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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