The Scent Of Burning Charcoals

When Arijit Ackroyd Ghose went back to Shimla in 1892, having become a Wrangler in Mathematics and then secured a double first in Greek and Latin from Cambridge, he was asked by the principal of his old school St Paul’s, Kasauli, if he would spend that summer teaching philosophy to students in class ten. Ghose hesitated initially for a few days : to ‘educate’ people by telling them what the right things to do were, to ‘instruct’ them regarding the range of beliefs and actions that was forbidden to them, and to ‘normalise’ those who burst through these bounds, would be a betrayal of his deepest anarchist conviction that what went by the hallowed name of ‘education’ was simply a sophisticated mask through which teachers inflicted their Will to Power on their hapless victims.

And yet three months through the experience, he was glad that he had taken up the principal’s offer, not so much because of what he taught the students but because of the trains of thought that a certain ‘problem child’, Vishal, set in motion within the labyrinths of his mind. Vishal spent much of the time in class alternately staring through the windows, pestering those on the benches in front, or throwing chalks at the empty blackboard. One afternoon, just as the low clouds were lifting from the valley shrouded in mist, Arijit met Vishal as he was going down to the Mall. That was the beginning of a series of extended conversations, of which the following are some snatches.

‘Do you know what true power is?’
‘Standing at the top of a mountain and ordering the people below to follow you.’
‘Power that is, yes, but not true power. That is when you stand at the top of a mountain immersed in your own work, look at the people gathered below but just for a fleeting moment, and get back to what you were doing earlier, oblivious of their existence. Indeed, you are even unaware that you are at the top and *for all you care* you could very well be sitting next to the people at the base. The leader who compels others to follow him is, unknown to himself, completely under the sway of those whom he is trying to lead for his existence becomes dependent on theirs. Have you wondered why no matter how badly a master ill treats, starves or beats his slave, he will never actually kill him? That is because the master’s own existence depends on the slave’s, and consequently the master himself unwittingly becomes subservient to his slave. But think of the other figure placed on the mountain top who remains unconcerned which way the wind is blowing, how many people are with whom, or how many of his followers are not moving astray from his command, because such human allegiances of mastery and serfdom do not touch him.’
‘So what is the point of all this?’
‘Well, if you do not like school, as I never did, you have two options. The first is simply to run away from it all, but that won’t work out in the long run. If you meet the Establishment head-on, you will soon realise that it is simply too powerful for one isolated individual like you. It will catch up with you sooner or later, slowly but unerringly squeeze the life out of you, and pack you to a correction-centre where you shall spend the rest of your miserable life. The second option is to do what I myself did : become a part of the Establishment, but this not because you love it but because you hate it, learn all its rules thoroughly, completely absorb and internalize them, and then slowly turn them against it.’
‘How does one do that?’
‘Well, for a start, never allow yourself to get any rank below the first rank. Fight tooth and nail, and with every ounce of energy in your body strain every muscle in it so that you can stay there. Always remain at the top of the game for you will find that there is more room up there, but this not because you adore the game but because you think it is just that --- a game, a game that some people play to pass their time. So when people come up to you and congratulate you on having achieved the first position, it is you who will have the last laugh.’

Remembrance of Things Present

Many years ago, perhaps when I was in Class 4 or 5, I happened to be at a commemoration service of a literary figure in Assam. Speaking on the occasion, his daughter made a comment to this effect : 'When I got married, my father called me over to his side and said, 'Dearest, I am not giving you just this boy, I am also giving you his entire family.''

I distinctly remember the feeling of uneasiness that crept over me when I heard those words, and telling myself that if this was what marriage entailed, I had to keep it at an arm's length from myself. Over the years, of course, that feeling has hardened into a fanatical conviction and the distance multiplied into several thousand light years' length.

