Skip to main content

Systems and Perversions


 The last quarter of the 20th century witnessed the emergence of the systems perspective in contrast to the reductionist approach that was followed earlier.  The reductionist approach viewed phenomena by their parts and treated them as such.  For example, if you have a headache you kill the pain with an Anacin ignoring the harms done to the body by the drug.  In the systems perspective, you look at the whole rather than the parts.  You use available knowledge and technology to find out the root cause of the headache and make the whole system healthy. 

Any system such as the human body or a society is not just the sum of its parts.  A system is a complex and inter-related network of interacting components.  Relationships among the components are of vital importance in any system. 

India is not just a sum of its states and union territories (Gujarata-Maratha-Dravida-Utkala) or a sum of the various religious communities (Hindu-Muslim-Sikh-Isai).  Any nation is much more than such sums.  Today, people's identities are not straitjacketed by nationality or religion or language or any one parameter.  Parameters cut across one another making a complex network which transcends the sum of the parts.  Any leader who fails to understand that is sure to be a millstone hung around the nation’s neck. 

Leader: of a System or?

One of the questions that is shot at me frequently by different people nowadays is why I question the BJP so much when other political parties have been worse in many ways.  Yes, the other parties were steeped in corruption.  Their politicians were selfish and filled their pockets and their Swiss bank accounts with more zest than looking after the nation.  Greed and selfishness are normal human vices.  The BJP is guilty of a vice far more vicious than greed, jealousy, and the normal list of vices seen in moral science textbooks.

The BJP and its numerous allies like the VHP pervert the entire nation, the nation’s imagination.  Consider, for example, the interpretation given by the VHP to the Prime Minister’s statement on the need for communal harmony in the country.  The Times of India quotes the VHP joint general secretary Surendra Jain, "The Prime Minister did not say 'minorities' nor did he mention any particular religion. The news traders are misreading his message to suit their agenda. When he has not taken any names, you have to see in what circumstances he has made the statements. The supposed attacks on churches have been going on for a while now but the PM never came out and spoke. He spoke only after the Delhi Police pointed out that 206 temples were attacked. He spoke on a day a temple was vandalized in the US." 

People like Surendra Jain create their own truths and shove them down the throats of jejune people who are more than willing to swallow whatever is given to them provided they perceive some benefit in doing so.  People like Surendra Jain replace truths with myths and falsehoods.  Such people should found new religions and write scriptures.  Instead, in India today, they enter politics and mess up the social networks in the country.  They bring fragmentation where there is integration, strife where there is peace, hatred where there is tolerance.  Worst of all, they fabricate a new history for the country.  Murderers of mahatmas and perpetrators of genocide are canonised and put up on pedestals in temples. 

Perverting a nation’s psyche is a crime that is far more vicious than stealing from the nation’s coffers or even using people as vote banks.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Lancelot QuadrasFebruary 19, 2015 at 11:01 AM

    That's really true... All these attacks on churches and temples have had a drastic impact on BJP and our religious communities too. People will believe what they want to.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 19, 2015 at 11:06 AM

      BJP accused the Congress of pseudo-secularism because of its vote bank politics. What is happening now is much worse: dividing the entire country into more pieces than the British could have done!

      Delete
  2. Saru SinghalFebruary 19, 2015 at 9:47 PM

    I agree, Sir. Like you mentioned in the post, you are taking something without realizing the side effects it will have in the long run.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 20, 2015 at 9:56 AM

      Our politicians want only short term results, Saru.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
12 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
16 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
15 comments
Read more