Skip to main content

Reading the Gita


I don’t usually read religious scriptures because, whenever I tried to read them, I found them absurd, silly or utterly nonsensical. Nevertheless, I ordered an annotated copy of the Bhagavat Gita from Amazon the other day. When the book was delivered all too promptly, Maggie asked why I wanted to read the Gita now. I had read it once, some twenty years ago, when I was teaching in Delhi. Almost all of my students and colleagues there were Hindus and the school was run by a Hindu organisation too. So I wanted to be familiar with the Gita. When I read, it didn’t appeal to me any more than the other scriptures I had read such as the Bible or the Quran.

“Our country is going to be a Hindu Rashtra soon. Nay, for all practical purposes, it is already one.” I told Maggie. “Shouldn’t we know what the scriptures of our nation’s official religion say?”

Maggie dismissed my explanation as yet another instance of my habitual crankiness. But I was serious. I really wanted to find out whether I had missed something substantial in my earlier reading of the Gita, which is now gaining putative international reputation.

I am stuck with the second chapter. Too many questions come bombarding my simple common sense and I can’t proceed. Not easily, at least.

The divine is the only reality. The rest is all illusion, maya. You and I are illusions. We fail to realise that we are divine sparks and instead imagine ourselves as different entities, egos. That’s the illusion.

I accepted that. Though I’m not fascinated by the divine and all that supernatural stuff, I know that my ego has been a dreadful thing throughout my life. Even now, when my country is eager to dump me on some garbage heap that is labelled as ‘senior citizen’, I keep grappling with my stupid ego. I know that the ego is a serious problem for quite many of us. If the Gita can really teach us to control that monster, it’s great.

But then the second chapter makes me feel that Lord Krishna is kicking up Arjun’s ego as a remedy for the depression that the hero experienced in chapter one.

We are souls with bodies. The body is an illusion. The soul is the reality. And the soul can’t be killed. You are only killing the bodies, killing illusions. Kill your uncles and cousins and teachers and whatever. Those are all illusions.

I’m not saying all that. Lord Krishna is counselling Arjuna, standing on the warrior’s chariot in a battlefield. I love the metaphor of the battlefield as the background for preaching scriptures. There’s much more than irony in that. There’s divinity.

Great warriors will consider you a coward for having fled from war due to fear. [2:35]

Hey, what’s this? Didn’t you say that we should shed our egos? What others say and how that affects our behaviour – isn’t all that what ego is about to a great extent? Arjun was actually rid of his ego, I think, until Krishna came and inflated that balloon with his own ulterior motives.

Even your enemies will defame you for your lack of strength and courage. The fame that you earned by winning battles with mighty weapons and armour will be reduced to nullity. Nothing will be more painful than that situation. [2:36]

Well, my reading of the Gita ended with that for the time being. The very basis of the scriptures is the shedding of one’s ego. And now the Lord is telling the hapless devotee to consider what will happen to his self-image [ego] if he refuses to kill!

Something doesn’t sound ok.

This is my problem whenever I try to read scriptures – of any religion. They just refuse to make sense to me. I think I’m stupid. Maybe, I should stay contented with simple things like Eliot’s Waste Land or Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov.

 

Labels:

Comments

  1. magiceyeOctober 24, 2023 at 10:47 AM

    Scary if that is going to be the official line in our governance!
    Hinduism is the most user friendly religion, you can select the God, morals, scriptures of your choice. If none of them suit you create your own! That's why Nobody can claim leadership for the community unless they have ulterior motives. It's unfortunate that we have become a nation of robots, silly robots.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 24, 2023 at 12:36 PM

      Yes, Hinduism is the most tolerant religion, that way. Most Hindus I have lived with are very tolerant too. More than tolerance, it's an acceptance of the other. But Hindutva is an entirely different matter. And that's where the problem is.

      Delete
  2. Yamini MacLeanOctober 24, 2023 at 5:19 PM

    Hari OM
    Oh my - where do I begin? As with any scripture, to read the words only is but to skim the surface. To dive deeper one must remember that a significant use of metaphor takes place within them (Sermon On The Mount is a prime example from the Bible). In the BG it is imperatve to understand that Kurukshetra is representative of the plane of life. Some people cower and will not face it. Yes we must kill the ego that makes us arrogant - but that does not mean that we must become lumps in the corner with no will to act at all. Sri Krisna represents our conscience, that inner voice with which we all do 'battle'.

    ...and it is true that Hindutva is a twisting of the cultural references for political gains, just as fundamentalism in any other faith structure makes an abominiation of that faith... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalOctober 24, 2023 at 5:40 PM

      I do appreciate metaphors, Yam. But I'd prefer them in poetry and other literature where they're employed more imaginatively. When Mahatma Gandhi gave the interpretation to Gita as you're doing, the Hindus hated him. They want to take the verses literally...

      Delete
  3. AnonymousDecember 10, 2023 at 10:02 PM

    I am a Christian by birth.And if India if gonna become a religious state , then i rather it be a Hindi state than Christian or islam

    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
44 comments
Read more

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The
62 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so
39 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let
36 comments
Read more

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r
34 comments
Read more