Lessons  from the Pandemic

Speaking about  his new novel Nights of the Plague, the Nobel laureate of yester years, Orhan Pamuck says that  “the Pandemic alters the political and social scaffolding of the  nations…the subject of plague is always related  to  politics.”Pamuck’s prescience is extraordinary when viewed in the light of what had transpired during the dreadful twenty odd months of Covid that witnessed the dance of death. Pamuck says “Humanity more  or  less behaves the same way during pandemics. First there is denial.  Denial makes the numbers go up. This leads to conspiracy theories-nationalism, going inward, blaming the governments or other ethnicities.  Sometimes it leads to new governments   being formed.  Other times, the government is involved and becomes authoritarian…”

Initially in November 2019, when China reported the deadly spread of Covid, the world was complacent as it was regarded as a one off plague in the far away, distant China. It only dawned a few weeks later that the Covid virus needed no passport to travel all over the world. We in India, true to Pamuck’s prediction, were also initially in a state of denial. By the time we acknowledged its presence, the fatality count had risen up by geometric progression. The appeal to nationalism by  the PM to be responsible citizens, observe a  self  imposed curfew and clap on balconies and clang plates happened with the kind of pomp and show that we see during Indian weddings or  festivities  and made the obedient  masses collect on the streets and hysterically clap and clang thalis(plates)  to frighten the virus to bolt out of India. But it didn’t serve the purpose; on the contrary it reversed the whole point of the exercise of self imposed lockdown by crowd’s close proximity causing still more rapid virus transmission.

Again Pamuck’s anxiety about the health of democracy has proved true as the coronavirus outbreak has globally challenged human rights. According to Freedom  House report, “the COVID-19 pandemic has fuelled a crisis for democracy around the world. Since the Corona virus outbreak began, the condition of democracy and human rights has grown worse in 80 countries. Governments have responded by engaging in abuses of power, silencing their critics, and weakening or shuttering important institutions, often undermining the very systems of accountability needed to protect public health.’  Pamuck is in line with the Israeli writer and intellectual, Yuval  Harari’s prediction about the post-Pandemic world that  its critical influence will be felt  on health care systems, where its impact on the ruling governments  will lead  to totalitarian surveillance through collection of personal data of every individual ostensibly  to provide  them   with better protection against the Virus. On the social front, the easy availability of personal data –especially related to health -can adversely impact life insurance premium, employability and even marriage.

 I like every other person waited for the day when masks would become a thing of the past and the world would move to normalcy as it did  after the Spanish flu exactly a century ago. Those born after 1920  when the Spanish flu ended , do not have any idea of what  those two nightmarish years (1919-1920)- that accounted for 50 million deaths- were like! All the havoc caused during the current pandemic years bear close similarity to the Spanish flu years except that the fatality is much larger than before.  Covid has once again brought to the fore the awareness of  Man as a Lilliputian pitched against a tiny virus that was gargantuan in its lethality. All the advancement in Medical Sciences and technological innovation could not put the present day Humpty Dumptys together again. The Virus has had its last laugh, becoming the cruellest leveller of mankind.

But all the resolutions and determinations that kicked in while experiencing the ruthless savagery of Covid are now gradually becoming a thing of the past as we blithely ignore  the lessons we absorbed while we were incarcerated within the four walls  of the house.  We have now turned deaf to the eerie silence of the walls that remind us of the countless deaths that struck every household, of orphaned children and devastated families, of forced isolation accelerating cognitive decline and damage to our physical health. For a short period  it had jolted us out of complacency  and reckless  self-centric life of the pre-pandemic YOLO years, when we lived and breathed the idea  that since  you  live  only  once, live life to the fullest. While it  is okay to let oneself loose and have some fun, the YOLO generation  is  using this logic as an  excuse to fully engage once again  in  doing things that are enjoyable and exciting,  however silly and  inane they are.  In the process of total enjoyment we have once again fallen back to self centrism, with no care or feeling for fellow beings and unmindful of the waste and devastation of our environment and its resources.

The pandemic brought us –albeit for a short interval-to appreciate the wisdom of a Gandhian way of life that stressed on minimalism, characterized  by sparseness  and simplicity. From our early days, we have been taught in our Tamil language சிறுக  கட்டி  பெருக  வாழ்-(build a small home and live King size).  But we were lured to adopt maximalism whose motto “more is  more”      that goes contrary to the philosophy of minimalism of “less  is  more.” In the years of freedom struggle and the early years of post independence   we took pride in following Gandh’s pithy advice- “waste not,  want not”. This was in the early fifties of the last century. As we moved from underdeveloped status to that of a developing nation, “waste not, want not’ became passe^’.  The waste that accrues in a present day Indian fat wedding can be measured from the trashcan filled with left- over food on the plates. But for a brief interregnum during Covid, despite the house imprisonment and barred from eating out, we readily accepted homemade food as a measure of healthy but frugal life.

But this did not last long and the deceptive lull of the first wave with people letting their hair down during the festival months resulted in the catastrophic rise of the second wave with people dying in thousands for lack of oxygen. The lessons learnt during the first wave were forgotten. The second wave raged leaving a trail of devastation.  The ominous forecast is the possibility of a third time repeat as  people have already forgotten  the two major lessons Covid had earlier taught –wear the mask and accept aloneness. The neglect of these two Covid appropriate behaviour presages fresh anxiety about the uncertainties of life and why things should not be taken for granted.

The festival season preceding the annual arrival of winter has once again turned people crazy. Today’s leading newspaper has 45 full page advertisements, excluding the half page ones that add up to another 15 pages.  The total number of pages as indicated  on top of the opening page pegs it at 88 which makes advertisements garner 2/3rds  of today’s edition. The TV channels advertise diamond and platinum rings, high quality silk sarees and dresses, high priced cars and electronic gadgets, packs of almond and pista and dry fruits ... Is it naivety on my part to wonder if we have all won Bachchan’s crorepathi show! But when I step into market and ask for a simple ‘Chaat”-the traditional savoury item sold by street vendors,  the rocketing price of 170 rs/plate make me scamper home. For the poor and the  middle class, milk, pulses, vegetables, oils have become beyond their reach as the prices have  rocketed sky high and all the sop offered by the government in terms of increased Dearness Allowance  cannot get the poor even a quarter of their daily needs. The traffic snarls with cars on the roads moving bumper to bumper, the surreptitious bursting of crackers(faking as green crackers, which was also banned by the Supreme Court)adding to the deteriorating air quality, the jostling crowds in the market without masks despite the experts’ warning indicate that lessons learnt have been forgotten. There is no thought left for the elderly, for those with co-morbidity, those with decreased lung power and for young children. In the name of tradition, which can best be defined as perpetuating the illusion of continuity, the crackers had to be burst. The unwritten advice is ‘if you have headaches, find your own aspirins’.

Life has returned to pre-pandemic days except for the poor facing even greater hardship than before. The government hails the industrial and corporate magnates for kicking in the animal spirits to show that economy is on the upswing,  but the truth is the upswing in economic activity is only for the rich, by the rich and of the rich. Animal spirits is limited to the entrepreneurs and businessmen and rich consumers who can afford mega purchases. But they are absent in the vast majority of consumers belonging to the lower strata of society who have no purchasing power.

