As a kid, these were some of my favourite lines,
"Be like a bamboo,
Strong on the outside, soft & open in the inside.
It's roots are firmly planted in the ground & freely intertwined with others for mutual strength and support.
The stalk blows strongly in the wind, bending rather than resisting.
That which bends is far more difficult to break".
--- A Thai Buddhist monk
But today my views on these lines seem to be confused.
These lines sound a little too ideological today to me.
If we are to follow our passions then some rules have to be broken…just try being soft & open in the inside and you'll soon find yourself scooped of everything inside you.
This takes me to ‘munnabhai MMBS’, I really don’t get the reason why it created so many ripples…especially at a popular awards…true it showed gandhigiri in full flow, and in a country where anything remotely connected to the word Gandhi is revered (to the extent of our present Congress chief honcho, who is as little a gandhi as you and me), the movie had to come off as a superhit!
But tell me how many people actually follow these truisms these days? They are good things to read and take momentary inspirations from, but to follow them always is beyond the sanity of the human mind! Just watching the reviews on TV, I saw a guy coming out of the movie hall shouting ‘gandhigiri rocks!’...not many people would have noticed it him wearing a 'skull n bones' t-shirt (new age gandhigiri?? ;-))….if it’s just a fad to say that “gandhigiri is still alive and kicking”, so be it!
Try giving a ‘jadoo-ki-jappi’ and you’ll see that almost 90% of the times you’ll be labeled a mad-man, (that’s if you are able to survive a few slaps :)).
Times are such that one of the key factors in determining your economic progress is by measuring how good your nuclear capabilities are. Could India just hold back and say that gandhigiri will help us out if any country attacks us? Or that no country will throw us around just because we are the land of The ‘Great’ Gandhi? That India should always follow the principles of non-violence and use it as a shield? That you should show your right cheek when slapped on your left cheek? (chances are that your teeth might be missing the very next second!) When push comes to shove, then everyone’s ready to barge in, quite literally!
I may be sounding like an extremist but believe you & me, I’m not political when it comes to supporting moderates or extremists as I feel both sides have valid points to their struggle or cause. But isn’t it ironic that the main protagonist in the movie was charged with having a hand in the killings of innocent people in the Mumbai bomb blasts? But as hypocritical as we are, we tend to overlook this. If non-violence is our diet, then why is it that we have made the man who is the father of India's missile program our President? hypocrisy again?? Why have children been taught to idolize him if we are staunch believers in non-violence? (and thank god for that, for he truly is a great man!)
While writing this I just felt as though I’m collectively letting off a lot of steam which is inside the ‘all of us’. Questions which we ignore because it’s not right questioning the basis of our ‘illustrious past’…I agree, it is important as the past always is, but it’s still the past, maybe it’s time we change for the future…atleast embrace the present.
One point I want to make clear here is that there is a very large gap between morality and age-old ideology.
And this is where my confusion is born! I still feel strongly about one of the lines, ‘our roots should be firmly planted’.
So with the passage of time I’ve begun liking lesser and lesser of my favourite lines? Will this one line remain my favourite or will it too change its perspective someday?
Have I changed? Or have times manipulated my thinking? Or will the bamboo evolve just as my thoughts have…or devolve…maybe the monk can answer this!
