Sunday, 13 September 2020

Free Will And Responsibility

 


Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Between the surd and the absurd man wavers perplexed to discover some logical certainty. Between dawn and twilight too he staggers as he has to finally move into the Methuselah night. So, one may ask: Is life an event, a happening, a revelation of nuances of reality or a commission to perform following a pre-written script? If man is a free agent to move and create a structure of values without sacrificing the central thrust of his  freedom, why does so often he recant like Galileo, Martin Luther and Savarkar what he stood for all his life? If a man holds his logic dear to his heart why does he fear counterbalancing negativity of other free agents of lesser sense of moral logic? Daylight is swallowed by the dark evening notwithstanding the twinkling stars braving the darkness – man too does it. But man dies while the stars continue their fight to burn darkness; whether they would win one day is immaterial. These questions have been asked by many in the past and many such questions would be asked in the future; I am just a gap filling speck of ignorance.

No one in our long past centuries and the progressing time has given us an answer to anything: be it life, be it man’s destiny or goal. Many have devised many ways of countering death, fighting sickness, old age and the other things built into them. What the Buddha said was a withdrawal from life. Buddha escaped his responsibilities and tried to overcome the pain by his eightfold (ten fold) path. But all paths lead to Death which perhaps can never be transcended or conquered. Is it nature’s determinism which our lives are patterned into? A compatibilist, Danial Dennet says, nature has no control over us, it is the other persons who try to control us. The Truth of this is felt by all human beings almost everywhere in the human sphere. The philosopher – religionist, the politician, the law giver impose their “moral” authority on us. Writers like Vyasa – Valmiki also to a great extent impact our moral sense, thereby, diminishing our freedom. But those who say that freedom and responsibility (as man, citizen, husband, father etc) are compatible with this external determinism often tread on our corns. Because they drive us towards a fatalism which militates with our freedom. The freedom to choose political ideology or faith leads all of us to struggle. The Balochs, Hongkongers want democracy but they face the challenge of power groups which never yield. Constitutional democracy also becomes a jail term for a freethinking man. In Bellow’s Dangling Man Regimentation at times is preferable to freedom. The tentative slogan is Freedom cancelled – Long Live Regimentation. But who or what really wins? Both die in the hospital or by the roadside.

 

In the new world, we experience a strange reality which man’s free will has created. China thinks communism is the best ideology, at least superior to democracy. Xi Jinping is now playing God; maybe he has the right to. China claims victory over Covid 19. The One China Policy now apparently means China is the world. Almost all smaller countries are indebted to china. Pakistan is a vassal; Nepal is valet, Africa is a colony… All land and water in God’s creation or the Big Bang blunder are China’s. Jinping exudes divinely ordained confidence in the Red Flag, for communist China is now the safest almost the richest and (untested) the most powerful. Jinping could say without a wink Arunachal is a part of Tibet; Ladakh is her territory. The Himalayas are no more the Indian Nagadhraj; in fact the South China, East China seas are fully chinese. Xi can create artificial islands and use them as nature subservient and manipulable. IS THIS HUMAN FREE WILL?

 

If money, military power are symbolic of human free will supported or unsupported by determinism, is it also an enabling factor in ignoring and suppressing all other Free Will(s) of the world? Or, is it possible that nature supports lies, deceitful diplomacy, Salami technique and machiavellism in China’s (Xi’s) free will? If this be so all free will could be subordinated by ruthless self glorificatory power push to make the world One China or one anything. An argument may be, so what? Why can’t China be accepted as the ideal, the model of governance and life management? A vast population of 1.4 billion is happy. The average Chinese is well fed, well clad, well employed. The system of education is ‘good’, its science is efficient, health care is great ( as has been demonstrated by covid- control), and China has put her money in almost all countries America, India, including. Moreover, on September 4,2020, China has successfully sent to the outer space a Space Plane which has unthinkable military perversities. Although undeclared, this classified military secret or astounding aerospace achievement has been caught by satellite imaging. Why not yield the pride of place to China, its political system and its free will to control all human affairs.