The austerity that marked the last two Diwalis is no longer there.  Lavish parties, travel to exotic  places, frenzied shopping, exchange  of Diwali gifts from the rich to the richer and from the richer to the richest...have  replaced past austerity to present  superfluity.  As stated earlier,  we  see bombardment of advertisements  and attractive offers  to lure customers-in particular the EMI offers- to soften the blow where the product is alluring and the price is forbidding. As Santosh Desai writes:  “The Festival  of Lights is at its heart a festival of consumption”.  The Rich splurge as they have more than enough to see them through the rest  of life, the upper middleclass , to keep up with the rich Joneses makes extravagant purchases for show off/ display, while the lower classes remain in awe and despair- which hopefully should not misdirect them to trigger a social crisis. We are back to the pre pandemic days without a thought for the most disadvantaged groups that comprise the majority of our population.

Labelled as the Black Swan event, Covid has had a devastating effect on all societies and on all sectors like health, education, jobs, industry and agriculture. We in India have been exposed  to the horrific  pictures of migrant exodus walking back with their families during the hottest part of summer when lockdown was suddenly  imposed rendering them jobless in megacities far away from their native states. It had a severe impact on millions of low-income migrant workers and daily-wage earners. Many charitable organizations arranged food for these migrants trudging back wearily on foot. For once even the most self centric person had empathy and felt connected to fellow humans however distant they were economically, socially and mentally. Pandemic did kindle-at times even unobtrusively-fellow feeling as everyone had lived through the pandemic. The shared experience of loss of beloved ones, the trauma of  a long period of isolation,  the fear and anxiety about contracting Covid despite the protective vaccination,  the job cuts and job losses, and above all the absence of contact with the outside world of Nature ... made us realize the worth and value of what it is to be human.

We, in India who had escaped the deadly onslaught of the two World Wars-1914-18  and 1939-45- while the West encountered the Absurd functioning of the universe where nothing was certain, nothing could be taken for granted, nowhere  to feel safe and secure, nothing to expect, nothing to predict....in short nothingness of Man pathetically confronting the  Nothingness of the Universe -- a timeless, spaceless, dimensionless state with no features a state beyond human mind and imagination. The unequal battle between the two forms of nothingness made the Western man value his worth and dignity by standing up to the Absurd without seeking crutches to support him. ‘The greatest mystery was not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.’(Maurice Friedman).Even the crutches were not available. The World War brutality tells us a story of a Jewish Rabbi seeing God crouching in a dark corner. When he asks God why He is hiding, God answers cryptically: “I am tired”.

The Pandemic has now given us the awareness of the Absurd. It has struck millions of families, sparing neither the rich nor the poor in its viral sweep. It has upended the complacent, self centred life we were leading to one of acceptance that we all belong to the single family of humanity-what our Upanishads had defined as Vasudeva Kutumbakam- “The world is one family” stressing the idea that all people are connected and that we should treat others with kindness and respect, as if they belong to our own family. The notable point is the virus has shown us as one collective humanity in sharing mental and physical trauma. It mattered very little if the pandemic raged in Timbuctoo or elsewhere, for its reach was wide and  rapid as the globe had shrunk with its amazing connectivity. The need to be united and not divided in the face of a common enemy  was the key lesson we learnt from the Pandemic.  But once the pandemic has lessened its vice grip, we have returned to our old ways of fighting in the name of ideology, race, religion, status and nationality. The pandemic had for a short period fine tuned the idea  “No man is an island” and we desperately wanted to move out of the sordid confinement within the house to meet and greet fellow beings.

But now that the Pandemic is on the wane, we are back to our egotistic self, back to the sense of the centrality of “ME” defined by my material, intellectual, racial, religious status . Everyone- the ruler and the ruled, the spiritual priest and his flock, the physician and the patient, the trader and the consumer, the employer and the employed,-asserts his strength and superiority that leads to national, ideological, religious, racial and societal schism. Pandemic for all its lethality had united us with a sense of belonging to the Human race. But as it makes its final bow, it seems to take back the unity that it had installed . In its place all that remains is alienation, discord and disharmony.  The news headlines and news flashes are no longer about the lethal invasion of Covid, but about the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the sabre rattling of China against Vietnam, the new geo politics of nuclear war, the deadly conflict over hijab in Iran, the fatal conflicts in Iraq, international  economic warfare, global food crisis, climate devastation…Add to this, racial conflict, religious polarization, genocide currently on the rise all over the world. The lessons learnt during the pandemic are the only fragments humanity has to shore against its extinction.

Let us recall how the Mahabharata ended signalling the end of the Dwapara yuga. After the Kurukshetra war ended, only 12 survived that included among others the five Pandava brothers, Draupadi,Krishna and Aswathama . The Mahābhārata ends with the death of Krishna, and the subsequent end of his dynasty and ascent of the Pandava brothers to heaven.. Soon after the death of Krishna, the entire Yadava clans of Dwaraka were destroyed due to a fratricidal war.

Once again the desperate cry of Where Shall Wisdom be found is heard. This is the title of Harold Blooms brilliant book, where he refers to Wisdom literature from the Bible to twentieth-century writing, that have shaped  our thinking. Though Bloom has not included the Indian classics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, we can add them to his list from the Book of Job and Ecclesiastes; Plato and Homer; Cervantes and Shakespeare; Montaigne and Bacon; Johnson and Goethe; Emerson and Nietzsche; Freud and Proust along with the Gospel of Thomas and Saint Augustine. These are what Eliot would have defined as  “the fragments to shore against our ruin”. Bloom says these Books “teach us to accept natural limits… Reading alone will not save us or make us wise, but without it we will lapse into the death-in-life of the dumbing-down in which America now leads the world, as in all other matters.”.While Bloom refers only to America, the post Covid World of today needs his sagacious solution. Go back to books and they shall hold the mirror to the lessons taught by Covid.

Reboot Contra Reversal

 

A few days back I wrote about the first anniversary of lockdown that resonated with a great level of positivity. The touch of human kindness was one of the positives many of us experienced this last one year   and it provided the much needed mitigation  from the unbearable heaviness of  house arrest. When I wrote that piece, the Corona wave afflicting the country had started waning almost to negligible level and there was palpable relief that the corona year like the 1918 pandemic flu could  be confined to the annals of history as an instance of centenary recurrence.. Even octogenarians like me inching into our last phase of life began to relax and ventured to step out for a walk in the park. To us, who for a year had wrestled with despair and despondency, the timely news of vaccination gave further relief and once again we began to view daily sunshine as a glorious birth and felt a  spring in our stride that had become slow and  weak with advancing years almost in a state of corona paralysis. The sudden fall in the corona positive graph  made us feel   like Wordsworth’s Leech Gatherer, bent double with age, with a resolve not to give in to despair and reaffirm life with courage and dignity. With the song “We shall overcome” on our lips, buoyed with hope and optimism we felt that together old and young  we shall return to pre Corona times, hopefully a little chastened and subdued.. But as  the saying goes small showers last long  and sudden storms are short This sudden welcome interlude barely lasted for a couple of weeks as the aggressive bug once more reared its more vigorous and more lethal head We are back where we were a year ago.

We had this time brought it on ourselves by lowering the bar through mindless complacency, forgetting all the lessons of COVID appropriate behaviour. Vaccine hesitancy compounded by vaccine shortage further  fuelled the Corona fire and what looked like embers a few weeks back has now burst into a huge conflagration worse than the Amazon forest fire of 2020. .

