This carving is a thousand years old and comes from Banteay Srei temple in Cambodia. It depicts the burning of Khandava forest, a scene that travelled far from its origins in the Sanskrit epic. The fire described in the text still holds its place in this stone relief.

Some years ago, I embarked on a deep reading of the Mahabharata - a daily discipline of reading, digesting, and wrestling with its sprawling verses of the Mahabharata. I was looking for an unadorned philosophy of everyday life, a “street metaphysics” of sorts, dragging Indian philosophy out of the sterile halls of universities and the rigid dogma of fundamentalists. Not unlike the forest communities in which the exiled Pandavas argued about life, the universe and everything else. I wanted a philosophy that could breathe the polluted air of our modern world and help make sense of its dizzying complexities.

If you ask the average person what the Mahabharata (or the Jaya, as it is originally known) is about, they will tell you it is the ultimate family drama. It is a chronicle of a fratricidal war, a bloody dispute between two warring clans, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, over a kingdom. It is also a chronicle of divine weapons and the wisdom of elders, elements that continue to influence popular culture and many discourses of Indian life. And they wouldn’t be wrong. It is a magnificent, terrifying exploration of human dharma: the ethics of statecraft, the limits of patience, the justification of revenge, and the terrible burden of duty.

Mahabharata has a public afterlife that remains vivid even today.

Long before web series and cinematic universes, the Mahabharata was India’s original blockbuster. These posters are from television series that shaped how many generations pictured Krishna and the Pandavas.

But the drama is more than human isn’t it? It contains a full entourage of living creatures, both mortal and immortal. As I wandered through this vast, hypertextual landscape of stories within stories, I realised that much of it was also shaped by the profound, often violent encounter between humanity and the non-human world. After all, the epic is recited at its beginning, on the occasion of a snake sacrifice (the Sarpasatra), which is stopped before it causes extinction. To understand dharma, the central, elusive obsession of the epic, we have to look beyond the battlefield of Kurukshetra. We have to look at the forests, the animals, the rivers, the gods, and the unstoppable force of Time.

The snake sacrifice turns grief into exterminatory rage. In this scene, the epic opens with a chilling question about vengeance and power, and also the ease with which an entire species can be made into an enemy.

Itihasa and the Halls of Justice

In the Itihasa, the world is alive, a massive, pulsing democracy of sentience. The Jaya houses beings of many kinds. It is a cosmos teeming with gods (Devas), demons (Rakshasas and Danavas), rishis, speaking swans, vengeful snakes, and celestial nymphs. Here, the non-human has a voice, and in the itihasic imagination, to speak is to be admitted into the halls of justice. To speak, then, is to hold citizenship in a commonwealth that reaches from the earth to the cosmos. Here, the Jaya offers an imaginative precursor to attempts such as Project CETI and the Earth Species Project that are building technologies to communicate with other species.

The boundaries between the human and the non-human in the epic are remarkably porous. The supernatural doesn’t reside in some distant, absentee heaven; it walks the earth. Gods intervene in human affairs, hold petty grudges, and engage in existential struggles. Animals are not background scenery; instead, they are karmic actors. When King Nala is abandoned and desperate, it is a golden swan that serves as his messenger, setting the wheels of his destiny in motion. The epic continually insists on exploring the dharma of every being. Just as a king has a duty to rule, a tiger has a duty to hunt, and fire has a duty to burn. Dharma, as the epic never ceases to remind us, is subtle and profound; it is the intrinsic nature of a being, and the catastrophic conflicts of the epic usually occur when the dharmas of different species collide. It’s in the nature of the snake to bite and the king to hunt and the deer to frolic, but there’s something wrong when the king imposes his violence upon others without restraint.

To speak, then, is to hold citizenship in a commonwealth that reaches from the earth to the cosmos.

In one of the many interludes in the Mahabharata, Dushyanta (the father of Bharata and Shakuntala’s husband) arrives at the Rishi Kanva’s ashram in pursuit of a deer and is asked not to release his arrow. Dushyanta lowers his bow and meets Shakuntala soon after; meanwhile, his descendant much removed - Pandu - can’t restrain himself and the arrow he releases into Kindama’s heart is a precipitating incident for the epic. We can’t all be ascetics, but unrestrained greed is often a cause of catastrophic violence.

Nowhere is this collision more tragic, or more relevant to our modern ecological crisis, than in the foundational acts of violence that bracket the epic.

The Bookends of Ecocide

If you want an itihasic perspective on the modern world, in an age of climate catastrophe and mass extinction driven by unchecked developmentalism, you must look at how the Mahabharata frames the building of human empires. The epic bookends the apocalyptic human violence of the Kurukshetra war with two massive, calculated genocides against the non-human world.

The first is the framing narrative of the entire epic: the Sarpasatra, or the great Snake Sacrifice.

The story begins with King Parikshit, the grandson of the great hero Arjuna. While hunting in the forest, Parikshit grows thirsty and asks a meditating sage for water. When the sage, deep in a trance, does not answer, the arrogant king picks up a dead snake with the tip of his bow and drapes it around the sage’s neck. It is a casual, thoughtless desecration of both the spiritual and the natural world. Parikshit is subsequently cursed to die by the bite of Takshaka, the king of snakes.

A thoughtless insult, a dead snake draped in mockery and a chain of consequence that outlives the king who set it in motion. Small cruelties rarely stay small.

When Parikshit’s son, Janamejaya, ascends the throne and learns of his father’s death, he does not seek justice against a single serpent. He seeks total annihilation. He organizes a massive sacrifice with the express purpose of magically drawing every snake in the world into a blazing fire. It is an act of species-wide revenge. As I read this, I couldn’t help but think of our modern grudges. What is it with men in power and their thirst for disproportionate vengeance? We see an act of terror, and we bomb entire nations. Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice is the ancient blueprint for our modern wars of extermination. It is the hubris of a human king deciding that an entire species must be wiped off the face of the earth to satisfy his grief.

But the epic does not let this genocide stand. The sacrifice is interrupted by Astika, a young scholar born of a human father and a snake mother. Astika is the ultimate bridge between species, an activist-shaman, stepping in front of the flames to negotiate peace. The Mahabharata is recited to Janamejaya during this very sacrifice, serving as a desperate, sprawling plea for empathy.

The epic itself is the medicine meant to cure the king of his genocidal rage.

The Inferno of Progress: The Burning of Khandava

If the Snake Sacrifice is the bookend of the epic, the Burning of the Khandava Forest is its dark, foundational heart. Before the Pandavas can ascend to imperial glory, they need a capital. They are given a tract of wild, untamed land: the Khandava forest. But they do not simply chop down trees to build their gleaming city of Indraprastha. They burn the forest to the ground in an act of staggering ecological violence, in which they are aided by Agni, the god of fire. Evolutionarily, humans became humans in part because we tamed fire; ever since, Agni is the motive force behind human civilisation, the Promethean gift that protects us from predation and allows us to forge tools.

But Agni is also an insatiable hunger. Having been overfed by King Swetaki in a twelve year long sacrifice, Agni’s indigestion can only be cured by devouring a forest’s worth of creatures. He approaches Arjuna and Krishna and begs them to help him consume the Khandava forest, which is protected by the rain god, Indra. As Agni engulfs the ancient forest, thousands of animals, birds, and forest-dwelling creatures rush to the edges to escape the inferno. And there stand the great human heroes, Arjuna and Krishna, shooting arrows into any creature that tries to flee, forcing them back into the flames. They slaughter elephants, lions, deer, and birds. They burn the forest down to its roots to feed Agni’s hunger and to clear the land for their empire. Indraprastha, the greatest city the world had ever seen, was built on the ashes of trees and snakes.

Even in a landscape marked by destruction, some lives endure and carry the future forward. Survival here is fragile; it is collective. The sarngaka birds ask us what collaborative survival looks like when the world around them is ending.

When we look at the Amazon burning today to make way for cattle ranches, or when we look at the blackened skies of our industrial capitals, we are looking at Khandavaprastha. The Mahabharata understands the terrifying double-edged sword of human progress. Civilisation requires the taming of fire, yes; both sword and brick are its progeny. But take it too far, and we run the risk of collapse. The Pandavas established their supremacy through violence against nature. Should it surprise us that this ‘original sin’ culminated in absolute violence against their own kin?

The Limits of Human Dominion

Yet, the Mahabharata is not a text of unyielding despair; it is a text of deep philosophical inquiry, a street metaphysics of dharma. It constantly questions the limits of human dominion. Does a warrior’s dharma justify unchecked violence against the non-human? Consider the story of King Pandu, the father of the Pandavas. While hunting in the forest, Pandu spots a male deer mating with a doe. Without hesitation, he draws his bow and shoots the male deer.

But this is the itihasa, where the boundaries blur. The deer is not just a beast; he is a powerful Rishi (sage) named Kindama, who had taken the form of a deer to enjoy the pleasures of the forest away from human eyes. As the sage lies dying, he rebukes the king. Pandu defends himself using the logic of human supremacy. He argues that the dharma of a Kshatriya (a warrior) allows him to hunt wild beasts by any means necessary - openly or by stealth. A king rules the forest, Pandu argues; therefore, the forest’s lives are his to take. The dying sage dismisses this anthropocentric arrogance. He does not dispute the king’s right to hunt for food, but he condemns the king for shooting a creature in the sacred act of mating. He curses Pandu: if the king ever approaches his own wives with desire, he will die instantly.

Even a king’s violence against nature has limits. The forest has its own rhythms, its own sacredness, its own dharma that exists independently of human needs. When human law violently disregards the natural law, the earth strikes back. The curse of the dying deer sets the entire tragedy of the Mahabharata in motion, rendering Pandu unable to father children normally and leading directly to the birth of the rival clans.

Time, Chance, and the Cosmic Joke

Finally, the non-human enters the Jaya as an unstoppable cosmic force: Time, or Kala.

Throughout the epic, human beings scheme, debate, and fight. Yudhisthira obsesses over rule-following. Draupadi and Bhima argue passionately for pragmatic action, political reality, and justified anger. They build empires, they lose them in rigged games of dice, they spend years in exile wandering the forests - which, crucially, act as the ultimate school of dharma, stripping the royals of their hubris.

At the end of the epic, the dog walks beside the Pandavas as a figure of loyalty and dharma.

But looming over all their human debates is Kala. Time is not a passive ticking clock in the Mahabharata; it is an active, non-human entity that routinely possesses individuals and ravages empires. Time is the ultimate equaliser. Regardless of how ruthlessly kings subjugate the earth, how many forests they burn, or how profoundly they debate their human dharma, they are subject to the cosmic cycles of boom and bust. The Mahabharata ends not with a triumphant parade, but with the heroes walking into the Himalayas, dropping dead one by one, their glorious empire already fading into the dust.

A Street Metaphysics for a Burning World

To recite the Jaya today is to recognise that we are living in the ashes of Khandavaprastha. We have built a magnificent, terrifying world of glass and steel, but we have done so by declaring war on the democracy of sentience. Our modern Rajdharma of economic and political duty has become fatally divorced from the non-human world. We treat the earth as a resource, the animals as products, and the climate as an externality. Perhaps street metaphysics can help reconnect us to the world around us, grounding our care in everyday acts of more than human justice. Justice today has to be planetary, and being so takes nothing away from justice towards the marginalised among our species.

But the Mahabharata warns us that dharma is a web. You cannot pull one thread without unravelling the whole. The violence we inflict upon the forests and the beasts will inevitably find its way into our homes, our cities, and our families. The profound, radical message of the Jaya is that our moral obligations do not end at the boundaries of human society. True dharma requires a reckoning with our dominion over the earth. The crisis before us is a result of our deep alienation from the planet and its various creatures, so much so that every butterfly and every bear is either a replaceable resource or a cute exhibit in a museum or zoo. We have lost the terror of being alive, the intense awareness of our mortality that sent the Buddha into the forest looking for the end of suffering. We have to end this alienation, starting with our senses. We have to listen to the voice of the swan, to respect the sacredness of the mating deer, and to recognise that we are just one species sharing a fragile, burning world.

