It’s time for a peace call

I have a penchant for the bizarre. I can sit through horror movies, watching vampires and ghouls feast and feed off tender necks for hours. My imagination is at its liveliest at sundown. Plots, characters, tombstones and silky cobwebs waiting to jump off my head at the slight touch of the pen. So much that I have to shoosh them into silence at the noises they create in protest of my worldly preoccupation.

Given this scenario, a colleague had a surprise in store for me one morning. Precisely a year back. He promised me an unforgettable experience, so I eagerly made myself comfortable and available for the surprise. He took his seat, logged onto his computer, opened his mailbox and then asked me to take a deep breath. Nothing fazes me, I retorted impatiently, as the email popped open. It was a video mail – so big deal, I shrug – until the credits rolled large and eerily in black and white -  DANIEL PEARL’S MURDER.

The twinkle of the sunlight reflected off the murderer’s blade. The hand purposefully brandishing the weapon, almost mockingly, meant business. A man was lying on the floor. His shirt collar rolled down from the neck. His mouth open, as if groaning. Next, in a millisecond of a thought, the knife touched skin and then sliced through blood-filled veins, repeatedly cutting through muscle as the man on the floor wreathed…..till he was headless.

As a condition of habit, which my mother says will cost me dearly later, I  normally rush out of home without breakfast. If  I was struggling to throw up, there was nothing my stomach could purge out. It was a wrenching from the gut. The images have stayed stamped within the folds of my brain since then. My obsession for the ultimate horror fix quelled by Daniel’s video.  No ghouls – man made or supernatural -- have rattled me since.

I never knew Daniel personally. Good fortune did not ordain that our paths cross, though we did share similar interests and frequented the same music hot spots in Bombay. As I set about finding more about this extraordinary man, I learnt that Daniel had touched more lives with his simplicity and genuineness, than his pen could ever reach. And that’s what remains till today with friends who fondly remember him as a man, who, `was a gem of a person.’

Daniel had ideals. He put his profession first before family in the pursuit of a story, even in the face of danger (though many people would like me to believe he was foolish in doing so). I’m told he was idealist to the core, in action so much as in word. And that’s where the thought processes meet. I know a very few in Goa, yes, they are journalists too, who profess a sense of this idealism.

However, the yardstick means different things to different people. It is the death of these ideals that I mourn more as I see how we have bargained and prostituted the pen for a few materialistic and political gains. Journalism has been simply reduced to a profession today, just like you go bargaining for potatoes and tomatoes in the market. The highest bidder will buy off your principles, will make you slave to commerce, will indoctrinate you into the techniques of back-bending and ass licking, will brain wash you into believing that you are not the master of your mind or talent, that you are a mere pawn on a chessboard, the moves depending upon your ability to crawl. It is this loss of ideals that bleeds your mind, making the ink dry inside your pen before it seeks the purity of paper.

The Daniel Pearl Peace Concert on October 10 at the Municipal Garden in Panjim, is an idealist effort not to glorify a slain journalist, but to highlight the ideals that underlay the profession of journalism. Ideals that must be used to build our community with the weapon of truth. Ideals that must preach the message of peace. Ideals that must seek harmony and tolerance without political inclinations. As I set about putting this concert together, I’m asked by sundry types what is the purpose behind the movement. Daniel was an American after all. I’m flabbergasted with the closed minds I encounter all the time.  Sadly, some in my own profession too. But there is room for change if there is a willingness of the spirit. It is this spirit that we wish to stir. A clear call to rise beyond one’s cultural cleansing and serve the community that we pledge to protect with the gift of truth. If the watchdogs are a compromised clan, there’s not much I can see happening to our country, and in particular Goa. 

Sure, like somebody remarked after watching a portion of the Pearl video – `So, he’s dead and gone. What can we do about it.’ It is the politics of indifference that gets to me. This shrugging of the shoulders and an attitude of insensitivity that kills our reasoning ability. An ability to question the distortion of intrinsic values, because we are busy paying lip service to a materialistic ideology. We have forgotten to exercise the right to life, as dignified as possible. 

I would like to know Daniel’s last thought as the knife severed the life from his brain. Or the pain of raw anguish as children lose their mothers and mothers  lose their children and husbands to hatred and communal riots. This call is not only about Daniel. It is about the millions of people who die every single day to a bullet, to violence, to rape, to murder, to hate.

The peace call at an open garden is our first step to say `Yes’ to change.

EVE’S REVENGE

“Love overcomes fear. Fear cannot exist in the presence of love.”  PEPE  ROMERO, Spanish guitarist

(ENDS) 

Ethel Da Costa
September 26, 2003

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