emptiness, which went against the then Christian theology. The followers of Shiva and Vishnu had clashed over the alleged superiority of one over the other and the symbols they adorned their foreheads with had immediately divided them into warring camps. The thin line that divides a symbol from the reality it is meant to represent vanishes at the merest whisper of opposition: the symbol becomes the reality.
Symbols have been used to harness mass power in order to achieve certain desired ends. Political parties use symbols in order to promote mass identification. Democracies thrive on voting the symbol representatives to power. This mass appeal sometimes helps legitimize political actions which may seem patently inhuman in other contexts. The rallying power of the symbol was fully exploited by the Nazis before the Second World War. Since they adopted Swastika as their party symbol, it became infamously associated with the most appalling crime in the history of humanity: six million Jews became victims of the Nazi’s racial bigotry. The communist ideology propagated by the symbol of hammer and sickle consumed the minds of a whole nation before it collapsed under the weight of its own tyrannical means to impose it on millions in the erstwhile Soviet Union. The advertisers use symbols to promote their product brands. And the well-known channels of advertisement, like hoardings, TV commercials, web banners and SMS ads on the mobile phones, are intended to lodge the symbols in the mind: the worth of the product (of which kind many exist in the market) hardly justifies this subliminal invasion and the resultant excessive cost to the consumer.
Not only in our waking moments, but even when we are sleeping, symbols affect us. They are the stuff