And despite all these efforts, we too will eventually be swallowed by Time.

MWF

Time for a new rhythm: I will send newsletters three times a week (instead of the current two), on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The Monday essay will be an opener, raising questions and floating balloons for the future; in short, giving us pointers to continue our reading of Eswar Prasad and Niall Ferguson’s books on Money, Bolter’s book on Reality Media and Chalmers’ book on Reality+: four tomes split evenly between “money” and “reality.” 

An crisscross reading of these four books will be the focus of Wednesday’s post and the at the end of the week, I’ll open a discussion thread like I did last Friday. The books might change as winter turns to spring, but the format will remain the same - when I am done with one tome, I will switch to another from my anti-library. That’s how I plan on grasping the fundamental question.

Fundamental Question: What if everything were Media? 

Order & Chaos

My Delhi childhood was mostly peaceful & boring, but on occasion the veneer of civilization broke down. The day Indira Gandhi was assassinated was one of those occasions. We were interrupted in the middle of art class, asked to pack our bags and go home. An eerie silence settled on the streets as we shut our doors and sat glued to our TVs and radios.

The next morning, mobs were about, electoral rolls in hand.

That curly haired fellow who lorded it over a small gang was in it, wearing a white kurta-pajama declaring his Congress colors. I spotted other known faces, men who worked the streets and shops nearby. They weren’t strolling or running or marching like I had seen people move their feet. Instead, they swarmed and prowled in fits and starts. And when the order came, they rushed towards their destination, a flock of predators circling their prey. 

The house across the street from me belonged to Sikhs. It was empty, neighbors having taken the family into protection. The mob pelted stones at the windows. I had broken glasses playing cricket, but this wholesale shattering had another pulse. An advance guard broke the door and everyone stormed inside; a few minutes later, men came streaming one by one, some carrying furniture and others carrying electronics. One man stood out from the passing crowd: he had an enormous TV on one shoulder while using his free arm to fend off others who too wanted the idiot box. That melee within the melee turned a corner and vanished into the daytime darkness. 

Soon, nothing was left to loot and the only the mob leaders were left. They reentered the house with kerosene cans. After they were done and back on the street, some threw burning cloths wrapped around stones through a broken window. Soon, the house was ablaze while neighbors tried - feebly - to douse the flames. They wouldn’t dare to be serious in their efforts. The mob moved on to the next Sikh house on the street, where a fresh batch of rioters waited for their TVs.

And where were the police? Standing in a posse at the corner of the street, making sure no one stopped the violence.

If Partition was independent India’s original sin, 1984 was its fall, when it was made clear that state sponsored genocidal violence was possible in the heart of the nation’s capital, that one community could be isolated and turned into the enemy, living under the ‘sign of the sword,’ subject to arbitrary violence without any hope of justice.

We have since expanded the sign of the sword to many others and not just in India. Much of the violence and authoritarianism throughout the world since the 90s is due to the co-evolution of our societies with media technologies. The internet was advertised as a new source of democratic organization, but has since become an agent of turmoil. Carrot and stick, right hand and left hand, yin and yang - whatever you call it: the very instruments of order shade into chaos.

The Nature of Order

Where does order come from, where is it going, what instruments and institutions sustain the order we see around us? And: what happens when it breaks down? Does chaos have patterns or is each departure from order unique1? These are old puzzles about Dharma, ‘that which upholds the world.’

The Fundamental Question

We thread the world in many colors: the economic order by markets, the political order by states and serving both masters - the order of text, of memos, documents, manuscripts etc, the order of money, of cash, banks, budgets and allocations and the order of violence, of guns and bombs. Text, coin and guns are the media through which the market & state order is conveyed, but what if they were the order itself? 

Fundamental Question Repeated: What if everything were Media? 

What if we took that question seriously? We are familiar with a caricatured version of this claim already; for example, if the Matrix were real and we were all living inside a simulation, then everything would be media because: 

1. everything would be a simulation and 

2. simulations are media. 

Simulations are a new media form, and the medium being the message, we are peppered with movies, novels and even scientific treatises claiming our universe is a hologram. But others have ridden their technological horses into the reality sunset before. An ancient version of the Fundamental Question is: what if everything was the WORD? The WORD has two manifestations: one in the metaphysical plane as a ‘cosmic principle’ and the second in the material plane as a cluster of sacred texts. This twinned claim is taken seriously by several influential religious and philosophical traditions.

Elevator pitch: Technology and Theology are combined - there’s the divine WORD and there’s the written WORD.

Barbara Holdredge's book on Veda and Torah examines the 'In the Beginning was the Word' idea across two religious traditions - the Brahminical tradition in India and the Rabbinic Jewish tradition in Israel. She says “each is represented in certain strands of its respective tradition as a multileveled cosmological principle identified with the primordial Word, and while this Word might have found expression on the earthly plane as a concrete corpus of texts, it is not held to be bound by this textual referent.

If you’re Christian, the written word becomes flesh in the body of Christ.

You don’t have to believe a word of this 😛 to acknowledge the profound theological-technological moves that underlie the world → word → flesh transmutations.

I am not a humanist. What I like about 'everything being the WORD' is that the WORD comes first; humans are incidental to the story of the WORD. The Vedas are said to be 'apauruseya,’ i.e., ‘not of a human.’  It’s only with the WORD becoming flesh as a human being that theologically sanctioned humanism takes center stage.

One day, I want to trace the evolution of this deep idea about the word in the nonhuman world; not the ‘history of this deep idea’ since history is a chronicle of human agents and their actions, and that doesn’t work for non-humanists does it? The WORD as an idea has its own dynamics; it mutates after the print & scientific revolutions, so that Galileo is able to say: 

Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.

The word has become ‘book,’ but equally importantly, Galileo also had ideas on how to fold the universe into the book - through the languages of mathematics. Less known than Galileo's epiphany but equally important to our lived experience is the 'taming of chance,’ the mathematics of risk and uncertainty that also emerged at about the same time and has since been deployed in the service of speculation and markets. Once we start on those parallel paths, we are bound to ask sooner or later: what’s the essence of the language of probabilities and triangles and circles?

Today’s answer: information or code. It's with that understanding that when we say today ‘everything is media’ we have two new tracks: 

• Metaphysics: everything is code,

• Technology: the interverse is everything

Word becomes book, the world becomes the universe, but what happened to the flesh? There’s a line of philosophical inquiry from Kant to Marx to Merleau-Ponty that’s devoted to uncovering the flesh in the modern world. It’s a road we won’t travel this season😔 and in any case, since books have become code, we have to identify the avatars of the world as well as the flesh in a new trinity.

How assimilation works

Does the coded interverse have teeth? Does media subsume existing institutions and instruments of ordering the world? For example: are Nation States media? Is Money media? Are Markets media? For those claims to be believable, we need to show that the 'everything is media’ theory: 

1. illuminates & incorporates existing instruments and institutions, i.e., unifies these disparate entities and gives new insights, and 

2. incorporates emerging instruments and institutions.  

I have mixed feelings about 1 & 2, for they can create new forms of order and unleash new types of chaos. While writing this essay, I chanced upon an obituary for the Catalan-French architect Ricardo Bofill. Bofill’s buildings are known for transforming classical architectural themes into geometric forms, like how he was inspired by the Kasbah Taourirt in Morocco to create a an apartment complex in Spain called La Muralla Roja, the building on the right.

Bofill reimagined a dwelling of the powerful into a democratic residence.

His goal, his son Pablo said in an interview, was “to demonstrate that at a modest cost you can build social housing where every floor is different, where people don’t have to walk down endless corridors, and where different populations can be part of one community.”

Or take this piece of generative art inspired by traditional Chinese landscape painting:

The computer generated version doesn’t match the skill of a great master, but the point isn’t to make something better than what a master can - we aren’t trying to beat world champions at Chess or Go - but approach the past aslant, with gratitude and irreverence, which fosters creativity. It took a click of a button to make another one:

and this twitter thread 👇🏾 tickled me. The faces on the right are synthetic btw.

Tweet by @waitbutwhy

Tweet by @waitbutwhy

Tweet by @waitbutwhy

I imagine growing old with an intelligent muse that will help me create synthetic masterpieces.

But all is not well in futuretown. There’s a recurring dream that the free and open flow of knowledge will end strife for ever or that the universal library will be the meeting point of all cultures and nations. Or more cynically, that people would rather make money than shoot one another. The internet hosts the manifestation of both dreams, and for a while it looked like we will all be content harvesting information for knowledge and profit. But it doesn’t look that way anymore, does it? 

Toward the beginning of the great epic, after he was mistreated by Takshaka, the snake king, Uttanka goes to the emperor Janamejaya's court. Recounting how Janamajeya’s father’s died after being bitten by the snake king, Uttanka needled the emperor:

Uttanka: Why do you sit idle while your father's death remains un-avenged?

Janamajeya: What should I do?

Uttanka: Organize a great sacrifice. We will burn every snake in the world.

Much harm comes from malign reason married to unchecked power. Adam Smith thought violence can be tamed by self-interest, that a society of merchants will be peaceful for selfish reasons. If only! Any needle that threads the world can stab and sting.

Two hundred years after Smith, in the flush of cold war victory, the US pushed markets and deregulation everywhere, outsourcing jobs and pauperizing Russia. And if those tragedies weren’t enough, 9/11 provoked the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Nothing like an emperor scorned. But away from the public eye, the malaise was creeping back from Baghdad and Kabul into the streets of Columbus and Pittsburgh.

However idyllic the matrix, a war is raging next to it. 

1

As Tolstoy says in the first line of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

In his book on the Propensity of Things, Francois Jullien starts his discussion of Shi (the Chinese concept that’s the main concern of Jullien’s book) with an analysis of military strategy. He talks about how a good general senses the natural order of the terrain, his weapons and other resources and arranges them in a manner that assure victory. It’s not victory due to heroism or clever battlefield maneuvers - the standard fare in Indo-European myth as well history - but due to the general being at the right place at the right time.

Thinking about this tension in Indian terms, it’s as if the Mahabharata war wasn’t won by Arjuna but by Krishna - the former merely placed the arrow in his bow when he was told to, but it was the latter who arranged the situation such that the war happened in the circumstances that it did. The Chinese might say the war was won by the only non-combatant.

Since these texts were written in the Warring States period, battle metaphors migrated into other parts of the Chinese intellectual tradition, becoming the order of things as such. Today, there’s a similar metaphor that penetrates all human activity, the generator of all order: the market. We have money as money of course, but we also have social capital, human capital, natural capital and moral capital. We can’t grasp the world unless we impose a market on it. The GND is no exception.

Al Gore wears that economic hat as he introduces Biden’s task ahead, including what might become the GND (without naming it as such).

Gore’s Vision of the Future

Gore starts thus:

The pandemic was Trump’s downfall and a successful response to the second phase - vaccine distribution, followed by a strong economic recovery - could be the making of Biden’s presidency. Note how Gore frames the most important problems facing Biden - he starts with the economy and ends on a high note with climate. That’s the universality of the market speaking right there: you can’t talk about climate without talking about how to put bread on the table.

And then he talks about the climate crisis is an opportunity to renegotiate the basic contract of society, of building ‘a more just and equitable way of life.’ It’s easy to laugh this off as propaganda, but if liberalism isn’t able to offer this possibility as a genuine and likely outcome of its method, it will fail. The architects of the liberal order know that. But that requires a recognition of the fact that the real battle has moved to a higher and more treacherous terrain:

In other words, liberalism has to expand to include ecology. That’s both exciting and daunting and opens itself to a range of challengers - deep ecologists who say we need to privilege the rights of nature first, degrowth proponents who think the economy should not just be transformed, but reduced. At the other end are the fossil fuel authoritarians who will continue to build coal plants and prospect for oil.

