Fr. T.O. Sebastain
[dropcap]M[/dropcap]an is born free and wants to live free. You don’t want to sacrifice your freedom for anything else in the world. If you lose your freedom you will fight back with all your might to regain it. You are ready to sacrifice everything to regain your freedom. That is what happened with the country’s National leaders who fought along with Mahatma Gandhi for India’s independence. Of course the whole of India was united in one purpose of achieving swaraj.
There is nothing in the world so much abused as freedom. Freedom is the free gift of God to every individual, group or a nation. Freedom is to be exercised with responsibility. Some persons abuse their own freedom and spoil themselves by taking to drugs, alcohol or even by committing suicide. Another person infringes on the freedom of others by torturing inflicting wounds imprisoning or even killing others. What we observe among individuals we find happening among groups, nationalities and countries. Whether it be in the case of an individual or a nation, you find that each one is busy in expanding one’s own freedom at the expense of the other. Each one is busy in developing his space or area under his control. The simplest example is the boundary disputes that happen between families, groups and countries.Most often authority is wrongly understood as power and control of others. You feel you are exercising your office only when you have brought everything under your control. You feel terribly uneasy if you cannot control others. In this quest for control you begin to trample upon the freedom of others. Crushing other’s freedom is never willed to be your role. Leaders of the nation or a group can easily steal away the due freedom of others in the name of discipline. They can assume for themselves the power of healing and administer bitter pills to others. Nobody has invested them with such authority. It is the duty of the authorities to see how bitter pills can be avoided so that each one under their rule suffers the least but enjoys the maximum freedom and comfort to grow and develop as he or she should.
We have fought the British and won the freedom but only to be stolen by others through stealthy and crafty ways, hoodwinking the general public. However punctured it is, freedom still remains the best gift we have received from God. It is fragile and vulnerable and can be lost at any time. Eternal vigilance is the only safe guard. It is normally the unlimited greed of others that dents our freedom. Remember you may not feel free even in a wide open field but you can if you want to, be free even in a solitary prison cell. Freedom won at midnight still remains elusive for most Indians. We need to recapture it.
