Matsyanyaya

For a change today when I write, I do not write as a person of colour looking through his kaleidoscope in to a very white western world. Instead I look without any colour, being a species as complex and diverse as one can ever wildly imagine and simply name them Humans. My writing as usual is an outcome of my day to day interaction with people I have met in a continent which is predominantly white for last four years and through my conversation with my friends.

So the other day I was walking with my friend, a very white man. We both were making racist jokes, but what I suddenly realized was that he has to be much more careful about his choice of words even around his friend than I have ever been. That made me wonder how necessary is this political correctness in our everyday conversation? It is true in recent past parts of the white race have done terrible things to people of different colours, but expecting them to be apologetic all the moment of their existence seems too much to me, especially knowing they personally did not do anything to harm a race.  In fact, I even believe if the white race came together and tried to end the “atrocities” of the coloured races of present day as they tried to do in the past, the former group has a big chance of being at the receiving end considering the coloured people constitute the majority of this world. And on the other hand it is not that in the history of our species, the whites are the only one who have colonized, brutalized, vandalized and everything terrible to other races. It has happened again and again, whenever there was a disbalance of power in this world. The apparently more powerful has invaded the meek one again and again, and all our hands are stained in blood, some is fresh and some has faded away a long back. There is a wonderful word in Sanskrit to describe this animal instinct in us, Matsyanyaya, the instinct of the big fish to gulp down the small ones. And the Hindu tradition justifies the presence of laws and Government and even political correctness to prevent Matsyanyaya because this is not a very desirable situation and hence needs to be prevented from happening.   I do still understand that political correctness is important at spaces out of respect but I would rather make those internalized habits rather than things that you are just supposed to do to have a face in this apparently “liberal” society we live in.

With that key word, “liberal” I move to my next experience. Every time I had to come out in recent years, and if I were coming out to a hijab wearing dark skinned woman I always anticipated hostility whereas when I was doing the same to a brightly make up clad white woman I always thought it would be easier. Interestingly in my personal experience, all coloured people I came out to, they all surprised me by being extremely accepting and made me extremely uncomfortable by making me realize that I have a big bias against my on “sub-species” when it comes to taking them as open individuals. On the other hand I had at least two experiences where the “expected” open race reacted in a way that did not exactly express acceptance. So I wonder if we put too much pressure on these poor white folks by expecting them all to be liberal, accepting and inclusive in their thoughts. After all they all are a product of a damaged social system as we are at the other side of the “darker” world.

What I take away from the history that as a species we all have written is we all have done terrible thing, and we have never learned from it ever. May be it is our time to realize the meaning of the word “Matsyanyaya” from the depth of our hearts for a change and not blame each other for doing wrong. Rather accept that we all have done wrong and learn from it. This I believe will help us, who have been betrayed recently heal and take away the burden of mandatorily being “liberal” from another race. 

Yoga, ganja, meditation, samosas or more?

I have met couple of people who want to experience the “Indian lifestyle” if they could. I never thought about that statement very deeply ever. But then another friend of mine told me the iceberg analogy of culture very recently, and I started thinking about the “Indian lifestyle”. For people who are not familiar with this analogy it says just like the tip of the iceberg does not actually give an impression of the extent of the real thing, the exposed and ever changing “tip” of any culture is its clothes, food, music and art which assimilates from everything around. Now if I take away the food and the colourful clothes and the music and the great art of India away, I wonder if any of my foreign friends will have any clue what Indian culture is actually about! It is even hard for me to think what exactly this “Indian lifestyle” then will be. But for sure we do not wake up and take an elephant or camel ride to the bathroom where we shower with exotic spices and then wear gold threaded clothes and once again ride a very compassionate Royal Bengal Tiger and go to a yoga class and meditate the whole day only taking break to smoke ganja! On the other hand, I personally had no experience waking up in a slum with my twenty siblings and shitting in open air and then going out for begging the whole day at the traffic lights. So it comes down to the fact that I have no exotic lifestyle to share with anyone. My mornings used to be pretty much the same in Indian as it is here in North America, sans the heat and humidity. So now that I know my cultural heritage is not entirely the food that I eat, or the music that I listen to, the question becomes what the hell this cultural heritage is!!

To answer that I will go point by point and try to explain how through simple words and gestures I realized that I come from a different culture. The other day one of my good friends planned to come over around noon with her little kid to help me with cooking for a big event that evening. It was not until two hours before she was going to be there that I realised that I never told her to have lunch with me!! My cultural heritage just assumed that she knew that a lunch time meeting at someone’s place meant having food together! I did text her immediately but alas! It was already too late and she had her lunch. When I told her about my whole assumption she thanked me and told me she will never want to impose on me. And there we stood two cultures, both right at their own points, one very individualistic and the other very communal. And I realized its not the food that makes us different, but it’s the value around the food that makes a big difference.

Then the second is my extreme discomfort with the phrase “you are very kind” even for the slightest thing that I do for my friends, like thinking about them when they are sad or something. Though I can sense what do they mean by “kind” but to me kindness is something much more profound. Somehow the word kind to me personally brings the image of the soft gaze of Buddha the Avalokiteshwara.  To be kind I have to do something extreme, like give blood knowing may be my body will not be able to replenish it. This might be a too extreme example but kindness in my culture is something for which we sacrifice a big part of us.

Now that I have used the key word from an Indian cultural perspective, sacrifice, I should elaborate on that. The whole upbringing of an Individual in India they hear how important is it to live for all and not for your own self, life is about sharing, about giving and not expecting in return. It’s all about finding joy in discovering your own self in everyone and everything, to feel that we are at the core connected. And that is the Indian culture to me, to move from I to we, from my to our and from individual to collective. And in our practice in sharing food, making garments, celebrating festivals, getting married, mourning a loss and even fighting it is all about finding bliss in us.