no limit to the use of words. So when Dabanjan Chakraborty wrote on Facebook: ‘when someone asks you Religion first or country first, he said my religion teaches country first. My reply was ‘without the right religion you cannot get the country right, the country you want to be living in’. and exchange followed in which I clarified Vaishavism further as follows:
‘Buddhism is too extreme an expression of sattvic guna, rajasic guna of moderation, the middle path between sattvic and tamasic elements of our consciousness if optimal for the individual and for a country’. He seemed to enquire how one deals with oppression. And I replied as follows:
‘It has to be non-violent according to the Vaishnavist, believing as we do in ahimsa, only words in legal institutions to secure the rights of self-determination is allowed in my religion. The words used should be truthful, even gallies (because we are not pure-sattvically pious) to express our frustrations to the oppressors, like 'saale, bhosadiwale, madarchod, suar ke bacche kahinke, ******** pig-**** *******s, criminals, and ****bags', in showing our determination not to cooperate the oppressors, and retain our individual and national identity as Hindus. To preserve that Hinduism is our dharma, we preserve it through persuasive arguments to the internal tamasic and sattvic oppressors preventing the formulation of such a 'dharmarashtra' To preserve such a dharmarashtra will then be the collective sarvouttam dharma. A bad dharma rashtra should not be preserved but left to disinetrate into Nature in the fullness of time. Nature is sacrosanct and will take its due course, if we ourselves are not active in preserving Nature.
Gunas exist as part of Creation in the thing Vaishnavists call Brahma-Nature, with gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva who we can refer to as Lords of the gunas. It is our choice alone which guna we subscribe to at which moment in time to deal with the dangers we face to our material survival. Survival is the key, survival in as great a comfort as it is possible to attain within the liberty-restrictions of the State that we live under to express our true feelings on the oppressors, is a matter of conscience, as to whether we wish to survive at all and to what level of martyrdom we are prepared to endure to practice our religion. As a Vaishnavist, the bottom line is that we are not martyrs to our religion deliberately and intentionally. We are non-violent in the Gandhian mould, we will tolerate being arrested, put in mental asylums, for our cause, but we will never do suicide-bombing like the Islamists, and we will never fight with our physical arms and weapons of rifles or atomic bomb weapons of mass destruction, not even demonstrate in the streets and cause disturbances to Nature from actions of inciting violence to property-infrastructure or to Law Enforcement personnel. We are not vane so disagree with the Government of Indian holding nuclear weapons which we wish to see wiped out of the face of the whole Planet. We are prepared to be jailed into prisons for the rest of our lives for our belief above. But we will never take up weapons, or physically fight another human being, the tiger, the lion, the snake as all these are Sri Krishna, our Creator’s, created creatures. Our love for Sri Krishna is shown not by doing puja in rituals, but through our actions, our karma. It has to be pristine sound, for however long we live’.