Tuesday, 19 May 2015

All that is Gold do not forever glitter

 

                                              All that is Gold do not forever glitter
A tamil proverb says “Koodu katta theriyathu, kattina kopotai pirithuduven”(I don’t know to build a nest, but I can undo a built nest). This proverb struck me while I was going through an interview with Seymour Hersh, the American investigative journalist and author. The same proverb once again resurfaced in my mind when I read the daily Health capsule in today’s edition of TOI that speaks about the nullification of the benefits of pills that are prescribed to lower blood pressure and cholesterol if taken continuously for a two year period. Here I have been popping the same pill for the last forty years and my BP reading continues to be 110/70 and cholesterol well within permissible limits.
The reader may wonder what  the connection is between these two news items! It is simply that both Seymour Hersh and the Health capsule editor exhibit the human tendency to bring down the reputation and estimation of a person or a pill to shock the world from its puerile acceptance of all things great and beneficial. They are not the one-off kinds to indulge in demolishing the good qualities of an erstwhile great person or the value of a medicine that has been proven to be effective for many decades; unfortunately, this has become the norm of the day. Pull down all those put up on a pedestal and leave the world bereft of anyone worthy to be lauded( except the Seymours and Assanges, Subramainam Swamys and the RSS-BJP brigades for their  pulverizing contributions). Seymour’s exposure of Kennedy earlier and his present bare-it-all story of the American success of Bin laden’s capture have catapulted him to a position higher than that of those whom he has brought down in the name of honest reporting( primarily Obama). In his interview with Chidanand Rajghatta of the Times Of India, he spoke about his earlier writings on the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war that killed thousands of people, on Abu Ghraib torture, on former American President, John F.Kennedy to show that he was not a great guy as had been made out and on the latest on the corruption in Pakistan’s ISI that helped the US to get to Bin Laden(with no credit to the US much famed SEAL’s efforts). This has become a new global phenomenon- to bring down the reputation of great leaders of the past and open up classified documents that would fuel afresh vendetta politics and violence among nations after a long period of comparative hiatus from war hysteria.
Today in India a lot of muck is thrown upon our first Prime Minister- even to the extent of a veiled suggestion that Pandit Nehru was keen to hide Netaji behind a bushel of lies about his death in a plane crash so that he never returned to  thwart his own Prime  Minstership and Panditji was covertly instrumental in the death of his successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri  to facilitate Indiraji’s ascent  to the throne. Such palace intrigues are offered suggestively so that what sticks is the mud thrown at the spotless achkan of Pandit Nehru. The latest to join this band of illustrious pedestal pullers is Tunku Varadarajan, the New York based columnist who in one stroke has brought down Nehru and Man Mohan Singh. He writes: “It is hogwash to say that Manmohan Singh was the architect of the reforms that won India its independence from Nehru in 1991”, denuding both of them of their contribution to the Nation. The architect of modern India and the architect of modern Indian economy have been pulled down from their pedestals by the searing stroke of a sentence. Our present PM whenever he is abroad talks about his vacation-less life and his 24/7 efforts to clear the backlog of three decades - another sleight of hand example of running down all the PMs of the past who seem to have vacationed all through their years in the PM’s chair and did nothing. It is not necessary to run down all the predecessors to get noticed or to gain in stature and popularity. 
But this seems to be the easy route to greatness- to criticize all the erstwhile heroes and present oneself as different and therefore a superior human being. The ability to speak negatively is regarded as a sign of intellectual objectivity and maturity, Today no one is spared if they had claims to any sign of greatness. Re-reading the past and reinterpreting it and arriving at the cynicalconclusion that all those who have been venerated have had their Achilles heel and therefore should be expunged from the list of the Greats are now the new national pastimes. Even Shakespeare has not been spared, not to talk of much smaller mortals. All the classical canons that had earlier given us an insight into the timeless beauty of art and literature have now been replaced by  the new School of Resentment and the School of Relativism  that promote biased negativity against  established assumptions  and thereof set them aside . If great works of art and literature have been shred to oblivion, all great men also suffer a cavalier dismissal into insignificance and obscurity.
What is now left, as a result of the vacuum created after hurling down all those who were revered, hero-worshipped and exalted, who had left behind their footprints on the sands of time? Do we have to indulge in erasure of all those footprints to create new footprints with guaranteed permanence that they would not meet with  the same fate as those we have destroyed? Do we have to take the sheen of the works of great men and women of the past to project ourselves in showy splendour?
We are in the age of Selfies- trying to create   flattering image of ourselves in an act of overt narcissism. The new age Selfies propped up by Facebook and other forms of Social media are easy prey to mukha sthuthi ( flattery). Denouncement or excoriation of the past greats is the best form of flattery. Closely allied to Mukha sthusthi is Ninda sthuthi ( complaint by praise) -something akin to Mark Antony’s oration that keeps a veneer of praise to sneer at the opponents-
  “Brutus is an honourable man;  So are they all, all honourable men”
It is a pity that in our eagerness to bring down statues from the pedestals, we have not raised our stature. This global phenomenon coincides with the world entering the fourth cycle of its chronological age.  The world has moved through the Theocratic Age(Age of the Gods to  the Aristocratic Age( Age of the Kings and aristocracy),to the Democratic Age( the Age of the common man) and now to the  fourth one, the Chaotic Age. The Democratic Age has slowly morphed into the Chaotic Age and in the chaos around us we do not have a figure to shape us  out of it into chiselled human beings.
We have made an art of excoriation of the past heroes. Following Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, we question all the traditional assumptions about heroes and try to expose the deep seated contradictions in their personality. No doubt, it needs a special skill to deconstruct like we need a special skill to construct. In the process, we are gradually forgetting our identity as human beings. No one is a wingless angel on earth. But we celebrate our effort to discover that the statues on the pedestal have only feet of clay. We rivet our eyes only on the feet and refuse  to view the aesthetic wholesomeness of the statue.
Let us learn to remember with gratitude the contributions made by those whom we have till now worshipped. Even the Indian palm squirrel with its three stripes on the back had contributed in its own little way to the construction of the Rama Setu bridge by rolling in the beach sand and  running to the end of the bridge to shake off the sand from its back (chanting Lord Rama's name all along). Lord Rama, pleased by the creature's dedication, caressed the squirrel's back and ever since, the Indian squirrel has carried white stripes on its back, which are believed to be the mark of Lord Rama's fingers.  To denigrate the heroes of the past is to suspend one’s rationality and one’s humanness. This is not to say that there can be no re-viewing of the past heroes(and heroines) but the reviewing should not limit itself to negative deconstruction nor should it ignore their  positive and  significant contributions  to strengthen the quality of being human.
I revert to my opening quotation and wish the reverse is true- I know how to build a nest ;I do not know how to undo it.

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