More Of A Saint

After two weeks of steeping myself in Mandelalore - I watched
until the channel broadcasting his life closed down - I’m so struck
with the miracle that played itself out, I’m speechless – and can’t
write any more. To contemplate the liars who concocted racial
segregation and sold it under Biblical justification and separate
but – and here’s the biggest lie of the century – but EQUAL
opportunities; and the foolish voting public who accepted the
lie without questioning it – makes me furious; angry at myself
as I never felt interested in politics and did not know that
those evil politicians were dishonest to the Nth degree.
 
Then comes the miracle: how everything they threw at Nelson
Mandela to kill his spirit and obliterate his name from the world’s
consciousness, made him stronger and nobler and increased the
world’s interest until the day he walked free and behaved so saintly,
it charmed everyone, from trusting children to other evil politicians,
beyond description. And I feel cheated when I see his smile and the
little jiggle he gave when others danced, because I never got the
chance to see him. Not meet him, too many were in line – only
see him; that would have been enough.
 
Mandela’s fixation on his one goal, freedom for his people and a JUST
dispensation in his country, enabled him to overcome all hatred for his
jailers. His determination to understand his enemy led to his studying a
new language and read their history and literature – in the end he knew
more about them than Afrikaners know about themselves. His endeavours
brought about something never encountered in fiction because writers
love to reinforce the image of the vengeful warrior returning to destroy
his enemies, failing to visualise a visionary who can do the opposite –
thus failing to be visionaries themselves.
 
Nobody could visualize such a scenario until it happened for real. How

privileged we are to have a Mandela in our history, how delightful that he

averted the scourge of war and created a new society by the force of his
personality. Today my grudge is that the special Mandela channel was
closed before I had the chance to see everything about him one more time
– or twenty times, given my obsession. And the most marvelous thing about
Mandela is, he did not wait for any god or higher force to GIVE his vision to
him, he worked at it himself. He respected all religions but never trusted in
man-made ideas of what godly beings should be and do for him; he simply
went ahead and did it all by himself.
 
He is more of a saint than any one of those saints people have concocted
before…