I have found one method of empowerment, even if it is often transient, even momentary. And that is to platform people, real people—our most numerous reality. To listen to them and make those directly responsible to do the same. When a noun ‘‘platform’’ becomes an active verb, a non-entity becomes an entity, a digit becomes a person, and a thought, a fear, an emotion finds its voice. And when that voice, that true voice is heard there is no mistaking it. It is simply too powerful in content. Which is why in the several open discussions that we see on television (the best thing about our TV channels) it is some unknown face, some unheard voice, that invariably carries the show. In the numerous letters that I receive every day, it is from the simple postcard, the inland letter, written in the correspondent’s own hand that I get my most interesting, important and serious mail. Likewise, in the course of my travel within West Bengal, it is the face lost in the crowd of welcomers, the hand raised above the occupiers of front seats, the persistent if hesitant gaze of a bystander that educates me and, in fact, empowers me. More often than not, this ‘‘true’’ voice is a woman’s voice. It has spoken to me with the unmistakable ring of an urgent truth in the Sunderban to ask for life-saving embankments in the tide-swept mangroves. I have heard it spoken in Darjeeling to describe the fear of druggism, in Murshidabad about the gross inadequacy of a khadi spinner’s wage, in the ‘‘Pagla ward’’ of a jail to ask for compassion. When the afflicted feel they have been heard, they feel they count. When they know what they have said is being acted upon, they feel they matter. When they see change attributable to their intervention they feel they are participating. And that is when they share power. Empowerment is not a hand-me-down. It is a recognition of what, in a participative democracy, should exist but often does not and therefore has to be made available.
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