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THOSE who create history are themselves unaware of the fact. When one fine morning, just like any other, Martin Luther pasted on the church door in his native village his protest against the distortions creeping into Christianity thanks to papal misdemeanours, he certainly did not know that he had become the world's first Protestant.

When the 23-year-old Rani of Jhansi refused to obey Viceroy Lord Dalhousie's diktat to hand over her kingdom because her husband died without an issue, she had no notion that she had kickstarted India's First War of Independence. When a few angry settlers in the then British colony in the new American continent threw boxes of tea into the Boston harbour (an event known as the Boston Tea Party) protesting taxation without representation in British Parliament, they had no idea that their simple gesture was going to culminate in the famous Declaration of Independence and the formation of the United States. In 1893 when an obscure attorney, M. K. Gandhi, stood up to the white ticket-checker only to be thrown out of the train in South Africa, he could have hardly imagined that he had signalled the collapse of the British Empire and written finis to colonialism.

In 1955, when a poor seamstress, Rosa Parks, of Montgomery, Alabama in the US, refused to move to the rear of the bus as was required by transportation regulations binding on blacks, and in 1962, when James Meredith, a young student, demanded admission in the University of Mississippi, till then out of bounds for blacks, neither of them knew they were going to spark a veritable rebellion against racism, resulting in blacks getting voting rights in 1960 and all segregation and discrimination based on race being ended by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It is they, in a sense, who paved the way for the appointment of Thurgood Marshall the first black Supreme Court justice (1967) and Colin Powell, the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989) in the history of the US.

We must take to heart the lessons we learn from these and similar occurrences; one is that small pebbles start an avalanche, and the other, that it is a mistake to underestimate the power of a single, small person, humdrum to all appearances, but capable of taking viswaroopa when roused. The latest examples are Nisha Sharma of Delhi and Vidya of Tamil Nadu. Their names are reverberating not only in India but round the world for their fearless stand against the racket of oppression, extortion and robbery euphemistically called dowry. They are the Jhansi Ranis and Rosa Parks' of our times, and so long as even a few of them are there, there is some hope for the world.

Their heroic acts hold a third lesson too: One does not have to bank on big organisations to make a big impact. Little drops make the ocean. Little individuals singly and boldly stepping forward to uphold, sustain and strengthen values that make life worth living can also bring about momentous changes.

B. S. Raghavan

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