On India

"God created men, Colt made them equal."

For the state to confiscate and restrict arms is an injustice intolerable to a free man, but one could be excused if one finds it acceptable in a nation-state where there is an easy and efficient recourse against violence, especially for the weaker sections who do not have money or power.  In most places, this recourse is The Police.

In India, guns are de facto legal and affordable only for the rich and connected.  To add injury to this insult, the police usually side with the rich and connected and shoo away or beat up anyone who dares to think otherwise.

And since the police is worthless to a common man, one might think that after all the courts will be fair.  That assumption too is badly trampled as soon as one tries to litigate against the state or against the powerful.  In the rare case that there is a just verdict, the powerful keep appealing, finality is elusive, and as they say, the process is the punishment.

For a common man or woman in India, a region replete with injustice, illegality and corruption, not only is there no recourse to arms, but there is no recourse to law enforcement, and there is no recourse to the courts.

People might say the United States is corrupt too, and the powerful have their advantages, but it is head and shoulders above a third-world hellhole like India when it comes to the right to bear arms, the right to approach the police, and the right to a fair trial.

People might want to leave India for many reasons, but I left India to escape this tangible sense of being helpless in the face of aggravations.  I do not wish to approach a well-connected bureaucrat, and to stand before him, and to lower my dignity and beg for his favors to do something that should be done as a matter of course.

For those who cannot leave India, my advice is to lay low politically, and not be brutalized by the state.  You cannot do much as an individual, and you should try this perilous path of being a lone-wolf reformer only if you have no other ambition in life, especially that of living a free, peaceful and intellectual life.

If you wish to consider joining a mainstream or alternative political party, remember that the political parties are a reflection of India at large: corrupt, brutal, nepotistic, opportunistic.  You will have to kiss the feet of men like Rahul Gandhi or Narendra Modi or Amit Shah or Arvind Kejriwal, or Mr Vijay.  That may not be abhorrent to you, but it is to me.

I find it increasingly true to say that though I love many things that have happened in India (especially as it relates to some forms of music and literature and philosophy), I hate what it has become.  It is an ugly, dysfunctional and despotic region, and I feel fortunate that I am no longer trapped in it.

The Infinitesimal and the Infinite

 A friend shared a poem with me today:

Vast Emptiness

Emotion less
Thought less
Good less
Bad less
Joy less
Sorrow lessDevoid of it all
Is this vast emptinessA few fireballs littered around as stars
A few pebbles thrown around as planets
A few specks of dust moving around as life
As plants as trees
As insects as worms
As fish as reptiles
As birds as animals
As men as women
And the non-gender ones tooWinds swirling
Rains lashing
Thunders thundering
Dust storms brewingOf what significance
But an eternal play
Of time in the lap of timelessAll of the above
But words in my head
Without words
There is but
Vast Emptiness

I used to have similar thoughts, and I'm sure many a reflective man or woman have had the same.

But here is a counterpoint to this wondrous feeling and cognition of being a mere speck in the vast space-time. And that is the wondrous feeling and cognition that in this infinite vastness, infinite duration, but at present, here and now, I am. I exist, I am aware, I see, I wonder.

The insignificance is as marvelous as the infinitely improbable existence of us. Both are marvelous, both are wondrous, both are worthy of one stopping in one's tracks and be awed.

One existence, that of space-time, is infinite (notwithstanding the Big Bang model of a finite universe), the other ephemeral: I was not aware before I was born, and I shall be not aware after I die. But in a certain sense, I am eternal too, because I am part of this universe. And I shall never cease to exist, but shall go on to appear in different forms.

And what a wonder of wonders that matter arranges itself so as to be self-aware. It is perhaps the greatest wonder of all.

On the Grand Design

Suffering is always tragic, often random and mostly senseless.

It is a worldly endeavor to lessen suffering, while the other-worldly pursuit is to "transcend" suffering since suffering is a "noble truth" from which there is no escape, only transcendence.

A friend of mine, with a network of well-heeled people in his network, writes on LinkedIn:

Seemingly adverse things appearing in abundance and without warning could be arising for one of two reasons. First, it may simply be that dealing with them is a necessary step in our development and without them our life journey will be a superficial success. Relatedly and importantly, these circumstances appear because prior volitional activity or accumulated karma making them the birth child of thoughts or actions we have taken in the past, whether we can directly recall or correlate to the present incidents.

Whatever the specific reason, I take great comfort in the fact that there is zero randomness in how my life’s events unroll and I look ahead with optimism and enthusiasm, knowing that the temporal map of these occurrences is accurately following the karmic load that I carry and strive to purify.

I quote an incident from an earlier article of mine:

Abandoned in Life and Death
Parents leave baby boy undergoing treatment at PGI

In a blatant display of extreme callousness, parents of a seriously injured baby abandoned the child midway through treatment in the PGI Intensive Care Unit.

Faced with absence of support in a critical condition, the infant breathed his last on January 7 and no one has even come forward to claim the body, which is kept in the mortuary of the hospital.

...