Deep ecology might not be in contradiction with this vision - a transfer of regime argument might say we need to scale liberal institutions rapidly and create the infrastructure to draw down carbon by 2050 but once that task is done, we should manage a final transition to an ecological rather than economic regime. Perhaps a utopian dream that reminds you of the Marxist idea that capitalism development is needed before a society is ready for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

That’s the what. Tomorrow I will cover Gore’s ideas of how the liberal order could win the climate battle. I will leave you with a hint - a short list of the most important agents of transformation according to Gore.

COVID19 has inserted the non-human world into the drama of history; we can no longer write history as the history of our species alone.

I want to explore three cognitive stages of history writing, one ancient; one from the last two hundred years and one that doesn’t exist yet. This isn’t meant to be a history of history writing.

Stage One: Personalized History

Like every other academic discipline, history also emerges from widespread human needs and capacities. For history, that visceral need is the link to our ancestors which is prized by every culture. History gives that connection a coating of objectivity.

Individual people aren’t the only consumers of personalized history. Nations are even more obsessed with personalization for language, religion and history are what make nations into what they are.

A common tactic in nationalist and ‘cultural’ history writing is connecting the present with a glorious past. For example, to be a ‘cultured’ westerner is to have some sense of the Greek origins of western culture and there’s always the connection to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Which is both comic and tragic, since the connection to a Greek or Christian past also involves the erasure of any Celtic or Gaelic elements. Why the pope and not the druid?

Personalized history - especially when it’s made up - answers the question “why am I the way I am?” and history-weaving is a common mechanism for personalizing the nation. Consider the Indus Valley Civilization. Indians are taught to draw a personal link between that vanished culture and their current situation even though very little of that civilization has survived in the languages we speak or the artifacts we create. I may have no connection whatsoever to a bricklayer in Harappa but the Indian nation is imagined as the latest stop on a winding road that started on the banks of the Indus.

Personalized history is the history of the count noun - the king ruling with the mandate of heaven or the prophet leading his people to the promised land. When we tell the story of Ashoka stricken with remorse after killing thousands on the battlefield and promising to rule with kindness, we are reducing the acts of millions to that of a single person. In order to bring the ‘masses’ into history, we need historical agents that are collectives rather than individuals.

Mass Noun History

Count noun history has two versions:

• there’s the history me of me, i.e., the path connecting me to real and mythical ancestors; if you’re a north Indian Hindu you can go to Hardwar (to this day!) and ask a brahmin to recount your family history - there will surely be a few gaps but you will still get a way of orienting your own life within a lineage tied to a sacred landscape.

• the history of heroes and villains, of Alexander defeating Darius and making his way to India where depending on whom you ask, he was either scared by the elephants of the Nandas or his soldiers wanted a break from the constant fighting.

Only in the last two or three centuries did a new form of history become possible, the history of the mass noun. We discovered new agents: ‘peoples,’ ‘populations,’ ‘classes’ and other entities that can only described by mass nouns. The proletariat class or the capitalist class isn’t a person and is never meant to be one, even metaphorically; unlike the nation, which is a mass noun in some contexts and a count noun in others.

Mass noun history says: my individuality matters a lot less than my membership in certain collectives; the real levers of history are modes of production and the social classes that replicate those modes: labor, serfdom, etc. Alexander isn’t the hero anymore; neither is Chengiz Khan. Instead it’s the specific modes of warfare that the Greeks and the Mongols pioneered that created previous political cultures.

Warfare becomes a mode of production, i.e., a way of organizing means of violence that in turn controls other social categories. In this new form of historical explanation, the gunpowder empires ruling over much of Eurasia arose out of a class - the military elites - who could exploit all other classes, just as today the capitalist elites can exploit all other classes and the real historical transition is when military elites ruling agrarian masses were replaced by capitalist elites ruling over the laboring masses.

The discovery of mass noun history makes certain kinds of investigation possible, even attractive. While Abul Fazl dazzled us with the Akbarnama, he never wrote a history of Mughal innovations in weapons manufacture and military deployment. Such a text wouldn’t have struck his scholarly peers as a historical text. We, on the other hand, might be more fascinated by the technological advances in the Mughal era than in recounting Akbar’s successful campaigns. We can also subvert the Mughal empire or the British empire altogether by writing histories of subaltern populations in those eras, assuming we have access to primary sources.

What’s as important is a transformation in the exercise of power.

Akbar operated in count-noun history and did not have to explain himself to a nation on a daily basis; there were no sovereign ‘people.’ In contrast, even a brutal dictator today has to justify his existence in terms of the ‘people’ he represents.

The mass noun is truly an agent of history.

Once the mass noun enters our conception of history, it changes how we write the past too. It’s not only that labor and capital are the mass-nouns of today; we look to the past and discover mass nouns that mattered then - whether the merchant classes and trading routes that made the spread of Buddhism possible or the agrarian communities in the Yangtze river basin that formed the basis of Chinese civilization.

What’s common to Count Noun history and Mass Noun history is that humans (both singular and plural) are the only agents worth noticing. Labor shapes an otherwise inert nature into a form that creates value - for humans, of course. In its most extreme version, human activity so dominates the planet that we are beginning to call our era the Anthropocene.

But what about the nonhuman masses?

Inter-Species history

Imagine writing a natural history of antelopes without mentioning that lions prey upon them. Or writing a history of lions without mentioning they eat antelopes and other ungulates. It’s count noun natural history, except that we count species instead of individuals, i.e., I don’t write a history of this lion or that antelope but of lions as a whole and antelopes as a whole. That’s because other creatures are deemed unworthy of the kind of individuality that makes personal history possible.

More on that mistake on another occasion; I will stick to interspecies human history.

Predator and prey species enter into the natural history of every other species except ours. One reason is that no other species of comparable size is a threat to our existence. I am not worried about being eaten by a lion on the way to school. Count-noun interspecies history of the lion-antelope kind doesn’t apply to our situation in an obvious manner.

What about mass-noun interspecies history? That’s where viruses, bacteria and mosquitoes come into the picture, since they have killed and continue to kill humans at a rate that nothing else comes close. We have known that truth for a while, and books such as Jared Diamond’s “Gun’s Germs and Steel” trace the successes and failures of human societies to micro-organisms.

But still, the bugs aren’t the stars in show; they are the supporting cast. That has to change if we want to understand the world we are in today. COVID19 shows that microorganisms have agency of their own, and climate change shows the even bigger agency of carbon in the atmosphere.

Imagine writing the history of the human body but not as a thing in itself, but as a home for microbial communities in our guts. We are their environment, not the other way around.

If and when that happens, we will have accomplished the final dethroning of anthropocentrism - post Copernicus, we aren’t the central object in the universe; post-Darwin, we aren’t the central species in the universe and post-COVID, we aren’t the central agent in the universe. A special issue on Multispecies Studies starts with the following quote:

All living beings emerge from and make their lives within multispecies communities

But then the question arises:

How do we tell the story of those multispecial lives?

My response to that question is based on two instincts:

1. we have always lived in the microcene, that bugs have ruled for ever.

2. the planet isn’t a backdrop to the drama of humanity, but the primary agent that contains all other agents of history.

It’s time to go back to the exploration I started in March with “The Bug is a Feature.” I had some books in mind when I wrote that essay:

• D’Arcy Thompson, “On Growth and Form.”

• Jakob Von Uexkull, “ A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Men”

• Christopher Alexander et. al., “A Pattern Language.”

• Tarthang Tulku, “Time, Space and Knowledge.”

• The Jataka – in two renditions: Sarah Janet Shaw's and a translation of Aryashura's Jatakamala.

• Basho, Narrow Road to the Deep North.

• Richard Powers, "The Overstory"

• James Jerome Gibson, “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception”

• Eduardo Kohn, "How Forests Think"

• Lovelock, "Gaia".

• Bruno Latour, "Facing Gaia"

• The Adi Parva of the Mahabharata with close attention to the burning of the Khandava forest.

To which I want to add a few more:

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass.

• Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing et. al. (edited), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet.

• Marisol Cadena et. al. (edited), The World of Many Worlds.

• Dooren et. al (edited), Multispecies Studies.

• Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life.

• Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse.

• Maria Voyatzaki (editor), Architectural Materialisms.

and more and more and more

At that time, I said:

Goal: write an essay one or two times a week connecting the reading of these books to a reading of the world hoping the weekly meditation will clarify the question of planetary governance.

Which was immediately derailed as I went off on a detour about citizenship and states of exception, but now that I am back on track, I want to emphasize an additional goal I took on a couple of weeks ago:

(EL5) To say it like we are all five years old

Time to get going.

Photographer: Jan Genge | Source: Unsplash

A Terrible Beauty

Listen:

It’s come to your attention that Virustan is fake newsing the COVID19 crisis. Virustan’s president for life isn’t importing masks and isn’t testing his population because he thinks it’s a hoax. Meanwhile Virustan’s citizens are posting videos on Instagram of their grandparents dying in isolation. Wait a minute…. they don’t have money to eat, but they have smartphones? You have no idea, my friend. There’s a hierarchy of deprivation: people with no money to eat buy Android while people who have enough for a daily meal flaunt iPhones.

Now that you’re suitably shocked, lemme ask you a question:

Would you support an invasion of Virustan for humanitarian reasons?

Of course you would. You’re a human rights campaigner at heart, even if you haven’t paid your maid for three months and those migrants deserve every beating they get. It’s time the planetary police set the house in order. Here’s the rub: who is going to lead the invasion?

Not the US, whose president has declared you’re better off injecting detergents. Not China, whose offer to do so will likely set off WW-III. Every country is pointing fingers at everyone else. Boris Johnson says it’s a continental attempt to end the British Empire, the continent thinks it’s caused by African immigrants, the Americans are blaming the Chinese and the Chinese are being told by their fearless leader that it was caused by Yankee devils.

Rashomon

Reminds me of Rashomon, the great Kurosawa movie in which the same event was experienced in different ways by everyone involved. Or to use an Indian metaphor, we are all like the seven blind men identifying the elephant variously as a systemic failure of capitalism, a Chinese lab experiment gone rogue, an attempt by the West to defeat the Middle Kingdom and if you are a real lateral thinker, preparation for aliens to make contact later this year.

I am tilting towards the last option; otherwise why is the U.S Navy releasing video after video of UFOs?

Photographer: Erik Mclean | Source: Unsplash

But the blind men weren’t wrong in thinking something big is in front of them — we are living in exceptional times with downstream consequences for years.

What terrible beauty is being born?

The State of Exception

In answering that question, we should start with the (unfortunately Nazi) political theorist Carl Schmitt’s idea of the ‘state of exception,’ which Wikipedia pithily describes as:

A state of exception (German: Ausnahmezustand) is a concept in the legal theory of Carl Schmitt, similar to a state of emergency (martial law), but based in the sovereign’s ability to transcend the rule of law in the name of the public good.

Carl Schmitt

Schmitt’s ideas have been greatly expanded by the (decidedly non-Nazi) thinkers Giorgio Agamben and Achilles Mbembe. Agamben wrote a controversial essay about the exceptions created by the COVID19 crisis. Both are concerned with how the sovereign has the capacity to strip a person of their membership in a political society and turn them into ‘bare life’ (Agamben’s term) that can be extinguished on a whim. The slave plantation (for Mbembe), the concentration camp and the detention center (for Agamben) are archetypal ‘places of exception’ whose logic goes as:

1. Identify an ‘exceptional’ population.

2. Create a space — a ‘camp’ for isolating that ‘exceptional’ population

3. Turn screws

I am using ‘population’ and ‘camp’ in quotes because they are being used as technical terms. Nevertheless, today’s exception isn’t like the exceptions of the past; no specific population is being identified and only temporary camps are being created. We have a revolution in the history of exception which has escaped the confines of the detention center and occupied Main Street. The theory explaining today’s exception has to go beyond Agamben and Mbembe’s formulations.