We are back to our barracks except that now it is self imposed and not an official incarceration as the governments are caught in a catch 22 situation- to lockdown or not to lockdown. The PM exhorts the nation to observe four days of ‘tika utsav’ ( vaccination festival).What an irony! These four days harbinger the New Year in many parts of the nation that follow the solar calendar- ‘Puthandu’ in Tamilnadu,  ‘Baisaki’ in Punjab, ‘Bihu’ in Assam, ‘Vishu’ in Kerala,  ‘ Pana Sankranti’ in Odisha, ‘Poila Boishakh’ in Bengal. Close to these New Year Day the states following lunar calendar celebrate ‘ Ugadi’ in Andra Pradesh, Karnataka and Telengana and ‘Gudi Padwa’ in Maharashtra.

Now our PM has added one more utsav- Tika Utsav to celebrate these days with a prick of the needle. Probably in his inimitable mesmerizing voice, he should have given us Modi music like Modi dance of  clanging the thalis last year- and sing “Virus, Virus, go away, /Don’t you dare come another day, we want to celebrate our prick.” 

The nation has become delirious with the PM’s suggestion. Camps and Centres are set up all over the states and instead of summer sherbet in our hands, we have Covaxin in our arms.  This is Modimagic – a new term to be added to the numerous list –Moditva, Modinnomics, Modisarkar,  Modi dance, Modi music Modi upadesh,....Modi is the Man of the moment. Different strokes for different times- He presents different images to different people – Modi, the Modernist, Modi, the Seer, Modi  the Orator, Modi the Silent  sage in a cave, Modi, the Prophet ,Modi, the Guru, Modi the Hugger, Modi, the Charmer, Modi, the Saviour Modi, the friend of billionaires, Modi the protector of the poor, Modi, the heartthrob of the Bollywood, Modi, the patron of the Media... He is a poet in Hindi (like his illustrious predecessor Shri Vajpayeeji) a twitterate in English, a lover of the birds and animals (like the first PM of India).... he has demolished Lutyens elite culture and remodelled elitism with   his own brand of hinglish elitism. He is Rama and Krishna to the North Indians and Gujaratis, he is Ramakrishna Paramahansa and Tagore for the Bengalis, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu for the Oriyas,  Periyar for the insular parochial Tamils , Parasurama for the Keralites, ...

Modi hai to mumkin hai... Yes, his tika utsav irrespective of vaccine availability is the reboot mantra contra reversal to the second, third, fourth,.... waves of corona dance. The unbearable heaviness of the corona recurrence has been made bearable lightness thanks to Modi mantra Tika Utsav

 

The New  Normal(revised)

 

It is time to feel excited that 2020 will be a footnote in the annals of world History in less than a week from today. Without an exception, even the atheists, agnostics and sceptics will join the god believers and the eternal optimists to wish and pray for a new dawn when all the anxieties, worries, fears, sadness and sufferings of 2020 would be just history. With hope and excitement, we all look forward to the dawn of 2021 –if not for a miracle to happen- at least for a relief from the one in hundred years pandemic that has drained  humanity of its physical and psychic energy. 

What a year it has been- a challenge to us humans that touched every aspect of our lives. WHO had christened the new highly infectious killer disease, COVID(Corona Virus Disease) when it first surfaced in China in October 2019 and spread its tentacles globally in less than three  months.  Its growth had been terrifyingly rapid, affecting one and all, without social ,gender and class discrimination, sparing neither the rich nor  the poor nor the middleclass, nor the urban-rural fringe.  

The new word Corona has not remained just a medical term, but has become a part of our everyday conversation.  It is unbelievable how  from the sanitary worker to the vegetable vendor to the  street pedlar,  from highbrows to lowbrows, from the cultured to the philistine, from the sophisticated to the shallow, from the cerebral to the dull-witted, from memsahebs to maids, two English words - ‘masks’ and ‘Lockdown’ -  have become a part of their vocabulary.  These two words along with ‘vaccine’ and the ‘ new normal’ have gained a ubiquitous status. Imperative injunctions that earlier disapproved of idioms such as  ‘being masked’ and  ‘being negative’ have shed off their undesirability and gained acceptability among all sections of society. One of the Whatsapp messages  that has  been forwarded many times  has the  oratorical quip  a la  Brutus’ rhetorical funeral oration in Shakespeare’s   Julius Ceasar:

 Who is here so callous that would not wear a mask ?

If any, speak: him I leave to your judgement.

Who is here so unsocial that would not self distance by six feet?

If any speak ; him I leave to your judgement.

Who is here so vile that would not love his fellow beings?

If any speak ; him I leave to your judgement

 Who is here so dull that  refuses to be negative

If any speak, him I leave to your judgement

Who is here so foolish not to want to be negative

If any speak, him I leave  to your judegment

Who is here with unshakeable faith in the golden precept ‘be positive’

If any speak, him I leave to your judgement.

Who is here so lawless who refuses the ‘new normal’

If any, speak; him I leave to your judgement

 

The new normal is to hide behind the mask and remain to some extant incognito till COVID gets masked by vaccine that shall play its three-in-one role as our protector, preserver and saviour. The new injunctions about masks, keep safe distance and wash hands frequently   is nothing new,but only ancient wisdom in modern idiom.  I recall, eight decades back, my father’s quotidian question at the dining table :” Have you washed your hands”? He would expect us to repeat Eliza Dolittle’s answer to Henry Higgins( my father was a great lover of Bernard Shaw and remembered lines from My Fair Lady with ease); ‘I ain’t dirty. I washed my face and hands before I come. I did ‘. The notable difference is there was no sanitizer in those days. Even the word ‘sanitizer’was not a common one. The closest one got to was ‘sanitary inspector’  The water we used to wash our hands  was more often than not well water (as most houses had a well in the backyard). There was no escape from the patriarchal command. Similarly returning home  the first thing was to discard the footwear in the outer veranda and go straight to the bucket placed near the entrance or to the well in the backyard and  wash one’s hands and feet. In course of time these habits were forgotten once we started entering the dining room with shoes on and eating with forks and spoons( mainly  the urban inhabitors -both the urban naxals and the urban anti naxals). COVID has recalled these old habits and reminded us how far we have moved away from our hoary wisdom.

But COVID is also mocking our positive attitude. It has been dinned into our ears from our early days to stay positive, be happy, look adversity in the eye and remain optimistic. 20^th Century English dramatist Edward Bond had remarked “We are optimistic by intuition and pessimists by experience”. Ironically Covid has given us the reverse experience to give up intuitive optimism and embrace the pessimistic negativism. Everyone who goes through the antigen or RT-PCR test regains his positive cheer only after results declare him as negative. Where do we stand now? Be positive or be negative? Well the road to positivity seems through negativity. Covid has taught us not to be foolishly optimistic all the time, but go through the grind of negativism to emerge positive. With experience, seek negative; with hope and faith be positive.  Hope and faith are no longer to be based on feelings but on facts. We have reason to hope as we find human ingenuity coming with vaccine  at the darkest hour. The speed of the miniscule Corona virus measuring 120nanometre has found its match in human inventiveness with its speed of research and discovery of vaccines to put brakes on its fast and furious spread.

