Empathy with an unknown

'I suffer from nightmares and have done so for many years. Strangely, I didn't have them during the 15 years I spent in prison after being wrongly convicted , with three others, for the 1975 Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings in England. It was almost as if I was in the eye of the storm while I was inside, and everything was being held back for a repay later in my life.'

For those who are lucky enough not to have had nightmares, let me tell you my own version of what they mean. Nightmares are a cruel tendency of the mind to bring back memories of the things/events/situations which you would have disliked from the bottom of your heart, and play them back in fornt of your eyes, thereby inducing in you a fear of the past happening again. It makes you afraid of the past, paranoid, absent minded and lesser and lesser confident. Read more of what this person has to say:

'Not only did we have to beat the criminal justice system but we also had to survive in prison. Our reality was the nightmare. They would urinate in our food, defecate in it, put glass in it. Our cell doors would be left open for us to be beaten and they would come in with batteries in socks to beat us over the head. I saw two people murdered. I saw suicides. I saw somebody set fire to himself in Long Lartin prison.'

I couldn't read it at first, let alone imagining the situation. Life looks pretty simple, sometimes. But how do we explain one man dominating another. One life dominating another life. And that too for what purpose? Both live and both die.

The story of this man in prison couldn't have made me empathize. But I empathize. 

One case deserves specific mention. I know of a man who completed his Doctorate at an 'institure of national importance' after 14 years. Now it is upto who is reading to visualize 14 years as either number of years to complete the entire schooling, or as the number of years Lord Rama had been to forest, or as anything else which his mental make up permits. Sure enough, the 'doctor' would be pretty weak now to even have nightmares.

Nature, now and then provides us with the opportunity to dominate over fellow beings, in the form of money or social status or education or anything else. More often than not, we, unmindly of our responsibilty towards our life and others', indulge in domination of various degrees. Let us, consciously, not dominate over the unpriviledged and prevent a lot of nightmares from happening.

Here is how our prisoner, both inside and outside the prison, concludes:

'Since I came out of prison, I have suffered two breakdowns, I have attempted suicide, I have been addicted to drugs and to alcohol. The ordeal has never left me.

I am 55 now and I was 20 when I was arrested. So, what happened to us has taken up 35 years of my life. I am now with the girl that I met when I first came out of prison and I owe her an enormous amount of gratitude. Others have not been so lucky. I hope that what happened to us will always act as a reminder to people never to jump to conclusions, whatever the nature of a crime, and never to ignore the people who are now trying to get their voices heard so that the nightmare does not happen to them.'