I could try explaining Mbembe, Agamben and Schmitt’s ideas further for they are subtle thinkers well worth engaging but I am going to do something different instead: explain the logic of exception as a bug of political life. Or is it a feature? You decide.

Photographer: Jørgen Håland | Source: Unsplash

Being with Others

Hamlet’s most famous lines appear in a soliloquy: ‘to be or not to be; that is the question.’ He’s talking to himself, and while Hamlet’s indecision drives the narrative forward, it’s the talking to himself that concerns me here.

Hamlet is the archetypal modern individual: living in the cave of his own mind first before engaging with the world. In that cave, all existential questions are directed at oneself and not at others — hence the soliloquy. For that individual, the most important decision is to take one’s life. Or not. Suicide is elevated to a matter of existential importance. Albert Camus gave that thought its fullest expression in the first line of the Myth of Sisyphus:

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide

I used the phrase ‘cave of the mind’ with some intention, for it should remind you of Plato’s cave and its play of shadows. There’s no escaping that cave as long as you are trapped within yourself; it’s only in being with others that there’s the prospect of political freedom. Of course, if others can free you, they can also turn your life into an earthly hell.

There is a deep metaphysical question combining the paradoxes of self-reference and the nature of (human) beings: when I talk to myself, am I talking necessarily to the same person or is it just a matter of accident that I am talking to the same person and could easily be talking to someone else. The difference between the two choices:

1. ‘I’, ‘me’ & ‘myself’ necessarily refer to the same person. I am always me.

2. ‘I’, ‘me’ & ‘myself’ only accidentally refer to the same person and could easily refer to someone else.

In saying “I went to the grocery store earlier this morning” is the ‘I’ who is writing these words the same as the ‘I’ who went to the grocery store? What is the criterion of identity? These questions may seem like logical or linguistic quibbles but have enormous consequences for how we live — together or alone. To understand why, let’s go back to Hamlet. Or rather, another man caught in the web of indecision. I am, of course, referring to Arjuna at the brink of the great battle.

The Calm before the Storm

Unlike Hamlet, Arjuna is not alone; he’s with Krishna. He’s not in the cave of his own mind, but in a ‘moral commons,’ a space he shares with one other being, even if that being is Being itself if you are a believer. Arjuna doesn’t contemplate suicide. Instead he seeks the counsel of another being. If Hamlet runs the risk of alienation and isolation, Arjuna runs the risk of poor counsel or deception. Was Krishna right in advising Arjuna to fight? A war that started with 20 million combatants and ended with seven (yes, seven!) might strike the unbiased observer as disastrous for winner and loser alike.

Each mode of existence runs its own existential risk:

1. Solitude — alienation.

2. Sociality — deception.

The Buddha is still right: every mode of existence is radically impermanent, even if the form of impermanence switches from isolation to misinformation. Or to express it as two Shakespearean alternatives:

1. To be or not to be

2. To be is to be with

To not be (suicide) or to be with (politics): which one is it?

Part II in the following email

We are in global lockdown. It's a human first – people across the planet staying home or curtailing work for the same reason. That's just a few months after humans and wildlife across Australia, the Amazon and the western United States lost homes and lives due to fires. One month we are forced to stay home and the next month forced to to flee. When nature knocks, you never know what you have to do.

But this isn't pure nature; neither the fires nor the pandemic happen in the absence of complex human systems that lashes every species together on this planet. If it's not climate change or the collapse of bee populations, it's the flu – tomorrow's disaster will be different from today's. And yet, we are high on the illusion of control.

Pardon my pun: the bug is a feature.

Complex systems fail in mysterious ways. Human beings – I know, not all humans – have cheapened nature, turned it into widgets sold as the fulfillment of our desires while making money for a chosen few. Looks like nature is striking back. A hundred plus years ago, unions arose as humans banded together to demand a better deal from capital. While they succeeded somewhat – hello five day workweek, hello collective bargaining – capital has only grown and grown since. This time, the protests will be led by a wilder menagerie. From microbes to mountains, the non-human world is striking against human-made systems. We have no clue how to respond. Put another way:

The single biggest challenge of the 21st century is planetary governance, of creating systems that help human and nonhuman beings flourish everywhere on earth.

I have written about planetary governance on other occasions – here and here for example – but it's been sporadic so far. The challenge requires consistent concern even to understand what we are facing let alone respond with wisdom. Being a nerd, my way of expressing concern is to read books in order to read the world. Here are some books I want to read:

• D’Arcy Thompson, “On Growth and Form.”

• Jakob Von Uexkull, “ A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Men”

• Christopher Alexander et. al., “A Pattern Language.”

• Tarthang Tulku, “Time, Space and Knowledge.”

• The Jataka – in two renditions: Sarah Janet Shaw's and a translation of Aryashura's Jatakamala.

• Basho, Narrow Road to the Deep North.

• Richard Powers, "The Overstory"

• James Jerome Gibson, “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception”

• Eduardo Kohn, "How Forests Think"

• Lovelock, "Gaia".

• Bruno Latour, "Facing Gaia"

and of course:

• The Adi Parva of the Mahabharata with close attention to the burning of the Khandava forest.

And not just them – there will be others shining a light further down the road. It's a deliberately eclectic list of compelling visions. They don't have a monopoly on the truth but I will be thinking with them and thinking through them. What's not in the list: the usual suspects talking about the end of nature or the climate emergency. Everyone knows what they are saying.

Goal: write an essay one or two times a week connecting the reading of these books to a reading of the world hoping the weekly meditation will clarify the question of planetary governance.

Week One: Infecting India

The WHO declared a few hours ago that the COVID 19 infection is officially a pandemic. Every pandemic lives in the shadow of the Spanish Flu towards the end of the first world war. That was quite the terror – killing between fifty and a hundred million people worldwide, more than the war itself, the bloodiest affair in human history until then.

There's a lot to be learnt from that sorry episode. For one, it's called the Spanish Flu not because the disease originated in Spain, but because Spain was neutral in the first world war and therefore didn't censor news about the disease. In contrast

President Woodrow Wilson was so focused on winning World War I that he would not listen to repeated warnings about the pandemic from the chiefs of the Army and Navy, or even from his own personal physician. The U.S. ended up losing 675,000 lives to influenza, compared with 53,000 killed in combat in World War I.

However, like much else, the impact of the disease was greatest in poorer countries, especially ones that couldn't control their destiny. The country that suffered the most was (British) India, where estimates of mortalities run from ~ 14 million to ~20 million. There are doubts about the higher end of the estimate, but even at the lower end the Spanish Flu killed about 5% of the Indian population a century ago.

Astounding.

I have been hearing since high school that the first world war was a turning point in the Indian freedom struggle, that soldiers returning from the killing fields of Europe wanted a nation of their own and when that demand was refused the mass independence struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi went from strength to strength. It's not as if we don't remember other incidents from that period: everyone has heard about the massacre in Jallianwala Bagh on 13th April 1919 and how that shook the legitimacy of the empire. I bet more Indians died of the Spanish Flu that day and every day for a few months before and after. We have also heard in more recent years about the famines that accompanied colonial rule, ending with the Bengal famine during the second world war.

In contrast, the Spanish Flu isn't taught in school history, it isn't part of our collective consciousness of colonial rule and its deep impact on Indian demography is mostly unknown. The brutality of colonial rule, its impoverishment of the Indian countryside, its racial and cultural hierarchies have all been assimilated into the folklore of independent India, but the pandemic that killed one in twenty Indians is not mentioned at all. I find that surprising. Not only did the Flu kill by the millions, it struck able bodied adults as much as the old and the young, which means it must have caused immense economic damage too. Chances are if I dig into my family history, there will be a death or two in it. Yet there's no public memory whatsoever.

I had no reason to think about the Spanish flu and its impact on India until two years ago, when the hundredth anniversary of the pandemic brought a flurry of media attention. Among the many pieces written then was this one by Laura Spinney in the Caravan. Spinney says in her article

When the second wave of the flu arrived in Bombay in September 1918, almost certainly with an infected troopship returning from Europe, the data revealed a big spike in mortality in the Bombay Presidency.

Jallianwala Bagh happened a few months after the most brutal phase of the Spanish Flu. Surely the spread of the disease must have stressed a British administration dealing with hundreds of thousands of returning soldiers who were asking for freedom and infecting the population. Was there a relation between the outbreak of disease and the intensification of authoritarian impulses in the colonial regime?

Spinney wrote a book on the Spanish Flu where she says

The flu resculpted human populations more radically than anything since the Black Death. It influenced the course of the First World War and, arguably, contributed to the Second. It pushed India closer to independence, South Africa closer to apartheid, and Switzerland to the brink of civil war.

Interesting. The modern world was made by epidemics, starting with the Colombian Exchange. Jung wrote about the "collective unconscious;"perhaps it's time to write about the viral unconscious – a deep link between bugs, guts, brain and society that shapes our views over time and space. Should be part of any exploration of the nonhuman background of the human world shouldn't it?

Let's place a bookmark there and get back to India and influenza.

It wouldn't be surprising if the Spanish Flu informed how British authorities approached colonial governance. Epidemics were a known spur for draconian behavior: as it so turns out, just yesterday Karnataka invoked the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897, a British law created to address the plague of 1896. The British invoked the full force of the state to respond to epidemics, both to show they were on top of things and to strengthen their authority over the Indian population. China is doing the same thing today. Pale Rider sayeth:

As for the Indians on the receiving end of these measures, they came to see hospitals as ‘places of torture and places intended to provide material for experiments’. Indeed, in 1897, the head of the Pune Plague Committee, Walter Charles Rand, was murdered by three local brothers, the Chapekars, who were hanged for their crime

What's it about natural disasters that provokes political violence? What does that mean for our future? India is going through an authoritarian phase right now: will the fear of a pandemic be used as an excuse to tighten the screws on the populace? Will it work?

We can't answer these questions today but what we can say for sure is that the "real" epidemic is being accompanied by a virtual epidemic of fake news. Social media, especially YouTube and Whatsapp are playing an immensely harmful role in driving paranoid ideas about the Corona virus into the public sphere. The paranoid public sphere was in full display a week ago during the Delhi riots incited by 'viral' messages about Muslims. The COVID 19 outbreak is acting as a positive feedback loop for that paranoid outlook, which is in danger of becoming a generalized worldview.

No surprise there: the connection between disease metaphors and authoritarian politics is deep and what better when the two are juxtaposed in the real world?

I will turn to the deep and troubling relationship between virality in the real world and virality in the virtual world in my next essay.

Introduction

I have written a few hundred essays over the last five years, with a year and a half in the middle being devoted to a single text, the Mahabharata. I might start the Jayary again this fall, prompted by a seminar I am organizing this semester.

The Mahabharata is unique in that it starts with a post-apocalyptic scenario: a great war has ended, killing everyone except for seven survivors, a death toll of millions. There’s recognition that the old order has ended, that it was unsustainable and that its end came despite the societies of that time being led by people considered "good" by the standards of the time.

Perhaps we too are such a society, led by regimes with some legitimacy but collectively heading towards a transition that we can't plan for or avoid. What form will that transition take? What will be washed away? Those are the questions that I keep returning to, provoking a meandering journey through the forty two gates of knowledge.

To put it simply, there's an itch I want to scratch, but each time I scratch one spot, it starts itching in another. I don't want the itch to go away, but I would like to know the source of the irritation.

