Means and Ends

When I saw, on TV, the news of the death of Prabhakaran and of his diabolical organisation, the first thought that came to my mind was a visual image of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.
No man could be more different from Prabhakaran than the Dalai Lama, yet no cause, ab initio, could have been as similar as his. The Dalai Lama, over the last half century, has fought to regain his homeland, and, for his people, respect, equality and honour. The ethnic battle in Sri Lanka had a similar genesis, interestingly enough, much after the Tibetan conquest by the Chinese and the Dalai Lama's flight to India. Therefore, Prabhakaran and his ilk had a number of role models to emulate, and two primary paths - the violent and the non-violent - from which he could choose only one really. He chose the path most travelled.

The Dalai Lama, on the other hand, has traversed a long and lonely path of non-violence and gentility. This hardly guarantees result; however, there is nothing that can claim to consistently do so. I am told that Mahatma Gandhi once said, "I agree that non-violence is a bad idea. The only worse idea is violence."
Many months ago, I sat transfixed outside the Dalai Lama's residence in McLeod Ganj as he walked past the waiting gathering, his warm smile lighting the way to people's hearts. I am not a Buddhist, of course, but with the Dalai Lama this is an immaterial issue. Some months after McLeod Ganj, I met Wangchuk Fargo, a gentleman from Leh, in New Delhi in late February. He told me a story about the Dalai Lama: in the late 1990s, on a trip to a remote village in the mountains, the Dalai Lama reached a village where the population was entirely Muslim and very poor.
"Why is there no mosque in the village?" he asked
"We have no money," a villager replied, adding that the residents prayed in their homes.
Two years later, the Dalai Lama attended the inauguration of a small mosque in the village built from donations made by Tibetans and others he knew well all over the World, whom he had gently prodded to contribute. To repeat, the fact that I am not a Buddhist is, to the Dalai Lama, an irrelevant issue.

The real issue is of the means to an end. If he is a hero, a real hero, it is because he believes that the means are as important as the end and that all humans, the Chinese included, must be respected and treated with honour. If there must be a true definition of success, it must include the quality of the effort, the rectitude of the means as much as the achievement of the Goal. There is much to learn from him.