Although he started stabilising in the ICU, his parents suddenly vanished. After unsuccessful attempts at locating the parents, doctors informed the police.

...

Ruby passed away on January 7. 

...

The religiously-inclined might say that the child must have come to this world with his karma and that divine justice is infallible. And thus we avert our eyes from what must have compelled the parents of this poor child to desert him, and what must be improved in the hospitals, and in the mind-sets of doctors of this country for these events never to happen again. God forbid.

Truth is not comforting, it just is.  The truth is that this baby, Ruby, died of injuries and from lack of care, not of Karma.

Tragedy is not confined to the suffering of children, though it is perhaps easier to see that they did not deserve it.

I imagine the suffering of Ruby's mother as she abandoned him.  I imagine her compulsion, or perhaps her desensitized debasement.

I imagine the suffering of a father and a mother as their child is kidnapped and never found, as they imagine him or her to be amputated and made into a beggar or be raped by those who do not deserve to be called human beings.

I imagine the suffering of a noble warrior like Jaswant Singh Khalra, who, for protesting against others' killings, was himself tortured and killed by Punjab Police.

I swear, to my last drop of blood, and to my last breath, ... I swear on the still smoldering, in my heart, funeral pyre of Ruby who I never met, ... I swear on the courage of Jaswant Singh Khalra, that I will never forget your suffering, or justify it as part of a grand plan, or rationalize it as what you deserved because of your karma, but that I will hold your injuries as mine, that I will fight against what killed you, and that I will reject the abject nonsense of the eastern "wisdom" that claims that the world is perfect as it is, only if we would see it that way.

 

Though Lovers Be Lost, ...

There is no love like the love of a mother for her child, and the child assumes that love, and abides in it, and lives in its shelter and warmth.

The child leaves the mother first, to go forth in this world.  The mother holds her tears, but lets the child go.  For that is in the nature of things.  She wishes happiness and fulfillment for the child more than the child wishes for itself.

And one day, the mother, old and frail, bids her final goodbye to this world.  And only then it dawns on the child what a fragrant presence the mother was in its own heart.  When it is no more possible for the child to reach out to its mother outwardly, then the child reaches in, within, and finds the love whose intensity was so far hidden to it.

And that explosion of love and grief creates an intensity about an absence that the presence perhaps never could.  The world of the child is now absent the mother, but strangely its heart is full once again with her presence.

From being inside the mother before its birth, the child now nurtures the mother inside itself.

Though lovers be lost,
Love shall not.

And Death shall have no dominion.

On Being Well-Adjusted, part III

First seek an understanding of human affairs, THEN seek to integrate, adjust or withdraw.  Too often, whether in the case of Buddha or Krishnamurti, young, ignorant minds go off into seeking "the highest truth" while not understanding why clothes dry or why an interest is charged on a loan.

Too often, maladjustment starts at the very beginning of one's adult life.  From living a sheltered childhood, to a sudden exposure to the harsh realities of a competitive adult life.  Many are horrified at the prospect and withdraw.  But that is a failure of the adjustment process, not an indictment of society.  Parents are responsible for slowly exposing their children away from fairy tales and into the world of millionaires and courts and real estate.

After an adult has successfully navigated, to a reasonable extent, the "real world", it is permissible for him to seek to withdraw to focus on another kind of pursuit.  Not everyone has to be an entrepreneur.  One could as well be a mathematician, an artist, or an astute generalist.  But to be maladjusted, to never understand the world, and then to withdraw is not renunciation, it is an admission of failure.

Society is indeed sometimes brutal.  But the brutality is not mystical (due to "ignorance of one's true nature" or suchlike), but tangible, due to material and historical conditions.  It may indeed be justified for someone to run away from a war zone, to be a deserter, but then, he cannot live in honor as the town mayor when the war ends.  You can escape the obligations of a "sick society", but you do not, if you are moral, then get to reap the rewards of that same society.

For a sensitive individual, I recommend very much that they should seek to become financially independent, to live with thrift and wisdom so that they may have enough money to live the kind of life they want.  And to become financially independent, it is important to understand society.  Not from a guru, but from study as well as lived experience.

Innocence of spirit can be maintained only by living a life of integrity, where one does not deceive oneself.  If one has to compromise on one's integrity (say, by paying a bribe to get a driving license), it must be with complete self-awareness, and with a feeling of tragedy.  Continuing with this analogy, a morally compromised man (that Krishnamurti would consider well-adjusted) would feel happy that he was able to cunningly achieve his aim, a morally integrated man would feel dejected despite having achieved his aim, and a defeatist (but moral) man would hang himself to death at the state of affairs.

The society is rarely totally evil.  It is made of all kinds of people.  In a very decayed society, or even in jail, you may find exceptional individuals.  You must aim to understand and navigate the circumstances that you find yourself in, and then overcome those circumstances with your strength and acumen, WHILE preserving your innocence and inner moral compass.

And then, having achieved mastery over the earthly affairs, to enjoy your freedom from the shackles of an allegedly "sick society".

That, if you can manage, will be a life well-lived.