Does a sthithapragya – the ideal man of the Gita – feel guilt? This is not a question that has been addressed in the chapters of the Gita that I have studied so far, but upon reflection, my personal opinion seems to be – no.

Hindu philosophy specifies a number of ‘negative feelings’; negative feelings are defined as those feelings that interfere in a man’s performance of his ‘swadharma’. In the 3rd chapter, Krishna tells Arjuna that there is no greater way to becoming a karmayogi than for each person to do their self-duty, to be true to their nature. Arjuna asks Krishna what prevents a man from being true to himself. And Krishna enumerates two ‘negative feelings’ which stand in the way – kaama (desire) and krodha (anger). Krishna says these two feelings lead to a muddling of the intellect, which leads to destruction of equanimity, and eventually to misfortune.

In the course of the Gita, Krishna expands this list to six: kama, krodha, loba, moha, madha and matsarya – desire, anger, greed, intoxication, pride and jealousy. Guilt is an omission here.

An example of guilt leading to delusion and the omission of one’s duties is as follows. Assume that a doctor has to perform an important surgery. For various reasons, the doctor is tired and fatigued by lack of sleep, but against his better judgment, decides to go ahead with the surgery. This surgery turns out to be disastrous, and the patient dies, as a direct result of the doctor’s fatigue. Following this incident, the doctor can never perform any surgery of moderate complexity again, because his failure preys on his mind – he is consumed by an immoblizing, crippling guilt.

Is this an acceptable feeling for a disciplined karmayogi? I think it is not.

Even before reading the Gita, my standard for the description of ‘karmayoga’ was a passage from Kalhil Gibran’s the Prophet, in the chapter on “Giving”. The Prophet compares different attitudes that people have towards giving – for example, some people give because they expect something in return; some people give because they seek favour with God; some people give reluctantly because they are forced to it. And then the Prophet says there is a category of giver who gives like ‘yonder myrtle tree gives its fragrance into the air’ – not cognizant of whether it is doing good or doing bad, expecting nothing either materially or spiritually, but giving because that is its nature. I was deeply moved by this passage and I think in many ways, a sthithapragya should aspire to the same ‘non-conscious’ doing-good that the Prophet’s myrtle tree does, doing one’s self-duty with the faith that God has populated this world such that everyone’s duty plays a part in His creation, whether one is cognizant of it or not. Would the myrtle tree feel anger or greed or jealousy? No. Would the myrtle tree feel guilt? No.

Guilt is an enemy of the ‘living in the present’ which is the state of a jnani. By dwelling on the past, one cannot transcend the future. Krishna clearly addresses the negative feeling on ‘dwelling on the past’ because someone has caused a hurt to you. Strangely, Krishna does not (in the 5 chapters that I have studied) address the negative feeling of ‘dwelling in the past’ because you have caused a hurt to someone else.

Speaking for myself, I find guilt to be a greater immobilizer than anger or desire, though the latter two are also often the cause for misjudgment. But upon reflection, I am able to distinguish three kinds of anger. One is ‘righteous rage’ – for example when you hear about a terrorist attack; the second is ‘anger born out of unfulfilled desire’, which is the Gita’s “krodha”. Both these I am able to deal with fairly dispassionately. The anger that messes around with my head is the anger that is tinged with guilt, the anger born out of an undesirable situation which I feel I could have avoided if I had done something different. This consumes me, makes me obsess over it, leading me into the heart of Krishna’s ‘delusion’.

I want to reach that precious state where I am delivered from anger, desire, greed, intoxication, pride and jealousy; but first, I would like to be delivered from guilt.

I discovered a cache of songs on a hard drive that I thought had given up the ghost many years ago, and spent a good part of the day listening to songs that were my favorites at some point in time over the last ten years. I realized something about my own taste in music from this random walk down memory lane. For short songs, which I define as less than five minutes long, my opinion about a song’s merits is governed primarily by its lyrics. But if I make a list of songs that I can listen to again and again and lose myself in the music, there is a strong skew towards really long songs. I think it’s very challenging to create real emotion in music, and the longer the song, the more a musician can do with it to make it memorable.

As a whim, here is a list of five long songs, picked somewhat randomly.

1. Private Investigations, 7 mins
Dire Straits. The beauty of their music is Mark Knopfler’s ability to create atmosphere with music, of which I think this song is the best example. I can never hear this sing without remembering the entire genre of film noir and Raymond Chandler. For about a minute at the end, there’s a really lovely instrumental section that actually communicates more than the lyrics do.

2. Echoes, 23 mins
Pink Floyd. The plink in the beginning is very famous, and the album on which this song features – Meddle – is the most satisfactory of their albums for me. Again an atmospheric song. Reminds me of Arthur C Clarke and Moby Dick. In my opinion, it’s the only good science fiction song (actually, it’s the only science fiction song I have heard, discounting the psychedelic Gong).