 

All these questions are merely rhetorical. Nature allows the Peepal tree and the willow equal opportunity. The bulkiest vegetarian, the Elephant, and the squirrel move with equal freedom. The virus too is free to kill following its own nature. But what is important and vital is responsibility; freedom without responsibility is anti-nature. We should now delete Cain’s words “Am I My Brother’s Keeper?” from all books including the Bible. Otherwise, this Jinping may be a true anti-god, anti-nature and anti mankind. Man is free to help another’s freedom to flourish. This is Man’s sense of responsibility and for that, he is called human. Free will without responsibility is meaningless and this now must be understood by the democratic and the civilized world.

 


Lotus On The Grave


I am no Goddess or Empress

no asp bit me,

none killed me in any battlefield

built no monument for me

lay me in love’s flowery bed

a bastion draped

by muslin woven into a lotus

preserve me not like a mummy

but I am not normal,

I am infected with love

and half asleep in love’s grave

do not disturb me for

I am meditating to be born again.

 

Do not weep or offer roses

for I am measuring my

length on the ground to

build the foundation

of my new life.

 

Yes I am off the scene

to enter in a new role to enact

in the next act to tell

you how peaceful  it is to sleep

in the grave  where

the hands don’t rise to steal

when hunger squeezes.

Suffering, grief, sorrow

pain whirl in the abyss.

I’ll be up again

to play Cleopatra

and sleep on the monument

embalmed with love.

 

My confession may not

leave a mark on time

but the epitaph will

be remembered by all.


Sabita Sahu

 

 


Sunday, 6 September 2020

Numbers


Tired and bagheavy as I

walked  back from  silly laughter

the phone rang to ask me

how many steps I have walked

how many breaths I have taken

before the phone ring stopped me:

My stupid love has all such absurd

questions to tease me to madness.

 

I shot back how many minutes

you delayed in picking up the phone

he smiled back saying –

I count my minutes of missing you

my years have counted

the words not spoken, the sighs

and my love rises wavelike

on the dry beach always.

I laughed within and said – ok-

I’ll start counting till I reach

and tell you the number I break

calling your love to wait and wait.


Sabita Sahu

Search For Meaning


Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Everyone at some lucid moment of his/ her life says when asked, What are you thinking (or doing) - I am searching for meaning. The Buddha did the same and before him many others wasted a lifetime, searching for meaning. In the post - Buddha generations too people have searched for meaning. If someone sought the meaning of Thunder, another the meaning of death. Sadguru has tried to find out the inside story of Death. Viktor E. Frankl's meaning is -"say yes to life inspite of everything". A condemned prisoner stays awake nights on end, before climbing up the gallows, to find meaning of his own fractured reality. All men of power, spiritual or political, search for meaning. And some men like Caligula declare Two truths as their discovery: Men die and they are never happy. So what is this meaning? The meaning of meaning!

 

If search for life's meaning is a human obsession, meaning has no meaning, for man's search for meaning is endless. Poets, philosophers, and almost all suffering men search for meaning. If Shakespeare says "life's but a walking shadow," an idiotic tale without significance, another poet says "tell me not  in mournful numbers life's but an empty dream." This goes to show that meaning is never universal; whoever finds whatever meaning is circumstantially justified. Each life has a meaning, if it remains undiscovered, the search will go on in another life: That is why we are led to believe in reincarnation. Most people, however, wait for a Messiah, a redeemer to give a meaning. The Messiah changes from age to age, from divine incarnation to political incarnation. We all wait for a Godot to validate our lives.


