Bombay High
Like everything else in the country, from the composition of a government to the price of a lemon, our night out would be the subject of extensive and intricate bargaining, among ourselves and even with the authorities. In short, it was to be a typical Indian night out - an expensive, drawn-out ordeal so onerous and complicated that you would never wish to repeat it. The drinking would be simple by comparison. But just when I thought I'd arranged the perfect compromise, the whole thing hit a snag. In India, there is one thing you should never take for granted - India.
Saturday, October 07, 2006
Instant Karma
For thousand of years, Hindus have scaled the Himalyas of the soul, and invested the Indian landscape with sacred meaning. In the Rig Veda, the earliest known composition in Sanskrit or any other Indo-European language, all the earth's rivers rise in heaven, and life on earth began with their release. When a Hindu pours water over the stone phallic symbol known as lingam, they are re-enacting that first downpour. If the mountains are home to their gods, their seven sacred rivers receive their prayers and wash away their sins and ashes. Seven towns - Haridwar, Varanasi, Mathura, Ayodhya, Kanchipuram, Ujjain and Dwarka - are honoured as sites where spiritual release, or moksha, is most readily obtained. By their devotions, Hindus lay claim to the land, not always to own or govern it, but certainly to worship it, and no government in Indian history has successfully prevented them from doing so. The land is too big, the faith too deeply embedded in the people's consciousness.
Indian philosophy teaches that the things we perceive as real are actually maya, an illusion concealing the reality that lies behind appearances. Through India's long history of invasions and fighting, and the competition for land and resources stretching back to Aryan times, power derived from the sword and the bow. Long before it was ever a country, India had been colonised and, in the process, enlightened and brutalised, enriched and impoverished. In the dying decades of Muslim rule, and under the British, it became poorer, and by the time freedom came was rich principally in one thing:people. More people, fewer resources. Fewer resources, more intense competion. The struggle was endless. Socail churning, Indians call it.
It is not possible to live justly in an unjust society, unless of course you renounce it. Since the time of the Buddha, India has confornted well-meaning humanists with a dilemma:unless you give away everything you own, you are still better than most people. It is impossible to be at once moral and comfortable. If you enjoy even a modicum of prosperity and security, it means you occupy a priviledged place in a monstrous hierarchy. That man ther lying on the pavement is somebody's son, husband, brother, father. You walk right by him. The same dilemma exists in all societies to an extent - we sleep soundly while other suffer - but in India, the co-existence of wealth and poverty, of glamour and squalor, education and illiteracy is colossal. Imagine being a passenger on a plane that is falling out of the sky when you discover that there simply aren't enough parachutes to go around. It's a high-stakes grabbing game in which most people are losers.
Indian society reserves its highest honours for the renunciates, those who embrace tyag, or sacrifice. It counts among its greatest scoundrels, politicians; the more self-righteous, the more debased. Perversely, hypocrisy on a massive scale also appeals to the Indian psyche, for much the same reasons that the dance and drama spectacles of the Bollywood cinema appeal:it's all a damn good show. The politician who jumps ship from his party and principles more frequently than he changes underwear is acclaimed as a genius; the leader who archly renounces power before it unavidably slips from his grasp is said to have superb timing. Lust for power and a ruthless determination to hold onto it are seen as normal, partly because they reflect the desperation of the vast majority. Everyone except mahatmas (great souls) imagine that they would like to rule India, despity ample evidence that the job destroys all who touch it.
For thousand of years, Hindus have scaled the Himalyas of the soul, and invested the Indian landscape with sacred meaning. In the Rig Veda, the earliest known composition in Sanskrit or any other Indo-European language, all the earth's rivers rise in heaven, and life on earth began with their release. When a Hindu pours water over the stone phallic symbol known as lingam, they are re-enacting that first downpour. If the mountains are home to their gods, their seven sacred rivers receive their prayers and wash away their sins and ashes. Seven towns - Haridwar, Varanasi, Mathura, Ayodhya, Kanchipuram, Ujjain and Dwarka - are honoured as sites where spiritual release, or moksha, is most readily obtained. By their devotions, Hindus lay claim to the land, not always to own or govern it, but certainly to worship it, and no government in Indian history has successfully prevented them from doing so. The land is too big, the faith too deeply embedded in the people's consciousness.
Indian philosophy teaches that the things we perceive as real are actually maya, an illusion concealing the reality that lies behind appearances. Through India's long history of invasions and fighting, and the competition for land and resources stretching back to Aryan times, power derived from the sword and the bow. Long before it was ever a country, India had been colonised and, in the process, enlightened and brutalised, enriched and impoverished. In the dying decades of Muslim rule, and under the British, it became poorer, and by the time freedom came was rich principally in one thing:people. More people, fewer resources. Fewer resources, more intense competion. The struggle was endless. Socail churning, Indians call it.
It is not possible to live justly in an unjust society, unless of course you renounce it. Since the time of the Buddha, India has confornted well-meaning humanists with a dilemma:unless you give away everything you own, you are still better than most people. It is impossible to be at once moral and comfortable. If you enjoy even a modicum of prosperity and security, it means you occupy a priviledged place in a monstrous hierarchy. That man ther lying on the pavement is somebody's son, husband, brother, father. You walk right by him. The same dilemma exists in all societies to an extent - we sleep soundly while other suffer - but in India, the co-existence of wealth and poverty, of glamour and squalor, education and illiteracy is colossal. Imagine being a passenger on a plane that is falling out of the sky when you discover that there simply aren't enough parachutes to go around. It's a high-stakes grabbing game in which most people are losers.
Indian society reserves its highest honours for the renunciates, those who embrace tyag, or sacrifice. It counts among its greatest scoundrels, politicians; the more self-righteous, the more debased. Perversely, hypocrisy on a massive scale also appeals to the Indian psyche, for much the same reasons that the dance and drama spectacles of the Bollywood cinema appeal:it's all a damn good show. The politician who jumps ship from his party and principles more frequently than he changes underwear is acclaimed as a genius; the leader who archly renounces power before it unavidably slips from his grasp is said to have superb timing. Lust for power and a ruthless determination to hold onto it are seen as normal, partly because they reflect the desperation of the vast majority. Everyone except mahatmas (great souls) imagine that they would like to rule India, despity ample evidence that the job destroys all who touch it.
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