A series of short articles on the Bhagavad Gita for people
living and working in our volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous times
filled with stress and fear. This scripture born in a battlefield teaches us
how to face our challenges, live our life fully, achieve excellence in whatever
we do and find happiness, peace and contentment.
[Continued from the previous post]
Sanjaya
said: O Bharata, thus told by Gudakesha, Hrishikesha took the magnificent
chariot between the two armies and stopping it facing Bhishma and Drona and
other kings said, “Arjuna, see the assembled Kurus.” Then Arjuna saw them standing there: fathers,
grandfathers, teachers, uncles, brothers, sons, grandsons, fathers-in-law,
friends, all. BG 1.24-27
One of the most dramatic moments in the entire
Bhagavad Gita. Asked by Arjuna to take the chariot between the two armies,
Krishna stops it facing Bhishma, Drona and other kings and tells Arjuna, “See
the assembled Kurus.” And who does Arjuna who wanted to see with whom he has to
fight the war see before him? Fathers, grandfathers, teachers, uncles,
brothers, sons, grandsons, fathers-in-law and friends.
Our
perceptions are conditioned by our biases. We saw how speaking to Drona
Duryodhana describes the Pandava army as bhima-abhirakshitam, protected by
Bhima. For Duryodhana, Bhima has always
been the most important Pandava, not Arjuna.
When as a child he wanted to get rid of the threat to his power from the
Pandavas, it was Bhima he tried to eliminate by poisoning him at Pramanakoti.
Similarly when Duryodhana looks at the two armies standing face to face, he
sees only warriors there. On his own side, he sees Bhishma, Drona, Kripa,
Ashwatthama and so on and he describes them using the words sarva eva
maharathah – all of them are maharathis. They are not his grandsire, his gurus
and so on for Duryodhana, but just mighty warriors, because he understands only
the language of power. To Duryodhana
they are chess pieces in the game of power he is playing with the Pandavas. Like
all power lovers, he believes in using people and loving power. He does not
subscribe to the idea of loving people and using power for their good.
Duryodhana is
a man obsessed with power, has been hankering after power all his life. When
Krishna talks of peace in the Kuru assembly during his peace mission, Duryodhana
refuses to listen to anything other than the language of power. He keeps asking
Krishna: “...but who has more power? We or the Pandavas?” He wouldn’t share
power at al – wouldn’t give the Pandavas even as much land as a needle tip.
All life is a
power game for him and nothing matters other than power, just as to a man of
sensuality, all life is about enjoying the pleasures of the body. He gives no
more than token respect to grandsire Bhishma or guru Drona, because he believes
he wields the power and they are bound to obey him.
In the Ghosha
Yatra Parva of the Mahabharata, while the Pandavas are living in the jungle for
twelve years, he goes there to show off his power and wealth. An army accompanies
him, all the royal women are taken along, dressed in their best clothes and
covered in ornaments, specifically to show Draupadi who is ‘dressed in bark clothes’.
However, a quarrel erupts between his people and a group of gandharvas sporting
in a lake in the jungle, a violent battle ensues, a beaten Karna runs away, and
ordered by Yudhishthira, Arjuna goes there and saves him and his people from
the gandharvas whose chief happens to be Arjuna’s friend. When Karna comes back
later, after it is all over, a thoroughly shamed Duryodhana is sitting in
prayopavesha, announcing a fast unto death, and Karna is able to persuade him
to abandon his prayopavesha only by telling him Yudhishthira did no more than
his duty by saving him – all subjects of a king are expected to do everything
for him, it is their duty, the king does not have to be grateful to them for
doing their duty, and therefore Duryodhana need not feel any shame for about
being saved by Yudhishthira, so goes Karnas argument. It is this language of
power that finally convinces Duryodhana to end his fasting unto death – that
and the idea of a rajasooya sacrifice that would declare him the universal
monarch, plus Karna’s promise to go on a digvijaya on his behalf, a mission of
conquering all kings for him.
Why is
Duryodhna so obsessed with power? Because born as the eldest son of the previous
king, Vichitraveerya, his father who loved power had been denied power due to
his blindness and he, Duryodhana, was born as the son of a man without power. Under
different circumstances, Duryodhana would have inherited all the power of
Hastinapura. Just as an orphan clings to relationships desperately because he
has none, Duryodhana clings to power and he wouldn’t let anything stand in the way
of his acquiring power. He literally believes in what Kanika told his father: Kill the
person who stands in the way of your attaining goals even if he is your son,
brother, father, or friend. Putro vaa yadi vaa
bhraataa pitaa vaa yadi vaa suhrd, arthasya vighnam kurvaaṇaa hantavyaa
bhootivardhanaiḥ,
We all hanker
after what we do not have, hoping that if we get it, everything would be fine,
we shall be feel happy and contented. Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize winning
American writer, wrote a novel based on this theme, her first novel, The Bluest
Eye, a masterpiece of modern literature, in which the little black girl Pecola
Breedlove living in abject poverty with her violent, constantly drunk father
and her mother who hate each other and regularly get into violent fights,
believes if only she had blue eyes everything would be fine. Every night when
she goes to bed she fervently prays on her knees for blue eyes, hoping that
then she would be loved by her parents, her parents would love each other and
all life would be wonderful.
There is
absolutely no doubt that we all need money, without money we will not have even
the basic comforts, without wealth even spirituality will not be possible,
inner peace cannot be there for you when
your stomach is screaming for food. That is why Swami Vivekananda said that to
the poor man God comes in the form of bread. While India maintained that
obsession with anything would stand in the way of inner growth, including
obsession with wealth, India never taught the philosophy that to be spiritual
you have to be poor. India saw wealth as the most beautiful goddess and
worshipped her through hymns like the Shri Sukta, a hymn that appears in the Rig
Veda, the oldest surviving book of humanity, and is still ritually chanted by
millions of Indians every day.
