Flowing Water & The Very Indian Concept Of Upaya

The River- Roy Lichtenstein

Flowing Water & The Very Indian Concept of Upaya

If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy floating by… Japanese Proverb

Image management professionals rely on, and media men know, the axiomatic truth that every headline, however elating or distressing, is the successor to yet another headline. There is a riverine quality about the flow of news, and patience, for that matter, that allows the aggrieved, anguished or outraged to hope for justice. Also, “with a little bit of luck”, as in Eliza Doolittle’s father’s roguish expectation in My Fair Lady; today’s imperative can well become tomorrow’s irrelevancy.

So, hang in there, you who may be squirming uncomfortably in the eye of the storm. Minimise the damage as best as you can, and be sure you will slip off that front page and TV screen, into that dark and comforting oblivion you long for, probably much sooner than you think. All things do pass, including glory and ignominy, to be replaced by further glory and ignominy, but not necessarily your own. This may be banal as an observation, but that doesn’t seem to affect its home-truth quotient.

Besides, there is that other matter of coincidental juxtaposition- of inevitable good news and bad following on, that also manages to cast its own moderating/eclipsing influence.

Thus, for example, you have the monumental corruption, incompetence and unhygienic squalor on display in the run up to the CWG, memorably bracketed within a OC meditation in excellent East is East fashion, under the full gaze of international TV, on “our standards and their standards,” with more than a grain or two of truth in it. But, after making suitable amends with a war-footing clean-up: of dirt, snakes, dogs and pestilential mosquitoes: and the posting of Langurs to deter Rhesus monkeys from venues; we find such typically colourful and exotic issues segueing seamlessly into the glamour and hoopla of the all-is-forgiven high-tech Opening Ceremony.

And juxtaposed with the natural pride we all feel in witnessing this razmatazzy extravaganza, complete with prince, president, players and pageant; and on to the actual competition and the glint of medals, is the other insistent news of the Sensex striking out towards all-time highs, even as the GDP growth rate competes ironically with the food inflation figures.

And then, if that wasn’t enough to grant the government: its politicians, functionaries and bureaucracy a reprieve from their  bad publicity; you have a most sagacious  three-judge bench verdict from the High Court of Uttar Pradesh on the highly symbolic Ayodhya imbroglio. A verdict, long decades in its coming; one representative of no less than the vitality and resilience of our social fabric as a country. And this verdict has been received, not with discontent and public protest, but in a spirit of statesmanship and communal harmony nationwide. There is profundity and pride in this outcome, given the fractious history of this matter, not easily matchable, now or in the future, by any other nation on earth, no matter how apparently integrated and homogenous.  

Surely then, any future nasty shocks notwithstanding, two rights or is it two and a half depending on one’s perspective, of  varying import and relative stature, eclipse the remaining half. A half that is undeniably rotten, as it may continue to seem to those, both here and abroad, who prefer to make freer with criticism than praise. But of course this assessment too depends on the scales one uses to measure the abstractions underlying such weighty news flow.

And willy-nilly, the people of India are thrust into a new position of maturity. We make a mess of the Commonwealth Games preparations and yet redeem our pride, yes, Monsoon Wedding fashion, as hazarded by our Sports Minister MS Gill.

Our standards, of much more than hygiene and maintenance, on the other hand, are, without a doubt, quite deplorable. And it may be years, mysterious as the causes may seem, before we are able to get a fix on this sub-standard mind-set. Meanwhile, we will have to endure international slurs and ridicule, and pay for our sloppiness and unreliability in lost business, cost overruns, missed deadlines, faulty execution, diminished diplomatic stature and credibility.

So, easy as it may be to blame OC Secretary General Lalit Bhanot for his embarrassing remarks on relativity and filth; he has not, some of us may recognise, said anything untrue. Our cavalier attitude to cleanliness can be demonstrated on any city street or village across our beloved country. We may know what clean is but that does not inspire us to make and keep clean, particularly in any civic sense.

Meanwhile, the FII’s have pumped in close to $ 6 billion in the month of September alone, with a strong likelihood of much more to come, in a belated acknowledgement, that India is one of the few places they stand to make money in the next couple of years. This even as our absolute numbers of people below the poverty line keeps growing in relentless fashion.

And if we do finally resolve the Ayodhya issue with the building of a longed for grand temple to Lord Rama at his exact birth-place, as well as that of a great mosque on the banks of the Saryu river; we would, as a nation, have definitely achieved a  proud milestone in the history of independent India.

If the import of the somewhat inscrutable Japanese proverb to do with revenge and rivers and floating corpses was meant to be about our communally conflicted recent past, it will have turned instead to a last laugh on our ill-wishers and detractors with less than absolute faith in our native cohesiveness and good sense.  

Besides, we have other ways and means. There is a very old, very wise, Indian concept of “upaya”, celebrated, amongst other places, in the brilliant and visionary treatise Lal Kitab which has Persian origins and was originally written in Urdu. Without going into the esoterics of its efficacy, it is clear that the central suggestion is that of remedy and relief affordable to apparently intractable issues of karma and destiny. In short, there is no problem that cannot be alleviated or even solved with some flowing water, the gathering of certain offerings to be made, and the performance of some prescribed rituals over the whole enterprise. It is, in the end, a most reassuring world-view.

(1,055 words)

October 3^rd, 2010

Gautam Mukherjee


Published as Leader on Edit Page of print edition of The Pioneer as "We are like this only" on Wednesday 6th October, 2010. Also online at www.dailypioneer.com and is mirrored in the pioneer epaper.