The Art of Balance

                                                               The Art of Balance

It was early in the morning in the 1950s around 5:30 and Chennai true to its character had fully woken up as one could hear the clinking of tumblers and vessels from different households and smell the pleasant aroma of quality coffee brewed and filtered in the kitchens and roadside coffee stalls. Don’t ask about smell of tea as morning tea in Chennai is an aberration and further the coffee aroma is so strong that it is the only smell that prevails.  We were a group of three- me, my sister and brother, all in the range of 6-10 and as we entered the dining room, laughing and joking about something that  had happened in school the previous day, my mother halted us midway and peremptorily asked us not to laugh loudly saying those who laugh in the morning will necessarily cry in the evening. We never argued back nor questioned the logic behind this remark but accepted it as we wouldn’t risk the possibility of a lachrymose evening. The Proverb (14.13) says: “even in laughter the heart is sorrowful". Years later I came across Samuel Beckett’s famous lines:  “The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh” 

There is no denying the wonderful balance that Beckett impishly refers to in the above quote, is present in the universe. Because it is a quotidian and omnipresent phenomenon, we hardly ever notice it. When the sun rises in the morning, it is curtain call for the moon and in the evening it is vice versa. Day and night, spring and summer, autumn and winter keep to a time schedule that is amazing. Maybe the clockwork precision gets a little disturbed now and then thanks to human activities, nevertheless the seasons never get jumbled or mixed up. Autumn can only come at the end of summer and spring cannot supersede winter nor can come in advance of it.

But we rarely wonder at this phenomenon of the universe that is built on balance, constancy and steadiness that is visible all around us and all time. On the contrary more often than not it is only our actions that are not on balance causing instability and disturbance all around. Life’s movement can be seen through the changes that constantly occur but they do not necessarily upset the applecart and disturb the balance of life. Changes are not permanent in keeping with Newton’s famous proposition that what goes up will have to come down but rarely do we recognize how our own actions contribute to the changes that impact us positively as well as negatively.. When our actions tend to go off balance, they result in throwing life out of gear. But ups and downs are not permanent; they come and go. This is nature’s attempt at restoring balance.  No one can be forever happy nor can s/he forever wallow in melancholy. Fortune does not smile always on the same person all through his /her life and it is incumbent on every one to come to terms with the sudden swinging away of good fortune at some point of time.  It is only the weak, uninitiated minds that erupt in ecstatic hysteria or in dolorous whimper as fortune swings from one end to the other. To take things in their swing is given only to a mature mind. This is what the Bhagavad Gita sums up as  Samatve yogam uchyathe(equamimity is yoga) . But in an egoistic way, we attribute good fortune to our own actions and the reversal of it to the actions of others. We lose our balance when we don’t understand that for the restoration of equilibrium we need to balance good and not so good (or bad) periods in our life’s journey.

This balance is pertinent for the society’s order and stability. It thus behoves on us to keep a balance on all that we say and do, act and react in respect of all issues. One of the basic aspects of generational change is the conflict between tradition and modernity. Both tradition and modernity have their positives and negatives. There is nothing absolute about the validity of one or the other. What is modern today becomes tradition tomorrow and the chain goes on till such time when what is modern is nothing but a return to tradition.  Fashion is the best example of tradition and modernity that satisfies the human desire for change. Modernity cannot claim for itself absolute originality as it builds on the legacy of tradition. The right balance is neither to make a mockery of tradition nor to eulogize all that is modern. The generational change between the old and the young is the tension between modernity and tradition. For the society to retain its state of equilibrium, we need to cultivate self restraint so as not to go overboard over the two conflicting attitudes and values.

In the modern times when there is a strong emphasis on freedom and individuality, there is often a clash between democratic freedom and the practice of religious faiths. Religion has the unique power to unite and divide people. Intolerance of faiths other than one’s own and imposition of unitary religion results in catastrophic wars. From as early as the 11^th century the 200 year crusade wars between European Christians and worshippers of Islam had resulted in humungous losses to life and property on both sides.  Leading a religious war without respecting other religious identities and national boundaries continues even now causing misery to millions of innocent people all over the world. Fundamentalists in a frenzied zeal to thrust their religion on the rest of the world have shown scant respect for other faiths and are equally opposed to principles of secularism. They spread hatred and violence against all non believers in their religion and thereby destroying democratic freedom that guarantees every individual the right to follow and practice the religion s/he is born to. Unless we balance religious sensitivities against democratic freedom, the 21^st century may run true to the popular and yet contested phrase “the clash of civilizations”.