True, it is darkest before dawn. We have had experience of staying in the mother’s womb for nine full months. Our anti natal experience has helped us stay put now during the Lockdown for almost 12 if not 12+ months. We have remained incarcerated inside our homes with shut windows and closed doors to caution the Virus that thou shall not cross  the doorsill  of our homes. For once in the early months we followed our hon’ble Prime Minister’s dictum to draw the Lakshman rekha( a strict convention of rules not to be traversed  that will lead to undesirable consequences) to ensure that going out and coming in are prohibited. Much to our dismay, on those occasions like navratra pooja and Diwali when some defiantly crossed the line, we let in the virus to play havoc with millions of lives. Luckily there were quite a number of law abiding citizens who adhered to  the norms to save ourselves and others from the virus  . They along with doctors and healthcare workers including the sanitary staff have been the sentinels to keep the virus at bay. The new normal has given us a new proverb:  “Six feet distance  keeps the Virus at bay. The Pandemic has triggered in us a semblance of discipline, though a lot many chafe against it as an infringement on their freedom.  They fail to understand  that the Pandemic is a one in 100 visitation while our  festivities come every year. A small step in discipline today,, a giant leap  towards a secure future.

 Yet another new normal is to greet with ‘namaste’ and  folded hands. The Western practice of handshake and the middle east practice of hugging that became universal practice has been pushed aside in favour of the Indian way of greeting with folded hands. Our PM’ s signature bear hug that excluded female world leaders, leaders of countries with lower GDP, with below average FDI, with no significant bilateral debt with India and  with less number of NRIs etc can no longer be discriminatory as pandemic has imposed greetings from a distance with folded hands.  Greetings have become formal and distant.

In his new book Now It’s Come to Distances: Notes on Shaheen Bagh,  Coronavirus, Association and Isolation Soumyabarta Choudhhury states that the whole world today is confronted with fhe brute fact of human mortality. The global assault of the pandemic has brought about a global impasse- “not simply an impasse of ‘ oh! we can’t go out.  , we can’t do our usual routine things ... but an impasse of not having the adequate concept for the situation”. I remember in despair I used to look for astrological predictions as to when the pandemic will ease off . I asked an astrologer friend of mine why all the positive indications of the movement of stars and planets as predicted by famous astrologers had failed, she answered warily that this visitation of virus has gone beyond all our knowledge and all our calculations.  We need new knowledge, new approach, new strategy to figure out the whys and whats of such a visitation. It is impossible to abstract knowledge from whatever limited resource we have had. We need a new normal.  Soumyabrata says the same thing: “  the threshold of the new...is what I call the impossible. So the impossible is what makes us do what we do...When we do something new, when we produce something new, when we say something new, it is the impossible that makes it possible, paradoxically” The new normal is to accept that this is the world we belong to. We are at an impasse. We have to overcome it, however impossible it may seem. In that very attempt, the new normal will throw up possibilities to resist the impasse and liberate the world from it.

2020 will be gone in another sixty hours( i write this on the 28^th afternoon). We need not attempt to consign it to the history book. The lessons we learnt as collective humanity against a tiny virus will have to be remembered. Corona Virus has made the world a level playing field. It has spared none  -from Donald Trump to Bolsanaro, from Boris Johnson to Emmanuel Macaron, PM of Russia to PM of Armenia besides billions of men and women from the lowest to the highest rung of the social ladder. Let us not forget the lessons that for once shook us to become aware of the common thread of humanity that runs through all of us.  Let us affirm without fear the universality of  human mortality. Let us remember 2020 with gratitude that has made us realize we are human beings who have unwittingly been host to the virus and suffered en masse the consequences. From arrogance to humility, from bluster to quietness, from bravado to modesty let us look at ourselves not  as conquerors of the world and the universe,  but recognize that the world holds for us  a blank slate on which we  re-write the normal that we had forgotten, the normal that we had discarded and the normal that waits  to be re-engineered as the new normal .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every Individual is Different

 

                                                         Every Individual is Different

My nephew in US, a young boy around ten years, asked his mother to request her writer-uncle to write a book on “Every individual is different”.  While I was stunned at this strange request from a ten year old, I realized how the fact of being individually different is for us, the adults, more of a facetious remark than an acknowledgement of an indelible truth. Obviously this young boy mustv have viewed with awe and surprise the variation and differentiation that he saw around him, but we grown-ups accept it as the bald truth and so does not merit too much discussion. Very likely, the boy’s query must have stemmed from his being constantly chided that he is different and not being like his parents or like any of his friends who are toppers of their class.

The boy’s natural acquiescence to the prevalent difference among individuals brought to my mind Henry Higgins famous lines in MY Fair Lady:

Why can’t a woman be more like a Man?...

Why does everyone do what the others do?
Can't a woman learn to use her head?
Why do they do everything their mothers do?
Why don't they grow up, well, like their father instead?

 

While Higgins is at his sarcastic best attacking women for not being like men(which he would have disliked if there was no gender disparity), he fails to appreciate the truism:

Women are women, men are men

And the twain shall never meet .

 

All of us like Higgins insist on sameness or identicalness as against distinctness or individuality. The reason for insistence springs out of our sense of superiority that should serve as a model for others to follow. It flies in the face of existential reality of diverse species co existing in our planet.  On the wider expanse of the universe, we see  different planets and stars present in the sky,  despite their structural and qualitative differentials. Sun releases light and heat, but moonlight is cool and dusky.  All that we see around us is variety. Even our five fingers are not alike. But each one is pre-programmed to do a particular task. The middle finger cannot be a substitute for the thumb or the thumb a substitute for the ring finger etc... Look at our physical structure. The eye can only see, it cannot hear. The ear can only hear but cannot see. The food pipe lets the food go while the windpipe is for breathing. Heart cannot do the kidney’s function and vice versa. Every organ has a specific assignment to keep the body functioning. If anyone of them deviates from its assigned path, the body collapses.

Before we came into the world, we had no clue where we came from or the purpose for which we are born or the nature of our self. We don’t even have a voice to refuse to be born or to express a wish to be born in a particular country or family... It all comes down to the indisputable fact that we were pre- programmed even before we were thrown into this world. Our life moves along a pre- designed programme. What we call ‘I’ is not an ‘I’ that we want it to be, but an ‘I’ that has been set in motion before it came into the world.  Each ‘I’ is unique and it is never replicated. This is the best evidence of the presence of God , the Master designer who alone can programme many billions of  billions of ‘I’s where no two ‘I’s are similar. What is given to every individual is a unique ‘I’ and it is that uniqueness we have to discover and live up to its potential. It is patently absurd to expect interchange of ‘I’s.  We have to constantly bear in mind

‘I’ is ‘I’

 You is ‘You’  

and the two shall remain forever different.

 

The world will be a better world if we accept its built-indifference and not seek conformity. But deep within we all desire conformity. Parents want their wards should be in their mould. They beam with pride when their children are complimented as chips of the old block. Then there is the family pride, caste affinity, racial distinctness, cultural congruence, national identity – all these fundamentally militate against acceptance of difference, giving rise to chauvinism, hyper-nationalism, insularism and isolation. Hitler’s call for united Germany incited xenophobic nationalism under the three rules he promised-one people, one Reich, one leader. Hitler fell and so did Napoleon, Mussolini and many dictators who in the name of uniformity, ethnicity, homogeneity and racial identity attempted to obliterate all differences among people.

The world is witnessing a hark back to an era of authoritarian rule, different and distant from rule  by democracy. All over the world, we see a forcible thrust of hyper-nationalism that has given rise to intolerance of differences. No ruling party wants opposition and there is a constant attempt to stifle any form of dissent. Plato recognized the consequences of the rule of a single, powerful leader that would degenerate into tyranny. The rise of a strongman will breed greed based self-centric rule that will gradually descend to anarchy.

