Belong somewhere
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What makes Narendra Modi a hero is that he belongs, or claims to belong,
to a particular culture or religion or history that a lot of other people too
belong to or claim to belong to.
People in general can be divided into two groups: the geniuses who belong
to the stars and the commoners who belong to the soil. Albert Einstein and
Salvador Dali would not have bothered themselves with Facebook or Instagram (let
alone Tick Tock) and the absurdly noisy 8 pm debates on news channels. Geniuses
do and silly mortals follow. Bhakti is the ordinary soul’s shakti. Bhakti makes
you belong somewhere. You belong to a god or many gods. You belong to a
political party. You belong somewhere.
Life looks like a rainbow when you belong somewhere if you are commoner:
very charming and nothing less than infinity. Our gods are infinite. And we
belong to them. How nice!
Creating your own space because you know you don’t belong is the job of
the genius. Let the genius alone. You and I need to belong. Since the gods are
a bit far away and apparently listless, we choose to belong to their religions.
Religions are close by. And they give us very strong feelings of belonging.
Especially when we attack those who don’t belong to our own religions. Enemies
give us stronger feelings of belonging than anybody else. If you don’t have
enemies, create them.
Narendra Modi is the best Prime Minister of India because he is good at
creating enemies and giving us the much-needed feeling of belonging to a
galaxy. Only he can gift us that glib feeling that we don’t belong to the
thousands who walk hundreds of kilometres to their homes having been evicted from
their workplaces by joblessness and hunger. Only he can create real or
imaginary enemies all around us and give us that glib feeling that we are
better than them, stronger than them, superior to them.
Belonging. Isn’t that what drove those thousands of migrant labourers to
hit the endless roads?
Belonging. Isn’t that what drives you to your killing gods?
We all need to belong somewhere. The geniuses are lucky that they belong
to their private realms. To the relativity of reality in the infinite spaces.
To the psychedelic bizarreness of that reality. To absurdity.
But we need our gods and their bloodthirst.
Suppose we start seeing gods in our fellow beings. That is what our
religions teach actually, isn’t it? Suppose we actually start practising what
our religions teach. The world can be a far better place. But we won’t practise
what we preach. Because we are not geniuses who see infinity and the stars
there. We are the little moths that belong to the candle flame. We belong. And that
belonging makes us happy. Even if it is killing little lights that we belong
to.
PS. Inspired primarily by
Indispire Edition 327: What you have learned from
life so far? #life.
And boozed up by a friend’s comment on Facebook this morning about the need to
belong to certain lights.
Belonging gives us a feeling of warmth and safety. It is scary to not belong, atleast for us commoners. In that manner, I guess it makes sense to be lured with a promise of belonging. It is sad.
ReplyDeleteSad and happy simultaneously, right Dashy? I think so. The security feeling is good. But the narrowmindedness it breeds is wretched.
DeleteYes the feeling is great, what is sad is the way this feeling is exploited.
DeleteYour thoughts are completely agreeable. However sometimes geniuses need such a sense of belonging not to some cult or community or religion but to someone special (or some special ones) because, after all, they also are human-beings like the ordinary ones with ordinary IQ. (Materialistically) successful people like Mr. Modi do create such illusions not for themselves but for those whom they have to keep subservient or devoted to them consistently so that their own success (say power) remains unscathed.
ReplyDeleteThe need to belong is at another level for geniuses. That's what I meant.
DeleteModi is not and never will be a genius. He belongs to a clan. His mind is the narrowest among all PMs we have had so far. But yes, he is clever enough to delude a large population.