My New Year’s Resolution needs a prelude: I used to be a Marxist once. Wait. I am going ahead of myself: I used to be a staunch advocate of capitalism. But then I turned a Marxist after reading Karl Marx thoroughly while relating it to the current capitalist system of the west with the miseries of life of the world at large.
I was also a religious person once. As a graduate of a madrasah, my mind was receptive to doing something. Something for my religion, which was at that time, in danger; at least I believed it then more than anything in the world.
But then, I enrolled in an institution in a land of opportunity; and, at the first opportunity, I detached myself from religion.
Now, I come to my new year’s resolution. My aim is to change myself has an unbreakable linkage with the flashback of my life I have lived so far.
During all those phases- I described earlier, on one point or another, in one way or the other- I tended to be judgmental. Judgmental about things, about people, about a certain system or belief. In believing any of those ideas, I readily embraced it with all its entirety while rejecting all others as wrong and misguided.
This dilemma continued to trace me like a haunting shadow during all the time and I unceasingly went on shifting from one to another ideology, that I had been crusading against before.
I’m coming to my new year’s resolution but before that few things owe some more explanations.
Ultimately, what happened that I found myself espousing no more ideology at all, not even any of the preceding ones. Or perhaps, each ideology had divorced me!
Now, I’m a human without an ideology. No longer a capitalist or Marxist; neither religious nor a secular. I am no more a black, nor a white.
But fortunately, and perhaps more importantly, what was left of me was no less formidable: I remained a human. A human who had shed the skins of religion and politics: I had unpacked the burden of history!
A history that was a paradox in itself. Written by the victors and the kings and the queens and too preoccupied with their achievements and heroics that it had discussed nothing more. Nothing about the human misery and sufferings of laymen. Minute details of their daily lives are abundantly found in the history books profusely found everywhere. But what was about the ‘others’. Who would talk on their behalf? For scribes busied writing what they were dictated by their patrons.
So, by and large, history was written by the conquerors at the expense of the conquered; and, this, I had come to realize at last.
Yes. I’m now coming to my new year resolution. But wait lest I should break the continuity of this.
So, I remained a human after realizing the tragedy that befalls when one comes to know the intrigues of history.
No more, since realizing this, do I view people with any religious or political orientation. Nor do I tend to be judgmental about them.
With a unique realization that reality is little more than a mirage; more often than not constructed by those in power.
Ultimately, my new year resolution is to keep unraveling the layers of this phenomenon, that people call reality and which ironically is taken to be a fact, which in fact, it is not: for it entirely depends on which angle you are looking at it!
My resolution for the following year is to shed the skin of self-righteousness and begin to see things from the way others might see it. While doing so, I do not mean to espouse the cause of others at the expense of mine. No, it’s not the aim in mind.
Rather, I tend to be more inclusive in my approach towards others, for we know whatever consequences, exclusiveness has brought about throughout human history (in the form of marginalizing others).
Religion will continue to be a part of my life but I shall no more put people in boxes while claiming superiority on its basis. For, it is not the philosophy of religion. It was never a dividing force between people or civilizations. But sadly, it turned out operationally so due to their self-righteous delusions.
Likewise, my new year resolution will not prevent my political growth. I shall not cease to grow as a political animal.
But the difference will be in the intensity with which I used to attach the ideals of a certain political cause, ideology, party or a leader.
Last but not least, my new year’s resolution is not to become a victim of an ideology!