But what is this meaning? If the meaning is, Sansara is unreal and life is a lie, we deny identity. Each man at every stage of civilization tries to find the meaning of his self (and soul), which in modern terms is identity. 'Who am I' is the question in every thinking man's mind. Buddha - Ashoka - Descartes- Einstein and all of us quest for our identity in the context of the larger reality of the world. If Arjuna threw the Gandiba away it was because he could not be certain about his identity in the context of the reality he faced at the Kurukshetra battle field. Each man is an Arjuna in his own battle field of life. The meaning he has of his life is often self - negating. And for that, he waits for a Krishna to reveal to himself his identity. But in the new world we cannot expect a  Krishna to sing a new Gita for us. We have to find our own meaning to go forward in life. A man living in the present day world confronts several contradictions vitiating the meaning of his identity. He lives in a country he calls his motherland. He is born to a culture, a language,  an economic class, a climate. He is at times moved by patriotism, nationalism but he understands liberalism, universalism as higher values.  His first conflict comes from the question: Am I a Hindu (because my father was one, an Indian, an Odia or I am a Man, a proud member of mankind?


If I am a proud member of mankind, what is the source of my pride? This question jams the mind. Am I not responsible for all the horrible wars, murders, rapes, conspiracies and thousand other things which shame my species? Am I not responsible for climate change? Am I not responsible for poverty, hunger, inequity and also this Covid? These questions kick my sense of identity away from world consciousness to my own existential self. As an Indian now I am worried about the Chinese incursions into our territory and the Indian and People's Liberation  Army standing in eyeball to eyeball confrontation. I am also worried about the GDP tanking 23.9% and the jobless youth savouring their anger in cold resignation. And the rich and mighty indulging in drugged fancies ruining the youth.  My national identity is now in doldrums.


Many people thought and also think today that identity is not for the present but for the future. They argue that man leaves behind something like a story, poems or inventions helpful to man, posterity will remember with gratitude,  and that identity is the most authentic. Many people do that. But when today you hear people say that  Vande Mataram is not worth singing, you doubt the identity of a creative man. Others argue: why not the man who designed and built the Mahanadi bridge be remembered with reverence by posterity?  People, in general, enjoy the benefit of a genius's labours. A poet is remembered, if at all by a few but the bridge actually serves the people for hundreds of years. The derived idea is man should forget his self and dedicate his life to men who need the selfless service of others. If this is true of grace and identity how many Indians remember a single name out of the six hundred Covid Warrior doctors who died in 2020? What meaning emerges out of our reality is a story of two breaths.


I believe, the meaning of life is to live it with full concentration. If by living well and truly I can bring smiles in other faces I know what I am. If posterity remembers me that is their goodness - I won't be there to share the joyful remembrance of my work. Meaning was always contemplated over human suffering. Don't make your suffering meaningless.                                                                                                                                                                                 






Sunday, 30 August 2020

Noun And Adjective


I am the noun

You are the adjective

both are unrelated in substance

the noun changes-

shape, size, colour and meaning

the adjective follows it

chameleon like with

focal adjustments to catch

the form and spirit.

But can it ever?

 

The morning dew drops

give a pearly shape to the flowers

but when the sun touches mid point

the petals dry up

the adjectives change

their epithets wobble.

 

When the flower droops

in drowsy stupor

the adjective darkens

the petals close 

in the fading hour

a noun is lost

the adjective is lost too.

 

Sabita Sahu


The Show Must Go On

 


Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

We make all simple things complex for the human mind loves to play adverse, reverse and inverse games with life to make it vast, inscrutable and challenging. Man loves to fill his moments with loads of reality. If time according to John Barrow is God's device of  stopping all things to happen at a time, it is man's desire to enjoy / suffer all things at a moment.  Man makes things to happen following Nature. In nature everything moves, mutates, rotates dissipates and revives. Beckett's bald tree in Waiting for Godot oozes in the second Act; the possibility of regreening is immense. Santiago in his after failure reverie sees lions, pillows of death bed patients vibrate and things move on. If you ask why, the answer is the "sky is very very high" - which in childhood jocularity was quite a happy resolution to all incomprehensions. Man is a questioning animal. He never stops at anything. Never is content with any finality, be it death, a catastrophe or even Apocalypse. Look at the Pandemic Covid 19 which China gleefully exported and see how in Wuhan, the city of its origin, people gathered at a poolside in very large numbers, around 50k+ and cavorted in drunken orgy! Well, the show must go on - a cliche but so what!

