One is significant

Last week a young man named Majula Ranasinghe, the winner of the 2006 State Drama Festival’s award for the ‘Best Supporting Actor,’ concluded a free one-and-a-half-month theatre workshop for village kids of Kiula in the Deep South of Sri Lanka.

Manjula, a father of three young kids, is himself from the neighbouring village of Hungama and chose to volunteer to share skills he had acquired during a short break from work, fitting it into part of the school holiday period.

The culmination of the event was the staging of a play by Parakrama Nirielle’s Janakaraliya ‘Andara Mal’ to an audience of around 400 villages at an arena created within the junior school’s excuse of a playground.

 

Courage and change

‘Andara Mal’ takes a deep look at what is wrong in our society such as deprivation of basic learning tools to many ‘not so pleasant’ (‘priya manapa novu’) schools in remote areas, the various gimmicks of politicians who make empty promises and officials hell-bent to please them.

The play is about the courage, determination and creativity of a young dance teacher who mobilises kids to learn dance and song even in the absence of a drum in the school.

The way he mobilises the kids to use whatever scrap material they can find to create an orchestra and how they sing and dance to that music not only brought a tear to one’s eye but also gave much hope that there can be change brought out by a few people who truly care.

What was needed they demonstrated, was to stop complaining and act utilising whatever resources one had, to make things happen.

Back in time

Seeing the play unfolding last Sunday, to villagers, most of whom perhaps were exposed to such an event for the first time in their lives, my mind was taken back to the learning we had of days of direct democracy of the Athenian style, during our school and university days.

It all began around 500 BC, where all adult male citizens of the Greek city state of Athens gathered in the arena, to participate and vote on issues that impacted on them.

The power of one in decision making at the time was so significant that there was even a word, which is now used as a strong negative coined to describe a person who chose not to participate.

The word is ‘idiot’ that is derived from that early Greek usage of the word idiōtēs, meaning a private person, a person who is not actively interested in politics (positive social action and not party politics as we now know it); such characters were talked about with contempt and the word eventually acquired its modern meaning.

Exercising the power of one

Exercising the power of one that began then in the direct form, withered away with the sheer unmanageability of the process with population and size of the ‘electorate’ growing. In a majority of democracies around the world, a shift was made, with elected representatives mandated to represent group interests.

Often called the proportional representation system, the individual citizen delegated his or her power to decide or influence over governance issues, to another individual who then became his or her elected representative functioning on behalf of all those who elected him or her. And thus the ‘power of one’ was subjugated to a secondary status with reliance on the goodness and the effectiveness of the representative, in whose charge each individual’s power to influence or decide on issues was placed.

In the real domain there are still some semblances of direct democratic representation seen in governance such as the Swiss system of Canton-based decision making, the African tribal systems and the Gandhian concept of the ‘Panchayat’ or ‘Gram Swaraj’. It can also be made to work if it is designed to operate at the village or grama level in Sri Lanka.

On another sphere with the advent of the internet, its penetration and expanse of its reach through the info-communication revolution, the true power of the ‘power of one’ once again has begun to assume a new meaning and significance. It is also interesting that the binary code in use as the base for digital computer language also is about numerical 1 and 0 demonstrating the sheer power of its permutation and combination.

Effecting change

Today, we as citizens of Mother Earth and of our individual nations have with us the ability to exercise each of our ‘power of one’ mandates. The focus is on examples of how we can effectively participate to effect change and call for justice on issues that impact on our lives collectively and individually.

We are aware of how instantaneous coverage of events happening in the remotest parts of the world today are brought to our living rooms or even to our palm-tops through satellite based TV and mobile communication tools. We are also aware of how we can interact and instantaneously respond to those events and their outcomes, so we can add our inputs and even opt to contribute in kind to ensure that the outcomes are achieved also through our participation.

With moves to reduce the ‘haves and have-not’ gap in the access domain to these tools, many opportunities unfold before us. Education of millions in the remotest corners of the world using remote technologies is possible today.

Making available information on potential disasters such as floods, earthquakes, tsunamis and the like can lead to saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Making our voices heard on issues such as climate change, handling of poverty, pandemics, flouting of the rule of law or corruption in governance is all possible.

Indian example

Last Sunday, I also saw how India’s social action TV channel NDTV conducted a 12 hour telethon to raise funds on a campaign ‘Support My School’ with cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar leading it.

He and a few stars in the movie world were able to raise over Indian Rs. 700 million in support of 140 of most needy schools. We had our own ‘Trails’ the fundraising walk organised by a few caring individuals to raise funds to build a cancer treatment facility at the Jaffna Hospital. There too, the young team mobilised the internet to the fullest in their fund raising efforts generating interest both on the real and virtual domains.

These are but two examples of the opportunity for each of us to exercise the ‘power of one’. While there are thousands of such initiatives that are on focussing on both macro and micro issues, it is sad that the major portion of the energy and the power of info-communications in the public domain is presented to us for entertainment or for influencing people’s minds for achieving purely commercially driven objectives.

Time to act is now

The coining of the word ‘idiot’ for those who did not participate in the process of direct democracy in ancient Greece, was that society’s way of asserting its authority then and expressing its displeasure about those that did not care.

It is true that there is so much wrong happening around us and that there many issues that need be addressed. Yet if we were to wait till all of it got right and only complained about them all the time, not much may be achieved and for sure they will not go away.

It is time that we exercised the power of one to the optimum and did all we can to ensure that each contributes even in small measure. That must reach beyond the self-centred agenda to a look around our own society. Beyond the ‘selling’ and the ‘getting sold’ we indulge in.

Whether the landscape is rural or urban does not matter. There is so much that needs be done, without leaving it to others to do and feeling that we do not have the time. I salute those who do… the likes of Manjula.