A similar sensation of queasiness came over me when I read these words some weeks ago :

'The ideal woman in India is the mother, the mother first, and the mother last. The word woman calls up to the mind of the Hindu, motherhood; and God is called Mother ... In the West, the woman is wife. The idea of womanhood is concentrated there --- as the wife. To the ordinary man in India, the whole force of womanhood is concentrated in motherhood. In the Western home, the wife rules. In an Indian home, the mother rules.'

'Even I, who never maried, belonging to an Order that never married, would be disgusted if my wife, supposing I had married, dared to displease my mother. I would be disgusted. Why? Do I not worship my mother? Why should not her daughter-in-law? Whom I worship, why not she? She has to wait till her womanhood is fulfilled; and the one thing that fulfills womanhood, that is womanliness in woman, is motherhood ... That, according to the Hindu mind, is the great mission of woman --- to become a mother'.

The writer, or rather the speaker, was Swami Vivekananda : this was at a speech in Pasadena, California on January 18, 1900.

Notes From The Middle Ground

1. How to live in the world at an angle of forty-five degrees to it.

1.1 It is impossible to live in it when this angle is perfectly zero degrees. One would have to become a mute stone to accomplish this feat, to be swept away by every passing wind.

1.1.1 Living in it at an angle of ninety-degrees is yet another impossibility. Nobody has ever succeeded in doing this, not even the hermit on Kailash who needs to scavenge for herbs and roots and who orients his life in terms of a vision that has been handed over to him by other people.

1.1.1.1. Thus to live on the thin red line that divides the two halves is an expression of the fundamental ambivalence in which the individual is located in the world. For some, it is a sign of wobbly weakness, for some an expression of dark despair, for some the joy of ironic play, and for others, it is simply a constitutive aspect of the human condition.

2. Sanity is a statistical concept.

2.1 If more people inhabit the right half rather than the left, you are rightly sane if you are in the former.

2.1.1 The scarecrow of insanity is ultimately one that threatens to undermine the very foundations of social existence. Which is why social norms are invented to police and discipline any trespassing of this line which, though otherwise fuzzy, is now made to appear rigid and uncrossable.

2.1.1.1. As a matter of fact, however, sanity is not the state of stolidly existing in the right half but an ongoing process of negotiation through which this line is shifted, played around with and criss-crossed in a never-ending dialectical motion.

2.1.1.1.1 Thus one becomes more 'sane' by becoming aware of the depths (or the heights?) of the 'insanity' one can descend into (or ascend towards?). 'Insanity' is the intimate stranger one loves to hate.

Casual tourist (CT) outside Trinity, Great Gate : Excuse me, is this Trinity College?
Transparent Ironist (TI) : Well, I would hope so!
CT : And you study here?
TI : I certainly try to do so.
CT : Ermm, is this the way you always talk?
TI : You mean the way I am talking to you right now?
CT : Yes, I mean this hypothetical, hesitant, and tentative way of speaking?
TI : Perhaps yes, but why do you allow it to bother you? Say if I stood up there in front of this Great Gate and declared to you, 'X is the Truth, the Way and the Life', what would you do?
CT : Probably laugh it away, probably not pay too much attention to it, probably declare it to be a form of intolerance.
TI : So there! If I told you, 'This is Trinity', you might not take too much note of it either. You might even think that I am some sort of a propagandist on Trinity's behalf, that there is some sinister power-play that I am trying to mask and that you must excavate by going behind the scenes. But if I dress it up a bit more carefully, your ears stand up to take it all in.
CT : Why do you think this is so?
TI : Well, it is all a part of a merry-go-round game that we play, both inside and outside the Academy. Outside, nobody likes the way people talk inside, they complain that people inside the famed ivory-tower are trapped in their webs of language and their theoretical mazes, and yet for all that, they do have a curious fascination for the arcane talk that goes on within. They like to 'problematize' things, to have a 'critical perspective' on matters, and to do a bit of 'deconstructing' every Sunday morning.

CT : And why is that so?

TI : Well, I don't know. But before your tour-guide moves on to St John's, here is a bit of bone to gnaw on. Perhaps we most violently reject in people around us what we most passionately dislike about ourselves.