Tolerance in life

When I wrote my Civil Services exams, “Tolerance in life”, was the essay that I opted for without much bargaining. After thirty-four years in service, neither “tolerance” nor “life” bears any discernible evidence of existence in me, perhaps. It is not an obituary of my life or my tolerance that has prompted me to write a few lines here. I have almost a different influencer to seduce my thoughts and pen to express which I have never felt worthy enough to be expressed before.

The tolerance, as I grew up and learnt, does not bear the meaning nowadays except in those dull dictionaries. It is a concept that sleeps silently as a sepia photograph inside an ancestral album. It’s a loss of inheritance! And, it has so far been so intense a belief for me that I started really doubting if it ever existed. When Professor Hilbert, a great mathematician in Gottingen University was once asked by the then Nazi Minister of Education, “Is it really true, Professor, that your institution suffered so much from the departure of the Jews and their friends?” to which Professor responded in a surprisingly calmness, “Suffered? No, not at all. It didn’t suffer, Herr Minister. It just doesn’t exist anymore!” Similar had been my feelings about the existence of tolerance in life.

I was fortunate to have grown in a home, where I had had enough—voluntary or compulsive—exposure to the presence of some renowned people in the field of academics, and, knowingly or unknowingly, my childhood learning was grossly influenced by the humility, wisdom and expression of tolerance of those stalwarts. When the smell of the Jesuit fathers was yet to evaporate from my cheeks, my exposure to a new world of rebellion left quite a substantial dint onto that innocent growth of tolerance in me and it died pretty swiftly as I entered into the prime of my youth. Yet, the myth surrounding the Bengali intelligentsia has its crafted veil to be neatly draped around me and I remained tolerant without being one in the core. The life has also learnt to be lifeless in the meanwhile. So, the game was a pact, and the pact was the essence of the game. Collaborating together to defraud the other over a bet who gets bankrupt early.

As I was saying about my childhood; the phase one never forgets even in the worst departure from life. I continued to see those learned men discussing in ever smiling face—sitting upon the open balcony facing the road and the public—over a cup of tea. People used to gather and listen to them. Whenever any question or a contrary view would come even from any naïve source, they used to explain what they had so far learnt, where it would be found as a reference and would patiently express eagerness to know where the new knowledge came from. I never found them agitated on any occasion.

Over the years, the wise men faded, one by one, and once I realized that time has silently put out the last lamp too. And, my entire life of tolerance has had its silent death in such an inauspicious manner that I don’t even remember when and where I last found it alive. The life continued to thrive in its proud vest carrying a dead soul inside. And, I never felt it an unenjoyable situation in my pursuit of illusory knowledge and peace. It’s been a win-win case, with both winning, in failing to live through, with utter serenity and fulfilment.  

A few days ago, my wife received a link from a friend in Bangladesh, which provided us an opportunity to listen to her octogenarian father, a renowned academician in the neighbouring country and the world, delivering an address to the Alumni of a famous university at its Reunion meet. I floated through his lecture. Such humility, such patience, those chosen words that never hurt but inspire only, and those fluent waves of thoughts intermingled with the innocence of a child and the awe in experiencing the grand texture of knowledge; it all surrounded me and carried me to my lost childhood. I could see my transformed belief of a non-existent tolerance evaporating into a shapeless sky while fresh air of innocence began to fill in. My thoughts began to liberate a whole new wave of vitality; a lost feeling of reassuring the self that nothing can rob your innocence so long tolerance allows your life to pursue what it aspires truly at the end—the truth. The seeds of wisdom lie only in tolerance. The tolerance is not a compromise, not an adjustment, not a bargain; it is to withstand all illusions that life presents in its trial, to keep life unperturbed by comfort and luxury of thoughts, to steer away life from the traps of unlearning the pure knowledge, to keep the innocent lamp of childhood aflame forever in the midst of strong winds of misleading opinions and manufactured doctrines. It is a strong yes to say a strong no even sacrificing the life in enduring utter humiliations that the mankind has ever experienced. It is what that keeps the life alive.

The innocence of the soul of a child of eighty years has so gracefully inspired me to disinter the hidden gems in the deepest of my treasures of life—the essence of tolerance in life—that I start believing again, “Yes, the life still bears the prospect of resurrection.”