Mission accomplished last week: I found the source. I bet you're itching to learn what I found. Here's a clue:

Elrond: "This peril belongs to all Middle-Earth. They must decide now how to end it."

Elrond: "The time of the Elves is over — my people are leaving these shores. Who will you look to when we've gone? The Dwarves?

Gandalf: "It is in Men that we must place our hope."

One of my (many) favorite lines in the Lord of the Rings, describing a world that's about to pass. If you haven't read the books, here's the premise: the dark lord has emerged from his hideout and is gathering his forces. If he wins, game over: everyone's dead or his slave. If the good guys manage to defeat him, the dharma of the elves is fulfilled and they have to fade away.

Either way, one yuga is over and another is about to begin.

Fast forward a few thousand (or is it million?) years and we are at a crossroads once again. Just as the elves had to fade away after Sauron's defeat, we might have to fade away too: except that we are the good guys and the bad guys, so if our bad guys win, we are all done for and if our good guys win, we will have to make away for something else.

What I don't know is whether the future will transform the world we have created over the last seventy five years after the end of the second world war, or the world we have created as a settled species over the last ten thousand years. I tend towards the latter, hence the sensationalist slogan:

The age of men is ending.

Whether it's a rejection of the last 75 years or of the last 7500, we are in for a great unsettling.

Photographer: Patrick Hendry | Source: Unsplash

Apocalypse?

Let's get rid of the Sauron scenario first: I am not thinking apocalyptically. Major violence is almost certain, but I am skeptical about futures lacking in humanity altogether.

Let's say all of Eurasia outside Siberia becomes uninhabitable because of climate change and Russia refuses to change its immigration policy in response, leading to pitched battles over migration and settlement. How many people do you think will die? A few hundred million? A billion? It would still be a smaller loss, relative to population, than what happened in China over the 13th century after the Mongol invasions, when a population of 120 million collapsed to 60 million over six decades.

Even if we are left with a human population of 4 billion in 2100 - undoubtedly the outcome of the greatest disasters in the history of humanity - it will still leave enough humans that the species is not threatened. In other words, whatever happens, there are going to be people left on earth. Lots of people.

The real question is: who will they be and how will they live?

Settler Humanity

For most of human history, we were a mobile species. It's only with settled agriculture sometime in the last ten thousand odd years that we became "rooted." It's fair to say that what we call history is nothing but the chronicles of settler humanity; even when they were conquered by nomadic tribes - the Mongol invasions for example - it was in order to loot or skim off the wealth created by settler humanity.

In fact, the concept of wealth is a settler concept; a mobile species has no reason to accumulate.

Settler humanity has won to such a large extent that for most people including me, the only ways of life are rural or urban, i.e., agricultural settler humanity and industrial/post-industrial settler humanity. Non-settler humanities - often captured by the blanket term "indigenous peoples" - are barely 5% of the human population and every single one of them lives at the mercy of settlers.

I will not recall the long and torturous expansion of settler humanity across the globe, the waxing and waning of agrarian and industrial civilizations. We can say that all of that came to a head in the second world war, at the end of which were two "final settlements" that vied for support across the world: communist society and liberal democracy.

In the history we have written so far, one of them won and the other lost. I am thinking that's that not the final verdict for they were both heading towards the wrong finish line.

When the Soviet Union fell, scholars such as Fukuyama thought we had arrived at a secular, this-worldly end of all times. In that moment of triumph, liberal capitalist democracy represented the end of history, a city on the hill that approximates the universal ideals of settler humanity. Which is to say that after an agonizing journey filled with disease and violence and predatory social relations that extracted wealth from the majority of toiling humans, we had created the institutional framework that made most people happy most of the time.

I think Fukuyama was right, in that all that toil and struggle produced a brief period under US hegemony when it seemed like a global settler human will become the universal ideal. Unfortunately, that ride into the sunset turned out to be a short stroll to the edge of the abyss. Instead of a final settlement, we are the beginning of a great unsettling, where every idea, ideal and institution of ours will be questioned, rejected, transformed or destroyed.

To give just one example: do you think we can continue to live in a world of sovereign nation states when hundreds of millions of people are desperate to migrate with their lands running out of water and their oceans frosting their fields with salt?

I have a hard time believing in that settled future.

There are many many other unsettlings waiting to happen and I hope to chronicle some of them. While there are many objects that catch my fancy, ultimately, my essays are a dairy of the great unsettling. And when I turn to the Mahabharata, I read another era's retelling of their great unsettling and the painful recreation of a world worth living. That's the source of my itch.

There's still uncertainty over what will be unsettled: will it be the post-world war liberal order or will it be all of human history? I tend towards the latter, which is what I mean by the claim "the age of men is ending," but even a rejection of the last seventy five years will be a great unsettling.

Caveat: Dramatic claims need extraordinary evidence. I am not arrogant enough to think one essay is enough evidence in the court of the cosmos. I am arrogant enough to think that an essay can make that claim vivid enough that further evidence will make it plausible and ninety three volumes later, lay the foundation of a cult in my name.

Meanwhile, as an educator, the great unsettling prompts some questions about learning to live through the shift -

• how to imagine life as we enter that phase?

• what skills will help us navigate its uncertainties?

• and most importantly for me professionally - how will the world of knowledge be unsettled?

I will leave you with a diagram that captures my answer to that question. More about it next week.

This is the last newsletter for awhile!

The League of Nations

When I was younger, I was a big fan of world government. I remember reading about Einstein's support for such a state of affairs and understood the appeal after the disasters of the two world wars. I was even willing to excuse the idiocy of the existing attempts at global governance - the League of Nations and the United Nations.

What kind of government can we expect from an institution in which two out of five permanent seats belong to seventh rate hasbeens such as England and France. Shouldn't the entire western world - and I include the US and Russia in that list - have one seat in total? Otherwise the UN should be razed to the ground.

As you might guess, I have soured on the prospect of world government. Not only because the system is rigged in favour of the imperialists but because government is fundamentally about power, not freedom. Especially when it's being formed - it's always easier to talk about democracy and freedom after getting rid of all opponents. Governance's obsession with power makes the system unstable.

Sure, but why this talk about world government in the context of the Jaya, especially when I want to end the year with a discussion of divinity?

Because the state killed God.

While organized religion also exerts power, it's founded on submission to a higher power. The state bows to no one - it's a sovereign and the power hunger of that sovereignty made it easier for the state to usurp power from the church. The church might have persecuted its heretics but its violence is nothing in comparison to what the Spanish state did in Latin America.

The Jaya is a warning to those who believe in overweening state power. The Pandavas and the Kauravas are fighting over the right to establish imperial authority. They don't even listen to the gods in their quest for dominance. We know how that ends.

Feature or Bug?

The normal understanding of the Jaya has the Pandavas as the good guys and the Kauravas as the bad guys. Of course there are parts of India where Duryodhana is worshipped - there's no rule to which we don't find an exception. Digging a bit deeper, we find that the Pandavas aren't all that good and the Kauravas aren't all that bad.

In fact, they are both fighting over the same prize. It's Yudhisthira who orders the burning of the Khandava forest. It's Yudhisthira's crowning himself chakravartin in Indraprastha that precipitates the fratricidal struggle: Duryodhana might have been happy if Yudhisthira was merely a fellow king, but he couldn't stand him as an emperor.

All of which prompts a question: what if both sides are the bad guys?

If so, we have an entirely new picture of divinity. When Krishna says the famous words "yada yada..." we take it to mean that he will take birth on earth to vanquish adharma, by which we understand the greed of the Kauravas. What if he took birth to vanquish adharma in the form of both the Pandavas and the Kauravas, or more generally, the imperial drive?

We know that the war ends with seven survivors out of millions of combatants. Was that bug or a feature?

The Real War

A few years ago, an anti-corruption movement arose in India as if out of nothing. It coincided with other popular movements in the middle east and in Ukraine and had some of the same characteristics. The movement was led by an unlikely figure - Anna Hazare - who transported himself to the national capital from rural Maharashtra for the occasion.

That movement catapulted two men into power, neither of whom is Anna Hazare. One is now the chief minister of Delhi. The other is the prime minister of India. It's clear to me that Old Man Hazare was played.

I am reminded of those heady times when I think about the history of God. It strikes me that humans put God on the throne only to overthrow him when the time was ripe. If I had to think of the perfect way to orchestrate a materialist regime, it would consist of two steps:

1. Deny every other deity besides the one true deity. Drive all other gods from the earth.

2. Organize a coup against the sole remaining God - he's out of sight anyway.

Isn't that what we have done? Materialism-secularism isn't a reaction to religion; it's the natural conclusion. In contrast, the Jaya says: watch it, for when things get out of hand, I will come and wipe the slate clean.

I am going to end 2016's Jayary with that thought: that the real battle in the Mahabharata was not between one cousin and another or the good guys against the bad guys. Instead it was a struggle between divinity and humanity.

Farewell

It's the last day of the year. I send out my newsletter every Friday but for obvious reasons I thought I should wait one extra day.

The Jayary has been the most interesting project I have undertaken and the most difficult one. It's a form of insanity, not to say narcissism, to unleash one's ambitions against a mountain.

Like every good bhakt, I too want to say "I have learned a lot from this experience," and that would be true. I can also add a couple of cliches about miles to go before sleeping and knowing that I don't know and those cliches would be accurate as well.

But the cliches can wait. I am exhausted. I like reading everyday. I like writing everyday. I even like reading and writing every day. But reading and writing everyday about the same topic and to retain a continuous thread while doing so - that has proven to be more tiring than I ever imagined.

I am going to take a break. No Jaya for a month. Or more.

But when I come back - and I will - I want to go back to the drawing board and craft new tools that will help us imagine and reimagine the Jaya. Not as a novel. Not as a philosophical text. Or rather, both and neither. But most importantly, tools that will help me transplant the Jaya into a medium that's made for it: the web.

Sample thought: if Donald Knuth created TEX to write the books that he wanted to write, what do we need to do to write the Jaya the way we want to write it? There are no firm answers to such questions, only some promising directions that I will explore in 2017 and come back to you in 2018.

Farewell for now.

PS: In the meantime, I will fold this list into the Dharmapolis list where my friend Smitha Rao and I are reading, writing and podcasting about some of the seminal books from the Indian subcontinent. Here's our take on Gandhi's Hind Swaraj if you're interested. We are now reading Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste. If you have recommendations, do pass them along.

Why Sacrifice?

So why did Janamejaya conduct a genocidal sacrifice?

Let's assume that he - or his advisors - desired the genocide. The question wasn't "should we?" but "how should we?" While kshatriyas are within their dharma to bear arms against an enemy, they still need to show that their actions are consistent with kshatriya dharma. Once we ask the question that way, the choice of a sacrifice becomes clear.

If you don't see where I am going, consider Bush's war on Iraq. There too, the question was never "should we invade Iraq?" All of us know that was a foregone conclusion. Instead, the Bush regime wanted to know "how should we invade Iraq?" That's why the whole weapons of mass destruction story was concocted, with Colin Powell making a speech at the UN asserting their existence. That's why the invasion was justified under Iraq's failure to comply with UNSC resolution 1441.

If you want to understand why Janamejaya conducted the sacrifice, try answering the question "why did the aggressors in Iraq bother going through the UN?" The underlying reason is the same: just as violence backed by law is considered justifiable violence, violence backed by sacrifice is also justifiable violence.

By the way, we shouldn't consider this justification as a mere fig leaf. That would be a misunderstanding. Justifiable violence is far more powerful than unjustifiable violence. What's the difference between a dictator and a mafia don? The latter holds a gun to your head and says "pay up or else." His justification is the gun in his hand and because of that, it has to happen behind closed doors. The dictator is more powerful because he holds a gun to your head and says "pay up or else I will have you arrested." His violence is backed by the law so it can be carried out in the open.

