the Fantastic Indian role models 2

In my continuing rant against the amazing Indian role models, specifically from that all pervasive mythological part of our culture, I am going to look at another of my favourite fantastic ideal men from our epics… the great Yudhisthir, also known as dharmaraj…or the king/lord of ethics.

The USP of this demigod is honesty and ethics. He never lies, never cheats, does no wrong. Or so the great epics and popular and common understanding of culture would have us believe. But think about it. This man “SHARES” his younger brother’s bride… supposedly because mom told them to share whatever they had brought home. At worst, it is sheer lust and covetousness of a renowned beauty, who just happened to have been won by a younger bro. Mom’s unknowing instructions just acted as a nice easy way, and cozy justification, to realize his own nefarious desires. At best, it is considering the woman an object, a THING to be shared out among five brothers… never mind which one she wants, all because mom said so… with no idea what they were bringing home. Doesn’t really sound very ethical or honest to me.

If this was the worst of his sins, he would still not be a man I would in any way be persuaded to like. However, this is merely the tip of the awful iceberg that is the great personality of this great epic hero. Having co-married a woman very much in love with his younger brother, he assigns himself first conjugal rights, to continue for one whole year. Why? Because he is the eldest of course! How stupid of you to ASK!! Then comes Bheem’s turn, for another year, until she finally, after bearing two children, comes to the man she really loves and the one who won her in the first place. What about what the woman wants? Isn’t she in love with Arjun? So? Who cares? She is a mere woman, property and chattel of the lord and master, so who cares what she wants? She’ll bloody well be amenable to orders and do what she is told!

At the end of the Mahabharata, when the 5 brothers and the wife are on their way to heaven, Draupadi falls by the wayside. When asked why she does not deserve heaven, this man has the temerity to say that it is because she always loved Arjun more in spite of being the wife of all 5 Pandavas!!! OBVIOUSLY she loved Arjun more! Heloooo! That’s the one she always wanted, loved and desired! That’s the one she rigged her swayamvara for so that ONLY he could win, winning her hand in marriage along with the contest! Is she really expected to give up that love, or SHARE it out among four men she does not give two hoots for? Merely because you force her into marrying them?

Having spent all his life pursuing a steady policy of pusillanimous appeasement of the arrogant and power hungry Kauravas, Yudhisthir agrees happily to the beggarly handout of five villages, one each for the five brothers, instead of claiming their rightful half. Be that as it may, the time share arrangement of the wife continues, with each brother being forbidden from interrupting or interfering while she is with one of the others. While this is fine under normal circumstances, it so happened once that Arjun forgot his arms at Yudhisthir’s rooms. With one of his subjects begging for help, Arjun is put into a quandary. He can either disturb the esteemed Dharmaraj in his private time with the time-share wife, or he can disregard his duty as a ruler and a warrior, and neglect to help.

Choosing duty over the inconvenience of interrupted coitus, he enters Yudhisthir’s apartments and gets his arms, helps the subject and returns. Instead of understanding the necessity that drove Arjun, Yudhisthir is unable to see beyond his own interrupted lust, and the covenant the brothers had agreed to. A true DHARMA RAJ, in my opinion, would have seen the difference between wanton and willing interruption of another’s solo time with the time share wife versus the necessity of retrieving arms to protect the weak and punish the wrongdoer. Instead, he punishes Arjun with 12 years in exile, to be carried out in abstinence, thus further eliminating the biggest rival for the wife’s affections for a good solid chunk of their lives. WHAT an amazing role model!

That’s nowhere close to all either! The Kauravas, angry and jealous at the amazing pleasure palace and capital the Pandavas have built in Hastinapur, invite the brothers to a game of dice. Yudhisthir the inveterate and obsessive gambler, manages to lose everything he owns, as well as his entire kingdom which he only holds in trust with his brothers, and does not own outright. They give it back to him, he loses it all again! Then, he proceeds to wager, and lose, his brothers, as if they are property he owns, as well as the time share wife because, after all, she is his and his alone, a piece of property to be done with as he wishes. Then he proceeds to sit and watch while the “winners” drag her into a full royal court, and proceed to strip her! This is an IDEAL man? I think NOT!

