Abhijeet Banerjee and Tihar Jail..!
Robert Clements
Newspaper Columnist, Author, Playwright and Communications Trainer in Powerful Writing and Dynamic Speaking!
Did you know Tihar jail was where Nobel Prize winner Abhijeet Banerjee spent ten days of his life?
Till now, you must have been under the impression only politicians made a success of their careers after a stint in jail! Though, I doubt the ten days Banerjee spent in India’s most dreaded jail, had anything to do with his rise in the field of economics, I am sure it was that same questioning, analyzing mind, fearless in expressing an opinion, as his mother says, that got him and a number of other students jailed while studying at the JNU in the nineties!
And that is the dangerous attitude we have to intellectuals who question.
We tell them to shut up or else, and the ‘or else’ is not a threat, as we look back in history, and see people like Giordana Bruno, burned to death for saying the earth was round, Copernicus and Galileo also threatened for saying likewise. Hundreds of others who questioned ‘civil rights’, ‘women empowerment’, ‘slavery’, and hundreds and thousands who questioned authority put to death or harassed till they shut up.
Just imagine if Abhijeet had decided to ‘shut up’!
“Hey Abhijeet, the poor are crying out for help!”
“I don’t want to go to jail again! No! No!” Read On