My Speech

This was what I said for my Public Speaking competition.

Good Morning Teachers and Friends. My topic is "An eye for an eye makes the world blind. Before we start let us go to the years when Gandhiji started the non-cooperation movement. Here is a familiar scene you may have heard of.
Nehruji said "The Indians have done nothing wrong in the Chaura Chauri Incident. They were just paying the British back for what they did. It’s an Eye for an Eye..." "..makes the world Blind" continued Mahatma Gandhi.
We may have heard the first part commonly, but with the continuation it makes the most sense. Let us delve deeper to extricate the true meaning of this line.
The first part refers to revenge. If you take revenge for everything, it can never end. You take revenge. Then your victim also does the same. It goes on. Soon innocent people also fall prey to your anger. A very good example is the Bush and Al Qaeda conflict. We also take revenge amongst ourselves. We revenge every evil that has happened to us and exaggerate it. Do we have to take revenge? Is it not simpler to end the topic with silent non active resistance?
Tolerance was the weapon Mahatma Gandhi used. And it worked because when the doer of injustice saw the silent pain of the sufferer, at some stage it hurt his conscience and brought about a fundamental change in attitude and led to remorse, and genuine reconciliation. Like anger, revenge feeds on itself. You remove anger, and you remove revenge, and the basis of the revenge collapses.In fact silent tolerance is a genuine non-cooperation with what the revengeful person is trying to do. He is trying to cause pain and elicit a violent response from the sufferer, which justifies the revengeful person to cause more suffering to the sufferer. If you look back at history, during the Second World War, direct and indirect deaths arising from the war worldwide are estimated to be around 40 million people. It is quite conceivable that if a non-cooperation and non violent movement at the doorsteps of the Germans would have hurt the conscience of the German public and removed the power of Hitler. Let us not think it would have been easy; but perhaps the death toll may have been much lower. In our times, the non violent movement of Martin Luther King in the United States did more to improve the plight of the blacks, and uplifting their image in society, than all the violent killing that preceded Martin Luther King.Revenge is the curtain that hides the light of the truth of the true us. To sum it all i use this quotation

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall — think of it, always."

Nilay