A few days ago I went to this Thai/Vietnamese restaurant with some colleagues from work. This restaurant has a large aquarium as you step in and there is a fish about a foot and half long that swims in it. I have never seen another fish in the aquarium. This time, however, I saw a tiny goldfish in the aquarium. While this large fish continued to swim around, this small goldfish pretty much stayed in the bottom corner of the tank behind some air tube. Something struck me as odd but I could not place a finger on it.

Later, I was narrating this story to my friend, Veena, and she said that the tiny goldfish was actually a feeder fish put in the aquarium so that the large fish may eat it when it feels hungry. Something bothered me about that scenario. And yet, I could not quite say what it was. After all big fish eat small fish and big animals eat small animals all over the world. There was nothing wrong with that? Besides, I am hardly a queasy person and have seen bodies mutilated in road accidents without flinching at the gore – accepting that accidents happen and when trucks are involved, the human body is pretty delicate. And yet!

And yet, there was something wrong with the picture – it was a picture of violence. In the wild, the prey can be itself. It mates, has young ones, eats, runs, plays, fights. And somewhere in all of this it might become a prey. Its being is not restricted to a role of a prey. That was the violence in this aquarium. It was not the large fish eating the small fish but that this small fish had no role but that of a prey. Similarly, the large fish had only two roles – to be a showpiece in this restaurant and to be a predator. Both were in a situation of violence and they could do nothing about it. I must thank fishes for helping me clearly understand the Nonviolence of Being. Or the violence that is connected from constraints in being.

That is the violence of the meat industry – it is not that a human eats meat. What is violent in our meat eating today is that an entire world of organisms is raised only to be eaten. They have no Being except to be reared for eating. They find no avenues to Be the truth they are – chicken that are supposed to mate, lay eggs, cluck around in open spaces, rear their chicken. While I personally am not for their being eaten, within this process of living if they were eaten, there is a lesser sense of violence. The same is true for cows reared for milk and meat, goats, all kinds of livestock.

The violence associated with the oppression of being goes even further. It extends to the violence of slavery in the 1900s and indentured labor now – where their only reason for existence (as defined by a certain set of institutions) is to provide labor. It extends to the porn industry where they serve the lust of others and this defines their role. It extends to relationships with servants when we see them only in their role of serving us. It extends to when we see another region only in their ability to produce oil, or water, or minerals.

I think that every individual defines itself by some truths and tries to live them. Self-consistency in these truths is important and to the extent that we are not able to make them self-consistent, we are torn by internal conflicts. Nonviolence, as I see it, is the commitment to a process to be as per these truths. Non-violence is the commitment to Being of this Self.

I guess I knew all of this – however, these two fishes helped me put all of these together and understand what was meant by nonviolence and how it might guide me in how I interact with others, how I see policies and how I see institutions. I should thank the two fishes – one that still swims around for the entertainment of customers visiting this restaurant and one that was been gobbled up.

- Sanat Mohanty