'Desi's need a cogent language!

I was accompanying a few American clients on the roads of a small town about 30-40 kms from Patna. They wanted to meet some distributor of an SME venture. They knew the name of the distributor but the address they carried was half baked. It was important for them to talk to this distributor, but now we were stranded having no clue how to find him. I sat relaxed, looking around for some help from a messiah out of nowhere as we really didn’t know how to go about this. I took the paper with the nebulous details and went to a stranger asking if he had any clue how to find this man. He said, “Find him? He is my childhood friend! Wait I’ll call him...”. As he dialed his buddy from childhood, my clients looked at me, astonished, as if they had seen a ghost! When we returned to the car after finishing an exhaustive interview with this SME trader, I told my client, “if you really want to understand India, you need to reflect on the phenomenon that you just saw, because this spirit runs a major part of the soft power of the country. A belief and huge reliance in an invisible force that guides you towards what you need. Well, always? Perhaps not! But to a large extent this plays an indomitable role in our mental construct! The man that appeared out of nowhere to guide us to your fictitious contact, is a living reality that takes different forms at different times and guides a large part of India's collective consciousness.”

As we go deeper into rural India, we see the role of faith play out at a much deeper and stronger level as compared to its relevance among city folks.

The obvious reason attributed to this by the urban folks is lack of education. But it is important to remember that what we mean by education is fundamentally a system that is based on empirical knowledge of the western world. An integrated system of learning with an incisive understanding of the laws of nature, plants, animals, humans, man, woman, planets, celestial movements are at the heart of an integrated way of life of the east, something that is totally absent from the formal curriculum that we have been exposed to since the colonial times. This system of integration is too deep and complex. For example, if we just study how our language has developed we see an astonishing alignment of our vocal anatomical contour with the letters – ka, kha, ga, gha, anga, progressively deepening along the vocal chord. Or, when we do a deep research on fasting, we see mind boggling application of science. Fasting is today adopted by the western world too because of the correlation with lunar and planetary motion and its impact on our digestive system. And more recently, Namaste is getting global acceptance as a safer form of greeting though the real import of Namaste is far deeper and more profound than to just avoid bodily contact. My American clients pointed out, “how come these villagers have such glowing skin and shining white teeth?” I told them, “your global cosmetic products have not penetrated and interfered with the natural wellness regimes of these village folks!”

So, when we say there is a lack of education, what we perhaps unwittingly mean, is lack of education of the western empirical learning.

This clash of education, to some extent, explains the present day clash of the liberal and the conservative narrative in India. A friend of mine, Kashish, who fasts on Ekadashi recently told me that she brands it as a more acceptable ‘detox’ phenomenon for her friends who would otherwise frown upon her for taking to such practices and it’s a discussion she would rather avoid! And it is not Kashish alone. Many like her, despite having deep-seated belief in these practices, are scared they will be seen as a fanatic Hindu or a conservative Jain in the liberal and progressive ambience of their office colleagues none of who likes to associate oneself with any religion. And I get them too. Whenever you ask any ‘desi’ to explain or justify his point of view, he struggles to present a cogent argument in favor of his theories.

Here is my attempt at identifying the key challenges.

Problem 1: Our curriculum has not empowered us with the language of faith. We do not know how to structure an argument in support of our traditional values. Possibly because it is such an integrated study that any isolated attempt at explaining any behavior is often met with a counter argument that is difficult to resist. In that, the western education has succeeded through a solid communication system that is exactly able to verbalize things as they are. However, such a sophisticated vocabulary does not exist in the present day Hindu lingo. What that leaves us with is an intense conviction without commensurate articulation. In absence of an ability to communicate, the desi’s language is often garbled and laden with angst. Pretty difficult for a self-respecting English schooled individual of 2020 to associate with.

Problem 2: Accepted global pedigrees have minimal Indian traditional representation The average urban Indian has disproportionate respect for globally accepted pedigreed sources of knowledge (such as Harvard, Stanford) and a deep shame around our ancient eastern semantics. If we were to draw a semiotic landscape, this zone of ancient culture and rituals would come under a scary red zone for most city schooled folks, who would be immediately wary of a regressive, bigoted view of our culture. Some time back, in a breakthrough research, scientists from University of Barcelona, Axilum Robotics France and Harvard Medical School have successfully demonstrated a conscious transmission of information between the minds of emitter and receiver subjects far away from each other, a science that our Yogic practitioners have perfected since millennia. However, it is only when this knowledge comes to us with the branding of Harvard Medical School, that we open up to the possibility.

Problem 3: Eastern philosophy does not often follow a linear argument but a strange connection of seemingly unrelated streams of thought. Intermittent fasting is so much easier to explain than Nirjala Ekadashi upavaas!

The aqueous nature of human body explains the benefit derived from fasting on Ekadashi. It is a well known fact that high tide occurs on new moon and full moon days and low tide on the seventh day of the lunar cycle. This is said to be caused by the lunar attraction of the water on the planet earth. The earth and the moon attract each other but on certain days the attraction is predominant due their nearness. Arnold Lieber, a Miami Florida psychiatrist experimented that these tides affect our moods and behaviours. It has been reported from many of the psychiatric hospitals that on full moon or new moon days mental patients show a distinctly abnormal behaviour. In an article "Does the moon control your moods" Edgar Ziegler writes that the phoenix Arizona fire department has found that it receives 25 to 30 more calls on nights of the full moon. 

While it is being argued that the distance of the moon is too large for it to have any meaningful impact, but the truth remains that it's still a debate around a significant ancient finding, a ritual that has been followed for centuries. What seems like a linear argument in Biology suddenly starts combining Physics, Metaphysics, Psychology, Astronomy, Astrology, Philosophy, Medicine, Biotechnology, Geology, Chemistry and much more. And this is difficult to assimilate, process and reproduce for the common man. So when the desi tries to explain why one should resort to traditional way of life as prescribed in the scriptures, he is unable to articulate the complex argument, yet, deep inside, he knows the infallible foundation of the theories. Consequently, he is left with an acute sense of helplessness while arguing with a man of letters on the ever so polished NDTV debate.

The technology of bhakti requires way too much of investment in the form of time, interest, attention, diversity and depth of knowledge for an easy vocabulary to do justice to. And the reason is that the genesis of this knowledge is not the traditional empirical model but a deeply meditated finding of the yogis since thousands of years. Hence, forcing our western linear finite template on to a process that is fundamentally non-linear with infinite variables is likely to be a futile attempt.