Yeh tara wo tara, har tara…feature film Swades’ lyrical rendition on miniscule individual achievement in comparison to mammoth accessibility through group melding and synergy, India in its 50 odd-eth year of independence, and a Gandhi Jayanti made cool by Bollywood nods. The gap, a wide gaping fissure that exists in all forms and states of an Indian existence probably symbolizing Dvaita (duality) as its quintessential reality… The one I’m concerned with, a life lived that shuns any form of personalized ideology. Many Indians have philosophies to give out, and reasons to why it can’t be lived. The modern Indian, the average and above average Indian youth on the threshold of a something that seems to be happening…threshold to what? Good question, but lets just stay with the jazz in that term, it’s brain wracking to delve into any cultural implication and build on it. Instead, Dance with me baby, won’t you dance with me all night? Party, party party…crooning radios, page 3 newspapers with strangers’ faces pasted on the dance floor…
Finger pointing on either side: Yellow, black, blue and red fences running amok among sectarians like Age, Caste, Sex and Economy, not to forget Arts (no, not Bully-wood, no art there!), Education (oh don’t get me started!), Technology, Sciences (what Indian science pursuits? never heard of those), Politics, Culture. Beautifully shaped fingers raised and aimed out so well, military training helped with precision “in aiming” I suppose?
India in the last two years as seen through my eyes, my forbearance and my angst just unfolded. Look closer, as beneath the prose exist clichés, age-old and redundant used by yet another Indian. Life a few years abroad and I began to think that India is an object too flawed that needs to be set right. Unsorted emotion with forced intellect in action, masked with loads of “If only these were done…” and “If at all people could learn to…” and other such practical NRI (for want of a better acronym) approaches. This backed by a “it will not be all talk, I’ll move my finger too” motivation and what have you? Voila!, time worn, yet another Nodding Resigning Indian…almost there but not quite. The self-bashing comes and goes, the other-than-I bashing remains, but less intellectual, more in the moment, sans generalization.
What about compassion? I’m not quite there yet, but will the C word enter my frames of reference? Again, I don’t know because in my mind, implementing compassion activates statements of “be empathetic with us because we are bound by fatalistic choices” (the literary oxymoron was first observed in our culture don’t you think?) but yes, compassion is required with processes I realize. That is because as a very, very old “culture” which seems to have allowed very little cultural progress in thought (as I seem to think), we don’t seem to recognize that ideas create the world- push it forward. A stale compost of mental constructs that we allow not just to self-obstruct but also all the while, making sure these traps are set in the path of others around us. When awareness is completely asleep in the domain of recognizing our patterns in the outside world, it is irrelevant and incomprehensible to mention self-inquiry. So, this lack in awareness of entangled psychosocial complexity backed by eons of learned helplessness- or taught, imposed and now, inherited (maybe I’ll suggest to my geneticist peers to look for cultural genes that hinder us) rule the roost. Maybe the gene that aggressively markets learned helplessness is what needs to be found, the cure will lie there…or the blame could.
Blame, a term that gambles its winning way all through our interactions along-with its Siamese twin, guilt; shall we talk about these babies of mother culture? Wonderfully shaped biological pointers are raised in blame and presto, precisely our own, unable to handle the rising guilt does the same in another direction. Look, it’s raised and pointing north! Just avoid being in the line of fire-fingers and you’ll be fine, Mama told you. So in trying to jump, hop and skip, Blame the Guilt is played with the rules of Chinese Messages, never for a moment locally manifest longer than a second. If the impact would be taken in for a moment, however, surgery could be performed and two separate babies called Responsibility could be created- two unhindered babies that had abilities to respond. No more appeasing the audiences Bollywood style, just simple self-answerability and efficient functionality in the universe. Oh, to see those fingers drop!
Lifestyle pundits, media masqueraders, economic forerunners, governance gorges, Indian-ness markers, culture black-cats, yes, many more such succinct nouns to describe those fingers that stand raised, not as guideposts for self and the other, but as agents of hindrances that sneakily tend to create confusion for the other. How else could I express this?
