It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.

It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.

This famous quote of Voltaire very well outlines the importance of flexibility and rigidity of attitude one needs in life. Flexibility is the greatest strength. For a flexible person, it is impossible not to reach his destination, because by using his ability to be flexible, he can easily define a nearer new destination. Resilient systems fail gracefully. A perfect system is often most fragile. Adaptability and flexibility always provide you with a way-out to grow and develop. Sticking hard to your own thoughts and closing all doors to listen other’s viewpoint as done by ‘fools’ leads them nowhere.

Going by the literal meaning of the quote, we can mistake to restrict ourselves to a confined margin by sticking to the literal meaning of the word ‘fool’. It might sound offensive but fool isn’t someone who is totally naïve. A fool can be anyone who isn’t able to look around his/her surroundings and comprehend for himself/herself what is right or wrong. Looking from this perspective, we can have fools all around us. We would ourselves have behaved like a fool at some point in our life. Being fool isn’t bad in itself actually; what is wrong here is to have a rigid attitude and neglecting the idea of adaptability or flexibility with changing time.

So, as the quote says- its hard to change the thought process of ‘fools’ because of the chains they have confined themselves within. The most glaring examples in our everyday life can be of religious fanatic and their ancient, Adam’s era policies and rules. Since the very old times, there were practices like Sati, dowry, no provision for widow remarriage or girl’s education, etc. Some of them are still prevalent (like dowry, reluctance for girl’s education) Modern Indian reformers in the 18^th, 19^th centuries faced hard time to change the established system.

In reality, it is very hard to be right on matters on which the established authorities are wrong. They resist you with full blow on your face and your attempts go into trash. Like we can quote here the processes and methodologies of Moderates which needed radical reform overtime, especially since the start of the 20^th century. But they resisted hard and refused to cooperate with extremists. The chains of their hope, that cooperation with British government might yield independence sooner, were a hard nut to crack.

Similarly, even after entering into 21^st century today, the rural India is still living under darkness of ignorance; the darkness of resistance to reforms in their social or economic life. They still resist the girls education propaganda; believe in early marriage of girls; discriminate between genders; and most importantly even after so rigorous efforts over the years by the government of India to provide them with institutionalized lenders in proximity, the share of their loans from informal sources isn’t reduced to the required level. The financial inclusion process is still in its nascent stage.

This is due to the chains of orthodoxy and the rigidness to stick to the old methods which makes it impossible for them to move. They prefer to follow the old societal norms backing it with the arguments and quotes from religious scriptures. In the matter of financial institutions, they prefer to maintain their old ties with moneylenders and pay higher interest rates rather than taking the pain of providing the required documents to institutionalized lenders.

If a branch is too rigid, it will break. Resist it, and you will perish. Know how to yield, and you will survive. This rigidness of attitude isn’t confined to rural places only. They are quite starkly visible in urban areas as well. We too behave rigidly sometimes, yielding to our preoccupied thoughts. But rigidness isn’t the solution always. May be, rigid attitude towards achieving your targets and goals is the best thing. But applying it everywhere isn’t a sane attitude.

Probably, a mix of both and not the extremes is what we need in life. This was perfectly understood by the Fathers of Indian Constitution. They preferred to adopt measures that can stand the test of time being wisely rigid and flexible in its working. The measure of intelligence is the ability to change. And that is why our constitution has survived the test of times; successfully working even after almost 70 years of its commencement. Had they yielded to bow in front of the religious extremists’ that time, no one would have seen the world’s largest democracy today.

Similarly, it’s hard to change to change the mindset of people but it’s not completely impossible as well. Sometimes the reason behind not giving up on their ideologies is probably not to show themselves as weak. But here we need to understand that one which yields, isn’t always weak. They are in fact one of the strongest. Like we have seen in the past, Indian social reformers got successful to a considerable degree in changing the rigid social ideologies of 18^th century which had made the life of women as hell. Later they brought out legislation with the help of British government to punish those who violated the moral suasion. Overtime, considerable degree of change in the mindset of Indian society has been achieved as evident from rising graphs of girl’s education, lowering numbers of child marriages, reduced religious confrontations, even if not completely eliminated.

 

Strength should always be complimented by softness. If you resist too much, you will break. This was understood by Moderates after the political standstill brought about by 1906 Surat split. Hence they joined hands with Extremists again in 1915 and both of them tried to adopt flexible attitude in their ways and ideologies till India achieved independence. Here again, breaking the chains of rigidness seemed to be impossible once but later, due to mutual efforts, both of them succeeded.

It wasn’t so much the mistakes that people made but how flexible they were in their aftermath that made all the difference in how their lives turned out. This is the practical truth. Change is the rule of nature. Changing times demands adaptability. However hard it seems to change the direction of wing, we should always try harder to bring the change in the society. It definitely yields at some point of time. As we have seen in the above examples, the so called ‘fools’ who once resisted even the thought of change, successfully adapted the same overtime. All that counts at the end is your effort.