AN INSIGHTFUL MORNING : Asking right questions is not good.

By His Grace and Blessings I write….

An Insightful Morning,

While following my morning meditation routine, I had an uncontrollable flow of thoughts. Though meditation is all about observing your breathe and prevent our monkey minds from wandering around, it is always such a difficult thing to do. The unbreakable thoughts which swept me away in the morning revolved around an issue about which I came to know yesterday evening through some news channels. It was actually sensalisation around the main news that caught my attention and set my brain on the path of thinking. This issue now occupied a critical space in my mind during my dream state and also in the morning when I sat for meditation. It was really difficult to ignore it as I am little patriotic inside and feel for my country though every other day I try to get over these feelings of pseudo nationalism (but it is so fashionable now a days that everyone seems to be wearing his patriotism around his sleeves ).

What made me think more on this issue is that it was of critical significance to us all, but the media channels and social media approached it in a very roundabout manner. It was as if tail is wagging the dog. The paid social media hounds were all around to bite anybody asking the right questions and so everything was lost in hullabaloo of media channels and social media sites. Remember what Eisenhower one said…”The search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions “. In this expedition of the paid media, the scapegoats were a yestyear heroine of  Bollywood and a very powerful neighbouring country.

I was about to indulge in a deviant behaviour. In these times every thought beyond the tailor-made narratives was shunned and discouraged through all means. Thinking is considered a crime and I was about to commit this sin too soon…so I paused and started contemplating consequences of application of mind . …and this is the flow of thoughts that commenced in my little brain limited by its own little capacities and idiosyncrasies ..

I recollected what Mark Twain once said…”Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please”…so before going any further I started gathering facts..reader can definitely distort them as suitable to his confirmation biases and prejudices . For that matter what is a fact …well my thoughts again reminded me of an old Indian story where a group of blind people touches an elephant and everyone has his own version of the elephant. Everyone has his own truth and everyone is right. It’s like    a blind man ..we are all blind but the only thing is that we don’t feel that we are blind…i recollected Gurdjieff who once said…”you are in a prison, if you think you are free, you can’t escape”.

So all of us are in prison and we need to understand that as soon as possible. Now don’t ask me why and how of this mess created by Gurdjieff. Start thinking silently without anybody knowing about it .…thinking is a crime in this country  and at least that much all of us are aware now.

So , Madam ji I thought….i thought and thought and thought ….and I thought about our past problems and examples of similar nature from the past …I pondered over how we had dealt with them ….and then I had this profound realization which my esteemed reader may or may not agree….I realized that we Indians suffer from  Unique Indian inability –approaching a problem with clarity and consistency , and trying to solve it clearly—so has been our past record …the problems of the past still persist and have been complicated further …be it Kashmir, be it Naxalism, be it legal /land reforms or any  sort of economic reforms, be it our infrastructure or anything , be it our historical  religious bitterness which gets exploited by politicians of all hues…We have this habit of deliberate inaction and not facing the problem..of course the point that many of us are pawns and not the decision makers is not lost to me…

However, this time the situation seemed little different. It was not as if the problems of this nature didn’t exist in the past, it was that it was deliberately created by hubris and narcissism of a man who has been apotheosized by this nation. A man who was a textbook case of fascist tendencies,in the words of a psychiatrist who interviewed him long ago.

Well you must still be wondering what is this problem on which my brain deliberated so much and which somehow fired my patriotic emotions. Okay the problem is the latest border dispute between India and Nepal and scapegoats are Manisha Koirala ,a Bollywood actress of Nepali origin and a neighbouring country  China. These two, one a person and other a country were blamed for the fiasco. I am not giving a clean chit to China in the matter. My question is why did things reach to such a point where umbilical cord between India and Nepal got broken…. Remember what Caeser said to Brutus in that Shakespearean play Julius Caesar..….” The fault, dear Brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves, for we are the underlings.

Conclusion; The views expressed are personal and I must affirm that I am a patriot to the core. However, I have a little brain and problem is that it thinks. I feel I must continue to reveal truth to all my readers in whatever way possible. I am not free of making wrong conclusions and will always strive to change if there is some constructive criticism. Otherwise I am not afraid. Bertrand Russell once remarked….”one should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny”….so I  will continue with my topic in my next blogs .

Image; A border area around Lipulekh pass near  India Nepal Border as published in Indian Express.

With his Grace and Blessings i write

Dr. Seema Chaudhary