I remember my polity teacher mentioning, “With great power, comes great responsibility”. It was an oft repeated phrase in his class and as soon as my brain picked up the first two words, it signaled me to nap for the next few seconds as it knew what was coming ahead. The phrase was plain boring to me, mostly because I have seen people withdrawing whenever I am only halfway through uttering the word “responsibility”. So both the words- “power” and “responsibility” evoked emptiness whenever they arose in my mind. The word “power” brought up the image of a high-nosed colonial master and the word “responsibility” without the word “run” seemed to make an incomplete sentence. The true import of these words, I could only understand a few days ago.
It was raining heavily that day and I was trying to shut the bedside window. I wasn’t able to so I tried pulling it hard. I still wasn’t able to but I also couldn’t see anything blocking it’s way. When I looked near the hinge of the frame, I found a lizard, severely hurt. It reminded me of an accident I had seen as a child where a truck had run over a woman’s body. In this case I was that truck driver in my mind. The condition of the lizard was exactly like that poor woman, organs smashed, waiting to die. It didn’t die for a very long time and seeing it writhing in pain for the next few hours, I understood what power and responsibility meant.
Before this incident, of all the adjectives that I could use to describe myself, “powerful” was certainly not one. After this however, I now know that power is not a unidimensional word. Power is not limited to having a motorcade follow you wherever you go, but it is simply the ability to make something happen or not happen in our own or someone else’s life. If it is used without foresight, it leads to pain. What should come before exercising power, is an attempt to answer the question, “In whose interest is this power being used?” Another term for this question is responsibility. Progressive civilizations do have such a system to check institutional powers, but there hasn’t been any emphasis on putting a self check on the power that we exercise over our own selves and other earthlings almost all the time. We use this power very indiscriminately, taking or giving it away recklessly and without asking the questions that we should. At an individual level, if we ground ourselves with the possible outcomes of taking or giving away power too recklessly, a lot of our individual and institutional problems will be solved.
