Prayers to the Goddess of Learning
This year Dussehra has
been truly validated by our armed forces with their triumph over the present
day Aswathamas - evil incarnate- who had burnt alive eighteen of our soldiers. The ninth day of Dussehra, a day before the
culmination of the festival, is Durga puja
for the Bengalis, marking the triumph of Goddess Durga over a powerful
demon(Mahishasura) while for Tamils, it is Saraswati puja - the day dedicated to the Goddess of
Learning, music, art and culture. Since
my childhood, for the last seventy plus years, this day has been the most
important day for me , but today I pray fervently and seek Goddess Saraswati’s
blessings for more wisdom, intelligence, articulation and above all for greater
power to sustain my sanity amidst increasing crassitude, insensitivity and absurdity that
is in evidence all around. Let me not be misunderstood as talking down like a superior,
different and a cut above the rest. It is not ‘I’ versus ‘they’ syndrome, where
‘I’ stands for a refined and cultivated mind and ‘they’ for the lack of it. Such
deliberate paring will be like the vain boast of the one-eyed man in a land of the
blind. My ardent invocation to the Goddess of learning and culture is borne out
of the fear that I (which includes a large number of fellow beings who share my
values, ideas and feelings) may get sucked into the vulgar whirlpool of crudeness
in speech, action and manners that is present everywhere.
The 21st C India
continues to be at the cusp of tradition and modernity (even a century after the arrival of modernism in the West) as
the deep seated love for festivities and deep rooted faith in rituals have an
equally matching irresistibility towards all that is glitzy, glittery and
showily attractive. The churning that one notices in our society
today is a conscious attempt to move away from all that had been traditionally
followed, towards a jazzy modern outlook that paradoxically values
individualism and extroversion, openness and self- centredness, temerity and timidity, brashness and anxiety, aloneness
and mobbism, conservatism and radicalism. This is reflected in our ambivalence towards
festivals, where the enjoyment of food, fun, music and dance associated with
the traditional rituals conflicts with ritual-free enjoyment of the same that
is associated with modernity. The result
is formal observance of festivals without a genuine participation in them.
There is more of form and less of substance in anything that we do or say today.
This binarism is
prevalent in all aspects of life today. It is in evidence in politics,
academics, family relationships, music, art, literature and culture and in
everyday speech and action. It is difficult to understand if one is genuine or speaks
with a forked tongue, if one’s enjoyment is natural or artificial, if one’s
excitement is long lasting or for the moment.
This is not to be misconstrued as truth versus falsehood. It is simply
the confusion between two attitudes, two standpoints that are different and yet
both appealing and tempting. The
situation is what Robert Frost had said about being a single traveler who could
not travel on both roads and had to decide between privileging one over the
other, though neither of the roads was less travelled by.
In politics, we see the
pendulum oscillating from the left to the right where the left group is more
towards modernity and the right more in the traditional mould. The eulogizing
of all that is traditional from medicine to astronomy, from Vedic mathematics
to the modern binary computation, the invoking of Ram Rajya as benign monarchy,
the attack on the leftists as destroyers of Hinduism and Indian culture, and overarching all these, the criticism of
the left academics as western oriented who have changed the political, social
and historical discourse during the last seven decades- these are the central concerns of the Rightists. The Leftists,
mostly educated abroad have a more liberal and catholic attitude towards life,
veering away from what they feel as the accretions on tradition, valuing objectivity
more than subjectivity and wanting to be
in sync with modernism. Hence the clash of the two groups is seen as a clash of
two cultures- one that is tradition
bound and the other, the break free from bondage to tradition. It is a pity
that Right is right and Left is left and the two do not meet. There has been no
attempt to bring about a synthesis between tradition and modernism. All that we
hear, we read and we discuss are strong, acrimonious words intentionally meant
to demean one another. The political slugfest that one watches every evening on
primetime channels is verbal cacophony with no language restraint. All this
started a year before the 2014 elections and the election speeches were
singularly noticeable for their lack of culture, lack of language etiquette,
for their breach of the rules of decency and decorum, and for the mocking tenor
of argument bereft of any substantive discussion. Ironically, for the first
time, instead of our aping the West, the West is aping us as seen in the vulgar
debate in the current U.S Presidential elections. No one realizes that “the
aim of argument, or of discussion, should not
be victory, but progress"
as stated by Joseph Joubert in Pensées. The TV debates, the Twitter one- liners,
the Social Media messages are all characterized by indecorum and impropriety
that appeal to the baser and vulgar human instincts. We see this change on the sports field where players
pride themselves in slanging the opponent. The ‘macho’ feeling is applauded as
an essential part of the sportsman’s psychology. Cricket, that was earlier known to be gentleman’s game no
longer competes for batting or bowling skills but for sledging skills. The silence
on the tennis courts have exploded into loud grunts as players flash their racquets
, breezing from one end to the other.
Loud and boisterous behavior in the name of
freedom to be what one desires to be, has become the norm and sign of
modernity. Hangout at café corners is considered modish; to be dressed in patched
up and unwashed denim is a part of the checklist that is in fashion at the
present moment. It is unfashionable- deemed priggish-if one is in proper
clothes even at an evening concert. I feel ill at ease when I visit a theatre,
dressed in a saree in the archaic style of my hair knotted into a bun secured
with hairpins and hairnet. The more disheveled one looks, the more s/he is
regarded as modern. New genres of music, racy and loud, set to insistent beat have wider appeal than the
measured, classical and traditional music conforming to established form and
appealing to cultivated taste. Art, culture, books,- in keeping with the fast pace of life- keep us on a high, though for a short
period. There is no time to enjoy leisurely and in a sumptuous way. It is
instant addiction, instant pleasure, Instant levitation, followed by instant
descent to boredom, depression and despair that constitute this quick-fix
approach to life today.
I am out of my depth with the new ‘mod’
generation. It is not that I wear tinted glasses that dim my sight of modern
outlook and give me colourful, romanticized pictures of the past. I am certainly
attracted to the contemporary life of gay abandon.I love the thrill of its fast pace, its gaiety and jollity with not a care about the
fretful fever and stir of the world. But
the purity and aestheticism of the classical way of living is equally
compelling. Both have their pluses and minuses. One cannot be privileged over
the other. Hence my prayers are more
pointed now than before when I seek the Goddess’ intervention to give me the
wisdom to appreciate the gay abandon of
the modern, tempered by the civilized and refined attributes of tradition that
have an enduring value. The conflict and the descent into banality and
triteness frighten me and I wish for a juxtaposition of the two attitudes
leading to a new synthesis that is spontaneous but measured, aesthetically
pleasing but rationally satisfying, incorporating modern morality and ancient
ethics. This is my dream, this is my desire and this is my prayer to the great
Goddess of learning.
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