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Belong somewhere

Source: Dreamstime


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.





Comments

  1. DashyMay 31, 2020 at 2:45 PM

    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.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 31, 2020 at 3:19 PM

      Sad and happy simultaneously, right Dashy? I think so. The security feeling is good. But the narrowmindedness it breeds is wretched.

      Delete
    2. DashyMay 31, 2020 at 4:03 PM

      Yes the feeling is great, what is sad is the way this feeling is exploited.

      Delete
  2. जितेन्द्र माथुरMay 31, 2020 at 6:06 PM

    Your 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.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 31, 2020 at 9:18 PM

      The need to belong is at another level for geniuses. That's what I meant.

      Modi 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.

      Delete

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