Oh so far, the palace of wisdom!

The older I grow, and the more I reflect on the great variety of humanity that I have seen, heard about and dealt with, the more convinced I am that the old Chanakya niti, as adumbrated in detail in the Arthashastra, (dushter domon aar shister palon – subdue the wicked and nurture the good) is the only way not just to organise, administer and protect society but to preserve civilization itself and bring about any kind of meaningful progress hereafter.

I could write a whole book about this, but let me restrict myself to a short essay.

Just look about yourself, from the school classroom to the sports field to the mass media and parliaments today. Things are falling apart because we have overdone the ‘fight for your rights’ thing too strenuously for too long. Oh yes, for ages until very recently (and to some extent even now in too many relatively undeveloped countries-) lots and lots of people have suffered, often horribly, because all-powerful elites have neglected, harassed and oppressed them, women, children, the old, handicapped and poor, dark skinned people, religious minorities, and so on and on. And it is indeed an unqualified Good Thing that, thanks to widespread concern about the ‘common man (and woman)’, now enshrined in many national Constitutions and enforced by courts, his and her essential interests (the right to life, personal liberty and pursuit of happiness, to put it pithily) are far better protected than ever before in history. Also, as anyone who has carefully read my several posts on the need for socialism will know, my sympathies are by and large with the ‘common man’, because I have always believed that the enjoyment of unearned privilege (such as gained through birth and inherited wealth, for example) is a fundamental blight on civilization as well as obstacle to progress – reformers, statesmen and geniuses are not born only in traditionally elite families.

What I shake my head sadly (and with growing dread) at is the spread of anarchy and decadence, vulgarity and stupidity, lack of concern for other people’s convenience and feelings, growing rebellion against asking for any kind of standards in any sphere of life at all (from personal hygiene to language to traffic rules), acquiescence to everybody’s demand that his or her ‘right’ to enjoy themselves their way be treated as sacred and inviolable, and insistence that if I am on the same page with the dominant majority at the moment, then I must be right.

What are we seeing these days? ‘Nobody has a right to be offended’, scream the very same people who get offended at anything anyone has said, however famous or obscure, however well-informed and sensible that person might be, and spew vicious profanity at the latter, however stupid and ignorant the comment writer might be (‘You say Modi’s demonetization scheme was an unnecessary disaster? You are a…. unprintable!’, writes someone whose very use of language makes it obvious that s/he would never pass a basic exam in either language or economics). Parents who know their children are as lazy and distracted as they are dull scold teachers for not giving the darlings not just passing grades but excellent ones. Students disturb classes at will and show teachers the middle finger if they are remonstrated with, but the teacher may be hauled away to jail if she so much as scolds them, because she has ‘caused irreparable damage to their immature psyches’. Society falls over itself to ‘protect the future’ of seniors who brutally rag freshers in college. A drunken woman kisses a policeman who stops her for crazy driving and then lies down at a busy crossing to ‘lodge a protest’ against high-handed authority. A tired doctor asleep on his feet after touring the wards for twelve hours straight is beaten up with impunity by the relatives of some neglected patient, who died because they didn’t care to bring her to the hospital before they could hear the death rattle. The police are warned that they had better be nice and polite to people who abuse them in the noisiest way and the filthiest language for trying to make them obey the law – including women bikers who won’t wear helmets because it ‘spoils their hair’, because it is after all a ‘democracy’. A lot of people are very concerned about violation of the ‘human rights’ of terrorists who are unrepentant (indeed, gleeful) about blowing up unarmed and innocent women and children and old folks but turn a blind eye to the rights of the victims. Minor and failed actors pontificate about how our independence from foreign rule was fake, and actually get applause for such moronic, bestial nonsense. You object to people littering the streets, screaming on trains, parking under No Parking signs, and they get back with threats of physical violence and let you know what VIPs they are, far above both law and decency. Schoolgirls skip classes and exams to lecture heads of state for not doing enough to save the environment (‘How dare you?’) and they are tolerated by people in high places and feted by the media, instead of the security guards sending them home with a slap on their behinds and a warning to the parents to teach them to behave themselves and know their place. People who have learnt a very little of science and never read a single book of theology confidently assert that there is no God, nor soul or spirit, nothing higher than an accidental, short and pointless animal existence on this planet. You want more?

‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,

Mere anarchy is loos’d upon the world, the blood-dimm’d tide is loos’d…’

Yes, as I said right at the start, I am growing old. But I am still writing because lying sleepless at night, I worry myself to distraction about what is waiting for my daughter’s generation. Things, it is said, have to get worse before they get better. Moderation is the highest virtue, but it is arrived at through very costly experience of endless excess… as William Blake wrote, ‘The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, for you never know what is enough until you have seen what is more than enough’. Alas, not everybody will survive to reach the palace of wisdom.

(Thank you for prodding me, Aveek!)