Rajbir Deswal

An emotional averment, natural, and not manoeuvred like maverick demagogues, by the farmers’ leader, Rakesh Tikait, did what a million implorations couldn’t do. It generated unsolicited and free-flowing support from the hoi polloi, especially the farming community in UP, Punjab and Haryana. They all seemed to tell, and not ask Tikait — ‘Aap kyun roye!’

Crying is human to the core, and essentially balances the upheavals felt within. Lord Ram’s father Dashrath wailed for days over the former’s separation and going in exile, till he died. Even Lord Ram cried upon seeing his brother Laxman faint. It’s believed that Nehru cried when Lata Mangeshkar rendered the patriotic number, ‘Aye mere watan ke logon, tum aankh main bhar lo pani.’ So, nothing wrong, or unusual, even for the iconic figures to be human-like and not just flaunt the royals’ ‘stiff upper lip’.

I recall Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ In a similar vein, if you torment the bread-giver, does he not cry and bleed tears? Here, Tikait’s feelings of concern for his ilk have surfaced.

Crying elders move people even if they are stone-hearted. Look at the parents who lament their children deserting them! It may be only the kids and infants who may be just throwing tantrums, and feeling agitated, and making a song and dance about anything trivial, but when a mature person cries, it moves everyone around, for it’s just not for a naught that he might be thus painfully hurt. And Tikait is not a thespian, but a simpleton who bears his cross, valiantly.

In his seminal work, Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead, Tennyson talks about this very emotion, which if remains bottled up and doesn’t find an outlet, explodes. ‘She should weep or she’ll die’ — everyone is concerned about the soldier’s widow in the poem.

There is yet another story in which a tombstone cutter, who is approached by a widow for making her late husband’s tombstone, keeps standing like a statue, unmoved and listless for three days, without saying a word, and finally collapses and dies. The stone-cutter has to make two tombstones then. A tear says a million unsaid and pent-up emotions.

I once saw my father crying at the suggestion of our family’s separation. I couldn’t bear it then and to date it nearly eats up my entrails in pain. Similarly, when I came to know that my mother wept having seen me off to stay in a hostel, I cried endlessly for days together.