Oppressors and Common People

What enables oppressors to show such unity? Look at mafia, terrorists, smugglers, corrupt politicians, businessmen, imperialists. They all are hand-in-glove when involved in something vile. Somehow, their teams are extremely strong, despite being much smaller than the number of people they oppress. It's got to do with the common urges which drive them to do what they do. Greed, ambition, anger, fear, ego, vanity etc. are very potent motivators and unifiers.

On the other hand, common people never seem to come together? Because most people are cowards. They would rather hide behind their busy life etc. than come out in the open and speak out. They fear unpleasantness and messing it up with the 'important' and 'influential'. They would sometimes even turn against the very people who are trying to stand for them, just to avoid being marked as an agent of change in the existing social order. And agents of change are a set of creatures oppressors hate the most, and go to any length to get them out of their way.

The dominating emotion among the masses is fear. And here's another way fear works: as a paralyser, which is exactly the opposite of how it works on the oppressors. 

The oppressors often hold positions of influence, and once in a while do their bit to keep the system going. This could easily be construed as a service to the common man. But it's a delusion. A parasite needs the host to remain alive to be able to suck its blood. An intelligent parasite will go to the extreme of helping its host survive when it's about to die, because if the host dies, the parasite can't survive either. An intelligent parasite will also want to keep its victim deluded that it is actually a helpful guest, who should be allowed to suck its host's blood once in a while as a payback for its services. British, when they were here, also built bridges and buildings, apart from looting the people in immeasurable proportions. And even to this day, we punish ourselves by saying that their coming to our land did us a lot of good, whereas the reality is they kept sucking our lifeblood for two centuries, and left us scarred for centuries to come.

The common man -- lazy, ignorant, fearful -- is happy to lead a subjugated life as long as the oppressors keep them away from the need to understand things and take things in their own hands. They are afraid to take responsibility, to fail, to deal with the discomfort of understanding and learning. When the common man stands up to say something, he cowers back down after seeing the menacing look in the eyes of the oppressor which seems to say: 'Speak, and I will drop everything.'

An oppressor -- a social parasite -- will do everything in his means to keep the masses deluded about the true nature of its relation with the oppressor. One of the most potent ways to do this is to keep the masses divided. Mass ignorance is a great ally of the oppressor. People who are divided can easily be dealt with by a handful of oppressors. When the voices of the people come together, it is a beacon of death for the oppressors. Hence, it's a universal characteristic of the oppressor to try and kill communication. A group of sufferers is a formidable force. A lonely sufferer is puny in comparison. He is so afraid and lacking in confidence that his voice can be silenced for ever with a rap on his knuckles.

I now gradually realise why Netaji and Gandhiji were such great leaders. Because they could make millions of cowards come out on the streets and take up a gun or fill jails. Respect!

6 Vices

Through the 5 years of my Sanskrit education, I scored very high in that subject, by pure mugging up. I did pick up parts of the language, but nowhere enough to be able to claim that I know it. I terribly repent it!

Parts of it have stuck with me. And that gives me the hope that probably someday...

Anyway, here's a sloka I remember from my school days:

षट् दोषाः पुरुषेन हातव्या भूतिमिच्छति .

निद्रा तन्द्रा भयं क्रोदः आलस्य दीर्घसूत्रता 

6 vices try to kill man: sleep, drowsiness, fear, anger, laziness, procrastination.

Probably sleep, drowsiness, laziness and procrastination are related and similar. The other 2 -- fear and anger -- are related too. Anger is often a display of deep fear and insecurity. As Master Yoda says:

"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering."

That's all for now. See, sometimes, I too am capable to deal out small morsels of thoughts! But, do chew on it a bit please! ;)

The Enemy Within

I want to draw your attention to a subtle point I have tried making
many times: "Don't give in to fear." For me, the importance of these
words can't be overstated. How hard I try to stay calm and
composed when it's the question of drawing motivation to work! I have
let go waste tonnes and tonnes of fear which I could easily have used
to push myself into working hard and getting professionally benefited.
I daresay, I would have been able to prove quite a few points had I
let that happen. I have tried very hard to never let that happen
(though I don't always succeed). Same has been true with other sources
of motivation like rivalry, ambition and professional conceit. I have
always shunned them when I could have used them. The central idea was:
"My research is the purest and most beautiful thing I do. I will not
malign it by letting it get driven by things I consider negative." I
mayn't have been always correct in being so pedantic about the matter.
I sometimes wonder if I hadn't looked at certain things like fear,
anger, rivalry and ambition as out and out negative things, I could
have found it easier to get into a habit of working hard. Once the
habit set in, perhaps, I could have worked towards purifying my
thoughts, and then driving myself with purer sources of motivation
then on. Well, perhaps. I will hopefully get a chance to validate that
hypothesis in future. But, let's not talk about that aspect right now.

The above maxim can be partially stated as: "Never let negative
thoughts drive you to do anything good." But it gets completed when we
say: "Never let negative thoughts stop you from doing what you truly
want to do."

That second part of the maxim came to my rescue two and half years
ago, when I had almost got paralysed after suffering nearly 2 years of
fruitless toil on a problem which wasn't moving anywhere. By some
miracle (which is also called 'introspection'), I realised that,
bigger and more immediate than the problem of my research not going
anywhere, it was that deep fear of having to face failure and
disappointment which was my problem. Slowly, I could get clearer and
clearer sight of that 'fear' which used to draw away my energy
whenever I would decide to sit and do something towards my research.
This fear was born and had grown within me; and yet, I could see it as
an external thing -- something which I had cut and throw away from my
system, something I should take pleasure in killing.

When I succeeded in looking at this fear as something not essential to
my personality, but rather something that I could easily throw out of
my system, and survive, I could actually get up and do something about
my plight. I realised that, for the immediate moment, my success lay,
not in doing successful research, but in honestly trying to do so. And
I wouldn't let my fear stop me from doing that.

I think I won that little battle. But the fear is still there and
sometimes becomes overpowering. But, due to that one triumphant
experience during my PhD, I know that it exists somewhere inside me,
am far more capable to identify it in many of its clever disguises,
and with hardly any delay, am able to get up and start smothering it
back to its little dark hole whenever it raises its head.

I do think (may be it's a fallacy) that this tussle with fear is an
essential experience of doing PhD. Perhaps the most important one.
People who have got that momentum right from the first day, due to whatever reason, mayn't perhaps face this problem now.
Perhaps, they already had faced this problem earlier, and have,
consciously or unconsciously, devised ways of handling it. Perhaps, we
haven't been so lucky (or wise) enough to have faced this problem
earlier in our lives. But, whenever someone is trying to do something
non-trivial, I think, this hurdle is bound to be faced. And only when
one learns to combat one's own fear (which is the mother of laziness
and procrastination), one is really going to have a smooth sail to his
or her destination.

All this is not an advice. I just want you to know something now which
I spent an unnecessary amount of time and toil to understand. I don't
know if it's one of those things which can be learned only the hard
way of experience. But, in case it isn't one of those things, I
wouldn't like to miss this chance to share with you this little
thought which was almost life-changing for me.