Love that defines

It is a rare feat, one I've almost never come across, to be able to capture India, or a corner of it: for the whole magnitude of it is merely impossible. It is further rarefied to be able to tell everything in a matter of minutes and leave countless stories untold: to go deep into one man's consciousness and show him what he is composed of, amidst the flying accusations and erudite theories, of what all he was and still is, of how the Marina sparkles as I sit for hours on its wide expanse of sand looking at the stormy Bay of Bengal for hours on end, feeling the humid Madras sun. It is all that the latest "Royal Enfield: Handcrafted in Chennai" ad manages to do, another ad that proves how India excels head and shoulders above the rest in the advertising world, but also that goes so much beyond.

My love for Tamil Nadu is synonymous with my love for life; both commenced very early. Even though I do not know Tamil, and there are many more things that I, the uninitiated, do not know, it has never bothered me: when I am there, I know from inside that I am there. The soil, the air, the sun, the smell. Every being inside me cries with delight, and every me is moved to beauty, to the contemplation of beauty. What tells me I am there? All modern scientific theories seem so ridiculous besides that knowing: I pity them; they will be always at a loss to know the worth knowing.

Tamil Nadu, on overt looks, is a land of men and women very simply clad, especially men: checked shirts not inserted in the pants, and of course lungis. A land where both religion and atheism has its rigid rituals and many men and women are bound by them: to sway the populace to the latter, a leader would strike a deity with a chappal and laugh, and ask did something happen to me? The land where films with strange pyrotechnical fights and dances rule the hearts, and the actors are more dearly loved than gods, because the latter are feared more than loved.

But Tamil Nadu is so much more to me. It is liberty itself; the sense of vastness and an open earth and open seas is everywhere. In the luckier days, you could have gone to Tharangambadi and felt man as an outpost of nature: behind, the desolate Danish mansions of the first missionaries to India, and ahead beautiful ruins of a temple or two. Besides, a honest face who is trying to make sense of the world and an intelligent mind, selling you conch shells picked early morning. And yourself: in a world which is not uniform, which does not apportion you theories to follow and isms to join and sophies to debate about, but which directly enters your heart and makes you understand all its beauty. The world where religion is completely absent, unless you call the unflinching humidity everywhere except in the mountains by that name. Architectural marvels rise here as commonplace as every stone's throw, and every road of Mylapore rings with music: from temples equally as from vocalists practising and learning. In the harmony is that disharmony brought by the British - ideas of nation and state, ideas of career and English; and yes, the Enfield - but India has the unique ability to dissolve everything in itself but not to lose itself. And thus to create only more of richer nuances and novel ways of expression. The people are too many, the diversity is too great and the minds are too intelligent; how would you make a robot, whether mechanical or intelligent word spewing one, out of a Hindu?

Tourism ads are meant to please, and nowadays one is pleased when things are adapted for them; thereby, those ads automatically go against the grain of India. Hence, it is not an accident that the ad had to be that of a motorcycle, Royal Enfield - the oldest continuing motorcycle brand of the world. I would simply say that the ad is flawless and I thank the maker for it. Love of the earth, for when you love, it is always there: forgetting the receiving, you have to give, and it is in you and with you, it never takes you for a ride. It is the truest for every day comes with a new sun and a new storm, and every day must you woo.

You may watch the ad, if you have not already done so, here: http://www.royalenfield.com/community/handcrafted-in-chennai.aspx or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goOu4aNsOKU

Seeking a way out

The evils of a capitalist society are quite well-known and yet are often overlooked, maybe because what we’ve come up with in the last two or three centuries as panacea has been much worse: the same emphasis on capital in a different guise. We talk feminist theories and try to prove that everywhere a prejudice has always existed; we keep on focusing on the rich-poor divide and then only worsen it. And yet the unnamed monster has always been that we measure humans: in terms of their productive abilities. As long as you are productive in the sense of not creating a poem but a bushel of wheat, you can live; when you stop being productive, then there are many options: you can be killed, you can be relegated, you can be called a burden upon the society, you will get a proportion of society’s sum because you will be replaced by some others in the same position. Man does not remain free, for he has to produce to remain alive; he becomes the slave of his labour rather than his labour leading him to self-realization. The more he produces the thing considered more desirable in that particular epoch, the more “better off” he is: the problem with communism was that it never got itself rid of the prejudices for capital, and thus its start line was the acceptance that yes, more material goods is being better off. And then the fight for being better off started. Similarly with feminists, who forgot to question the basic premise of the society on which we function. It is very much like if politician A starts eating into the state’s funds, politician B starts rather quarreling as to why he also shouldn’t have a slice in the pie, too!

