On Dissent

An act of dissidence is eventually solitary. It’s the result of a choice taken in the solitude of a person’s conscience. The same was the case with the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who disappeared on 2 October after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents for his marriage. Weeks later, Saudi authorities admitted that the journalist - who had been close to the Saudi royal family for decades but went into self-exile in the US following crackdown on dissident in Saudi Arabia – was killed inside the consulate.          

‘In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot,’ said Czesław Miłosz, a Polish poet, writer, and diplomat, in his Nobel Lecture in 1980. ‘And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn’t allow one to think of anything else,’ he goes further to say.   

Khashoggi, who, after moving to the US, had been penning a column for the Washington Post, was publicly critical of Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, as well as of the Saudi military intervention in the ongoing Yemeni civil war. Khashoggi regularly wrote columns criticising the policies of the Saudi crown prince. His killing, according to the Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor, was premeditated - most certainly aimed at silencing and eliminating yet another dissenter.

Dissent has predominantly been linked to the activity of thinking critically and questioning the established notion of authority, meaning, and truth. A key question today is about what roles dissent should play in democracy or any other form of political arena or governance.

For Immanuel Kant and Plato, dissent was important for developing the ability of individuals to inspect their lives in relation to others or collective ability for public reasoning. Even more recent philosophers, including the nineteenth-century liberals like JS Mill, the twentieth-century critics of liberalism like Foucault, and those belonging to the Frankfurt School, termed dissent as a vital good.                   

While many see the acknowledgment of dissent identities as essential to a healthy democracy and a wide-ranging pluralist political culture, others fear that dissent may lead to the fragmentation of socio-cultural and political system.

Curbing freedom of speech and cognitive diversity and silencing dissident are a dangerous stride towards Orwellian oppression.

The Presence of Absence: on Losing a Cuddly Quadruped

Anatole France, a French poet and novelist, said that a part of one’s soul remains unawakened until one has loved an animal.

One of my colleague’s dog died of a disease a couple of weeks ago, and when I suggested, like her mom also did, that she get another pet to recuperate her distress caused by the quadruped’s demise, the idea, to her, was inconceivable. We all think that the people we love are invaluable and irreplaceable – the same goes for pets.          

The dog’s ailment began a few months ago when he suffered an injury around his nose, and the wound became chronic up to a point veterinary physicians were unable to help him survive and advised that he be euthanised to relieve the suffering. The dog, however, died, without needing euthanasia, days later.                      

A pet, be it a cat or a dog, often embodies a child, a good friend, or a long-term companion. Pets live enough time in our lives to actually enter and dwell in our heart, and become a part of our family and daily life. The death of a pet often forms a void in our hearts and lives, somewhat akin to losing a friend or a family member.   

The healthiest way to deal with the pet loss is to remember him or her by keeping the memories of the cuddly quadruped alive. My friend buried her dog under a tree in her house lawn, where he often used to play, with a large candle - that, she said, remained lit on the grave for three days - and a headstone engraved to memorialise the beloved companion.

Summer’s Flit

While living in Brabant, in the south of the Netherlands, in 1884, Vincent van Gogh, wrote to his younger brother Theo, about how he perceived the seasons in colours, and described summer as ‘the opposition of blues against an element of orange in the golden bronze of the wheat’.

Summer Evening (June 1888) by Van Gogh

Van Gogh thought of summer to have a deep-seated symbolic meaning. His fascination with summer continued even years later when he moved to Provence and, thoroughly under the spell of the harvest of the wheat, produced several works that captured the essence of summer days in southern France.                  

If spring is the season of new beginning and regeneration, summer is the period of youth - the time of romance, fullness, growth, and limitless potential - something well portrayed by Mark Twain in his Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer stories (it is the summer when Tom helps Huck, who finds his ‘civlised’ life confining, escape and explore the world outside).

In the poem Insect Life of Florida, Lynda Hull mulls over how the hot summer days appear to be endless and how the rains on hot days make her transiently forget the cruelty of love:         

Afternoons, showers drummed the roof,

My parents silent for hours. Even then I knew

Something of love was cruel, was distant.    

Summer Evening (1947) by Edward Hopper

While it is scientifically not known whether the notion of ‘summer love’ is really real or it has just become a part of our collective consciousness, at least art and literature love hot, long summers, as evident in scores of films, songs, paintings, novels, and poems. Even Shakespeare, the ‘Bard of Avon’, was no stranger to the importance of summer as the season of the forcefulness of the passions:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.  

Cloudless sky, sunny days, creeks and streams flowing in their fullness, roadsides kneaded in grass, trees laden with leaf, poppies, and goldfinches, sparrows, and robins squeaking and squawking: the fulsomeness of life is more vivid in summer than any other season.         

But if there is flowering, sweetening, and ripening, as the summer ends, there is also putrefaction. Autumn takes a light-footed leap, wiping out all symptoms of summer, which it now looks like was the evanescent mist that hung over a tree on which hope and love lived in unison.

The end of a season is like the irreversible course of growing up.