JOIN USThe making of a hero
Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest a few weeks ago in Myanmar. You could call it a victory of sorts. Though only if your expectations were really low. We have not seen democracy in the country for many years, and Suu Kyi, the figurehead of peaceful, democratic process, has been locked up in her own house since 1989 under one pretext or another, with few brief interludes of freedom. In 2007, protests against the government were led by thousands of Buddhist monks.
The military government opened fire upon them, mixing the saffron of their Buddhist robes with the fresh crimson of their blood. This is the same government that, fearful of foreign influence, let its people die by the hundreds, and maybe by the thousands, when it refused any foreign assistance in the wake of the Cyclone Nargis that devastated the country in 2008, killed up to 200,000 people and left an estimated million others homeless.
In such a place the release of one person from a house arrest sounds like nothing, and yet for the thousands that gathered to greet her, for the may tens of thousands who could not, and God only knows how many hundreds of thousands that heaved a sigh of relief at the news, it meant something. Aung San Suu Kyi is not just another person. She is a hero. Her life and actions affect millions, and we are all just a little better for the fact that somebody like that is around.
What defines heroism
At times I wonder if we understand what the term ‘hero’ means anymore. We don’t seem to have heroes these days, except in comic books, and even those seem to be full of their own personal problems. When you mention that somebody is your hero, people tend to look at you in a funny way. If you bring up those who participated in our Independence struggle, you will find at least a dozen books telling you that each, in his individual way, was a villain worse than the rest. It almost seems like we should give up, that it is no use trying to figure out the heroes from the rest, because everybody is flawed, and people do things for their own reasons, most of which we shall never know about. That would seem to be the easiest thing to do: to give up trying to understand things, make a cynical remark, and move on.
But then you read the news about Aung San Suu Kyi, and somehow all of this sounds petty, merely an excuse to ignore the greatness of somebody doing something truly worthwhile. Maybe one reason people are so happy to pull holes in the characters and lives of the truly heroic is because they expose the fact that in our normal daily life most of us are not up to taking such a challenge, or are just too afraid to.
You have the case of Irom Sharmila, who started a hunger strike in 2000 to protest the use of the abuse by military and paramilitary personnel of civilians, and primarily civilian women, in the North East. In response, the government set up a very high powered Commission to Review the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) set up by the Home Ministry. The commission delivered its report at the end of 2005, and its message was blunt: the law was being used exploitatively, often not in the ways originally imagined. Paramilitary and police forces - which are not even covered by the law - were using its draconian nature as a cover to get away with all sorts of crimes.
Most people, whether military or non-military, did not understand its provisions or that the things it was designed to do: help in combating terrorism, protect the military from being accused for non-offences, and to hold them accountable, are better able to be fulfilled by other laws. The Commission stated that the Act should be scrapped.
It has been five years, and that report is still gathering dust. Indian citizens, our brothers and sisters under the Constitution which we live, are still being exploited under the name of a law that is unnecessary. In Kashmir this year, three innocents were killed in the Macchil encounter, and the soldiers responsible tried to hide behind AFSPA, triggering off protests that have led to the killings of more than a hundred civilians. That the events have brought discredit to our image as a fair, functioning democracy across the world, is obvious.
Deep wounds
Maybe we could ignore all of this but Irom Sharmila continues on her fast, and is force fed through tubes up her nose in the hospital. Her actions force us to acknowledge that something is deeply wrong, that we are failing in our duty as citizens. Her act of courage forces us to acknowledge that we are not as brave, that in fact we are failing our country and its people by doing nothing. The essence of heroism is not just the heroic act, but also how that heroic act reminds us of what are basic principles of humanity that we all acknowledge. A hero rescues us from ourselves, from our day-to-day lives in which we tend just to go along, not make waves. A hero reminds us that there is a greater goal, a greater good.
An act of heroism reminds us that there is a right and wrong, and we all know, even if vaguely, what the basics of that right or wrong is. There is a particular belief in mystical traditions of Judaism called Lamed Vav Tzadikim - the Thirty Six Righteous Ones. According to this belief there are 36 hidden, humble people who keep the world going due to their simple virtuous lives. This is another idea of heroism - that it is not the people in the headlines who we look to, but people we are most likely to overlook, that by their virtuous conduct keep the idea of what is right alive, and doing that is enough to keep the world going.
Then there is the last idea, which says we cannot be heroes all the time, but can we be heroic even once in a while? A recent book, Day Scholar, by Siddharth Chowdhury touched upon this theme. The book is a harsh look at the life and times we live through today, seen through a young man growing up in Bihar, aspiring to nothing, except to write, even enjoying the atmosphere of criminality and violence he finds as a day scholar attending a college in Delhi University. And yet even he finds a point at which he has to make a stand, at least just once. It may not be enough, but it is still something.
Should we trust heroes?
Samit Basu, another young Indian author with talent to spare, has chosen to look at all of these ideas in his tongue-in-cheek, slyly funny novel, Turbulence. The basic premise of the story is that the passengers on a British Airways flight, mostly from India, wake up after a flight and realise they have all been given superpowers. One girl has enough charisma to storm Bollywood single-handedly, another is an almost indestructible super warrior, while a third can replicate herself endlessly. Unlike most of us who would never have the chance to be heroes, this group of people has no choice except to have lives that are larger than ordinary, that affect people across the world, change the face of politics, of the world itself. Basu’s novel, as funny as it is, asks a deeply serious question: should we trust heroes? And a further question: should heroes trust themselves?
Because there is one last thing about being a hero: once you are one, you influence and shape the lives of so many others. Whether it is the Hidden 36 or the very public heroes such as Aung San Suu Kyi or Irom Sharmila, what they also have is power. And how do we know that they will use that power properly? In Basu’s novel the answer, if there is one, is complex. Let me offer a slightly simpler one. There are many ideas about what makes a hero, but they share one overriding theme: that all that is required is that one person does that one right thing to make us all realise that some principles are worth standing up for. The question is not so much about trusting the person, but recognising the principle. That is what makes a hero, the ability to recognise and act on principles that are clearly understood by all of us, when most people are confused or cannot summon up the courage to do anything. That is why people like Aung San Suu Kyi are so important, because they show us the way to live up to our own principles. That is why her release is a victory, even if a limited one right now.