Whenever I have tried to take sides on issues about which I
have delusional perception of knowing them, my father has patiently again and
again reminded me that it is yet too early for me to have opinions and that too
strong ones on anything and everything. In the light of this confession the
reader must try not to jump towards being judgmental about the depth of my
knowledge and insight, but allow his or her opinion to be juxtaposed to what is
said below, and see if there are any logical connections . If yes, I would be
happy to say the least, if no I would be happier.
On the issue of hypocrisy I have to admit, I have a bitter
memory of the conversation when in a heated debate which ended inconclusively,
I was termed and proved a hypocrite by a close friend. Those were college
years, times of wisdom flowering and shaping up, but even with best of my
abilities and almost desperate attempts to prove him wrong, I couldn’t put a
counter argument . And since then I have , with great difficulty come to accept
that I am a hypocrite.
But a little solace was to come my way, as in the years
following that day, grappling
with the mundane issues of day to day life, and allowing my reason to flourish
and become more inclusive, I have come to notice that this hypocrisy seems to
be an all-pervading, omnipresent element in our value system. It almost takes
its place as an unavoidable element of our collective being, stemming (as I
have reasoned) from a clash between our efforts to chase the element of
elegance and beauty/piety and the inherent drive of existence or nature , whatever
you call it to be. Looking around me,i I find ourselves being torn between
these two almost irreconcilable pursuits, trying to become more than something
that we are, or are told or still worse, feel to be.
If I put it a little non seriously, nature I feel has got
only four commandments for us- eat, shit, fuck and die-that’s it. That is all
nature wants from all living beings to allow her workings to keep going on. But
we could not accept that and we invented society, then culture, then values,
and value systems, and whole other load of complexities that we felt were
necessary to see ourselves as something more than flesh hunting, perennially
copulating beasts with no sense of ‘why are we doing, what we are doing’.I
guess those must have been the times to envy, when reason had no reason to be.
Alas, going down the road, screwing our happiness, we were
on the way struck by the contradictions stemming out of our own creations. We had to develop institutions, and then
commandments to be adhered to, to maintain the sanctity of these institutions.
Thus we gave ourselves family, religion, relations, and then rules to follow to
be a part of the same. But look around, and observe the obvious. The scattered
incidents which are on the least disturbing and challenging to the social
order, do hint towards a rebellious instinct directed against these very
institutions created by us, that has been there like a silent undercurrent
finding such violent escapes. Incidents of gang rapes, honour killings, child
abuse, flesh trade, prostitution(legal or illegal), domestic violence seem like
contrasting singularities in the social order that was in the very first place
expected to be symbiotic and inclusive.
As said before, I feel we have been victims of a self
imposed strife. In chasing that element of elegance we have not yet found a
reconciliation, or to say a sort of satisfying compromise leading to a sense of
acceptance of our place in this natural order. As put earlier, in all her four
commandments, nature has left no place for us to be elegant. You can’t find a
way to shit or fuck elegantly. A really hungry man cannot be told to eat like
in a corporate dinner and death for obvious reasons finds no parallel apart
from poetic abstractions to be equaled to something elegant.
This puts before us a natural question, why did we need such
a pursuit?- were we not happy being who we were, or are there deeper
implications to this dichotomy?
Was this an inevitability or are we just trying to find
clever means of lying to ourselves constantly, ages after ages, generations
after generations ?
I shall be blunt to push forward my point- take for example
sex. This is one idea that has baffled(in abstract terms) and eluded(in
tangible terms) me the most.To me sex
stands as the centre of the entire dynamics of any social order. It is amusing
to think that the genesis of an entire social order and the politics associated
with it, starts in a bedroom, needing just two hormone crazed people. This is
where a sense of identifying and ascertaining a claim of territorial sanctity
begins. It is with a child brought into the world out of a conjugal union that
a woman finds her motherhood to be complete. The idea of a motherly affection
never propounds the need of exercising your womb exclusively to put forth a
progeny. Motherhood transcends that, but we give squat to that
transcendence.Yes, there are honourable exceptions, but they are few.
Secondly as an inevitable consequence of the
institutionalization of the act itself your bodies become a sort of exclusive ‘
no trespassing ‘ territory of the other. The man claims the woman for himself
and vice versa. This adjustment probably revolves around the idea that ‘you are
allowed to go yabadababdooooooo, but no more than I can make you do’- this is a
clear example of how desperately we are fighting to ascertain our ego, because
if a partner can find happiness outside the relationship, the importance of the
other is compromised and the other no longer remains ‘the one’, because there are ‘more’, and
nobody wants that.
So much for the divinity of love .
Another example of this dichotomy is how most of the
religions have tried into integrate and continue to propound sex as a means to
attain a higher plane of consciousness and enlightenment. Hindus, who on one hand
acknowledge the supreme power as female deity, the mother Goddess or Shakti,
somehow managed to invent the concept of Devdasis in their religious structures
to suit their’needs’. Kama has been acknowledged as a force to awaken the
kunalini. Even in sufi traditions there are passing references to such
parallels where the devotion of a person to God is compared to the servile
passion of a bride all decked up waiting for her love to paw her real nice and
good. It is sad to believe that this is the highest level of metaphorical comparison we could
climb to in our portrayals of divinity.
The above mentioned examples centered around sex do hint at
how human kind has been falsely trying to defend what it desperately wants,
understands it as a need and yet denies acceptance of it by trying to weave a
cobweb of sanctions, morals and theories around it. The above mentioned clash
of value premises pervades not just in our take on carnality but in almost all
our choices, be it about being what kind of ‘ist’ we are, in eating or renouncing
meat, in being a believer or an atheist, almost all our choices that have their
roots in any kind of value system, automatically puts us in place where we are
questioning not just our choices but the relation of our ‘self’ to such
choices.
But as I said before, this all confusion and clash of values
works out best for all, for we find things still running and happening
smoothly, atleast on the surface. I found my own sick route to happiness in
this as now when I visit temples and see ladies prostrating before Shiva and
Durga and Krishna and Hanuman, I can’t help chuckling inside thinking only if
these stones could talk, they would go like,” Kya Rani, khub hi kasrat hui kal
to.” Or when I see people engrossed in the problems of nation, fighting over issues,
big issues, small issues, theorizing, proposing ideas, defending views and
creating all sorts of fuss and cry, I quietly imagine them to be going home,
eating their dinner, and then asking their better half,” Dear, aaj mil jaata,
to majaa aa jaata.” To me, that’s our humble self, the children of mother
nature, believing her, obeying her, rest of it can wait.
Shehr
e jaana mein yun to hue hain nakaam kai
Dil
aey magar yahan aur bhi hain muqaam kai
.