India has followed till recently the principle of unity in diversity. Hinduism has never been a proselytising religion and it is famed for its syncretism- fusion of differing systems of thought or belief in religion, philosophy and ideology. That is why we love argumentative discourses. The other great democracy is US, which was till recent times known for its acceptance of cultural mosaic. The salad bowl culture of US has been its juxtaposition of different cultures that are not forcibly turned into a homogenous culture. Each culture keeps its own distinct qualities. And has made American society one of many individual cultures and has brought about a mixed culture that is modern  American culture. Today both India and US are in danger of losing the essence of pluralism that made it possible to accept democratic rule of governance respecting difference.

.Democracy based on liberty, equality, and fraternity is the only form of governance that is in line with the universal concept of diversity, plurality and multiplicity that are genetic to the created universe. Disturbing the differences is disturbing the order of the universe. Respecting individual difference in family, society and the world is key to establishing order and harmony.The Master Designer has created the universe with differences. Let us keep it that way for we cannot outrival Him. 

La de^’mocratie semble mort; vive la de^’mocratie (Democracy seems dead; long live democracy)

 

Dilemma and determination during Internment

  Lockdown period can be productive if one has the flair for reading and writing. Of course there are times when even this gets tiresome and we seek desperately other sources of diversion to fill the long summer days imprisoned within  the four walls. I have also experienced a similar degree of ennui and weariness with books and computers – the main tools we all have- to stay in touch with the world beyond our mental borders. It was a serendipitous discovery as I flipped the 24x7 Corona news channels to Star plus to find a repeat telecast of the Mahabharata of the 2013 production. I had seen it earlier and therefore I had decided to skip viewing it a second time. But since  the news channels ceaselessly churn out the daily depressing dose of  CV news about its spike, the lack of hospital beds , the increase in positive cases and mortality rates, besides the fearsome predictions of a gargantuan peak in the next few weeks, I had no option but  to vacuously indulge in channel surfing when I stumbled on the Mahabharata serial and saw the  episode  featuring Bhishma’s surrender to Krishna which  is a part of Bhishma parva that narrates the first ten days of war.

Bhishma, stung to the quick by Duryodhana’s accusations of not keeping his vow to be loyal to the throne of Hastinapur which was then with the Kauravas, pledges to annihilate the Pandavas. He enters the battle field the next morning and is at his ferocious best slaughtering all who dared to confront him. Finding Arjuna hesitant to raise his bow against the family patriarch, Krishna gets  angry and descends from  his chariot to confront and kill  Bhishma contrary to his vow not to wield arms during the war. Bhishma is taken aback to see an angry Krishna.  Bhishma who had prided himself of having lived a blemishless life of self denial and rectitude, strictly adhering to his twin vows of celibacy and loyalty to whosoever who sat on the throne of Hastinapur, asks Krishna as to where he had erred to incur Krishna’s wrath.

Krishna accuses Bhishma for his failure to be on the side of Dharma because for Bhishma, adherence to his vows was as his sole dharma. Bhishma had failed to intervene in the injustices done to the Pandavas and more so to Draupadi when the Kauravas attempted to disrobe her. He was a mute spectator to all the evil games played by the Kauravas, but because of his vow of loyalty to the Kauravas, he had remained silent. In keeping with his vow, he had entered the fight on the side of the Kauravas even when he knew that Pandavas stood for Dharma.

Bhishma privileged his own dharma above Universal Dharma which essentially signifies right conduct in keeping with Rta or the cosmic Law that benefits society and mankind. Krishna reveals to Bhishma that all his actions to serve the Kauravas were unethical and had resulted in the establishment of adharma personified in Duryodana and his band of Kauravas.

This episode involving Bhishma and Krishna is illustrative of the perennial conflict between individual dharma and the Universal Dharma where the pride and ego  of adherence to one’s personal conscience often conflicts with moral conscience that upholds the larger interest of humanity. The conflict between id, ego and Superego is inherent in all human beings. Id functioning on pleasure principle caters to our base ideas and urges, while Superego operates as our moral conscience and seeks to direct our activities to a higher spiritual ideal what we refer to as Dharma. Our behaviour and conduct have to be in keeping with Dharma which follows Ṛta, the order that makes life and universe possible, and that includes duties, rights, laws, conduct, virtues and "right way of living". Ego is the one that mediates between id and Superego. Bhishma’s privileging his personal vow (dharma) however noble it was over universal Dharma is egoistic and unethical. As Krishna unfolds the unethicality of Bhishma’s actions- which he justifies as keeping to his personal vow,- Bhishma realizes the futility and ineffectiveness of his vows and seeks forgiveness from Lord Krishna. Since  Bhishma had been given the boon of immortality unless he wills his death,  he expresses his desire to atone for his wrongs  at the hands of Shikandini. On his deathbed he bestows his blessings on the Pandavas for their victory as they were the upholders of Dharma

Coincidentally on the day  I watched this episode of Krishna and Bhishma, I was engaged in writing an analysis of  Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses  written  nearly two centuries ago(1833). This has been my favourite poem of Tennyson as it represented the Victorian conflict between an artist’s love of art for art’s sake and his duty to use art in the service of humanity. Ulysses, the great hero of the Iliad, next only to Achilles, returns home to ascend the throne as the King of Ithaca. But soon after he becomes restless as his thirst for new voyages, new discoveries and new knowledge overpowers him and he decides to abdicate his throne in favour of his son Telemachus and s out on his quest saying

“ I cannot rest from travel: I will drink/ Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd /Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those/ That loved me, and alone,”...  and proceeds “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”. He abandons his duty by his people as he seeks fresh knowledge and fresh discoveries.

This sums up the perennial dilemma within all of us- should we live to satisfy our personal desires or live to serve fellow beings. To seek knowledge and to satisfy the personal urge to expand ones knowledge horizon  is not wrong, but can that alone be the meaning of one’s existence? Isn’t it a kind of indulgence on the part of the artist in satisfying his love for self expression?  Can he use his art to rejuvenate mankind? Can we find meaning by making our life useful to our fellow humanity! Overarching these questions is the larger question as to how to reconcile the two as both are required and both need each other.

These Lockdown days seem endless as there is no specific action to be done at any specific time( the exception being those who  are mandated  to WFH(work from home) and complete the task assigned to them before they call it a day).  For others the lockdown days stretch beyond sunset and sometimes well into the early hours of night. Days and hours seem long and provide golden opportunity to reflect on life- a luxury of timelessness that CV has gifted us.

Even as the reader looks askance at my placing Bhishma on par with Ulysses, I brought them on the same platform as I found them sharing the conflict of personal satisfaction as against dedicating their talents to serve ‘ others’. This dilemma between I and the ‘other’is a perennial one –a  dilemma everyone of us  shares with every other person- how to live an ethical life with a focus on self alongside a life of altruism , a life dedicated to the service of fellow beings. It is easy to accept, though difficult to put in practice what our Hindu scriptures say- to lead our individual life worthy of the gift bestowed on each one of us by our Creator with a focussed goal to attain personal salvation through total surrender to the Lord. The merger of the self with the Self has to be the final goal.

But somewhere this concept of personal salvation as the ultimate goal intrigues me as its focus is on me and my individual self.  It does not accommodate the ‘others’ who have been a part of my life from my birth. Everyone knows  the one and the only certainty that I am born, I exist, and one day I shall cease to exist, This life is the one and only life that we  know as we have no knowledge of  what went before and what shall come hereafter. What we pack into life gives the meaning of our existence. Hence for everyone, the meaning we pack between birth and death is of our own volition, a conscious choice we make. And what we do will have to factor in, its effect on others around. To questions who am I, why was I born, what is the purpose of my life and where do I go- to the five ‘W’s of who, what, why, when and where, no one has answer. To find a meaning for life then becomes our vocation. 