When, eventually, at long last, he finally goes to war against the Kauravas, he sanctions innumerable unethical strategies and tactics, including lying outright (the great un-lying, ideally honest hero). It is one of the most irreconcilable aspects of the Mahabharata that the supposedly honest and “right” Pandavas use the most amount of cheating and subterfuge, from mild tricks to in-your-face cheating, from a fib and a white lie to outright genocide, this model of ETHICS and HONESTY uses all and every means to win at any cost. Hardly the behavior of an ideal man.

Hardly surprising then, that the whole Indian ethos is so skewed. That we consider women mere property whose only duty and role is to do the bidding of the husband and the in-laws. That we do not even have a concept of “what the woman wants” forget about actually trying to find out. Women do not have dreams, desires, aspirations, ambitions. They cannot have. And as for honesty and ethics? Well, they are highly flexible commodities, to be brought out and paraded when convenient, and coolly circumvented when they stand in the way of what we desire.  

The fantastic Indian role models

As anyone who knows me, offline or through my blogs, knows – I am, and always have been unhappy, irritated, angry and disappointed with the way I see many of the people around me behave, and with how they ARE. While venting about my understanding of the “why” behind how the new generations are turning out (Kids today!), I got to thinking about why the people I hate are the way they are. When you really think about it, it is hardly surprising, given how problematic I find most of the greatest cultural role models that we grow up with.

The epics are more than just books in India. They are all pervasive, underlying a huge number of festivals, traditions, daily lore, and even anchoring much of the language. So, we grow up with the stories and the characters, and overtly and covertly they are set up as role models, as ideals for us to follow or emulate. Considering what some of these characters and ideals are about, this can be a hugely problematic thing.  

Possibly our biggest ideal, the most IDEAL of role models, the one beacon that pretty much all men are supposed to aspire to be and all women are supposed to aspire to marry or give birth to is Ram. The title character of the ubiquitous Ramayana (practically THE cultural icon of India – worldwide), is otherwise known as the maryada purushottam – literally the best among men. Held up as the shining example of the ideal dutiful son, the perfect brother, the perfect husband, and the ideal warrior and king, he is the man who does no wrong, whose every move, every decision is another step on the path of righteousness.

This is drilled into us, in myriad spoken and unspoken ways, from the day we are born. Most of us never bother to think about or question these assumptions, and as I attempt to do so now I am expecting a large amount of flak, especially from the orthodox, traditionalist, narrow thinking, blindly following majority. If you really think about it, how does the life, and actions, of the great role model Ram stand up to scrutiny? Not very well in my opinion. What I find instead is a sometimes selfish, sometimes callous, sometimes egotistic, sometimes unethical MAN. Not a god, not an avatar, not the shining example of all righteousness, not the ultimate perfection in manliness, not an ideal anything, just a man, and not a particularly likable one either.

A man who kills from hiding (the Bali episode), kills someone he has no personal enmity with, who has done no harm to him or his, merely to form a political alliance may be human, and even shrewd, but is certainly not an epitome of ethical behaviour in my book. A man who spends roughly 10 years planning and executing a revenge for a slight to his ego, fighting a war in the process, killing thousands and laying waste to an entire nation, is hardly the best of men. OH wait! The war was supposedly about getting his beloved kidnapped wife back…right? WRONG! If that was true, the first reaction after rescuing her would not be “walk through fire to prove you have not been fu*#ing your brains out with that demon everyday”.

Even as an average woman with an average man as a partner, I know that the moment I have to PROVE my innocence/purity/chastity whatever is the minute I walk out of the relationship. And here we are talking about a GOD! An incarnation of Vishnu himself! One would expect a modicum of trust in his long suffering wife who has followed him into exile and lived in hardship all those years just to be near him! Also, she was kidnapped. So if she is no longer “pure” how is that her fault? RIGHT! It’s that old monster of victim blaming. Rape is the fault of the woman right? Now we are told in the Ramayana how Sita fended off the amorous advances of the demon with the sheer power of her fidelity … good for her, but unrealistic. If someone is strong enough to kidnap you, and really wishes to do further harm, chances are, he will. Does that mean the woman no longer has the right to be a wife? And is unacceptable to her family? No wonder we are still murdering the VICTIMS in the name of honour.