The sacrifice, just like the law, provides moral legitimacy to violence.

Sacrificial Governance

One last Jayary about sacrifice.

Let's consider the most violent institution that's ever been invented by humans: the state. Paradoxically, the state conducts its violent affairs by asserting its monopoly over violence. That means I can't kill my neighbour for murdering my son: it's the state's job to do so.

The current consensus is in agreement with the state: we wouldn't want to take matters into our own hands would we? The law backs the state's monopoly, which is underwritten by a constitution that supposedly documents our collective assent to the state's rule. Every constitution I know starts with some form of "we the people...." What does "we the people" even mean?

Anyway, now that the people have signed over their rights to the state, it's the only entity with legal recourse to violence. That's why it can float an army; that's why it can create a police force. The state is the sovereign. Our granting of monopoly rights to the state is the ultimate blank cheque.

What's interesting about the Jaya is how sacrifice replaces the law or a constitution as the legitimizing entity. Jarasandha is able to justify keeping ninety eight kings captive because he's going to sacrifice them one day. Yudhisthira is able to send his brothers in four directions to conquer the earth because that's what he needs to do to conduct the Rajasuya.

What would a state look like if sacrifice was its basis, not a constitution? By the way, I am not saying it will be better or worse. It's pure speculation: what's the shape of governance grounded in sacrifice?

God is Dead

It's time to start wrapping up this year's Jayary - not that I have another year's Jayary planned. I am going to take a break before restarting. But that's for another time: the question at hand is: how to end a year of exploration?

I am going to end the year with thoughts about religion and divinity in the Jaya: today being the day after Christmas after all. Talking about Christmas, it's impossible for us to think about religion without thinking about God. Not gods: God. The dominance of the Abrahamic religions has ensured that this particular interpretation of divinity is part of everyone's background, even if:

1. You don't believe in any god

2. You believe in several gods

3. You have a completely different religious intuition

How would one classify Krishna in this scheme? He's a supreme deity, but also a human who befriends others. He reveals the secret of all secrets but he's killed like any other mortal creature. How do we reconcile this hybrid being with an omniscient God?

Then there's the additional problem that God is dead. I am not the first person to make that claim, and Nietzsche who famously uttered that phrase was only diagnosing the disease. The movement to eject divinity from human experience has a long history; arguably, the history of civilization is the history of gods vanishing from the earth.

In the Biblical story of Genesis, God ejected Adam and Eve from Eden, but one might equally well say that the human earth (given unto us to go forth and multiply) is a world without divinity.

Bottom of the Pyramid Divinity

Whether true or not, there's this widespread belief that mammals survived the asteroid strike because they were small and adaptable while the reigning species - the dinosaurs - died out. Of course, it's also true that most individual mammals and perhaps most mammalian species also died out, but what was merely a catastrophe for mammals was an apocalypse for the dinosaurs.

Let's say that modernity is the asteroid attack on divinity. It's killed God, but perhaps the gods are luckier. I am thinking of a chalu god like Ganesha who rides on a mouse - exactly the kind of animal we think avoided the asteroid. Ganesha is such a protean deity that he's even willing to take dictation from a human being. We have the Jaya only because the elephant god agreed to be Vyasa's scribe.

Plus, the divine Boswell is not even as smart as his Johnson: the god has to be extra careful whenever Vyasa throws a googly at him, which gives the human author time to compose further verses. I very much like the idea of a god with limits.

You can guess where I am going: the omnipotent God who rules over the universe from above is a non-starter today: not even wrong in Pauli's terms. But it's an equally big mistake to assume that divinity can only occupy the apex of the food chain.

Sacrifice and Deep Embodiment

I am going to retire the term "Deep Embodiment" in a minute; it's a phrase better reserved for research papers, but one final academic rant before I set it aside.

The fundamental idea of deep embodiment is that any liberation we can hope for is liberation in this world. I want to highlight this point because the Indian philosophical and religious traditions are often caricatured as other-worldly, an impression that's been actively supported by Indians seeking an alternative to western dominance. "Western Body, Eastern Mind" goes some way to capture this caricature, pointing to a shangri-la tilled by massive industrial combines under the benevolent gaze of orange robed mystics.

I don't believe that caricature one bit. An abstract belief in a supernatural god is otherworldly. In contrast, karma is central to every major Indian tradition. There's nothing otherworldly about karma. Even better: if we are in some other world, we will be subject to that world's karma. In short, karma is the logic of deep embodiment.

No wonder that sacrifice plays such an important role in Indian religion: sacrifice is the means through which we work through the dross of this world. The Jaya is the longest sacrificial manual in the world. Unfortunately, there's no going around the fact that sacrifices are often literal: sacrifices of the flesh. Which brings me to my next Jayary topic: the relationship between violence and dharma.

Universal Violence

The first major event in the Jaya is the snake sacrifice. The snake king Takshaka is the ostensible target of the sacrifice but Janamejaya is persuaded to take genocidal revenge for his father's death by killing every snake in the world. Isn't that what Dubya did: taking revenge on all of Iraq to get at Saddam Hussein?

The revenge part should be familiar to us, but why organize a sacrifice to do so? Why not go out and shoot every snake you can find? Or marshall your forces for a war against the snakes? If anything, the Jaya reverses the relationship: the war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas is subsumed within the larger history of sacrifice.

Why is sacrifice so important? It's got to do with violence.

Siddhartha leaves home because the reality of suffering hits him in the face; but that suffering is a bit passive isn't it: sickness, old age, i.e., events that feel natural as opposed to intentional. But sickness and old age aren't the only way we suffer: we also suffer from wars and famines, and if we look far back into prehistory, we also suffered from predation. It's not just suffering that colours our world: violence is at its core.

What can we do about universal violence? One answer: organize sacrifices.

Sacrifice and the Law

Sacrifice is a generative concept, just like the concept law.

There are laws everywhere: we have laws that govern human affairs, we have the concept of divine law and we have the laws of nature. These laws vary in their ferocity, from the absolute commandments that God gave to Moses (or the axioms of set theory for that matter) to the humanly interpretable laws that govern the complaints that fill our courts. We consider a body of work to be a science to the extent that its findings are captured by laws.

Sacrifice is similar. While its origins might lie in specific rituals, there's a clear sense that the sacrifice transcends any specific domain. When interiorized, it becomes yoga. When exteriorized, it becomes the wheel of the dharma. If karma is universal, so is sacrifice, for it's in sacrifice that karma is created, maintained and destroyed.

Having grasped the concept of the law, we are obsessed with ensuring that it delivers on its original promise: a complete, consistent and certain system for grasping the world. Now we know that isn't possible. The law breaks down when you take it to its limits.

What is the corresponding promise for sacrifice? I don't know, but it can't be certainty. Unlike the law, sacrifice isn't infallible. Having eliminated Jarasandha and conducted the rajasuya, Yudhisthira should have remained a chakravartin for ever. Instead, he's in a forest wearing bark.

The Knife's Edge

Why did the Pandavas spend thirteen years in the wilderness? Or, to put it somewhat differently: why were the Pandavas banished for thirteen years? Why did they agree?

That's the question I have been working toward in the last few Jayaries. Thirteen years is a long time in a human being's life, even by the superhuman standards of the Pandavas and Kauravas. It's long enough that you're no longer a contender for power when you re-emerge. It takes an extraordinary person - A Mandela, a Gandhi - to retain power despite being sent away for such long periods.

The answer I am working out can be stated simply: if you want to follow the dharma, you have to be ready for long periods of exile while you rework your understanding of its principles. In other words, cultivation of the dharma takes a long time, especially when your earlier understanding has been shown to be flawed.

If you agree with my assessment, you will also find yourself agreeing with Yudhisthira's behaviour during the years of exile. Why was he talking to rishis instead of building an army? Why does he listen to so many stories: Nala and Damayanti, Agastya, stories of pilgrimages. Why didn't he renege on his promise to the victorious Kurus?

The answer is simple: Yudhisthira believed that he needed to absorb a new vision of dharma first and renew his quest for power only after doing so. Note that he isn't giving up the pursuit of power; he isn't turning into a rishi. He is a ruler, but he wants to be a dharmic ruler.

It's a knife edge he's walking on. We know that he succeeds after thirteen years but it's a success that kills everyone except a handful. That's why Yudhisthira has to go back to school again in the Shanti Parva.

Continuity

The subtle tension between discrete and continuous dharma marks the epic. It permeates our understanding of some of the deepest ideas of Indian philosophy and religiosity. Consider how the rishis Jaratkaru and Agastya are derailed in their quest for enlightenment by their rat-gnawed ancestors.

The standard model of enlightenment is one of sudden awakening even if it's primed by years of practice. Consider the Buddha's story: he spends years in the forest learning from various teachers, starving himself and pursuing various ascetic methods until he's done with all that mortification. Enlightenment comes quickly after he changes track. Siddhartha becomes the Buddha after two nights of meditation. Not bad. In this story, Nirvana is modeled as a discrete object that comes within the grasp of the ready mind.

It's a model that Jaratkaru and Agastya have adopted before they are awakened by their ancestors. Having spent years in deep tapasya, they are well on their way to becoming Brahmarishis. Why step into the world and work for money or help raise children?

There's no reason at all in the logic of discrete dharma. Unfortunately for them, continuous dharma intrudes itself in the form of ancestral duty. It's different from Yudhisthira's encounter with continuous dharma; but like the exiled king, the two rishi's are rudely interrupted in what might otherwise look like a smooth path toward success.

Why?

The Light Away from Home

Is the yogi absolved of all earthly responsibilities? Even better, do those responsibilities simply disappear with enlightenment? The traditional answer is yes, or I should say, that's the answer of the dominant tradition. From the Buddha to Shankara the yogi seeks the light away from home.

We should take that dominant tradition's advice with a pinch of salt. What about all those people whose capacity to leave home is limited or forbidden? Shouldn't we be concerned that there are so few women in the pantheon of gurus?

The Jaya isn't a liberal text; however, it clearly sides with those who think our responsibilities are responsibilities with or without enlightenment. When Jaratkaru happens upon his ancestors hanging by a fraying thread, they are insistent that no amount of yogic achievement is a substitute for progeny. We are nothing if our bodies don't produce other bodies. If you can't continue the lineage, you're going to hell.

Hidden beneath that advice is a form of deep embodiment, i.e., an understanding that liberation cannot be divorced from this fleshy existence of ours. It gives us a hint that there's a religious worldview that doesn't deny this world; in fact it demands the full acknowledgement of being a worldly creature.

I will flesh out the meaning of deep embodiment - pun intended - in the next Jayary.

Deep Embodiment

There's no doubt that we are earthly creatures: we spend our days seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. The pleasures of the flesh (and the pain of being fleshy) is the rope binding us to every other creature on this earth: not advanced mathematics, not philosophical discourse, not flame wars on the latest social medium.

Every religious system I know tries to escape from our bodily circumstances, though the solutions vary enormously. Some posit a loving God who will take care of us in the afterlife if we do as he says. Some posit the opposite: a vengeful God who will burn us in the afterlife if we don't do as he says. Yet others are agnostic about the existence of God but look for a special state of enlightenment that comes from strenuous meditation.

However they do it, they are all acutely aware that death awaits us and we need a way out. The Jaya is an interesting alternative to these otherworldly religions. Hell awaits men not because they fail to worship a god, not because they refuse to shut their senses, but because they don't want to have children.

How much more fleshy can you get?

Indeed, in this admonition is a tacit understanding of tapasya itself. We have this idea that meditation is a relaxing activity, "reality unplugged." Tapasya is a lot fiercer: etymologically it's tied to heat. It's the burning up of the body.

