On Pity: Thoughts on the Past Week

For the first time in my life, this past week I felt pity. It may sound strange as the word is so commonplace and yet it was profound experience.

As a writer, I am fascinated by the near impossible challenge of capturing human experience in words. It is the ultimate paradox: to attempt to capture the subtleties, complexities and vastness of human experience with materials and tools that are inherently inadequate and ill-suited to the job.

This means that I am always astounded when I grasp the meaning of a particular word. That is always an exhilarating moment of epiphany, when a commonly used word or phrase takes on new and powerful emotional resonance and understanding. It is a flash of insight into a word’s original use. Those moments are like an instant journey through human history into the very dawn of time, to that first moment when that emotion was felt and expressed by some anonymous human ancestor.

It is also a strangely mystical experience: as if for that instant I am connected to the entire unfathomable spectrum of humanity, from its very origins to my own. In that instant there is magic: of sudden understanding of how extraordinary the human mind is, and how extraordinary our journey through time and space has been as a species.

And while mysticism and evolution are not two words that normally go together, these moments provide a strangely personal glimpse into evolution: of how we humans are different from other sentient beings; of how extraordinary that very first moment of feeling a particular emotion must have been for that original ancestor; of the power of human emotions and the extraordinary hubris of attempting to articulate it in language.

For the first time in my life, I felt an emotion that I could identify only as pity.More importantly, for the very first time, I had a new understanding of that commonly used term (even more so in modern Britain, where it seems everything from a spilled cup of tea to a car accident is carelessly lumped together as “pity.”)

Yet what I experienced was something quite exceptional: first, of what the word means, rooted as it is in Latin, in pietas, as in duty. That is not duty as in a burden, or insistence on doing something right or anything at all under duress, but rather as duty when something unfortunate must still be done.

On looking up the word I found further explanation in the dictionary: “a feeling of sorrow that inclines one to help or show mercy.”

See what I mean when words are inadequate? To help is quite different from showing mercy. And yet, in its Latin sense, performance of duty would require a sense of mercy rather than helpfulness.

As I pondered the meaning of pity, I was struck by the following image: compassion or sympathy is when upon seeing a wounded, suffering being, one feels compelled to assist and ease its suffering.

Pity is what one feels when that wounded being is beyond all aid and we can do no more but feel a strange mixture of sadness and repulsion at its suffering.

Of course this begs the question: who excites our pity? Why do I not feel pity for those suffering in Gaza or the Congo or Darfur? Why do those weak, suffering, wounded people evoke my sympathy, compassion, sorrow and yet a grudging admiration and solidarity? Perhaps it is because of the sense of resistance and dignity that they bring to their calamitous lives; a sense of self that is asserted by their very determined efforts to survive the quotidian horrors that surround them.

No, they do not deserve pity, because they require no mercy. All by themselves, they exercise a powerful personal and collective agency despite the odds that face them.

Which then brings me back to the object of my pity: Pity diminishes the dignity of the one who receives it. The object of pity requires mercy from the strong because like that wounded animal that is beyond our aid, its pain is its only sense of self; its weakness is its only expression of identity. Even worse, the object of pity can not be saved or helped; the only mercy one can offer is to step gingerly, carefully, to avoid contagion, around and beyond it.

For the first time in my life, I have felt pity and understood the word. It is neither an emotion nor a word that I would ever like to repeat again.

A Paradigm Shift on How History is Written?

There is that old adage that "history is written by the victors." And that has indeed been true for much of human history. Yet something has shifted with the technology that now powers global communication systems.

No longer can a government dictate what gets reported. No longer can a newspaper or television channel be the sole determinant of who and what gets counted as news, and therefore, as "historical reality." The new media, powered by millions of citizen journalists are changing that adage on writing history.

As we have seen repeatedly in India, citizen journalists are faster to get the news out than traditional media. True, many complain, they provide "superficial" or "unsubstantiated" information and thus muddy the waters.

Very often these complaints are from those who form part of the government establishments and/or mainstream media. It is true that most citizen journalists or as Mumbai and Gaza reveal, twitter-nalists only provide quick facts. Some of it is not verified, but simply sent out. Yet that is what many reporters on the ground - file in copy with their immediate experience and let the news desk make sense of it back home. Now with the "over-democratization" of news, all of us can be our own news-desk, filtering through accounts to decide for ourselves to analyse and understand issues and events. For an old-style liberal like me, that is a dream come true.

Of course, there are problems. Like all human inventions, the over-democratised new media is only as good as the people running with it. Yes there are vanity contests, and propaganda wars, and shoddy reporting. But that is no excuse for throwing out the baby with the bathwater, especially when that baby is overturning the old maxim and giving the vanquished a chance to write history too.

My contribution to that paradigm shift are the following links, all providing images and news from inside Gaza:

1. A detailed blog on the conditions in Gaza from a medical angle dating back to July 2008: A must read for all those who believe the Palestinians instigated this particular crisis.

2. A poignant blog by a Palestinian journalist and mother on raising two children in a perpetual war-zone.

3. Sameh Habeeb's blog on the Untold Story of Gaza.

4. And finally, a poignant, heart-warming photo-log from inside Gaza, again by Sameh Habeeb.

Over-democratization of the media? Bring it on!

Never Again? Lets Not Kid Ourselves!

When I studied in the USA, I was constantly told that "never again" was the moral to live by. Holocaust studies, memorials, monuments, documentaries, novels, memoirs dominated and still dominate the Western marketplace and psyche. In that process what is lost is the genocide determinedly practised over 60 years by survivors of the Holocaust.

Like children of abusers and alcoholics, the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust have grown to refine and put into practice the very atrocities they suffered from and apparently fought against. And they have had their cheerleaders and enablers to continue their abuse, as is borne out by the most recent massacre in Gaza.

For the past week, I have been sickened by the hypocrisy and hubris displayed by Western politicians and press over the massacre in Gaza. Again and again, we are told that Hamas is to blame. That they "started" it by lobbing rockets at Israeli towns - which just for the record have killed all of FOURTEEN Israelis in the past SEVEN years. Compare that to Israel's record of killing over 5000 Palestinian civilians in the same period.

The same press and politicians care not to talk of overt acts of war practised by Israel in breach of all international law including:

1. Blockade of sea/land/air in Gaza
2. Collective punishment by denying basic amenities to civilian population whose only crime is to vote against Western wishes, and for the party that provides them the basic modicum of education, health-care, social services.
3. Assassination and kidnapping of elected leaders of government, which would be considered acts of war against any "sovereign" state.
4. Killing of civilians during the same acts of war.
5. Illegal incarceration of thousands of Palestinians with no trial or reason.

And that is not even going back to the simplest point: that Israel has behaved as a racist, imperialist power since its inception. And it flouts all international law with full support of its Western cheerleaders and paymasters who consider the Palestinians simply as Israel's unter-menschen, to be incarcerated, humiliated and killed with impunity. But since words no longer suffice, the picture below speaks loud and clear:



So yes, indeed, Hamas is to blame. As is Fatah. And the PFLP. And every Palestinian who dares to protest the genocide they are being subjected to, and thus challenges the logic of the superior race in the Holy Land!

Never again? Yeah sure, but not when its practised by the worthy heirs of the Nazis!