A powerful bomb rips apart a shopping complex and hundreds of corpses produce a macabre scene. At one comer lies the lifeless body of a student, his cold hands clutching on to a pen.
This pen in his hand stands for dreams—dreams of a bright future where he would use his intelligence to contribute to mankind’s march towards a better tomorrow. But these dreams bite the dust as the pen lies on the floor splattered with blood. The repulsive fog of dust and smoke shrouding the building celebrates the existence of murky maniacs who revel in a bloodbath.
So where does the pen lie in a world of bombs and guns? When we talk about the relative might of the pen or the sword, it needs no gainsaying that our perception and analysis need to be essentially metaphorical. Thus while the pen stands for the might of the human intellect that has made man the master of the world, the sword stands for man’s physical prowess—raw, instinctive and ever eager to push its way through nature.
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The sword can refer to the power to protect or to destroy. Man has used his physical strength more to destroy than to create or protect. If the pen represents the world of ideas, it is to be remembered that man without his ideas or intelligence could have never created the sword. If man uses his pen of ideas to visualise the use of all the swords in the world towards destructive ends, that would still maintain the superiority of the pen.
It all depends on whether we treat the fruit of knowledge as poison or manna. The sword is merely an instrument; it is the world of ideas and thoughts as represented by the pen that decides the use of this instrument towards a fair or foul end. Fear not the sword, but the hand that wields it.
The world is driven by ideas. Positive ideas shall create a sword to improve the world and negative ideas shall do the opposite. Either way, it is the pen that calls the shots. While some Laden shall celebrate the massacre of thousands of innocent lives, a Ruskin Bond somewhere else shall wonder why a song doesn’t bring a shower or a gun doesn’t grow a flower! Both men use the pen of their ideas, but with very different results. But there is no point discussing the sword in the absence of the pen.