The Lockdown period has given me ample time to dwell on questions that had been put on the backburner in the hurly burly days of mundane activities. The daily chase to be one up on the ‘others’ had been the driving impetus all through these years. My life, my achievement, my success, my happiness have been the overarching compulsions  to give meaning to my existence. In this selfish pursuit of happiness, there is no place for the other. We share the animal instincts similar to the force behind all animal movements. In our personal life, it is as though we were following the Keynesian economic theory that encouraged animal spirits in Man, unleashing our basic instincts, proclivities and emotions to influence and guide our human behaviour. We have been living like animals in pursuit of mindless happiness and self satisfaction. We had almost forgotten what is happiness because we were constantly chasing happiness.  The Corona Virus has flattened the social and  economic curves  and has shown how we all share the  vulnerability of life

Watching the Mahabharata  and listening to Krishna’s message to Draupadi settled the conflict within me. Krishna foresees the tragedy that awaited Draupadi as all her children would be the victims of this war. She had earlier vowed to avenge the attempted destruction of her honour but as she apprehended the ensuing tragedy where she would  be called upon to sacrifice her children,  she tells Krishna that she would rather withdraw her vow than face a colossal tragedy. Krishna’s advice to Draupadi not to rescind her fight for justice even at the cost of personal sacrifice helped me to reconcile the dilemma of  I and the other. My passion, my commitment, my choice of ethical action for the upholding of justice and fairness is a blending of I and the other.  In the bargain, if it demands personal sacrifice, I should have the courage to face it.

 Well my reflections helped me to get rid of a binary approach to ‘I and the other’ as both are the two given fixed determinates  and they exist only because of their interdependence. ‘I’ cannot remain in isolation. ‘I ‘ cannot be happy if all around ‘I’, others are unhappy. It is true vice versa. A community or a society is made up of many ‘’I’s and its happiness depends on the wellbeing of all its ‘I’s. What is important is the need to focus upon ethical conduct that is conducive for the well being of all the ‘I’s that constitute a community

Lockdown has its own gifts to bestow. It has given us time- time to retrospect, time to introspect, time for hindsight, time for foresight, time to look back, time to look forward, time for I and time for the other. I recalled Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner where the old Mariner lay cooped inside his ship that had got stranded. He had inadvertently killed the albatross in a sudden moment of violence and despair.                     

                                                                                               Beyond the shadow of the ship,                                                            

I watched the water-snakes:

They moved in tracks of shining white,

And when they reared, the elfish light

Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship

I watched their rich attire:

Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,

They coiled and swam; and every track

Was a flash of golden fire.

O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,

And I blessed them unaware:

Sure my kind saint took pity on me,

And I blessed them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray;

 And from my neck so free

The Albatross fell off, and sank

Like lead into the sea.

My dilemma that hung like the albatross fell the moment I accepted the others as myself. Like the Ancient Mariner, I blessed the Corona Virus unaware.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

  Lockdown period can be productive if one has the flair for reading and writing. Of course there are times when even this gets tiresome and we seek desperately other sources of diversion to fill the long summer days imprisoned within  the four walls. I have also experienced a similar degree of ennui and weariness with books and computers – the main tools we all have- to stay in touch with the world beyond our mental borders. It was a serendipitous discovery as I flipped the 24x7 Corona news channels to Star plus to find a repeat telecast of the Mahabharata of the 2013 production. I had seen it earlier and therefore I had decided to skip viewing it a second time. But since  the news channels ceaselessly churn out the daily depressing dose of  CV news about its spike, the lack of hospital beds , the increase in positive cases and mortality rates, besides the fearsome predictions of a gargantuan peak in the next few weeks, I had no option but  to vacuously indulge in channel surfing when I stumbled on the Mahabharata serial and saw the  episode  featuring Bhishma’s surrender to Krishna which  is a part of Bhishma parva that narrates the first ten days of war.

Bhishma, stung to the quick by Duryodhana’s accusations of not keeping his vow to be loyal to the throne of Hastinapur which was then with the Kauravas, pledges to annihilate the Pandavas. He enters the battle field the next morning and is at his ferocious best slaughtering all who dared to confront him. Finding Arjuna hesitant to raise his bow against the family patriarch, Krishna gets  angry and descends from  his chariot to confront and kill  Bhishma contrary to his vow not to wield arms during the war. Bhishma is taken aback to see an angry Krishna.  Bhishma who had prided himself of having lived a blemishless life of self denial and rectitude, strictly adhering to his twin vows of celibacy and loyalty to whosoever who sat on the throne of Hastinapur, asks Krishna as to where he had erred to incur Krishna’s wrath.

Krishna accuses Bhishma for his failure to be on the side of Dharma because for Bhishma, adherence to his vows was as his sole dharma. Bhishma had failed to intervene in the injustices done to the Pandavas and more so to Draupadi when the Kauravas attempted to disrobe her. He was a mute spectator to all the evil games played by the Kauravas, but because of his vow of loyalty to the Kauravas, he had remained silent. In keeping with his vow, he had entered the fight on the side of the Kauravas even when he knew that Pandavas stood for Dharma.

Bhishma privileged his own dharma above Universal Dharma which essentially signifies right conduct in keeping with Rta or the cosmic Law that benefits society and mankind. Krishna reveals to Bhishma that all his actions to serve the Kauravas were unethical and had resulted in the establishment of adharma personified in Duryodana and his band of Kauravas.

This episode involving Bhishma and Krishna is illustrative of the perennial conflict between individual dharma and the Universal Dharma where the pride and ego  of adherence to one’s personal conscience often conflicts with moral conscience that upholds the larger interest of humanity. The conflict between id, ego and Superego is inherent in all human beings. Id functioning on pleasure principle caters to our base ideas and urges, while Superego operates as our moral conscience and seeks to direct our activities to a higher spiritual ideal what we refer to as Dharma. Our behaviour and conduct have to be in keeping with Dharma which follows Ṛta, the order that makes life and universe possible, and that includes duties, rights, laws, conduct, virtues and "right way of living". Ego is the one that mediates between id and Superego. Bhishma’s privileging his personal vow (dharma) however noble it was over universal Dharma is egoistic and unethical. As Krishna unfolds the unethicality of Bhishma’s actions- which he justifies as keeping to his personal vow,- Bhishma realizes the futility and ineffectiveness of his vows and seeks forgiveness from Lord Krishna. Since  Bhishma had been given the boon of immortality unless he wills his death,  he expresses his desire to atone for his wrongs  at the hands of Shikandini. On his deathbed he bestows his blessings on the Pandavas for their victory as they were the upholders of Dharma

Coincidentally on the day  I watched this episode of Krishna and Bhishma, I was engaged in writing an analysis of  Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses  written  nearly two centuries ago(1833). This has been my favourite poem of Tennyson as it represented the Victorian conflict between an artist’s love of art for art’s sake and his duty to use art in the service of humanity. Ulysses, the great hero of the Iliad, next only to Achilles, returns home to ascend the throne as the King of Ithaca. But soon after he becomes restless as his thirst for new voyages, new discoveries and new knowledge overpowers him and he decides to abdicate his throne in favour of his son Telemachus and s out on his quest saying

“ I cannot rest from travel: I will drink/ Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd /Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those/ That loved me, and alone,”...  and proceeds “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”. He abandons his duty by his people as he seeks fresh knowledge and fresh discoveries.