The poor
believe they would be happy if they become wealthy like the rich; only the rich
know that richness can give us all that money can buy but not happiness.
In the
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, belonging to the Shukla Yajur Veda, we have a
brilliant conversation between the celebrated Vedic Sage Yajnavalkya and his
wife Maitreyi. One day Yajnavaklya
announces to his two wives Kalyani and Maitreyi that he is going to divide his
wealth between them and going away in search of spiritual freedom. Kalyani
accepts his decision but Maitreyi has several questions for him before she
would say anything. She wants to know if the enormous wealth he is giving her
would make her find happpiness. The conversation between the husband and wife,
who herself later becomes one of India’s greatest sages ever, is one of the
most blunt and forthright discussions on wealth, love, human relationships and
several other subjects. Yajnavalkya tells her that it will not, her life would
be like that of any rich man living in the middle of comforts.
What
Yajnavalkya means is that wealth alone cannot give us happiness and
contentment. While wealth is desirable, it is not in it that we would find
happiness and contentment, which is true with success, fame and all other
things that man seeks in the world.
In my younger
days, I lived for several years in one of the most respected ashrams in the
country. We had in the ashram with us either on short visits or living for
months at a stretch corporate giants, chairmen and MDs of major government
enterprises, national and international celebrities, people who owned entire blocks
of major cities, founders of banks, bureaucrats at the highest levels of the
government and so on, all in search of what power and position and wealth could
not give them.
Ultimately
all life is a search of ananda, which is to be found only within us. We are
like the proverbial musk deer searching frantically everywhere for the
fragrance the source of which is itself. Duryodhana believed it is power that
would make him happy and the war that was being fought was also for him a means
to find happiness and contentment through power, for which he did not mind
sacrificing any number of lives. That so many people are willing to sacrifice
their lives for him is also a matter of pride for him, as it would be for
anyone for whom life is a power game. Their death is of concern with him.
O0O
When Arjuna looks to the two
armies, the people he sees standing there are fathers, grandfathers, teachers,
uncles, brothers, sons, grandsons, fathers-in-law and friends. But what
Duryodhana sees when he looks around in the battlefield is maharathis
everywhere: sarva eva maharathas. Bhishma, Drona, Karna, Kripa, Ashwatthama,
Vikarna, Jayadratha, Saumadatti – they are all mighty warriors on his side,
ready to lie down their lives for his sake. And on the other side he sees
Bhima, Arjuna, Satyaki, Virata, Drupada, Abhimanyu, the sons of Draupadi, and
so on – again, all of them great warriors.
The people standing there are
the same, but for Duryodhana they are warriors and for Arjuna they are fathers
and uncles and gurus and so on.
It is the same everywhere. A
‘manager’ looks at the people before him and he sees his workforce which is the
reason why management experts like Tom Peters have to remind them “People are
People.” Sometimes when certain teachers – certain teachers, not all – look at
the young people in front of them they see not young people but students –
students whose natural tendency is to be unruly and have to be dealt with an
iron hand, who have to be taught discipline, whose minds have to be filled with
ideas and information, who have to be taught to think the way they want them to
think, who have to be taught not questioning but obedience. Sometimes when we
look at people through certain lenses, we don’t see them as people but as
something else.
When Hitler looked at the
Jews, what he saw were not human beings of flesh and blood and feelings and
emotions, but a race that had to be eliminated. And he systematically went
about implementing his final solution for the Jewish problem. Six million Jews were sent into his extermination
camps, there to be used as workers until their death by overwork, starvation,
diseases, and all kinds of atrocities committed on them. People were asked to
stand in lines and dig their own graves and when they finished, they were shot into
the pits. The next line of Jews was asked to fill the pits and then dig their
own graves, to be shot into them. Smoke from the chimneys where the bodies of
people gassed to their death were burnt rose up into the air thicker than smoke
from huge factory chimneys. Unspeakably cruel medical experiments were
committed upon them by doctors like Josef Mengele. Because you do not see them as
people but as members of a race human but inferior, who had to exterminated.
The same thing happened to black
slaves in the United States too throughout the slavery centuries. People were
bought and sold as though they were animals, they were made to work from dawn
to dusk bound in chains and were tortured using instruments specifically invented
for the purpose. They were starved and so cruelly whipped that they felt death
was preferable. Toni Morrison herself was the granddaughter of a black slave in
the United States. In her most famous book Beloved, we come across a mother who
kills her own baby. She wanted to save it from her own fate which was a
thousand times worse than death.
Duryodhana does not see people
as people but as a means for his purposes – they were just warriors for him.
Arjuna sees them as people – as fathers and sons, as uncles and nephews, as
gurus and disciples, as brothers and friends.
The battle that happened 3102
years before the Common Era was a war between two sides, one of which saw
people as people and the other, people as a means to achieve their goals. It is
this war that Krishna tried his best to avoid, risking his life, stooping so
low that future generations would call him a man without principles. But he did
not mind it because for him his name, his ego, did not matter. What mattered was the good of the world,
lokasangraha. For him, as for Arjuna, the war is the very last alternative. But
for Duryodhana, it is a matter of his ego, his first choice, so that he can
have absolute power. There is nothing he wouldn’t do for power.
It is this philosophy that
Krishna wanted to destroy: the philosophy that people could be used as a means
to your egoistic goals, that people are expendable.
O0O
Photo
courtesy: Devender Malhotra
Thank you in advance for your questions and
comments.
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