Negativity

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Negativity is the pastime of a few intellectuals, obsession for some politicians and a born womb- inheritance of a good number of naysayers. Some people enjoy negativity just to create controversies. Some  others are attitudinally negative out of jealousy. If they see a beautiful woman they will sigh like a demented philosopher and say- yes she is beautiful but beauty is transient, time will cause wrinkles on her shining skin, her golden breasts will hang like rotten mangoes just to touch her naval. There are  yet others for whom nothing in God's vast acres is good, nothing is pleasant. They are what the late lamented Arun Jaitley coined , "Nawabs of Negativity". There are people for whose palates nothing is tasteful. If a flawless Royal Dinner  is thrown on the marriage celebration of the  Princess these nawabs of negativity like the old Brahmin, in an old story I remember to have read, will say  "If it is too good how can it be good; it may satisfy the tongue but it will not be good for digestion". Such people, if they are taken to heaven- if there is a heaven somewhere- they will certainly say, "If there is no contrastive disorder Order has no meaning". These people are incurable specimens of negativity.

A Greek dramatist wrote " It is better not to be born in this world full of pain". I would like to ask, if you are not born how would you experience the pain of the world? Life is a cat and mouse game. If you are chased by a cat you run like a hare  to a lair of safety. Once you are safe in the dark corner of your hiding place you feel blessed. If a cat misses its prey it would curse itself. But if you catch your prey and make a hearty meal of it you  will say like my sometime friend in my salad days. "What a lovely  world God has created"!- for his favourite Lobster breakfast. The World is beautiful for its variety and plenty. You see light and shade, enjoy your (stupid) joys and suffer your( cursed ) pain. But at times the pain of separation is also the most enjoyable feeling this world offers. You write volumes, wait out the unending hours and  sing woeful songs requesting, cajoling the clouds or the wind to carry your bleeding heart for your love's mercy. The binaries of life  make life desirable despite the prickly pears wounding your kissers. The world offers choices. You can be what you wish to be or you can wait for nature and society to shape your body and mind. But most philosophers and thinkers, poets and politicians are positive in their approach to Reality. The horrors of life must be vanquished by human intelligence. If floods come and devastate life does not end. Man is the greatest survivor and in order to survive you have to utilize all the negative intelligence positively . The politicians all over the world are a hated lot because they often fail to use their  positive thinking  in making the world a good place to live in. But those who blame them, do they have an alternative in their mind? It is easy to  say that the world is  an unmanageable place. But man has managed the world for millions  of years by his positive thinking. The negativists have not given us any alternative world. They do not have the blueprint of  an alternative scenario of life.  Negativity and cynicism are impediments on the  path of the positive visualizers of life on the planet. Negativity stops progress, halts life, increases pain, the pain of nothing happening anywhere.

Death is the natural negativity to life. But death has not stopped the world's forward movement towards progress of life. In the world today man's life is more comfortable, the world is more livable than it was ever before. But negativity is also essential  for it inspires thinking, it gives energy to penetrate the layers of clouds to reach light. It induces human  energy to fight against all the enemies of life- hunger, sickness and old age, even death. It is negativity which creates  the scenario of horror and doom, thereby forcing human consciousness to fight the doomsday possibilities with redoubled vigour. Negativity is like the other side of hope, faith and light which man would like to reach by his determination to survive meaningfully.

But those who always see death in life are not human. The stubborn negativist  deserves expulsion from human society. But man has accommodated all negativity. Even Caliban whom Shakespeare abandoned in The Tempest has his place. The stubborn inhumanity of some negative specimens too are needed by the society to appreciate the glow of positive thinking. Despite negativity we now fly in the air, sail beyond the seas and create gardens in icy fields. The most unresponsive lover too is a darling:  We should win them with more love. The negative minds need our love for they are loveless barren wasteland. Let us try to make gardens of them.