Beginning with the Arab spring and the Wikileak tapes, to the rise of AAP(the aam admi party) in India, the political power equations  all over the world have drastically changed. Everywhere the political establishment is being challenged and democracy has taken a new avatar that gives power to the people-not just to elect a government, but to rise against establishment irrespective of whether it is a benign administration or a corrupt administration. In most cases this had gone bizarre as overthrowing of an establishment did not pursue the logical question “What next or what is hereafter?. The spontaneous uprising of people in humungous numbers has in most cases been unsuccessful for it has only replaced the democratic system with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Unrestrained power to the people has to be balanced with democratic principles where the rule of the elected representatives is a collective effort at governance. There is a thin line that divides power to the people from people’s power. The former is a proportionate mix of power and accountability where the power is exercised by people to elect those who should govern them and be accountable to them, while the latter confers absolute power on people with varied and divergent aspirations and expectations to exercise power without accountability.  The recognition of the subtle difference between the two alone can restore order and balance to our polity.

The people’s movement in the last decade has derived its strength from the social media. Social media has become a potent weapon in the hands of people, but it is a double edged sword. It can generate social benefit with its potential for effective, instant and interactive communication. It can be judiciously used for the benefit of humanity, to promote collective consciousness and make people aware of many life issues that impact them. But Social Media does not limit itself to bestowing benefits.   It lends itself to disseminate scandals and gossip, to spread rumour, for cyberbullying and to be used as a weapon of subversion of the establishment. Thus it has the power to create and the power to destroy. It can build and mar reputations, can catapult someone into instant fame and hurl him down to instant disgrace, can scale up and scale down any product or institution.  Unless we factor in the reverse side of social media, we may be unaware of its power that can destroy the qualities that make us social and humane. While it is able to percolate important messages to millions of users, it leaves little time for their critical examination. News and messages follow one another thick and fast and responses are generated at breakneck speed. The comments are hastily done on a superficial reading of the messages with no informed debates and discussions on them. The Twitter with its 140 character limit suffers most both in terms of what and how it is said. We have to reckon with the negatives of social media before strategizing ways to use it as the shaping agent of our consciousness for affirmative action leading to the crowning achievement of cultivating humanity-

Further yet another distressing aspect of the social media is the personality disorder it gives rise to among young adults. The abundant connections of social networking paradoxically bring forth a new solitude. “A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures...” is true of Facebook that boasts of companionship without intimacy!  Social networking turns people into ‘maximizing machines’ that respond to what it is thrown at them. Many blogs have turned into rumor mills, spreading misinformation that people tend to believe as the truth. We are as much overwhelmed by its capacity to trigger off instant exchanges as by its capacity to turn us into mindless nerds, socially inept and robotically obsessed with puerile and inane natter. The fearsome possibility of turning into social robots without forging one-on-one relationship will make us faceless in a faceless multitude. The Social Media can create personal, emotional, intellectual and spiritual disorder if not a total vacuum. We are at the threshold of the ‘robotic moment’ and it is essential to reaffirm our humanity by making a balance between what should go into and what shouldn’t in the social media.

We have to reaffirm the balance that nature exemplifies. This balance is at the core, one of accommodation as against one of negation. One of the great lessons I have learnt from Professors in England where I had gone for study is  is their willingness to accept the  student’s point of view even if it is at variance with their own  saying:”well that is also a line of thinking we can look into”   The French artist of the late 19^th Century, Henry Matisse wrote: “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”
Lastly we have to cultivate Work- life balance  where work relating to our profession, career and aspiration is balanced with our life style that relates to our mental and physical health, our interests in things other than work , our enjoyment of leisure and pastime, our attention to family matters etc. If this balance is upset, even success at work will have the negative consequences on health, happiness and well being. Society today is afflicted more by stress and mental disturbance than by all other forms of illness. The clue to work- life balance is to replace the current fascination with narcissism and “selfie’ obsession to philosophical humanism , to the belief in the advancement of humanity  by collective efforts. Let us remember the famous saying of Rumi, the Sufi poet : “Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.”