How can you be so sure?

I was having coffee with somebody I’d met recently and conversation drifted around the usual blocks — music, books, films. At some point he remarked that I had very strong opinions.
Since I no longer feel the need to defend my brains, I shrugged off the remark. But it continued to bother me. If my ideas are worth a passionate defense, then why did that casual remark feel like an accusation?

I think what really bothered me was the assumption that I am very sure of my beliefs. I am not. If there is one thing that really frightens me about human beings, it is their certainties. To me, really scary people are the ones who are absolutely, unwaveringly sure of themselves. When I think of hundred percent certainty, I think of bigots, serial killers, dictators and mobs.

The wonderful thing about mob certainty is that you are no longer required to have your own faith. Kirekegaard has said somewhere that often people treat difficult life questions like naughty schoolboys — they copy the answers from a book instead of working out the solution to the problem. I suspect that most political activists or party ‘workers’ do the same. They don’t want to think. They just want to follow someone’s lead.

Then it becomes easy to let go, for example during a bandh. The leaders call a bandh claiming that the state has been unfair to you. You are told you will not get justice or development until you get something else, say, a new state.

So you pull down statues. You go to an office which is already shut and set fire to it. The office might be full of important documents, like social audit reports of NREGS works. These audits are intended to help rural workers get justice. They help implement a law which creates jobs and infrastructure. But you burn the documents because you are convinced that you have a right to destroy things when you are angry.

This is what happened when pro-Telangana protestors went on the rampage during a bandh in Hyderabad last month. They set fire to the office of SSAAT, an organisation working with the government to ensure proper implementation of the NREGS. It was a lucky accident that nobody was hurt, but I doubt that the goons did a safety audit before torching the place.

Now if this were a movie, a hero would have stopped them just in time. He would have stood, legs apart, blocking their way, searing the mob with his dark eyes. Then he would ask them to think. Do they even know what they are burning? Do they know who will benefit most? Have they studied newer states like Jharkhand before concluding that a separate administration is preferable to better governance? How can they be sure that burning offices is the right thing to do?

Sadly, this is not the movies. Heroes rarely come out to stop mobs. If lone voices are raised, they get squashed, burnt or arrested when there is too much mass certainty. But speaking of movies and voices, one brave voice (particularly in the context of the current climate in Pakistan, where any dissenting voice risks the ‘blasphemy’ label) belongs to Ali Zafar. The singer-actor is gently demanding that people reexamine blind certainties through his beautiful new song, ‘Nahin re nahin’. The lyrics ask you whether you have met God. If not, how can you be so certain that God wants you to punish another man by killing him?

It is the voice of doubt and, in this world, doubt is the only sanity there is.    
 

Annie Zaidi writes poetry, stories, essays, scripts (and in a dark, distant past, recipes she never actually tried)