Perhaps the Jaya is hinting at a counterintuitive proposition: that liberating knowledge is to be found in the deepest strata of our embodiment, not by looking within the body but by looking with the body.

I can't believe this is the 100th Jayary newsletter this year. Only a few more to go.

Two Truths

One of Yudhisthira's virtues - less endearing than his kindness, but still an important virtue - is his truth telling. Yudhisthira never lies. That's why his lie on the battlefield is devastating.

Or is it a lie? Depends on what we mean by truth.

To use a mathematical analogy, there are two orders of truth: discrete and continuous. Discrete truth is tied to language: is this statement you just uttered valid? Can it be backed by evidence? Can it verified by appropriate procedures?

Let's consider the dice game. Yudhisthira agrees to the terms of the sabha knowing full well that Sakuni is a much better gambler. Yudhisthira's dharma is a discrete dharma: having received a challenge, he will assent to its conditions independent of the consequences.

You see Yudhisthira's discrete thinking in his response to the losses during the dice game. "Do you stake your horses?" "Yes, I do." One down. "Do you stake your warriors?" "Yes, I do." One more down. It's almost as if his memory register resets after each throw and he can only respond to the circumstances of the next instance.

Discrete truth might be correct, but it's unstable. Every throw brings the Pandavas closer to ruin. What kind of truth is that?

Discrete Truth

We are easily seduced by language. It's the easiest thing in the world to sign over your inheritance to a predatory company or advisor and then be forced to hand over our wealth when they point out our contractual obligations.

For example, consider software engineers. If you work for a software company, you've probably signed over all your intellectual production to the company, even if you're working on a side project at night on your home computer. They may choose to look the other way as you submit an award winning game to the app store, but in principle they own the IP to your late night labours.

It's not just a question of owning the engineer's intellectual labour: it's also about having that engineer be at her best when she shows up to work at 9:00 AM. An engineer who's up until 2:00 AM coding her side project is not as fresh at 9:00 AM as one who tucked herself in at 10 PM.

Discrete truth does a great job of hitting the bull's eye once but it's terrible at accounting for interests and power relations; much like a dead clock that shows the right time twice a day. Like that dead clock, discrete truth is unstable: it's awfully wrong much of the time.

Wasn't that the crux of Draupadi's complaint when she was dragged into the sabha: who gave this man the authority over my body? When did truth shade into power?

When Words Fail

I am wondering - if it's at all possible to speculate on the motives of a fictional character - whether Yudhisthira's thirteen years in exile was as long as it was because he felt he needed that much time to transcend the limits of discrete dharma.

Sure, he made a mistake by gambling his wealth away, but Yudhisthira could have easily asserted that a game can't be taken seriously. I mean, really, which king has ever walked away as a pauper after a contest? Isn't that what Draupadi and Bhima tell him in the forest: that Kshatriyas believe in arrows, not words?

So why wasn't he being a Kshatriya?

In discrete dharma, words fall squarely on the truth. But, as we have seen, a good aim isn't the only thing we want from our actions. You can train yourself to be really good at throwing darts, but what happens when the target changes shape? Does the truth follow suit?

Discrete dharma is brittle.

I take Yudhisthira's commitment to dharma seriously; while Draupadi and Bhima see the failure of the dice game as an instrumental failure, Yudhisthira must have reflected upon the underlying failure of dharma. How could he have gone so wrong? He's always kept his word, but what to do when words fail?

Widening the Gap

What I like about the Jaya is that there's only a small gap separating the heroes from the villains. Don't believe me? Consider two pairs: Duryodhana and Bhima; Karna and Arjuna.

How different is Duryodhana from Bhima? They were equals in the battleground. They prefer fighting to plotting. Do you remember when Bhima and Draupadi badgered Yudhisthira, asking him to reject the thirteen years of exile and engage the Kauravas in open war?

Isn't that what Duryodhana would have done? In fact, isn't that exactly what he did when he schemed to have the Pandavas burn in the house of lac? Do you think Bhima would have been any different when faced with a five-fold enemy? Do you think Bhima would have treated Draupadi any differently if she had been his cousin's wife and not his own?

As for Karna and Arjuna, we know they're equally matched too. Karna might have even been the better archer; unlike Ekalavya, he wasn't about to cut off his thumb to please his treacherous guru. Unfortunately, the gods didn't smile on his fate as much as they did with Arjuna.

No romps with apsaras in exile. No close relationship with the god of all gods. Angeya's matchup with Dhananjaya is one of equals despite all of those obvious deficits.

The Kauravas and the Pandavas are almost equal. Almost. But that small gap is enough to cause a great war.

Heaven and Earth

The gap between the Pandavas and the Kauravas is symptomatic of an even more important gap: between humans and the gods (and in another track, between humans and other animals).

You have probably seen a photo of God almost touching Adam's hand in the sistine chapel. The tiniest of slivers separates the two, and I guess if you're a Christian, Jesus lives in that gap: he's the Narasimha of the Abrahamic traditions, except that the purpose of his incarnation isn't to rend evil into two, but to suffer nails and jibes with patience.

There's something deeply right about a deity that suffers: why should sickness and death belong to the mortal world alone?

Unfortunately, I think it's too late. Why would a distant god care about this blue planet of ours? Why concern himself with how this greedy species is sucking out all the life from this planet that was ostensibly rendered to its care?

Today, we are increasingly aware of the flaws in a world where it's easier to buy New Zealand apples in the middle of the Delhi summer than to eat a fresh mango grown in a Panipat farm. Distance has its downside. How much more dangerous is it when your deities have left your planet altogether?

I don't believe

There was a time when I was often asked whether I believed in God. It doesn't happen so much any more; liberal adults aren't allowed to be curious about one another. Anyway, my invariable answer was no. Not because I am an atheist or even an agnostic, but because I don't believe. I don't believe in 2+2=4 either.

What good is a belief? The minute you have one, you open yourself to doubt. Is it true? Is it false? If it's true, why is it true?

The precariousness of belief led Descartes into the cave of his own consciousness. It might equally well lead us into complete planetary destruction; solipsistic retreat and unbounded violence strike me as the only logical terminus' of belief.

What's interesting is that the hold of a belief is often in inverse proportion to its believability. Abstractions incite the most fervent beliefs without giving us any grounds for doing so. Like that belief in God - again remember that the fault is not that of the God or gods, but of the faculty of belief itself.

If God is the source of a large number of unsupported beliefs, power is another. Control over a nation or kingdom. What does that mean? What does it mean to have private property? We behave as if these terms are completely transparent, but do we really think that the belief in private property is any more supportable than the belief in a six armed goddess?

Duryodhana's belief in power was his undoing. Then again, heroes are supposed to believe in power aren't they? Yudhisthira, Arjuna and Karna might have disagreed, but they were unable to stop the belief in power from running amuck. Or, to flip the equation, they were victims of the power of belief.

The Jaya warns us about the flaws in both natural and supernatural superstitions.

Ritual

If not belief, then what is dharma? The Jaya alludes to an answer: ritual.

I read Arjuna's crisis at the beginning of the war as a crisis of belief. It's no surprise that he appears Hamlet like to us, vacillating between his belief in the warrior ethic and his concern for his elders and his relatives.

Krishna tells him to set aside his concern and focus on his ritual obligations. A kshatriya has to fight: doubts about the dharma of war are above his pay grade.

Can we accept this alternate theory of dharma as ritual action?

I find myself unable to believe that ritual is the antidote to belief. It seems like another sub-optimal solution to a deeper problem: how to engage with abstraction powered human ambition? We can't set aside our fascination for abstractions (at least I can't) and we can't prevent abstractions from running out of control either.

In Hind Swaraj, Gandhi blames machines for the violence of empire. I am not going to repeat his arguments here, but it's clear that one line of thinking about abstraction ends with machines. Provably so, since Turing Machines are the most general abstractions that we can conceive - as far as we know.

But machines are in a long line of abstraction that starts with God, belief and ritual and ever since we have had those thoughts (about God, belief and ritual) we have been in one sort of trouble or the other.

The Serpent and the Rope

The Serpent and the Rope. First, the serpent.

A loaded metaphor, if ever there's one: serpents are a sign of evil, a sign of greed and a sign of danger. Snakes play all three roles in the Jaya, but the sacrifice at the beginning is triggered by Takshaka's greed: the naga king steals the earrings that Uttanka was taking to his guru's wife as dakshina.

As we know, brahmins are quick to anger. The loss of wealth prompts Uttanka to urge Janamejaya to avenge Parikshit's death by killing all the snakes in the world. Which prompts me to ask two questions of the king and his instigator:

1. Why kill every snake for the deeds of their king? Sure, Takshaka should be brought to justice for killing Parikshit, but why kill every single snake in the realm? Where does genocidal rage come from?

2. Why do we not pay attention to the guru's wife and her greed? She desired jewellry worthy of a queen. Is that a legitimate desire? Let's turn it up another notch: should anyone - queen or commoner - desire jewellry that can prompt a genocide?

However we look at it, the snake is a symbol of everything slippery, explosive or uncontrollable. What Nietzsche would call the Dionysian rather than the Apollonian aspect of our nature. What if reality itself was snake-like? That's brings us to the rope.

Slipping Away

We know the standard version of the serpent and the rope: let's say you're walking down a dimly lit path in Hosur while talking to a friend and almost stumble upon a serpentine object. Do you run away or keep walking?

Most people would run away: there's no cost to running away - though startling a snake might be a bad idea whether you keep walking or run backwards. A false positive is OK; a false negative could be fatal.

Descartes inaugurates an interesting version of the serpent and the rope. He says that you can never be sure if there's a serpent or a rope, but you can be sure that you saw a serpent. You are certain of what you experience, whether it's a hallucination or reality.

Is that really true? By the time I am done experiencing, the experience itself is in the past: at best, what I can be certain of is that I have the memory of experiencing a snake. Even that's shaky, actually: by the time, you are done having that memory, it too is in the past and the best you can do is have a certain memory of a memory of experiencing a snake.

And so the snake keeps slipping away: there's no avoiding infinite regress in the space of memories. Certainty can't be found in experience. That's why philosophers turned to logic and mathematics: even the devil can't deny that 2+2 = 4.

Expanding the Gap

Descartes was worried that the devil might prevent him from seeing the world as it is: making him see a snake when there's nothing more than a rope. Or worse: substitute a rope for a snake. So he retreated inward to the certainties of perceptual experience, to be replaced later by the certainties of logic.

I am not being fully accurate: Descartes had a more radical worry than a rope being replaced by a snake. Instead, what if an object out there - let's say, an apple - was replaced in perception by something entirely different: a snake. In other words, what if the relationship between perception and reality is entirely random?

The Rope-Snake model starts from a different assumption: that perception and reality are correlated, if not the same. It's possible to mistake a rope for a snake, but not an apple for a snake. If so, reality is never too far; even the illusion has a built in link to the real thing. It's more like predicting a victory for Clinton and missing out on the Trump groundswell, but as my leftist comrades will tell you, the gap between the two isn't that large.

Which isn't to say that the gap, however small, isn't important. While the Christian thinker is worried about eternal damnation and metaphysical errors, the Jaya takes a different perspective: it says that a small gap between the rope and the snake can expand and expand until there's a wide chasm separating the two.

Idea Two: Writing

Speech flows out of our mouths like a river but there's no ocean for it to flow into. It's as if all those words are consigned to the flames the minute we walk away from the conversation.

That's a real problem, for how do we keep people to their promises? How do we record the happenings of our world for future generations?

There are several solutions. The one we are most familiar with is: writing. The written word helps us record transactions, sign contracts and own property.

The written word creates a written world. Writing is so pervasive that even when we are talking, we are often writing. Consider the bride and the groom who seal their wedding with an "I do." You would think that's a purely oral speech act.

Of course not.

