We are a godless nation
There is something about young people in blue jeans that just gets the culturalists. Blue jeans were not just blue jeans to a young, bike-toting Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev; they were a philosophy, and only Levis would do, he confesses. But there are over 120 unique weaves in India today, some of them on the verge of extinction. Today, they represent a slavishness to 400 years of colonisation; an example of the fact that we weigh everything against the West, and take, in the name of modernisation, not just what works for us, and not always consciously.
A kindergarten child knows the body runs on oxygen, not carbon dioxide, and yet, a small village in India may not know what yoga is today, but it will surely have CocaCola, he notes. That’s what blue jeans represent. He gets it, he really does. It’s easy to commute in. If it gets dirty, it just gets more fashionable. If it gets torn, it gets even more fashionable. But a commercial organisation like a FabIndia has done wonders to promote the kurta, which his speak-English, eat-English, watch-English generation wouldn’t have been caught dead wearing.
There are principles; of conscious living, of capitalist free markets, which owns all the visible spaces, that pushes the West to the detriment of an Indian culture that has no voice speaking for it, that demands that self appointed defenders of Indian culture speak up and be heard. “When a certain wisdom, a deeper understanding, has been around for 8-10,000 years, and is in danger of being washed away by a single generation, I think we need to speak up about it. Why should it not get washed away is the argument. Why should it not be defended? People will anyway choose. The important thing is to make both things available. It’s almost become like if you are English educated, you should know nothing of India” he says. Not enforcing it, he cautions, but propagating it, this amorphous Indian culture, needs to be done. It’s also a reaction, to years of everything Indian being bashed, by the media, by the so-called intelligentsia. “People’s brains are still set on GMT” he says.
On his way back from the United Nations, accompanied by a vice-president of the BJP, Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev has just informed the world that India has insane levels of diversity. A nation in which diversity is a distraction. Nandan Nilekani, GV Prasad and Ratan Tata will speak at Insight 2014, the Isha Foundation’s forthcoming conclave, and over 2600 are estimated to have attended his session in Mumbai on November 7 this year.
The Sadhguru, a mystic and non denominational religious leader, is both politically present and socially active. Unafraid to insert himself into socio-political idioms, whether of film or industry, he is not one to shy away from commenting on the discourse of the day. Everyone becomes this amabassador of what it is to be Indian. And why not?
Indian advertising is changing. It is becoming cooler to be Indian. Until commercial forces begin to propagate all that is Indian, it will not change, he asserts. All that is west, has the commercial armoury at their disposal to propagate their coolness. “. Today because we are a market economy it is the commercial forces that will set the tone. Having said that commerce should never determine how human consciousness should be shaped. Human consciousness should determine commerce.” But who decides, then, in this free for all? Who sets the tone of what is Indian culture? Everyone has the right to be an authority for Indian culture, he says. Because everyone has his own Indian culture.
There is this inherent paradox in our diversity driving us to distraction and our at once wanting to be Indian. The erupting discourses of the day, from who the original Indian is, were all Indians once Hindu, the communal rhetoric of political parties, from the 1984 Sikh pogrom to 2002, who will bell the cat and separate church from state? The church and state were only united by the West because the church had an ambition to rule, Jaggi Vasudev says. “Largely, the minority communities have been made to feel insecure by the political parties. And religion is being brought into politics. If you look at the majority community, religion is never a part of their politics. Never been. Because we can stay in the same house, worship five different gods, still there is no issue. We do not know how to bring religion into our state. It’s only in recent times such talks have come because certain political parties are clearly trying to demarcate these things. But I think it’s on the wane not on the rise” he says. We need more remorse for 1984, he says. And we need to see that it was not religious when it happened. It was the followers of a leader or a political party launching a blatant attack on another. “This was not a clash of two groups. One group was not fighting. They were simply there” he says. That it happened not 100 years ago or 1000 years ago, but within our lifetimes should be a reminder, and there are not reminders enough, that we are a nation capable of such dastardly acts. “Do not make the minorities feel insecure, religion playing a role in politics will go away” he says. In a nation where a huge mass of voters are below 35 years of age now, the sense of identity of the nation is developing now. We have learnt to address India as India, and the nation as a nation.
What could possibly hold us together despite all our distractions? What ever did? It’s something our political leaders first need to understand, he says, and then every citizen. That India is not a product of sameness. We can all look different, eat different, speak different languages and still be Indians. Sameness is the formula for making a nation. But India stands in absolute defiance of that. When the British came to find the mythic India, there were over 200 political entities. So where is India? It’s only later, they realised that though everything was (and remains) divided, there was some underlying force which kept us one nation for over 8-10,000 years. “This is a nation of seekers. Every other nation is a nation of believers. This country is a godless country. God is not important. Mukti (liberation, freedom) is important. The highest dimension of our life is freedom, not god, not heaven. God is also one more stepping stone if you want, otherwise you can skip it.”
All kinds of gods are here, because we’ve understood the technology of god making. Never ever in this country did we propagate ‘The God’ up there. Never. Even god was only one more device to grow. Seeking freedom is what has kept us together. We can’t argue with each other essentially because we don’t believe any one thing. The fundamental quality of a seeker is somewhere there is a realisation that we do not know. And when you do not know and I do not know, there is nothing to fight about.
Every 50kms in this country people who look different, eat different, speak different have existed for millennia next door, without changing their habits, appreciating their differences. “It’s only now that we are developing this thing about you and me being different means we have to discriminate. Being different has always been the fundamanetal ethos of this nation. Once we convert our processes to discriminatory processes, then we have problems.”
Why now? Sadhguru blames it on a Western education. An education that inverts India’s inherent dialectical culture of experiential education to an intellectual one; one that needs to dissecting into parts instead of understanding as a whole. “We think A is A and B is B. India is a culture is a very dialectical culture. A can be B; B can be A. We’re all like that. Now because out logic is being honed in such a way, if you’re like this I’m like this, we are now different. Never was it so before. We just saw this as part of the whole kaleidoscopic view of the world.”
The answer to those groups of people asking, who was Indian first, who came here first, who converted who, and what is our origin, is simple to Sadhguru. Even now, he says, the problem is largely only in the educated minds. “It was all organic, India is an organic nation. It was always just there. Nobody made it. No group of people made it. It’s very important that in our education system, that a child is reminded of this: that it is beautiful to be different. That we are all different. And that may not be a problem. That difference need not be a basis for discrimination.” Who needs blue jeans, yeah?