 

In the history of the world, does not matter whether before or after a sense of history dawned on man, at no time man surrendered to the enforced revelations of anti-life. He fought his way to survive. The dinosaur failed and many other named and unnamed species failed but man has survived and has grown to be at 7.6 billion. The plague came and went, many other seen -unseen anti-life forces have come and gone: And now this Coronavirus! Well if China could celebrate the end of corona with unmasked joy why can't we? So many vaccine candidates are now competing for the Nobel, India too has her own Covaxin and three others. We will conquer. Why try to stop the process of life? Why try to stop all examinations?  It seems now there is a competition in India for the most defeatist coward prize which no one will award. But all states, political parties in the opposition and the examinees in India have raised their despairing hands in surrender to the forces against which they fight day and night.

 

The JEE and NEET tests will be held in September. The government of India mandated by the Supreme Court have announced the dates. Admit cards have been already received by 85 percent of candidates. But a clamour goes on for postponement. Appeals to the Prime Minister and Organizations concerned have been made by state governments and student bodies. Some motivated groups have started agitations: Why? Why try to stop the process? Why not brave the crisis and try to overcome the unforeseen impediment by driving into a new future? If University degree should be awarded without tests would the students be employable? If JEE and NEET should be postponed should the aspirants lose one year without batting an eyelid? If the present state of Covid and flood ravaged India is dangerous for a three hour examination what shall we do if the situation (god forbid) worsens? Why don't the opposition parties stay away from the sane judgement of the Supreme Court? And why do some people for their obscure intentions wish to stop the clock? Time will move even if the clock stops and those who do not move with time will be stuck at a moment of regret. Yes, the situation is bad but if the exams and tests are postponed or circumnavigated by political motivations the future may reveal our cowardice in more trying manners.

 

Crisis always brings out the bravest elements even in the most retarded minds. The indecisive people who fall prey to weak minded advice may not survive any calamity. And in such cases the decision ought to be of the individual. Why should a few weak willed candidates block the road for the heroic ones? Gresham's Law has no relevance in such cases. The bold must be allowed to move on. Life is short, losing one year in these times of uncertainty is unmanly. The pandemic has already taken its toll on human self belief. Unwanted cynicism and despair have already made many a young head heavy. If we willfully put more bricks on the walls of uncertainty the strength to jump over may suffer a time lag.

 

Man lives for his tomorrow working, dreaming, planning to better his 'today' which each tomorrow brings. If that today is wasted by yesterday's memories, life becomes memoryless, a gap in time without connectivity. My today is a preparation for tomorrow, if I postpone my tomorrow for a future date my personal history is holesome, not wholesome. We must remember- the Hero is one who willingly suffers the unslaughts of time and creates his opportunities out of the crisis which is not of his own making. But a man who does not have a heroic temper and never seizes the string before the murmur stops is a mere bystander. What the Supreme Court has decided is not a political decision. The SC has decided for the future of India, for the future youth of India. Those who by their unheroic temper display a fear of the morrow, should remember that they are setting wrong examples of Indian youth behaviour. Life must go forward. If some stumble and fall, so be it. For a few fearful persons the bold should not be sacrificed. Fare forward traveller- charaibati...


