Asiriyar's services are our comforts among discomforts

(The following are the excerpts of the felicitation address delivered by Respectful G.Balachandran IAS (Retd.) on the occasion of honouring Asiriyar Dr. K.Veeramani and Mr. Siddharth Varadarajan with QuaidE-Millath Award for Probity in Politics/Public Life by the Quaid-E-Millath Educational and Social Trust on 31st January 2023 at Chennai.)

- G. Balachandran

Respectful organisers, dignitaries, the recipients of the award for probity - Asiriyar K.Veeramani and Siddharth Varadarajan - a very good morning to all of you. I am glad, I am given an opportunity to speak felicitating them. Let me begin with a few words about Siddharth of ‘The Wire’. All of us know we would feel a shock when we touch a live wire. But when someone reads ‘The Wire’, somebody else somewhere is shocked. He is being honoured for that special feature. He knows about all the hurdles one has to face in protecting democracy. But he continues his efforts tirelessly. He is being rightly honoured today for his services.

The eminent French writer Albert Camus once said, “Democracy is not a rule of the majority; it is the protection of the minority.” He meant to say that it is our responsibility to safeguard the rights of all the downtrodden people, for whom we fought and achieved freedom. It is a difficult task but Siddharth and his team have resolved to accomplish it.

I cannot talk about Asiriyar Veeramani without talking about democracy and societal freedom. I recall Abraham Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg in 1863. Addressing the soldiers he said, “87 years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. We are now engaged in a great civil war. A nation so conceived and so dedicated can endure for long ............”

Lincoln had found out the basic problem that men who were created were not treated equal. Scholars all over the world analysed what Lincoln said comparing it with the state of affairs in their countries. In many countries, the minority had to exist under the domination of the majority. Hence people examined the social and political life of their own country.