Incredible talk by one of my most favourite philosophers, Devdutt Pattanaik. What he points out in this talk is very interesting (as usual!) - these days we often tend to read everything in terms of victor-villain-victim and that is is quite a narrow way to read history or any event and definitely not the famous mythologies of Ramayan and Mahabharat. A very unique feature of all Indian mythologies is that every character is grey. There is no hero. No one is the absolute winner in any story. Everyone loses something at the end and every action has a consequence. There is no act which can be labelled as good since ever deed produces mixed results. Did Pandavas win the war by losing all their sons? Did Ram win the war by losing Sita in the end? Was Draupadi really so virtuous that she asked for such a bloody revenge in return of what was really her personal insult? Or was it right for Sita to sit through a mass destruction of Lanka when she could have prevented that? No one has a moral high ground! And the most complex part of these stories is how it fudges with the idea of bhagwan - he/she is not something supreme or all endowed or all powerful but he/she also does questionable deeds and suffers consequences. Was it right for Krishna to have killed Kansa to avenge his brothers deaths when as a result of that his entire kindgom got wiped out? (and thats why Krishna had to shift base to Dwarka) And here lies the more deeper idea of these stories, that every apparent villain like the Kansa has a backstory which tries to explain why he did the brutalities that he did. Most Indian stories have this feature of trying to humanize the evil doer and treating that human identity as being distinct from the evil deed. But the distinction between the bhagwan (literally it means the one who sees all parts of the universe) and the rest lies in two ideas, (1) he/she has a sense of autonomy by which he/she is never bothered by external labels and qualifications - thats why Krishna sets the example of breaking the caste-system and repeatedly taking up menial jobs and to the extent of being the charioteer for Arjun - and precisely the same social position that Karna has sutaputra for which he is ridiculed - that Karna felt humiliated by this label is what makes him a mortal and not a bhagwan. (2) and that bhagwan knows the consequences of their actions by having a limitless access to information. Ram doesnt wage the war not knowing the consequences of it but despite knowing it since he sees that as a consequence itself of other acts. In the world-view of the bhagwan everything is consequential and is not limited by the perceptory limitations. And thats precisely what differentiates that from ones who are trapped by mithya (which actually means being limited in vision - mithya does *not* mean a lie) The beauty of rigorous approach to story telling is that it helps one understand the philosophical constructions without needing any crutches of stupid religions. Only if the believers understood the stories, symbols and rituals that they (fake!) to subscribe to had they also realized the futility and the damaging nature of the black-and-white interpretations they come up with. https://youtube/watch?v=6y10NApbPls&feature=youtu.be
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 04:25:55 +0000