Not a fairy tale...
The weather was very pleasant where this story begins. It was mid - September and though the land the people lived in, could be very, very warm it really wasn't so now. A description of it's people and history is more interesting. It was a devastated land, limping to recovery, and almost no one was aware of it's history, aware that they were really living it. They just took it's state as granted.
How did all this happen? Ah.. that's the story of the world, in the times we now live we are disconnected from that. We may not find how some things we read about, may actually be the attempt of someone to write what he witnessed as it happened before his eyes.
The roots of these people were deep, really deep, as old as any other living people. Philosophy is a distillation of knowledge, till it no longer refers to a time and it's particular events, but somehow, has reached in to bring into words those things, which do not seem to have a bearing on when, and to whom it happened - but is yet important and of interest for others to know. This kind of philosophy, comes only as a process in time naturally, the distillate of the experience of the peoples.
In the end, you can destroy everything, including most of the people living in the land, you may also as an attacker bent on mayhem, repress the people. The effort to root out their thinking, their manner of thinking will have to be very malicious, because you will make the effort to take their young, and painstakingly work at making them release their hold on what they are bound to in their beliefs.
Ah, this is a very somber tone for any tale, but unfortunately we have to go over all of this to understand the backdrop of our story.
Our story begins with a group of friendly young people, playfully playing their games, unaware of what has happened much before they were born.
Our story gets it's character from a particular fact that, amongst these otherwise unexceptional happenings, that there is nothing here which isn't also taking place in countless other places on that land, there was something different. Amongst them is another person, not so young, in fact of twice their age, and the interesting thing is his own history.
He can remember the time when he was just as old as these young people, and because he too grew up and belongs to this land, their history is his also. Like them, when he was of their age, he was just as unaware of the past of his people, at least he too had no idea that it mattered.
Then something in his life changed. In a way which he was able to make nothing about. It felt like nothing he could understand, reading in books, in his University or elsewhere. All he could tell was that somehow his future was, as though, being devastated even before he could reach it. How is one to grapple with this?
Was there a choice? no obviously there wasn't. Something extremely evil had taken away the picture, the one everyone lives by. It did not feel any less threatening than having one's breath sucked out. With each passing day the feeling of foreboding only increased.
Then he found one release. One place he could find some solace from this wringing of his spirit, and that was where then he placed the roots afresh of his life. Where he would grow up from.
It should not be surprising that this was none other than discovering the philosophy, the distilled philosophy of his people. You may even think that if his circumstances had not been so extreme, he would never have arrived to this point. It is not that people haven't access to the literature which he turned to. But he turned to it with his very person. Every morning he woke up, his mind would find it's way to this way of life and thought, as described in the literature he was reading.
Everything started to come together in a coherent whole. Yet something about his circumstances was disconnected. He could not see how to understand, that which was happening to him. And so it went on, till one day the moment happened. The inner life and thought coincided with his outer life. He saw and understood, what was going on with him, and also, what he needed to do to remove the feeling of being strangled by his circumstances. Actually he saw that he had no choice and everything would follow now on it's own accord, and he had only to wait till that point into the future, maybe some five or seven years out, then he would be released. A totally free person, like everyone else seemed to be..
It would be the matter for another interesting story, the events which followed. But you should not be surprised that they were near miraculous. He did as he had understood in that moment of truth. His conviction was so strong that he could not understand why others did not act with the same kind of conviction. He saw that perhaps the reason people fumbled was only on account of this uncertainty they had. Everybody spoke about what was the right thing to do, but in action, under some confusion they too were carried away from their own direction. They lost a connection with their own minds.
Sad to say that our person, the one whose history we are narrating, did not become a hero as one may think. Why, how come? You may ask. That perhaps is the first lesson everyone learns in adulthood. The lesson of the intrinsic selfishness of human character. This is not a lesson I would happily pass on to friends and those I care about. That do not stretch yourself too much to do something which is someone else's to do. Almost like saying, do not save a drowning man. He will not be willing to live under that obligation. If no one saw you saved him, he will discredit you and the risk you put yourself to. Years later he will even have another picture of the events and you will stand there mouth agape.
The sad fact is that the person who you helped is now embarrassed by your presence and wants you to leave because you remind him, he thinks, of his weakness and his faults which led to his getting into the prediction you found him and risked yourself.
So, we move on, narrating more history of this person who now finds himself with these young friends. Yes life's like that, unremitting. I doubt it is so extreme in what it will dole out to all. I think our person is really being prepared for something equally extreme.
What he had been through prepared him for what followed after another nearly fifteen years.
But for now, he found respite in the life that followed. He could live like others.
Lets gloss over the next ten to fifteen years because they were not remarkable. In time he married and was happy to find himself doing something more current and exciting for those times. Something his friends were doing, which stimulated their minds and intellect, creating a picture of a future which was unbounded.
There is another interesting thing going on which we must also now reckon with.
Without understanding completely why, the people look outwards, that is, to other lands where they see people live better, maybe even are themselves better, as thinkers, and seem to excel at other things. The products they manufacture are better, so is their way of living, and of course their money is almost 50 times more valuable than ours.
Everybody has heard about how the lives of those who left and lived there a while, had changed for the better. With the kind of opportunities offered, obviously nothing better could happen to an individual than to go and live there.
... end of part 1.