3. Saqia Aur Pila, 27 mins
Sabri Brothers. I love their music – they are a pair of Pakistani Qawwali singers, one tall and intense, the other fat and cheerful. This song is sublime. There’s a ten minute version on YouTube but the real deal is longer. It starts off with a patron asking a barman to pour him more liquor, and after an incredible journey through Islamic philosophy and history, ends with Hussain’s martyrdom in Karbala, when you realize the liquor is a metaphor for something quite different.

4. Into The Woods: Introduction, 29 mins
Stephen Sondheim. While this is usually split up into 4 songs in most CDs, if you watch the musical, it’s one contiguous, polyphonous masterpiece. The musical is a fairytale retelling, and this piece introduces all the characters – Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Jack, the witch, the Baker, and all their families. Tour De force, especially the way Sondheim creates a distinct style for each singer but they fuse so well. Polyphony at its best.

5. Die Walkure, 5 hours
Wagner. The Ring Cycle is my favorite western classical music, and Wagner is really the heavy metal of the genre. The cycle is a set of four operas that are the complete telling of a legend about a ring, which ends with the destruction of the world. Die Walkure is the second opera and contains the famous Ride of the Valkyries section.

Here’s to the gentle ones, the patient, the meek, the givers-of-way, the yes-sayers, the followers.

Victory does not always come from prevailing. Here’s to the ones who do not push back, not because they cannot, but because, for any movement to happen, there must be force and there must be yielding. Many people think that victory is to move in the direction that they push in; the gentle ones know that victory is to move in the right direction, and they do not push.

Always in battle, there is more wisdom in knowing when to fight than in trying to win always. And the gentle ones too have likes, dislikes, fears and fixations. But they do not rejoice in imposing their will, because they know that everyone is imperfect, and likes and dislikes are born of passions and prejudices, and none of those is as important as other people are.

Here’s to the ones who take the long view, the kindly ones. In twenty years, the arguments will be forgotten, the disagreements will have long ceased to matter, and triumph and defeat will be doled out carelessly by indifferent Fortune; and if people remain in love, it goes not to the credit of the pushy ones, but the gentle ones.

When they make the effort to see things from someone else’s point of view, or when they give in so that someone else may derive a small satisfaction from forcing his own way in an inconsequential matter, they perform an act that many of us can never understand, and which few of us ever grow graceful in.

There’s no faintness in their hearts. They strive harder than the enterprising, seeking reward for everyone. They experience the pleasure of victory and the pain of defeat, but do not allow themselves to become bitter or vainglorious. They have their preferences about the company they keep, but they allow no one to feel the sting of their wrath or sarcasm or spite, though it be much deserved.

Eventually, they too will die, as everyone else will too. And though their names will not be on the pillars and the parchments and the history-books, what made all things possible is not the effort of the passionate, but the effort of the patient.

If you have met the gentle ones, treasure them, befriend them, and strive (however imperfectly) to emulate them. In any hundred people, there are no more than 4, perhaps 5, of them; but because they are, the world is.

The spectre of loneliness stalks us, from the moment we gain consciousness to the moment we die.

For many of us, the spectre is held at bay by the company we keep, either of our own desire, or out of sheer necessity. Many relationships we forge are born of nothing more than a desire to drive the spectre one step back, to put one more person between us and the ghost.

Sometimes we make ourselves believe we have found a way to exorcise loneliness forever – a person, a job, a social life – all of these could make us forget, for a few moments, our aloneness in this world. And sometimes we pretend, because though we know in the depths of our souls that we are still alone, we like to play along with what is expected of us, and make our insincere vows just like everyone else.

But we are alone. Aloneness is our natural state: we are born like the tiger cub, whose maternal relationship lasts only until it is able to hunt alone, like the foal of the wild horse that will start to walk only a few moments after it is born, like the turtle that hatches in a strange land from an anonymous egg and has only itself to depend upon to feed and to procreate.

All of us fear the spectre of loneliness. We find a circle of friends, we get married, and we try hard to convince ourselves and to convince others that in the company of others, we find solace, peace, satisfaction, contentment.

That is a false contentment, for in all our lives – as accomplished as we may be – we have, in the end, no more to depend on for our happiness, no more to blame for our sadness, than us, ourselves. In pain we self-soothe; in pleasure we self-control; no joy from outside agencies is permanent, or even ultimately effective.

The biological instincts of reproduction and procreation drive us to seek a mate. The complex ordering of our human society drives us to find friends and companions. Neither is a substitute for the deep, permanent happiness that comes from realizing that birth was the goal, and by merely existence, we have already won the race.

This realization is our goal, our end in human life.