So what are we to learn from this IDEAL man so far? It’s ok to drop or ignore all your so-called much vaunted ethics if you have something to gain. Hmm that sounds about right, sounds like most of the people I know, and most human beings. It is ok to cause as much harm as necessary in order to avenge a perceived or real slight or insult. And it is not just fine, but divine to suspect your spouse and demand proof of purity and blame the victim. My! What an amazing role model so far. Already I begin to feel my insides churning in that special way that is reserved for the narrow minded MCP’s of the world.

So, now that the war is over, and the wife rescued and PROVEN 100% pure, one can head back to the long abandoned kingdom being looked after by the brother. Arrival, ascension to the throne, blah blah. Once he gets a taste of the throne, like all others who get one, he does not want to give it up. He is willing to throw his pregnant wife out of the kingdom, into the forest, because people gossip about her CHARACTER (a word which means only sexual purity in India), rather than relinquish the throne.  Not only that, he does not have the basic guts to face her, and tell her to her face that she must be sacrificed under the wheels of his royal ambitions. So, he sneakily sends his brother instead to take her for a nice drive, and then abandon her without any warning! The word of one narrow minded washerman, beating his wife for having stayed out all night, is worth more to him than any trust in his partner, any sense of the respect due to her, or any love she is owed. WOW! How perfectly divine!

So now, the pregnant wife lives in the forest, without any knowledge of what caused her fall from grace. She is lucky that she is taken in by a sage and gets to live, and give birth to her twins, in his hermitage. She could equally easily have become a fine meal for some wild animal, or been murdered or worse by bandits. Now, many years pass. In the meantime the chariot of royal ambitions rolls on until just one nation is no longer enough, and he sets out to perform an Ashwamedh yagya, a proxy way of establishing dominion over the neighbouring nations. In the course of this great proxy war, the horse is captured – and its escort regiment soundly defeated – by two children, preteens who live in an ashram, and appear to be the offspring of some ascetic.

Now what does our paragon of all virtues do? Does he go to bow to these amazing children? Does he laugh it off and move on? Neither! He sends an ARMY against two kids, again not led by himself, but by others. When this too loses, Lakshman, Bharat and Shatrughna sent back in shame, and hanuman captured, he finally arrives himself, not to laud and praise the children, but in anger, to fight them. Presumably he too would have been soundly defeated, if the sage Valmiki hadn’t intervened to prevent the fight. He still doesn’t seem too interested in such amazing children (as any normal human being not jealous of their prowess would have been) and makes not much attempt to find out who they are, returning to his own capital instead.

When the sage Valmiki finally takes matters into his own hands, and takes Sita and her two sons to court, and their identity is finally revealed, much melodrama occurs. Of course, now that heirs have been found for his not inconsiderable empire, much of it newly acquired, the past is forgotten, and all imagined and real trespasses forgiven. Until, that is, another murmur arises about Sita’s chastity. After all, if she could have slept with Ravana during her captivity, how much more opportunity for being unfaithful in a jungle hermitage full of handsome, fit, young sadhus? So, YET AGAIN! Sita must walk through fire to prove she is PURE.

FINALLY! She shows some backbone, refuses this new test of her chastity, and basically leaves the man! Should have happened much earlier…but whatever, better late than never and all that. But what, let me ask again, does all this say of this paragon, this role model, this demigod? Nothing particularly good as far as I can see, and mostly things I would not stand for in anyone, let alone my partner or significant other!

No wonder we are the way we are. No wonder we have such screwed ideas about duty, love, relationships, marriage, honour, and what have you. And this is just one of the role models which permeate our consciousness as a nation. I will continue to analyse more, both men and women, in the next few blogposts, in an attempt to understand where a lot of our TYPICALLY Indian thought processes come from. 

Kids today!

It’s a common theme at most gatherings these days, especially ones where people of “a certain age” are present. Psychiatrists and pop psychologists, agony aunts and parental advice columns, the next-door aunty and the maid servant, everyone is losing sleep over how badly the “aaj kal ke bacche” are turning out. It’s an incessant refrain wherever I turn. Kids today just don’t measure up! They are too selfish, too aggressive, too materialistic, too brand oriented, too rude, too mercenary, too something or the other.