This sums up the perennial dilemma within all of us- should we live to satisfy our personal desires or live to serve fellow beings. To seek knowledge and to satisfy the personal urge to expand ones knowledge horizon  is not wrong, but can that alone be the meaning of one’s existence? Isn’t it a kind of indulgence on the part of the artist in satisfying his love for self expression?  Can he use his art to rejuvenate mankind? Can we find meaning by making our life useful to our fellow humanity! Overarching these questions is the larger question as to how to reconcile the two as both are required and both need each other.

These Lockdown days seem endless as there is no specific action to be done at any specific time( the exception being those who  are mandated  to WFH(work from home) and complete the task assigned to them before they call it a day).  For others the lockdown days stretch beyond sunset and sometimes well into the early hours of night. Days and hours seem long and provide golden opportunity to reflect on life- a luxury of timelessness that CV has gifted us.

Even as the reader looks askance at my placing Bhishma on par with Ulysses, I brought them on the same platform as I found them sharing the conflict of personal satisfaction as against dedicating their talents to serve ‘ others’. This dilemma between I and the ‘other’is a perennial one –a  dilemma everyone of us  shares with every other person- how to live an ethical life with a focus on self alongside a life of altruism , a life dedicated to the service of fellow beings. It is easy to accept, though difficult to put in practice what our Hindu scriptures say- to lead our individual life worthy of the gift bestowed on each one of us by our Creator with a focussed goal to attain personal salvation through total surrender to the Lord. The merger of the self with the Self has to be the final goal.

But somewhere this concept of personal salvation as the ultimate goal intrigues me as its focus is on me and my individual self.  It does not accommodate the ‘others’ who have been a part of my life from my birth. Everyone knows  the one and the only certainty that I am born, I exist, and one day I shall cease to exist, This life is the one and only life that we  know as we have no knowledge of  what went before and what shall come hereafter. What we pack into life gives the meaning of our existence. Hence for everyone, the meaning we pack between birth and death is of our own volition, a conscious choice we make. And what we do will have to factor in, its effect on others around. To questions who am I, why was I born, what is the purpose of my life and where do I go- to the five ‘W’s of who, what, why, when and where, no one has answer. To find a meaning for life then becomes our vocation. 

The Lockdown period has given me ample time to dwell on questions that had been put on the backburner in the hurly burly days of mundane activities. The daily chase to be one up on the ‘others’ had been the driving impetus all through these years. My life, my achievement, my success, my happiness have been the overarching compulsions  to give meaning to my existence. In this selfish pursuit of happiness, there is no place for the other. We share the animal instincts similar to the force behind all animal movements. In our personal life, it is as though we were following the Keynesian economic theory that encouraged animal spirits in Man, unleashing our basic instincts, proclivities and emotions to influence and guide our human behaviour. We have been living like animals in pursuit of mindless happiness and self satisfaction. We had almost forgotten what is happiness because we were constantly chasing happiness.  The Corona Virus has flattened the social and  economic curves  and has shown how we all share the  vulnerability of life

Watching the Mahabharata  and listening to Krishna’s message to Draupadi settled the conflict within me. Krishna foresees the tragedy that awaited Draupadi as all her children would be the victims of this war. She had earlier vowed to avenge the attempted destruction of her honour but as she apprehended the ensuing tragedy where she would  be called upon to sacrifice her children,  she tells Krishna that she would rather withdraw her vow than face a colossal tragedy. Krishna’s advice to Draupadi not to rescind her fight for justice even at the cost of personal sacrifice helped me to reconcile the dilemma of  I and the other. My passion, my commitment, my choice of ethical action for the upholding of justice and fairness is a blending of I and the other.  In the bargain, if it demands personal sacrifice, I should have the courage to face it.

 Well my reflections helped me to get rid of a binary approach to ‘I and the other’ as both are the two given fixed determinates  and they exist only because of their interdependence. ‘I’ cannot remain in isolation. ‘I ‘ cannot be happy if all around ‘I’, others are unhappy. It is true vice versa. A community or a society is made up of many ‘’I’s and its happiness depends on the wellbeing of all its ‘I’s. What is important is the need to focus upon ethical conduct that is conducive for the well being of all the ‘I’s that constitute a community

Lockdown has its own gifts to bestow. It has given us time- time to retrospect, time to introspect, time for hindsight, time for foresight, time to look back, time to look forward, time for I and time for the other. I recalled Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner where the old Mariner lay cooped inside his ship that had got stranded. He had inadvertently killed the albatross in a sudden moment of violence and despair.                     

                                                                                               Beyond the shadow of the ship,

I watched the water-snakes:

They moved in tracks of shining white,

And when they reared, the elfish light

Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship

I watched their rich attire:

Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,

They coiled and swam; and every track

Was a flash of golden fire.

O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,

And I blessed them unaware:

Sure my kind saint took pity on me,

And I blessed them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray;

 And from my neck so free

The Albatross fell off, and sank

Like lead into the sea.

My dilemma that hung like the albatross fell the moment I accepted the others as myself. Like the Ancient Mariner, I blessed the Corona Virus unaware.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Lockdown period can be productive if one has the flair for reading and writing. Of course there are times when even this gets tiresome and we seek desperately other sources of diversion to fill the long summer days imprisoned within  four walls. I have also experienced a similar degree of ennui and weariness with books and computers – the main tools we all have- to stay in touch with the world beyond our mental borders. It was a serendipitous discovery as I flipped the 24x7 Corona news channels to Star plus to find a repeat telecast of the Mahabharata of the 2013 production. I had seen it earlier and therefore I had decided to skip viewing it a second time. But since  the news channels ceaselessly churn out the daily depressing dose of  CV news about its spike, the lack of hospital beds , the increase in positive cases and mortality rates, besides the fearsome predictions of a gargantuan peak in the next few weeks, I had no option but  to vacuously indulge in channel surfing when I stumbled on the Mahabharata serial and saw the  episode  featuring Bhishma’s surrender to Krishna which  is a part of Bhishma parva that narrates the first ten days of war.

Bhishma, stung to the quick by Duryodhana’s accusations of not keeping his vow to be loyal to the throne of Hastinapur which was then with the Kauravas, pledges to annihilate the Pandavas. He enters the battle field the next morning and is at his ferocious best slaughtering all who dared to confront him. Finding Arjuna hesitant to raise his bow against the family patriarch, Krishna gets  angry and descends from  his chariot to confront and kill  Bhishma contrary to his vow not to wield arms during the war. Bhishma is taken aback to see an angry Krishna.  Bhishma who had prided himself of having lived a blemishless life of self denial and rectitude, strictly adhering to his twin vows of celibacy and loyalty to whosoever who sat on the throne of Hastinapur, asks Krishna as to where he had erred to incur Krishna’s wrath.

Krishna accuses Bhishma for his failure to be on the side of Dharma because for Bhishma, adherence to his vows was as his sole dharma. Bhishma had failed to intervene in the injustices done to the Pandavas and more so to Draupadi when the Kauravas attempted to disrobe her. He was a mute spectator to all the evil games played by the Kauravas, but because of his vow of loyalty to the Kauravas, he had remained silent. In keeping with his vow, he had entered the fight on the side of the Kauravas even when he knew that he had pledged his loyalty to the adharmic forces.