And the spectre of loneliness, for all its dreadfulness, is our friend; it teaches us that, in the end, all through, we are alone; that what will make us permanently happy can be reached on a path that can accommodate no more than one person abreast, and that for all the pleasure and courage that companionship gives us, the company of others is no more than a distraction from the realization of the self, the unitary, deeply individual self, that is the destiny of all of us to eventually confront.

The moon always brings out the best in poets; like the Chinese “Quiet Night Thoughts” by Li Bai, required reading for beginner Chinese students, or contemporary lyrics of movie songs, like Shakeel Badayuni’s Choudvin ka Chand.

This post is about a Tamil song, from the 1970′s. It’s called Vaan Nila Nila Alla, which means (in literal translation) “The moon in the sky is not the moon”. Here’s a video.

There is a background to this song which I was told relatively recently. The lyrics were written by Kannadasan, possibly the most gifted Tamil poet and song-writer of the 20th Century. Kannadasan battled alcoholism and bipolar depression all his life, but he wrote sublime Tamil verse. He was the most sought-after of Tamil lyricists.

The lyrics to this song were (so it is said) written by Kannadasan ‘under protest’. The producer of the movie was insistent that Kannadasan write a song for him. The poet, who was going through one of his lows, was not particularly keen, and tried hard to put off the producer. But the man was insistent. Finally, Kannadasan told him he would dash off a poem for him on the back of a piece of paper, and he would have to be content with that. This is how this song came to be (at least apocryphally) – an extempore creation to put off an unwanted client.

Of all the poetry I have ever read, I think there are few poems that would beat this one for wordplay – especially the pun and the rhyme. But I think this is at least partly because of the language that it is written in. Tamil is an agglutinative language; that means there are no prepositions or question-indicators in the language, these being provided instead by suffixes to the word. For example, the word nenju means heart; nenjil means ‘in the heart’, and nenjilaa means ‘is it in the heart?’. The fact that the language is so pliable means that it is much easier to find rhymes in Tamil than in English; most often, a Tamil word’s trailing syllables are not a part of the root word, but of the grammatical scaffolding instead.

In this song, Kannadasan pulls off an incredible achievement: nearly every phrase rhymes with the word nila (which means ‘moon’), and the poet exploits agglutination in the language to achieve remarkable variety of grammatical expression while retaining this constraint.

The song starts off with: Vaan nila nila alla, un vaalibam nila – “the moon in the sky is not the real moon, your youth is.” The word then in the next line means honey, and very interestingly, the words then nila mean “honey moon” – which has the same meaning in Tamil as in English.

The heights of wordplay are brought out, for instance, in this verse:

Deivam kallila, oru thogaiyin sollila
Ponnila pottila punnagai mottila
Aval kaatum anbila?

I’ve translated this somewhat loosely as:

Does God reside in an idol of stone? Or in the murmur of a woman’s clothing?         ['thogai' literally means a peacock's fanned-out tail]
In gold? In vermilion? In the bud of her smile?
Or in the love that she shows?

The next stanza is:

Inbam Kattilaa, Aval Thaega Kattila,
Theethilla Kaathala Oodala Koodala?
Aval Meetum Pannilaa?

Which I’ve translated as:

Is love the bed, or in her body’s embrace?
In suffering? In romance? In lover’s fights? Or in their coming-together?
Or is it the song that we draw from her heartstrings?                 [the verb meetu is typically applied to stringed instruments like the veena, and pannu means song.]

Note the amazing fact that almost every word ends with the same syllable in this verse (‘la‘). In the first word kattila, the agglutinative suffix is the interrogative -a, kattil being the Tamil word for cot; the second word kattila has the root kattu (which means embrace), and the suffix is -ila, which is a locative, interrogative form (“in the embrace?”). 

I particularly love the climax of the song — the beautiful line Ennilaa aasaigal ennila kondathaen, athai solvaai vennilaa. The first word Ennilaa is a conjugation of eNNu (meaning ‘count’) and ila (meaning ‘not’), and means ‘countless’. The second ennila is a conjugation of en (meaning ‘mine’) and nila (meaning ‘moon’), and means ‘my moon’ (my lover). The last vennilaa means the real moon (literally, white moon). The line means, “Desires innumerable, moon of my life, why has she so many, O moon in the sky?”

Here’s a freer translation:

The moon is an imposter. You light up the night for me,
Not him, though honeyed he be. My lady love, the moon of my life;
Your absence is my waning, and pale-faced am I.

In a land bereft of deer, will not women’s eyes will make up the loss?
And a land without flowers will not miss them, if there are women there.

Does God reside in an idol of stone? Or in the murmur of a woman’s clothes?
Is He in the gold in her hair? The vermillion on her forehead? The bud of her smile? Or in the love she shows?

