Skip to main content

Under the Peepal


It was years since I had met Siddhartha.  When I heard that he was sitting under a peepal awaiting enlightenment, I was curious.  I embarked on the metro train that would take me near to Kapil Vastu Estate.

Kapil Vastu Estate was a huge complex developed by Siddhartha’s father, Shuddhodhana Gautama, one of the most successful industrialists of neoliberal Hindustan.  “Profit is the dharma of the trader,” was Shuddhodhana’s motto.  He had graduated from the London School of Economics before doing MBA from Harvard University. 

Siddhartha and I were classmates.  Not that my father could afford to send me to the same public school as Siddhartha.  Since my father was Shuddhodhana’s personal assistant and a close confidante, the business magnate decided to put me in the same school as his own son.  Probably, it was his way of monitoring his son indirectly. 

Siddhartha showed little interest in academics or co-curricular or extra-curricular activities.  He came and went back by a chauffeur-driven air-conditioned car.  The school was centrally air-conditioned.  Siddhartha didn’t have to see the world outside.  But he longed to see it, I think.

Shuddhodhana was alarmed by his son’s increasing melancholy contemplativeness.  He decided to do some cleaning up.  Starting with the library, he removed all serious literature and filled the shelves with books of Sidney Sheldon and his Hindustani avatar, Chetan Bhagat, as well as other such stimulating writers.  “Burn all the books by intellectuals and subversives,” ordered Shuddhodhana.  “Bring in our classics like Kamasutra and Arthasastra.” 

Nothing worked.  Neither the ancient classics nor the ultramodern metro reads stimulated Siddhartha’s soul.  It hankered after something that all the fabulous wealth of his father could not buy. 

In the meanwhile, I completed my post-graduation and teacher training and became a teacher in a fully residential school which occupied me body and soul round the clock.  I was not aware of what was transpiring in the walled world of Kapil Vastu Estate.  But when the news of Siddhartha’s contemplation under the peepal tree reached me, I applied for a casual leave from school and rushed to meet my old mate, son of my benefactor.

The ten feet massive steel gate opened before me.  I still had some contacts with people inside, you see.

“There is death, I learnt,” Siddhartha told me.  “Human life is wretched.  There is illness.  There is much evil. The air-conditioning is an illusion.  The Estate is an illusion.”  He went on to give me a long lecture.  All desire is evil, he said.  He was going to found a new religion, he said, to help people overcome desires.  Live without desires and attain nirvana.

“Can you arrange one nirvana for me free of cost?”  I asked.  After all, I was his closest friend at school.   He could do me this simple favour.   It was then I noticed the book lying near Siddhartha’s meditation mat. 

“What’s this?”  I was stunned.  “You’re reading Dostoevsky?”  I picked up The Idiot.  “This is as outdated as Das Capital by those two nuts.”

Sitting under the peepal tree with Siddhartha Gautama, I became enlightened.  Nirvana is living out of joint with time. 


Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers


Comments

  1. Noooooooooo.. You are my favorite Blogger n Buddhism is my current favorite philosophy.. My fav Blogger writing a humorous, sarcastic story on my fav philosophy is unbearable Matheikal.. But it is a nice modern version, very different take..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am also an admirer of the Buddha, Roohi. And I haven't done any injustice to him here. As you realised, this is quite a different version of the Buddha.

      At any rate, any genuine religious person - the Christ, the Buddha, saints - are social misfits, people who found themselves "out of joint" with their time and environment. Ordinary mortals like the narrator in this story will go to them to buy nirvana and not for understanding and internalising it or the values represented by it.

      Delete
  2. One nirvana free of cost! Ha ha ha...
    Great post Sir!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's what religion has become, today, Indrani, something to be bought. The forms of the purchase differ from religion to religion, that's all.

      Delete
  3. Beautifully put. Loved the tone and the dialogue in the last is truly 'enlightening '.... I agree .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We need strong kicks in the posteriors nowadays to be enlightened, Kokila.

      Delete
  4. Ha ha ha :D .. This is a brilliant one Matheikal. Definitely a twist from your usual style. I really like it :)..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In some ways, the twist came from O V Vijayan. He wrote a series of satirical pieces for a Malayalam weekly and my 'nirvana on sale' comes from him.

