The Tyranny of Virtue

Democracy is the bludgeoning of the people, by the people and for the people remarked Oscar Wilde. Nothing else captures our present times as well. I also wonder whether the truth as the Buddha sought is in the middle path, to avoid a dangerous polarisation of ideology and practice. For the extremity in virtue is often as tyrannical as the naked wielding of coercive power. Over time we begin to believe what was merely a rhetorical device as part of the dogma of being different and then suffer the same hubris, though born of our rival claims to virtue. The Anna Hazare phenomenon seems to strain between form and content. Often most seem to forget that the form of protest substitutes for our responsibility to examine content of the Lokpal bill in context of existing and proposed legislation; more so the likelihood of creating a short circuit to formal legislative process by civil society. (However ironically the real problem was that it was started by the government when they started the National Advisory Council as civil society with no representation from the  opposition and based on an in-transparent selection.)

Sheje Amar Janmabhoomi

A Srinivas Rao

I was surprised when someone I know was wishing others the national day of his adopted country, a state which is also unfairly sometimes called a ‘nanny state’. It was not the incongruity but the intriguing idea of solidarity and loyalties (however divided) to the lands of our adoption. The lands in question are not merely those of geography but mental worlds. “We Are All Palestinians” was the emblazoned lettering on the Tee shirt that one day flashed across the street, provoking me to wonder whether that was true. Palestine to the author of this shirt sleeve slogan was more than a nation without a state. Palestine is a ‘state’ of exile. Maybe we are all Diaspora, exiled in varied ways from what we imagine as ‘home’. In other words, is ‘home’ an imagining of a golden childhood, inaccessible except through longing, a nostalgic hankering for the “holy grail”? Just like the saccharine refrain of Dwijendralal Roy’s song “Amar Janmobhoomi” a mere fictitious idyll. Are our loyalties really divided between our native lands and the places of our adoption (and our freshly minted citizenships markers to a yearned difference in our self identities and descriptions and demonstrated by declamations of loyalties)?