While I do see the signs of all this in most kids, it would be wrong to say ALL kids are this way, because many are not. And as for the ones that are, I think it is important to look at the why, what, and how. If the kids, and by kids these discussions mean anyone between 2 and 32 these days, are the way we think they are, the way we hoped they wouldn’t be, the question is haven’t WE made them this way? As parents, teachers, role models, and general authority figures, haven’t we set all the wrong examples that have created this generation of self centered materialistic human beings? After all, no matter what big WISDOM we cram in their books and how much we lecture them on right and wrong and values, monkey see monkey do.

When a parent at my daughter’s school, the guardian of one of her classmates, complains for 40 minutes at a time about how her kid keeps watching this particularly disturbing cartoon, which the parent disapproves of, and doesn’t listen to directives to change the channel or turn the TV off, I wonder which is the parent in their house, and who makes the rules. How does a barely-six-year-old have the temerity to ignore parental directives so easily? Obviously it has never learnt that no means NO. and that’s hardly surprising given how I see most parents handling discipline (and no discipline DOES NOT mean hitting your child). At home, in malls, in cinemas, the scene is almost identical. The kid asks for something, parent says no. kid throws a grandmother of a tantrum, screaming, crying, kicking, falling on the floor and in general making a scene, parent gives in.

What the child has learnt – all it takes to turn a no into a yes is a little waterworks and public embarrassment. A valuable lesson that the child is NOT likely to forget in a hurry. I really don’t get it. If I can get the child whatever it is, and if I think my child should have it, I wouldn’t say no in the first place. If I can’t, or won’t get it for the child, then I simply WON’T. initially my monkey tried the tantrum routine, until she realized that mommie has an exceptionally thick skin, does not get embarrassed at all, and the no never changes to a yes. In restaurants, especially in India, kids are a menace! They run around, getting under the feet of the serving staff, running into chairs and tables, disturbing other diners and making a godawful racket. The parents seem to be blind and deaf! Assuming the kid has never been taught to behave itself and keep its seat in a restaurant or other public spaces, I don’t find it surprising that these kids grow up to be obnoxiously loud in restaurants and plexes, and NEVER turn their phones off in a movie or a play.

Increasingly, the ONLY focus of the parents seems to be the GRADES of the child. With all consuming obsessiveness about grades, parents ignore all transgressions as long as the RESULT is good. The child need not socialize (in fact socializing is often actively discouraged), and need not have any hobbies or extra curricular interests. In addition, relatives and friends are discouraged from coming over, or coming to stay, especially around exam season, and every whim of the child, healthy and legitimate or otherwise, is indulged in order that the child is in the RIGHT frame of mind for the EXAMS (even if they are the mid term evaluations of a 5-year old). Then, when they grow up, we suddenly expect them to care about relatives? Having taught them that nothing matters except their academic records, and that people are unnecessary, we suddenly complain when they behave as we have taught them to.

We complain ad nauseum of how materialistic these kids are, and how they talk brands all the time. We compare them to how simple, down to earth, and innocent we were at their age, when all we cared about was climbing trees and playing kho-kho. How accurate that self-portrait is, is anyone’s guess, but what we don’t examine is how we are making them that way. I know of mothers who throw away dadi ma’s home made roti and bhindi ki sabzi (in front of the kid) to replace it with salami and pizza for his packed lunch. I know parents who don’t buy any electronics, not even their own phones, without the advice and permission of their pre teen kids! I see kids in school, and not even high school at that, who sport the latest brands in everything, who carry expensive and high tech phones, tabs and what have you. They obviously didn’t buy all this for themselves, so who taught them the BRAND thing?

We don’t socialize anymore, not really. At best our CIRCLE is a small set of people of similar social and economic background. We have done away with the gift giving and family gatherings, because they cost too much time and money, both of which can be better used elsewhere. Time….in making more money, and money … in buying the next dress, bag, pair of shoes, phone, etc. so the kids don’t learn to share or give. They don’t learn to tolerate nosy or irritating relatives, just because it is something that is done, and they don’t learn that some friends may have a LOT less stuff than others. They only learn the importance of having the PS2, and of going to shop in DUBAI. We don’t give to charity, and would rather buy more clothes we don’t need than sponsor a child. We would rather throw away discarded clothes than bother to cart them to an orphanage.

And we still expect our kids to grow up to be amazing human beings with all the right values? That’s a little childish isn’t it?