      Delete
  5. I am married, can I get buy one get one free or some subsidy for holding a aadhar card......Well written.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ranjana, mine is a site where only nirvana is given free :)

      Delete
  6. The brilliance comes from eminent contacts, Bhavani :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. I didn't read it as a satire because I found it deeper than the usual satires. May be it is because I have been disturbed for some time and this state of mind tries to find melancholic depth in almost everything.Dostoevsky and the idiot too added its own dimension in the story(thanks Google for recognizing Dostoevsky). You add yourself as a character in most of your stories,where you act as a visitor or rather say observer. So,these characters about whom you write,are they inspirations from your life or is it just a way of telling a story

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Amitabh, a jadoo ki jhappi to you. (Is that the way it is expressed, I don't know.)

      I am an observer. I am a participator. I am the sinner and the potential saint.

      I don't know what to say.

      Now you become my teacher. I'm ready to sit on the other side.

      Delete
  8. The current day take on Buddha was fun to read and had your famous lesson hidden in there and yet so strongly conveyed. Another awesome post sir.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Do I Dare?

Alfred Prufrock was sitting in a dimly lit café when a young boy, who was yet to reach adolescence, walked in. The boy looked as inquisitive as Prufrock looked flurried. ‘Hello,’ the boy said. ‘You look so… lonely. And sad too.’ ‘Sad? No, not sad. Just… contemplating. I am, as they say, measuring out my life with coffee spoons.’ ‘Aw! That’s strange. On my planet, I measure things by sunsets. I love sunsets. How can you measure life with something so small as a coffee spoon?’ ‘Did you say “my planet”?’ ‘Well, yes. I come from another planet. I’ve been travelling for quite some time, you know. Went to numerous planets and asteroids and met many strange creatures. Quite a lot of them are cranky.’ The boy laughed gently, almost like an adult. Prufrock looked at the boy with some scepticism and suspicion. He was already having too many worries of his own like whether he should part his hair in the middle and roll up the bottoms of his trousers. ‘They call me Little Prince,’

Why Live?

More than 700,000 people choose to commit suicide every year in the world. That is, nearly 2000 individuals end their lives every day and suicide is the leading cause of death in the age group of 15 to 29. 10 Sep is the World Suicide Prevention Day . Let me join fellow bloggers Manali and Sukaina in their endeavour to draw more people’s attention to the value of life. One of the most persuasive essays on why we should not choose death voluntarily in spite of the ordeals and absurdities of life is The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. Camus’s basic premise is that life is absurd. It has no meaning other than what you give to it. The universe is indifferent to you, if not hostile. The confrontation between the human need for clarity and the chaotic irrationality of the world can lead to existential despair. Suicide is not the answer to that despair, however. Camus looks for a philosophical answer in his essay. Not many people find consolation in philosophy. Most people seek a

Ashwatthama is still alive

Fiction Image from Pinterest “I met Ashwatthama.” When Doctor Prabhakar told me this, I thought he was talking figuratively. Metaphors were his weaknesses. “The real virus is in the human heart, Jai,” he had told me when the pandemic named Covid-19 started holding the country hostage. I thought his Ashwatthama was similarly figurative. Ashwatthama was Dronacharya’s son in the Mahabharata. He was blessed with immortality by Shiva. But the blessing became a horrible curse when Krishna punished him for killing the Pandava kids deceptively after Kurukshetra was brought to peace, however fragile that peace was, using all the frauds that a god could possibly use. Krishna of the Kurukshetra was no less a fraud than a run-of-the-mill politician in my imagination. He could get an innocent elephant named Ashwatthama killed and then convert that killing into a blatant lie to demoralise Drona. He could ask Bhima to hit Duryodhana below the belt without feeling any moral qualms in what

Live Life Fully

Alexis Zorba, the protagonist of Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Zorba the Greek , lives life to its fullness. He embraces human experience with his whole heart. He is not interested in rational explanations and intellectual isms. His philosophy, if you can call it that at all, is earthy, spontaneous and passionate. He loves life passionately. He celebrates it. Happiness is a simple affair for him. “I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing happiness is,” he tells us. “A glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.” You don’t need a lot of things to be happy. Your possessions don’t bring you happiness. All that money you spent on your big house, big car, big everything… It helps to show off. But happiness? No way, happiness doesn’t come that way at all. Zorba loves to play his musical instrument, santouri. He loves to sing. To dance. But don’t get me wrong. He works too. He works hard. There’s no fullness of life without that hard w