Is love in the cot? Or in her body’s embrace?
Is it in suffering? In romance? In lover’s fights? In coming together?
Or in the song that we draw from her heartstrings?

Is it in our journey of life, or in the light of a woman,
In a town, or a country, that we find happiness? Is it at home? Or in a petal of her heart?
Is a relationship of the darkness? or of the grace of a woman?

Desires innumerable, the moon of my life, why has she so many, O moon in the sky?

I was thinking about how the discovery of germs has transformed modern medicine so completely. In the same train of thought, I was also thinking about ancient systems of medicine, such as the Greek, Chinese and the Indian systems, and how they were effective (to an extent) even without discovering this key piece of knowledge that unlocks the mysteries of disease.

It is a nice example of an interesting theme: the difference between the ability to cure and the ability to understand. Do we need to understand the fundamentals, the building blocks of disease – in this case, that of germs causing illness – in order to be able to cure it? The answer seems to be, no. Disease is a phenomenon that occurs in a predictably repetitive manner. An unlettered scientist, a  witch-doctor if you will, would, with sufficient experience, be able to identify patterns in the diseases that different people have. For example, he (or she) will be able to identify a combination of symptoms – fever, body pains and rashes – even if it occurs at different times, to different individuals. And then this proto-doctor will be able to give it a name.

Once named, the doctor will be able to administer treatment. True, the first generation of treatment will be completely random – different kinds of food, different environments of rest. But almost by accident, something will end up working, just as some things will end up making the disease worse. By careful cataloging and guided trial and error, the doctor may very well end up being able to not only identify the disease, but also treat it. This process of knowledge accretion is immeasurably improved by the ability to pass on the knowledge from generation to generation, which is why in societies with a strong knowledge culture – such as ancient Greece, or ancient India – where there was a societal approval for teacher-student relationships, the ability to diagnose and cure reached a very high degree of sophistication.

Once a large catalog of diseases and cures has been accumulated, the proto-doctor becomes a proto-scientist. He will now see patterns, not just between disease and cure, but between symptoms, between cure ingredients, between lifestyles. Assisted in some measure by dissection of human remains, or extrapolation from animal innards, this proto-scientist develops a theory of body, a system of anatomy and physiology, and a theory for the manner in which the typical body is affected by disease. The development of the system is, in some sense, an act of compression: taking a huge number of anecdotal facts, the proto-scientist tries to invent abstractions that help in reducing the complexity of the system by reducing the number of variables. In Greek medicine, disease was postulated as a non-equilibrium of the four ‘humours’ (or four liquids) of the body – blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. In Ayurveda also, there is a similar classification, where disease is conjectured to be a dosha (imbalance) of kapha, pita and vata – the three building blocks of physiology. Indeed, Dr A V Balasubramanian of the Center for Indian Knowledge Systems (CIKS) once told me about an Ayurveda doctor who gave him a detailed explanation of the cause, symptoms, effects and treatment of blood cancer using the doshaterminology.

The question is: does the discovery of germs automatically discredit this entire body of work? My staunch answer is: no. This also seems to be the market’s answer, judging by the resurgence in popularity of ayurveda. It is not necessary to understand the fundamentals of a science in order to establish patterns and make intelligent predictions about the future based on past happenings. The more fundamentals we find, the better our ability to predict; however, according to Ayurveda die-hards, there is nothing ‘more fundamental’ about germs compared to doshas, and just because doshas are less tangible, in some sense, than germs (i.e. you cannot see them with a microscope) doesn’t make them any less true. Perhaps, with sufficiently diligent inquiry, the Ayurvedic scientists performing an inquiry into the cause for disease may have, sooner or later, somehow deduced the existence of germs, even if they would never  be able to see them (the microscope not having been invented). The history of science, however, tells us that we find what we look for, and I am quite sure that there are possibly numerous other hypotheses that fit the facts as they were known to the ancients, in addition to the germ theory.

Eventually, then, it comes down to truth. In Gita class, Swami P specifically makes a case against rationalism: the refusal to accept as truth what you cannot perceive for yourself with your sense organs. And yet, this is a rather arbitrary refusal. There is no need for truth in this world to conform to our sense organs. There is no reason to believe that what is true is necessarily what we perceive. Our sense organs have evolved for the purpose of propagation of our genetic matter, not to aid us in self-knowledge or discovery of the truth. The new scientific age we are in has not gone far beyond knowledge that can be gathered by the senses; in a few cases (to pick a random example, magnetic field) we are able to sense a physical quantity, not through a sense organ, but through a ‘transducer’ – which converts the quantity into something that we are able to sense, such as a reading on a dial or a readout on a computer. However, the nature of observed knowledge remains very narrow – facts, observed as singleton sensory stimuli, linked by linear time. It is unlikely that we will ever learn the ‘real truth’ until we have found a way to break out of this straitjacket first.