Hold on just a moment Mr. Srinivasan, you have quite gaily thrown around terms! Please expound on some without the legitimate vagaries usually allowed in their usage. Excuse me alter ego, there’s no space for all of those but I’ll choose one- my favourite, another C word, Culture. In college, during one of the literature classes (because only Literature Lecturers would do this) we tried to examine the implications of the word, Culture. What resulted from classroom discussion was that culture translated to religion, values, patriotism, geography, cuisine, sexual beliefs, sexual practices, political agenda, personal space and music & the arts. In my mind at that time, culture is what reeked from walls of my room. In biology, I had to deal with the component that very passively supported and provided space and nutrient to exist. In my recent understanding, culture seems to be individual and collective (albeit conflicting) consciousness of our world’s operative. I will leave out what Webster has to say, much thanks Mitwa.
Deepak Srinivasan
Finger pointing on either side: Yellow, black, blue and red fences running amok among sectarians like Age, Caste, Sex and Economy, not to forget Arts (no, not Bully-wood, no art there!), Education (oh don’t get me started!), Technology, Sciences (what Indian science pursuits? never heard of those), Politics, Culture. Beautifully shaped fingers raised and aimed out so well, military training helped with precision “in aiming” I suppose?
India in the last two years as seen through my eyes, my forbearance and my angst just unfolded. Look closer, as beneath the prose exist clichés, age-old and redundant used by yet another Indian. Life a few years abroad and I began to think that India is an object too flawed that needs to be set right. Unsorted emotion with forced intellect in action, masked with loads of “If only these were done…” and “If at all people could learn to…” and other such practical NRI (for want of a better acronym) approaches. This backed by a “it will not be all talk, I’ll move my finger too” motivation and what have you? Voila!, time worn, yet another Nodding Resigning Indian…almost there but not quite. The self-bashing comes and goes, the other-than-I bashing remains, but less intellectual, more in the moment, sans generalization.
What about compassion? I’m not quite there yet, but will the C word enter my frames of reference? Again, I don’t know because in my mind, implementing compassion activates statements of “be empathetic with us because we are bound by fatalistic choices” (the literary oxymoron was first observed in our culture don’t you think?) but yes, compassion is required with processes I realize. That is because as a very, very old “culture” which seems to have allowed very little cultural progress in thought (as I seem to think), we don’t seem to recognize that ideas create the world- push it forward. A stale compost of mental constructs that we allow not just to self-obstruct but also all the while, making sure these traps are set in the path of others around us. When awareness is completely asleep in the domain of recognizing our patterns in the outside world, it is irrelevant and incomprehensible to mention self-inquiry. So, this lack in awareness of entangled psychosocial complexity backed by eons of learned helplessness- or taught, imposed and now, inherited (maybe I’ll suggest to my geneticist peers to look for cultural genes that hinder us) rule the roost. Maybe the gene that aggressively markets learned helplessness is what needs to be found, the cure will lie there…or the blame could.
Blame, a term that gambles its winning way all through our interactions along-with its Siamese twin, guilt; shall we talk about these babies of mother culture? Wonderfully shaped biological pointers are raised in blame and presto, precisely our own, unable to handle the rising guilt does the same in another direction. Look, it’s raised and pointing north! Just avoid being in the line of fire-fingers and you’ll be fine, Mama told you. So in trying to jump, hop and skip, Blame the Guilt is played with the rules of Chinese Messages, never for a moment locally manifest longer than a second. If the impact would be taken in for a moment, however, surgery could be performed and two separate babies called Responsibility could be created- two unhindered babies that had abilities to respond. No more appeasing the audiences Bollywood style, just simple self-answerability and efficient functionality in the universe. Oh, to see those fingers drop!
Lifestyle pundits, media masqueraders, economic forerunners, governance gorges, Indian-ness markers, culture black-cats, yes, many more such succinct nouns to describe those fingers that stand raised, not as guideposts for self and the other, but as agents of hindrances that sneakily tend to create confusion for the other. How else could I express this?
Hold on just a moment Mr. Srinivasan, you have quite gaily thrown around terms! Please expound on some without the legitimate vagaries usually allowed in their usage. Excuse me alter ego, there’s no space for all of those but I’ll choose one- my favourite, another C word, Culture. In college, during one of the literature classes (because only Literature Lecturers would do this) we tried to examine the implications of the word, Culture. What resulted from classroom discussion was that culture translated to religion, values, patriotism, geography, cuisine, sexual beliefs, sexual practices, political agenda, personal space and music & the arts. In my mind at that time, culture is what reeked from walls of my room. In biology, I had to deal with the component that very passively supported and provided space and nutrient to exist. In my recent understanding, culture seems to be individual and collective (albeit conflicting) consciousness of our world’s operative. I will leave out what Webster has to say, much thanks Mitwa.
Deepak Srinivasan
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