It is not that we haven’t ever tried a system not based on capital. The much-reviled Hindu system of caste was one such system which instead had the objective of placing the emphasis on knowledge and creation (in the sense of poem, yes). It of course had to denigrate, for people soon made it a matter of inheritance, but before trying to see why did it become so, let me take a mild digression.

Emotions are something that somehow science thought till recently “in the way of reason”: so even if they studied where in the brain they are being produced, they were always thought of as “those little inhibitors” or at best as stimuli. It is only now that the realization is seeping through across the scientific community that the emotional richness shown by the human species makes it the most intelligent species till date discovered: emotions are cues! Because of emotions we are able to take decisions, for better or for worse, related to our future; we have a “happy” memory or a sadness associated with a particular experience and which guides us in our future conduct. Think of emotions as “labels,” but as interactive labels: the ability to have, store and process them is what makes the humans able to manipulate time and space, and to construct huge projects out of thin air, to dream and to believe. And yet all along we have discounted these very emotions when we have seen man as a mere machine, as just another species of being who can be more productive than a bullock because he also has got a “brain.”

The ancient Hindus did try to break the deadlock by having instead a system wherein they defined classes based on the kind of work (and work was not defined by the money it produced) they do. So a knowledge-seeker was free to seek it, explore it; he was not constrained by having to produce. Knowledge was given the utmost importance and thus the Brahmin was on top of the social scale (instead of the rich) and he wandered about, living off food from others, who considered it a privilege, an honour to be able to give him food. Of course, the explicit hierarchy established brought very soon into being the attendant evils of this system, but here at least was an attempt to define man as more than a machine: the West often considers it another form of “division of labour” but it forgets that the Brahmin is not doing any labour in the capitalist (and thus always Western) sense of the word. It was more an attempt to free men from seeing themselves as hunter-gatherers, and use the rich resources with them to further explore truth. The problem with the Hindu system of caste lay in the confusion between atma/purusha and jivatma: I will not attempt to translate the words because the West has no such concept.

Hindus posited the system of caste on birth: thus a Brahmin’s son was automatically a Brahmin. I do not have any idea when they started doing so, because here they have got themselves confused about the theory of karma (which again is grossly misunderstood in the West, import as it is). Out of a million-odd forms of life, including that of amoeba, if you are born in the household of a Brahmin, it was considered obviously as the best chance to further try to understand universe, as you are being born to parents who already presumably know a lot and moving in a similar society: thus, if you had a good karma, your birth could be there. However, chance does not mean anything else than a chance: someone with wealth has more means to do something, but how many times have you seen it happen? By way of good karma, in its quest for self-realization, the atma will be reborn as a higher form of life; however, one must remember that man’s consciousness is jivatma, and man is completely unconscious of his atma. It is the atma that uses different life forms as tools in order to self-realize, not the other way round. What man can tap into (what in the West is called as soul) is his jivatma, his living consciousness. This jivatma dies with the man; it does not get reborn or transferred. A Brahmin's son could be as bad as anyone; karma has placed him there, but it is now up to his present karma so that the atma that thrives on his jivatma advances further on or not. It is hard to tell when the confusion between jivatma and atma arose in the Hindu thought and how; probably it was with many of the Brahmins themselves who started to seek power instead of knowledge, and thus mixing up the concepts is one of the best ways to hold power. Also, with the prevailing of Jainism all over India, Hindu cults had to spring up, and a cult inevitably means sacrifice of knowledge for power. Both Jainism and Buddhism of course themselves are nothing but cults: offshoots from Hinduism to seek power. Ignorance of one has been always the source of power for the other.

I do not know what the answer is in the present day; we don’t have an aristocracy anymore, and the illusion of freedom that democracy gives, while actually antithetical to the idea all the time, is an evil hard to fight. Because everyone loves freedom in theory, and now that we have already divided not only society into fragments of individuals but also individuals themselves into fragments of selves, the more urgent question is how to make one self conscious of the other. Our different selves are becoming our hidden, many jivatmas, which are running in parallel to each other, manifesting a terrifying lack of unity. At the back, still, of course, is our urge to seek that unity, but when society forces us to think of ourselves as labourer-gatherers, and to live accordingly, the clockwork can only become worse. For we have become clocks from humans.