Photo courtesy: E-pao
The burning down of State Central Library by the activists of MEELAL is an act of insanity. However justified a movement is, there is no forgiving the act of vandalisation of intellectual property by any sort of activists - sugar-coated or not. The arson has destroyed books worth 10 crores and deprived the budding scholars of Manipur of their prime source of reference. According to a news report, we have lost rare books which can never be replaced. What remains of them now is this: ashes.

I have a personal angle to this sad episode. I still remember sitting for hours in the library trying to figure out a passage from the Alice in the Wonderland. I grew up with Charles Dickens and Jane Eyre during my school days immersed in thier novels (which I borrowed from this library). To have lost this library is a loss of a part of my memory. Students and researchers have lost a precious storehouse of knowledge.

The agitators of MEELAL have made themeslevs vulnerable to public criticism, making them look like cheap publicity mongers.

Another fallout is the reinforcement of our image as a violent people. By such acts of indiscriminate violence, we are projecting an image of ourselves as a violence obsessed people. There seems hardly any difference between the tactics adopted by the civil society and the armed groups. We all look the same and do the same. Our civil society is civil no more.