Bhishma privileged his own dharma above Universal Dharma which essentially signifies right conduct in keeping with Rta or the cosmic Law that benefits society and mankind. Krishna reveals to Bhishma that all his actions to serve the Kauravas were unethical and had resulted in the establishment of adharma personified in Duryodana and his band of Kauravas.

This episode involving Bhishma and Krishna is illustrative of the perennial conflict between individual dharma and the Universal Dharma where the pride and ego  of adherence to one’s personal conscience often conflicts with moral conscience that upholds the larger interest of humanity. The conflict between id, ego and Superego is inherent in all human beings. Id functioning on pleasure principle caters to our base ideas and urges, while Superego operates as our moral conscience and seeks to direct our activities to a higher spiritual ideal what we refer to as Dharma. Our behaviour and conduct have to be in keeping with Dharma which follows Ṛta, the order that makes life and universe possible, and that includes duties, rights, laws, conduct, virtues and "right way of living". Ego is the one that mediates between id and Superego. Bhishma’s privileging his personal vow (dharma) however noble it was over universal Dharma is egoistic and unethical. As Krishna unfolds the unethicality of Bhishma’s actions- which he justifies as keeping to his personal vow,- Bhishma realizes the folly and  egocentricity of his vows and seeks forgiveness from Lord Krishna. Since Bhishma had been given the boon of immortality unless he wills his death,  he expresses his desire to atone for his wrongs  by willing his death at the hands of Shikandini. On his deathbed he bestows his blessings on the Pandavas for their victory as they were the upholders of Dharma

Coincidentally on the day  I watched this episode of Krishna and Bhishma, I was engaged in writing an analysis of  Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses  written  nearly two centuries ago(1833). This has been my favourite poem of Tennyson as it represented the Victorian conflict between an artist’s love of art for art’s sake and his duty to use art in the service of humanity. Ulysses, the great hero of the Iliad, next only to Achilles, returns home to ascend the throne as the King of Ithaca. But soon after he becomes restless as his thirst for new voyages, new discoveries and new knowledge overpowers him and he decides to abdicate his throne in favour of his son Telemachus and s out on his quest saying

“ I cannot rest from travel: I will drink/ Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd /Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those/ That loved me, and alone,”...  and proceeds “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”. He abandons his duty by his people as he seeks fresh knowledge and fresh discoveries.

This sums up the perennial dilemma within all of us- should we live to satisfy our personal desires or live to serve fellow beings. To seek knowledge and to satisfy the personal urge to expand ones knowledge horizon  is not wrong, but can that alone be the meaning of one’s existence? Isn’t it a kind of indulgence on the part of the artist in satisfying his love for self expression?  Can he use his art to rejuvenate mankind? Can we find meaning by making our life useful to our fellow humanity! Overarching these questions is the larger question as to how to reconcile the two as both are required and both need each other.

These Lockdown days seem endless as there is no specific action to be done at any specific time( the exception being those who  are mandated  to WFH(work from home) and complete the task assigned to them before they call it a day).  For others the lockdown days stretch beyond sunset and sometimes well into the early hours of night. Days and hours seem long and provide golden opportunity to reflect on life- a luxury of timelessness that CV has gifted us.

Even as the reader looks askance at my placing Bhishma on par with Ulysses, I brought them on the same platform as I found them sharing the conflict of personal satisfaction as against dedicating their talents to serve ‘ others’. This dilemma between I and the ‘other’is a perennial one –a  dilemma everyone of us  shares with every other person- how to live an ethical life with a focus on self alongside a life of altruism , a life dedicated to the service of fellow beings. It is easy to accept, though difficult to put in practice what our Hindu scriptures say- to lead our individual life worthy of the gift bestowed on each one of us by our Creator with a focussed goal to attain personal salvation through total surrender to the Lord. The merger of the self with the Self has to be the final goal.

But somewhere this concept of personal salvation as the ultimate goal intrigues me as its focus is on me and my individual self.  It does not accommodate the ‘others’ who have been a part of my life from my birth. Everyone knows  the one and the only certainty that I am born, I exist, and one day I shall cease to exist, This life is the one and only life that we  know as we have no knowledge of  what went before and what shall come hereafter. What we pack into life gives the meaning of our existence. Hence for everyone, the meaning we pack between birth and death is of our own volition, a conscious choice we make. And what we do will have to factor in, its effect on others around. To questions who am I, why was I born, what is the purpose of my life and where do I go- to the five ‘W’s of who, what, why, when and where, no one has answer. To find a meaning for life then becomes our vocation. 

The Lockdown period has given me ample time to dwell on questions that had been put on the backburner in the hurly burly days of mundane activities. The daily chase to be one up on the ‘others’ had been the driving impetus all through these years. My life, my achievement, my success, my happiness have been the overarching compulsions  to give meaning to my existence. In this selfish pursuit of happiness, there is no place for the other. We share the animal instincts similar to the force behind all animal movements. In our personal life, it is as though we were following the Keynesian economic theory that encouraged animal spirits in Man, unleashing our basic instincts, proclivities and emotions to influence and guide our human behaviour. We have been living like animals in pursuit of mindless happiness and self satisfaction. We had almost forgotten what is happiness because we were constantly chasing happiness.  The Corona Virus has flattened the social and  economic curves  and has shown how we all share the  vulnerability of life

Watching the Mahabharata  and listening to Krishna’s message to Draupadi settled the conflict within me. Krishna foresees the tragedy that awaited Draupadi as all her children would be the victims of this war. She had earlier vowed to avenge the attempted destruction of her honour but as she apprehended the ensuing tragedy where she would  be called upon to sacrifice her children,  she tells Krishna that she would rather withdraw her vow than face a colossal tragedy. Krishna’s advice to Draupadi not to rescind her fight for justice even at the cost of personal sacrifice helped me to reconcile the dilemma of  I and the other. My passion, my commitment, my choice of ethical action for the upholding of justice and fairness is a blending of I and the other.  In the bargain, if it demands personal sacrifice, I should have the courage to face it.

 Well my reflections helped me to get rid of a binary approach to ‘I and the other’ as both are the two given fixed determinates  and they exist only because of their interdependence. ‘I’ cannot remain in isolation. ‘I ‘ cannot be happy if all around ‘I’, others are unhappy. It is true vice versa. A community or a society is made up of many ‘’I’s and its happiness depends on the wellbeing of all its ‘I’s. What is important is the need to focus upon ethical conduct that is conducive for the well being of all the ‘I’s that constitute a community

Lockdown has its own gifts to bestow. It has given us time- time to retrospect, time to introspect, time for hindsight, time for foresight, time to look back, time to look forward, time for I and time for the other. I recalled Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner where the old Mariner lay cooped inside his ship that had got stranded. He had inadvertently killed the albatross in a sudden moment of violence and despair.                     

                                                                                               Beyond the shadow of the ship,

I watched the water-snakes:

They moved in tracks of shining white,

And when they reared, the elfish light

Fell off in hoary flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship

I watched their rich attire:

Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,

They coiled and swam; and every track

Was a flash of golden fire.

O happy living things! no tongue

Their beauty might declare:

A spring of love gushed from my heart,

And I blessed them unaware:

Sure my kind saint took pity on me,

And I blessed them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray;

 And from my neck so free

The Albatross fell off, and sank

Like lead into the sea.

My dilemma that hung like the albatross fell the moment I accepted the others as myself. Like the Ancient Mariner, I blessed the Corona Virus unaware.