“The difference between an admirer and a follower still remains, no matter where you are. The admirer never makes any true sacrifices. He always plays it safe. Though in words, phrases, songs, he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christ, he renounces nothing, gives up nothing, will not reconstruct his life, will not be what he admires, and will not let his life express what it is he supposedly admires” 

                                    _ (Soren Kierkegaard)

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What the 19th century Danish theologian said about Christ is equally applicable to Sree Narayana Guru. Today, there seems to be a consensus among Malayalis, ranging from the Right to the Left of the ideological spectrum, about who our greatest idol is. It's Guru. As long as the person remains an "idol" or a "saint" on a pedestal, their life is a spectacle to be admired from afar and not to be followed. We extoll Guru's dictums but compete with each other on how to disobey them in total. It's easier to be an admirer than a follower. We make him into stone statues and put them inside glass cages.

A few days ago, I found myself in a court in Thiruvananthapuram—as a defendant in a case that has dragged on for eight years. Its origins lay in an afternoon when a four-member gang stormed into the newsroom I then headed, shoved aside the security guard, shouted slogans, placed a funeral wreath at the reception, and walked out after issuing a symbolic death threat.

Their provocation was a programme we had aired on the torture of elephants in Kerala’s festival circuit.

The programme documented, in disturbing detail, how over a hundred elephants had died after being forced to walk long distances on scorching roads, transported in cramped trucks, paraded for hours amid deafening fireworks and blazing lamps, and routinely deprived of food and water. It exposed how elephant ownership had evolved into a lucrative industry, feeding a nexus of owners, brokers, festival committees, and, inevitably, political and religious patronage.

The attack on our office was only the culmination of a barrage of abuse and threats—directed not just at me, but also at the woman journalist who produced the show. A year earlier, our reporters had faced similar hostility at Thrissur Pooram for a campaign—tellingly titled after Guru’s dictum “Kariyum venda, Karimarunnum venda”—against the excessive use of elephants and fireworks.

I recall these incidents today in the shadow of yet another tragedy: the recent explosion on April 22 at an unauthorised and temporary firecracker-making unit linked to this........

© Mathrubhumi English