A letter to Muhammad Ali, the greatest of all time

Dear Ali,

It's been more than two weeks since you died and yet you stand in the ring of public thought and international discourse as if you never went away.

I was born in a world where Muhammad Ali had captured the popular imagination. Like distant thunderstorms, news of your colorful antics, your famous fights and your incandescent words reached us in faraway India.
We invoked your name on the playing fields, our classrooms and at the family dining table.

Of course, it helped that your black pride, anti-war and pro-peace policies played neatly into those of my own family's. Like Che Guevara, you were our hero and your posters adorned the walls of our youth.

A black man as strong as a mythological god, with superhuman courage who was not only unafraid of the world's mightiest force – the US government – but also unafraid to be stripped off his hard-won boxing championship titles and his Olympic medal.

Could such a hero even exist? We were too young at that time to fathom the depths of your courage; how your act of refusing to fight in Vietnam not only cost you your titles and the license to fight, but also robbed you of almost four of your best fighting years.

And yet, you had done it. You refused to fight in a war that not only went against your religious beliefs but against your sense of justice. "Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam, while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?" you'd said at that time.

Today, it still gives me goosebumps to think of such courage, such clarity of thought, such peerless integrity.
Your resistance of the draft and your forced retirement from boxing allowed you to tour colleges across America, lecturing about the war and inspiring others to resist it too.

Of course, it's hard to understand almost fifty years later how radical and extreme you must have appeared.
To challenge the white man's supremacy in an age when segregation was still being practiced, to convert to Islam in a white Christian-dominated country, to fraternise with the likes of Malcolm X, a radical ideologue, to speak out loud and clear against injustice, whether it be to the Palestinian people or the people of Africa – and to do all this even as you proved time and again your supremacy in the ring – what a phenomenon you must have been and are, Muhammad Ali.

And so, I write to you to inspire the world you have left behind to follow in your path.

A few days after you were laid to rest, a deranged Muslim man shot and killed 49 people in an LGBT nightclub in Orlando in what was described as one of the worst mass killings the US had witnessed. "What would Ali have thought about this?" I found myself wondering. "What would Ali have said? What would Ali have done?"
And of course it was easy to guess the answers, given your well-known political ideologies.

You would have, from your infinite heart of compassion, comforted the families of the departed, called for a review of gun license policies, condemned killings especially in the name of Islam, a religion that you always maintained stood for peace and brotherhood.

You would also have called for a cessation of prejudice and hatred against the people the assassin represented. You would have called instead for peace and understanding.

Your words would have come as a salve for a bleeding, wounded America.

And what would you have said to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his heinous response to Orlando, had you been alive and well?

Every day the man's utterances whittle away whatever shred of decency and humanity there is left on this sorry planet of ours.

Would you have famously ridiculed him in your teasing, rhyming ways? Would you have countered his shallow, cynical and shameful arguments point by point, with the agility of that brilliant mind of yours? Would you have campaigned across the length and breadth of America rallying people – even horrified Republicans – to refuse to vote on matters of principle?

It fascinates me to think of how you would have taken on Donald Trump had you been alive and in your prime.

Personally, I think you would have challenged him to a knock out match. Going man-to-man against The Donald, in the ring would have been your finest, most applauded fight, Muhammad Ali.

Keep those gloves on, Ali. You never know when we'll need them again.

With respect, love and deep regard,
Yours sincerely etc
malavikasmumbai@gmail.com

(The columnist believes in the art of letter-writing)