Sunday, 23 August 2020

Happiness Is Not For Man

 

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

 

Pleasure and Pain, they say, are agreeable and disagreeable chemical reactions in the body. Ok. Let me dismiss them as aberrations of the system, a manufacturing defect deliberately left unattended by the Maker. What is happiness then?  A lingering sentiment where all wants, desires, aspirations, dreams are in a state of animated suspension? A happy man is ... what? Is he contented, desireless and therefore in a static state? I really do not know, for, in my childhood I read - Are you a pig satisfied or an Aristotle dissatisfied? I know I am not a pig. I am naturally dissatisfied with everything. The more I read, the more I discover my ignorance. My knowledge does not help me in fixing a blade in my Mac Fusion, I request others to do it for me, The more I see the state of the world, not only in 2020 but in all my years of silent encounters with reality I was never elated. A few scientific inventions, however, have made my senses wild in hope for happiness but I never saw or felt any static glow bringing cheer to all human faces. Happiness, I view as human happiness, not the personal happiness of a prophet or thinker or a political strategist who mesmerizes a large number of people to follow him. Private, personal frustration often makes a man devise a philosophy, a so called salvation path or an ideology which promises happiness. The people who followed Asharam or Ram Rahim or the Buddha or Shankar or any breathing creature, never lived their own lives. We follow an ideology or cult figure because we have no mind of our own to find happiness on our own. We always wait for a Messiah.  We always wait for Godot.

 

If happiness is really a worriless, healthy, prosperous, free, well loved, sexually satisfied, well respected and honoured state in a human being, it is available only in poetic imagination, in some gem studded Orb of infinity in which a person listens to the alaaps of Tansen at dawn, the Beethoven Jupiter Symphony while watching swimming nymphs being painted by  Botticelli in a moonlit night.  Such things make happy reading, not happy reality.  The human mind, we must remind ourselves is never happy, not meant to be happy as ideas, thoughts move in time defying logic in the mind.  But the fact is that the human grain cannot tolerate reality; if it is unchanged he is bored, if it changes rapidly he gets wild. Man is intellectually radicalised against his own civilizational values and the structures of his own making.


If man ever wanted to be happy, the present times are the best in the last about one million year old history of man. Food, house and medicines are available to more than 95 % of humans, although the availability is not equitable. But hunger-death, sickness - death have come down.  More farmers in India die committing suicide than due to starvation and disease. Wars of the mass destruction kind are almost gone. More people die of plane crashes and road accidents than by organised warfare. Yes, the argument will be based on Covid-19; the world has not yet found a vaccine and this coronavirus has changed the cultural patterns of society.  But by the year end more than three vaccines will be available and return to the old normal may become quite possible. But what is the old normal? Eat well, work hard, earn more, drink more and think of destroying India, China or some other country. Pakistan will stake her hunger against hate for India; the LOC and borders will always be hot. China would plot against America, India and other democracies; the latest being opium trade, getting supplies from Afgan Taliban. Despite all these deprivations of the human material the present period could keep a man happy in the post- covid decades. But who wants to be a good human being and live in peace with neighbours and fellow men?

 

The institutions built by civilizational values like Parliamentary Democracy, Supreme Court, Civic liberties, free speech and similar ennobling institutions do not keep people away from fakery, hate and violence. One argumentative thesis by way of explanation of the present and continuing danger facing modern man has come from Samual P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. The western values and the values of the Muslim world are almost always in a combative stage. And this clash both kinetic and simmeringly potential has kept mankind on edge. The Muslim world refuses to accept the modern education, work culture and institutions of free expression of ideas or individualistic lifestyle. Hence anger is nursed by groups of human kind who do not wish to be content. Nothing pleases them. They wallow in anxiety, uncertainty, fear and anger.

 

 Man creates order, harmony, balance and calls them classical values but romanticizes violence and justifies anger. In short, man enjoys polluting the earth, poisoning the air, killing other humans, hating his own breed- species and blowing up all bridges to human heart. If Cain killed his brother and raped his mother and ruined the future of  God's prized creation, why blame the inheritors for their transgressive shenanigans? Man never wants peace or happiness, in fact, he hates peace. A calm evening of human togetherness picks on his nerves. He breaks the calm of the head, bowing before some God at day break. Chaodelights him, cacophony excites him anatd love makes him a rapist. He will not change come Covid come Plague. Long live Man!


Forever New