Mother Teresa took service to the entire detritus of society to a limit not considered humanly possible till then. This is why she was revered as an angel of heaven. Or sometimes denounced by critics as one from the opposite address.
Mother Teresa put Kolkata on the world map, but many of its citizens could be forgiven for complaining that it was for all the wrong reasons. Her work began and found its greatest resonance there, but it forever turned Kolkata into the world metaphor of squalor. Among the most riveting images to have come out of a city high on visual drama remains that of a rickshaw carrying a dying destitute on the lap of a nun in the now-iconic blue-bordered sari of the Missionaries of Charity.
Kolkata was not just Rajiv Gandhi’s dying city; it had given up on itself. At one level, the work of Mother T with the beggars she picked off the street, the lepers of Tollygunge, underlined that hopelessness. At another, it transfigured the gutter. Poverty is easily romanticised, especially when viewed through the prism of a superhuman figure in the incongruous form of a tiny, frail nun. But the saint of the gutters arguably did make a difference to the way the double disadvantage of the dying destitute was viewed in a country where life came cheap, and went with even less of an impact on the account book of the conscience.
Mother Teresa’s Indian-ness has been eagerly claimed by a nation eager to bask in her global and Nobel reputation. Yet it was the foreignness of the woman born Agnes Gonxa Bojaxhiu in Skopje, Macedonia in 1910 which enhanced her myth, and to lesser degree hindered her work. It made her that much more heroic, and that much more suspect.
Long before she died in 1997, Mother T became the 20th century’s synonym for compassion. The world may have flocked to her Homes to expiate its sins and its luxuries, but it will always be debatable whether her adopted compatriots are truly richer for having had her among them for 66 years.
No comments:
Post a Comment