बोल के लब आज़ाद हैं तेरे

You do not always have deep disagreements with good, old friends on something fundamental or existential. But when you do, it makes you put your bum on a chair to spell out your thoughts. Not just for the record but because it also happens to be something that you have been thinking about increasingly over the past 5 years. What lies at the heart of these thoughts is what is going for the record here and has been duly summarised at the very end in just two lines for your convenient reference, in case you want to save yourself from the tyranny of few minutes of peaceful self-expression.

(Why 5 years you ask? Random and unremarkable, except perhaps for the fact that it happens to coincide with the first time yours truly made a choice of life and aspirations that was based on a delicate balance of ‘what we have been taught or told by people and institutions’ and ‘what we have learnt through our own individual learnings and experiences’, and not merely the former as had been the case until then. But perhaps I digress.)

Allow me to try to elaborate within the limits of time, personal wisdom and above all, the discretion that this exercise demands.

The disagreement – a tangential discussion on Swami Vivekananda’s speech at Chicago in the World Parliament of Religions in 1893 – began with the assertions (all quoted verbatim only to avoid any dilution by translation) ‘BC maine suna woh Chicago wala speech’, ‘aisa kuch extraordinary nahi hai’, which was duly seconded by ‘bring the hype down’ by another good, old friend in company. ‘International acknowledgement hai but aisa kuch nahi jaise humein market kara gaya hai’ was the contention. The POV was that back then there was no one ‘jo US jaake philosophy and religion pe baatein karta tha’ and ‘people were enamored’ by the fact that ‘in a world where (aero)plane invention was still some time away’, ‘an eastern philosopher’, ‘traveled in a ship so far away’, ‘not (to) Europe but (to) America’.

Holding Vivekananda’s ideas against contemporary philosophers, admittedly, far more worthy of adulation and following, like Nietzsche, the friend’s discontent was with the fact that ‘Indian people have literally started taking him as a God’, ‘just like some Indians do with Sachin Tendulkar, Rajnikant and all’ ‘just because he was the first to take it to the West’. The core point of contention, in case you have missed, was also duly explained later with - ‘we dont have many idols around, who broke the barrier and shone at (the) world level. Whoever does we make him a God.’

Now obviously there are a lot of subjects worth extensive debate in that just another casual interaction between 20-somethings. But dwelling on them here would be as pointless and unproductive as blankly holding any one individual/opinion in this exercise as right or wrong. However, what reminds me and makes me share what I have been thinking about increasingly over the last 5 years, is the bitter denouncement of the element of (allegedly - exaggerated) veneration of a person, whose ideas remain one of the most shining emblems of our culture, just because you ‘read his teachings’ and arrived at the conclusion that you ‘didn’t find anything interesting other than to control temptations of life like sex, money etc’ (which BTW is also the reason you feel ‘Osho makes more sense’) like ’sex mat karo’, ‘tamas ko control karo’, ‘mirror fenk do’.

This, in my humble opinion, is what happens when a little intellectual masturbation by self-proclaimed liberals and progressive individuals leads to a delusional sense of premature enlightenment at best, and at its worst, violent expressions of misguided iconoclasm that deeply affect our society today. Like I was constantly trying to assert during our conversation, such things come with their deep seated and highly sophisticated socio-political contexts and nuance which one must account for with the associated benefit of hindsight that lies at our disposal.

It is the same even while critically evaluating any person or ideology from history, for that matter. To elaborate my POV, while it is absolutely alright (even necessary) as a 20-something to disagree with Vivekananda’s views on the importance of Brahmacharya towards achieving one’s goals in life OR to criticise elements of your culture that don’t make sense to you as an individual, it is downright unjust to diminish someone’s life’s work or teachings for carrying nothing remarkable except regurgitation of ‘4000 saal pehli ki teachings’, just because one of the many happened to be a commitment to celibacy for self-actualisation that you fail to understand. To my mind, this is a gross oversimplification, misinterpretation and shallow understanding of the ideas which the spiritual leader stood and worked for in his entire short and troubled existence.

You can discover and critique his teachings or thoughts on neo-Vedanta on your own and it is not my intention AT ALL – to either defend or espouse them here, or even to talk about the historical relevance of his Chicago address. In fact, I simply can’t because I not only find myself intellectually deficient due to the lack of knowledge and profound life experiences in these domains, but also perhaps because I stand at the wrong stage of life’s journey, so as to have had adequate time for any form of spiritual development. Perhaps unlike in the late 19th century, sadly those aren’t the tools and toils of youth today. But I cannot ignore how difficult (even impossible) it is for people, even as learned and informed as me and my friends, to be able to observe and rationalise things with due context, reverence and, above all, the humility that a journey of self-actualisation asks for.

And I cannot ignore how convenient it has become in this age of internet, social media and sensationalism to develop and successfully deploy straw man arguments not just as a means to disagree and misrepresent a culture, a history, an ethnicity, a nation, a religion, an institution, a political party or an individual, but also use the same to stoke ideologies that foment feelings of divide and unrest. And I find it painfully ironical when the underlying subject itself is the primal and oldest human endeavour to further social bonding and foster collective identities which are the source of our power as sentient, intellectual, emotional beings in an unforgiving universe devoid of inherent meaning (aka religion).

To summarise, while I applaud and stand by all your rights to self determination as a means to self-actualisation - whether or not they happen to overlap with the much larger umbrella of our shared culture - I have also come to realise that it is equally important to call out the sharp edges of derogatory assertions, oversimplification, misrepresentations and misunderstandings that only serve to dilute complicated areas of human knowledge and experience by cutting them down to just a few incorrect conclusions.

It is because it is these sharp edges, which when left unchecked, can gradually get machined into lethally poisonous ideological daggers that carry the potential to rip apart the very fabric of the society over which all of us have thrived and prospered for the last few millenia (at times, apparently, too ignorantly and arrogantly as well). A fabric which has been stitched together over centuries, all the way from the gifted philosophers who conceptualised its tenets OR the generations of courageous believers who helped preserve and improve them even against constant forces of aggression OR the selfless souls who endeavored to use it to make this world a better place in deeply racist, feudal, casteist, colonial times, right up to simple individuals like you and me today who may choose to practice them in order to discover some meaning in our existence.

OR as Nietzsche would subscribe - after proclaiming 'God is dead' - in our quest towards Übermensch.

The later realisation that this discussion had to transpire today exactly one day after Swami Vivekananda’s death anniversary (which also happened to be a Sunday afternoon) was the cruel irony of circumstances that brings me (and you) here. In other news, Kanye West marked 4^th of July with the declaration that he will be contesting the 2020 US presidential elections. If an avant-garde rap artist with all his flaws, stands un-apologetically for his questionable, albeit harmless and unique brand of self-expression, as a means to discover and shape ones identity in a world where death is the only truth, who are we if we cannot even admit what we believe?

"उसूलों पे आंच आये तोह टकराना ज़रूरी है,

जो ज़िंदा हो तोह ज़िंदा नज़र आना ज़रूरी है"