While the bride and the groom and their witnesses (the priest and the audience) hear the oral testimony, it's the recording of that "I do" in the books that makes it a contract. Even if just the utterance "I do" is legally binding, it's only so because of the background of a written world in which most contracts are written.

Oral texts rarely have a "standard" version but once a text is written, we can ask about the critical version, variants and corruptions. The critical version of the Mahabharata is an example of written thinking applied to the oral world. That desire to recover the original text is deeply embedded in the task of writing, which is why written culture spawns fundamentalism. There's a strong impulse to return back to the original text, whether that text is the Bible or the laws of nature.

Idea Three: Itihasm

Speech is unstable; if it's not recorded it vanishes, causing problems for all concerned. Writing solves the problem of instability by freezing the oral world. It's a bit like turning a gas into a solid.

There's another solution: turn the gas into a liquid instead. Not that I need to tell you, but liquids are more stable than gases, but they are more fluid than solids. That's a valuable feature for many purposes.

For one, the liquid can be stored just like solids: just let the liquid flow into an ocean if you want a massive store. At the same time, the liquid circulates better: it can be easily turned into vapour and it has much internal movement as well.

That's what the Jaya does by creating a collective ocean of oral understanding and a stock of stories that can be used and reused by everyone. That also explains why some common tropes in the liquid world of reusable stories are anathema in the solid world of standalone texts. Both Jaratkaru and Agastya have the same encounter with their ancestors and that's perfectly fine in a liquid text. A modern writer would be condemned for writing such a book: she would be condemned for her lack of creativity, or worse, accused of plagiarism.

I have been using the term itihasm to suggest that such an ocean of understanding is both desirable and worth creating for many purposes.

Idea Four: Fragility

I have been talking about how speech is fragile, for it's here now and gone the next second, but that's not a property of speech alone. For one, speech is a special case of sound and sound is generally fragile. Thunderclaps are as evanescent as promises. Fragility isn't always a liability; it can be haunting too. Isn't that the secret to the siren's seductive powers?

What about touch? Once your hand leaves a surface the feeling of texture and volume is gone. You probably remember your grandmother's face. Can you tell me what it's like to touch her hands?

Smell and taste: even more so. All our senses - excepting vision - are treacherous. I will come to vision later.

The fragility of our senses reinforces the fragility of our world. Jaratkaru and Agastya's are reminders of that fragility - they know that our senses are failing from the moment we're born; without children, it doesn't matter what we do in this world. Darwin - and Dawkins - would be pleased at their insight.

Plato had a different insight into fragility. He didn't trust this world at all, preferring to sing the praises of the world of pure ideas. Ideas, along with vision, have been the metaphors for eternal reality for a long time. Writing makes those metaphors real.

Idea Five: Stability

Vision is the only human sense - and touch to a lesser extent - that lends stability to our world. If I take my eyes off the computer screen in front of me, I know that it will be right there when I refocus my eyes.

No such guarantees about sounds, smells and tastes. It's not a coincidence that sound and smell and taste are temporal senses while vision is primarily a spatial sense; even motion is seen against a background.

Touch is a little different: it's got both space and time in it. The keyboard beneath my fingers does feel about the same when I touch it every time. I can also run my fingers over the keyboard and experience a temporal event via touch. Touch is universal that way.

But touch's scope is limited, which vision has a much wider field. Of course, without touch we have no sense of real reality, but that's a different question from stability. Vision helps us have a stable illusion while touch has the best access to an extra-mental reality.

I know, I know: no mention of the Jaya in this discussion of stability, but it's intimately related to the previous idea about fragility. Together, they are at the core of deshakala, and what is the Jaya if not a chronicle of the human (and more than human) condition?

Switch and Hold

I could go on and on about the subtleties of causation and inference, but what's the point? Is there a relationship with the Jaya? Or more narrowly, is there a relationship with the four archetypal figures: Jaratkaru, Garuda, Damayanti and Agastya?

The first doubt is easy to answer: the itihasmic style allows for infinite digression as long as the topic is interesting. I think inference and causality are interesting. Don't you? There's a further reason: reading and absorbing a story such as the Mahabharata requires cognitive resources that have atrophied in the literate world.

The Jaya is a special kind of conversation: the entire story is narrated as a dialogue within a dialogue within a dialogue within a dialogue. Ugrasrava recounts to Saunaka how Vaisampayana told the story of the Pandavas to their successor, Janamejaya. In turn Vaisampayana hears the story from Vyasa himself, who, arguably, overheard Sanjaya telling the story to Dhritarashtra.

Oral conversation is fluid; it can switch from topic to topic while maintaining common ground between speaker and listener. The Jaya expands that style enormously; it's a year long, if not lifelong, conversation in which each speaker talks for a month before passing the mike to another speaker.

It's assumed that the audience has the capacity to hold that long a dialogue in memory and switch topics whenever needed. We will need those skills if we are to get grips on the multi-headed hydra that's the modern world. Why not? It's just a matter of training: the average mathematician can hold a book long exposition of calculus in memory.

Plus, that "switch and hold" model is eminently suited to the web, which is a fantastically fluid medium. If I may say so, switch and hold addresses the attention deficit disorder that the web imposes on us all while profiting from the hyperfluidity of the medium.

Which is my way of saying that we need to deal with digressions. What about the four archetypes? Unfortunately, I will not answer the question here. Today's Jayary is the last Jayary of November and like I did in June, I am going to spend December picking out itihasmic snippets.

The story of those four archetypes is for next year. And in book form.

The Hilbert Hotel of Stories

December 1st. I am tired. It's been an exhausting trip through the Jaya. The daily discipline is both freeing and severely restrictive. Reading everyday is hard; writing everyday makes it that much harder.

But today being the first day of the last month, I can look back while peering ahead. The future's never certain, but I know what I want to do next: 2017's project is to write a book introducing the concept of the Jayary as a mutual digestive exercise. This first round will revolve around four important but peripheral characters - Jaratkaru (or his son, Astika), Garuda, Damayanti and Agastya. Mahabharata eats world. World eats Mahabharata.

But how exactly are we going to eat? Is it a one course meal? A buffet? A seventy two hour long South Indian wedding feast?

Fortunately, I have given myself an infinite amount of time to answer such questions. I guess that makes it an infinite buffet married to an infinitely long South Indian wedding, like a Hilbert hotel of stories.

Having said that, there's one idea I want to get out there now: that the protean Jaya is exactly the cognitive tool we need to grasp modernity.

That's what I have learned this year.

Now it's time to go back to the beginning and surface thirty important ideas: one for each day of the rest of this month.

Idea One: Speech

Idea One: Speech. Why does the Jaya have to be (re)told? Why can't it be written?

Note: telling doesn't have to be oral, and writing doesn't have to be on paper.

The Jaya makes much of its "recounted" quality. When Ugrasrava encounters Sounaka in the Naimisharanya forest, he's asked where he's coming from. Ugrasrava says "I am coming from the great recital of the Jaya by Vaisampayana in front of Janamejaya and other great beings."

Sounaka responds "tell us what you heard, O Souti, for this story contains the truth of all scriptures."

From the beginning, the Jaya establishes a lineage of hearers and reciters. By doing so, it also establishes continuity. Is it just the lack of the written word? Would they have simply read the latest installment in a weekly magazine if the epic had been written in the Victorian era?

Perhaps, but that doesn't mean erase the advantages of telling. The oral tale lives in time. Unlike the written text which only lives in space, time being frozen by the act of writing. An oral text is also not a discrete text - it's always been heard before. Recall A.K Ramanujan's famous claim that no Indian ever hears the Mahabharata for the first time.

You would think that a temporal method has advantages when telling the history of all being. The Jaya needs to be told, even if it's with moving text on a screen.

Storytime

Story time, as we know is not the same as real time. In the Adi Parva Jaratkaru is forced by his beleaguered ancestors to bear a child and continue their lineage. Two thousands pages later, Agastya becomes a householder after running into his beleaguered ancestors.

There's no doubt that Agastya's story echoes Jaratkaru's story; they're almost identical. You could say that Jaratkaru makes Agastya possible within the logic of the story.

Of course, Agastya precedes Jaratkaru in mythic time - Astika, who is Jaratkaru's son saves the snakes from being decimated by Janamejaya. Since Janamejaya is Arjuna's great-grandson, Jaratkaru is roughly a generation younger than Yudhisthira. Agastya, is a much older figure. We hear his story in the Vana parva as part of the long series of conversations between Dharmaraja and the rishi Lomasha.

The usual past-present-future flow of temporal influence is reversed within the logic of the story. Of course, stories aren't the only contexts in which temporal logic is replaced by a different logic. Inferences can reverse the flow of time too: while fire causes smoke, we infer fire upon seeing smoke.

Which poses a serious question: what kind of thing is an inference? Is it even a thing of any kind?

Inference

Clearly an inference isn't a causal event - for causality always proceeds from the past to the future. Wait! Isn't it the case that perceiving smoke causes the cognition of fire?

Let me spell that out: let's say there's smoke on top of the hill you're climbing. Is there a causal chain connecting that smoke to your inferring fire on the top of the hill? After, photons from the smoke plumes hit your retina (that's a causal event), rods and cones fire (another causal event), photonic energy is transformed into electrical energy (causal event) and that signal is carried into the brain where an internal fire alarm goes off (causal event) .

All causal events.

Now that's not a real problem, for we can divide the world into two:

1. Fire causes smoke.

2. The perception of smoke causes the perception of fire.

There would be no problem at all if the two were unrelated event streams. We know Shakespeare writes plays. We know monkeys love playing on typewriters. Neither of those statement worries us one bit. But monkeys typing out a Shakespeare play: that's a real eye opener.

Similarly, it's not a problem that fire causes smoke. It's not a problem that stimulation of your retina causes your brain to fire away. However, it's rather strange that the retina-brain chain is the mirror image of the fire-smoke chain. The inference is not in the events themselves; it's in the relationship between the two pairs of events. Where does that come from?

Causation and Inference

Let's recap for a moment: fire causing smoke is a physical event. The perception of smoke causing the perception of fire is a causal event. The perception of smoke being the perception of smoke isn't a causal event.

That confusion between causation and inference causes (or is it infers?) trouble for all of us. Let's start with an undeniable feeling: when you open your eyes, you experience the world. It doesn't feel like you experience the inside of your brain. The world has flowers and trees and Donald Trump. The inside of your brain is a gooey piece of flesh.

Think about it: a deer runs away from a tiger because it doesn't want to be in the same place at the same time as the tiger's jaws. Causation - jaw meets neck - happens at the very spot that the causal influence is exerted - the deer's neck. But when the deer sees the tiger the perception doesn't happens at the spot that the photon strikes the retina. Instead, I perceive the tiger where it is, ideally, more than a hundred yards away from me. What good would it be for me to see the tiger only at the moment it's grabbing me by the neck?

If we buy the causal story of perception, seeing smoke consists of a long chain connecting the smoke on the hill with some neurons firing in your brain. But you don't see neurons firing. You see smoke!

Swayambhu

So why does causation here make me perceive there? How do I end up seeing smoke on top of the hill when all the photons are right here in my retina?

There's one answer to that conundrum: perhaps you don't see smoke at all. What you see is what the brain conjures out of the neural firings caused by retinal stimulation caused by photonic travel. The smoke is just the shadow that your mind casts on your consciousness.

If so, the real world is completely different from the shadow it casts via the mind. Smoke isn't anything like the smoke you see.

There's a big problem with statement: how is the brain able to turn causality into perception? I mean, if we retreated into the brain because we weren't willing to accept that we see the smoke on top of the hill, we only see its shadow, then why is the brain any better?

Why is the brain able to throw shadows on the wall when the hill can't? Where does the brain get its special powers? There's only one credible answer: God or some other supernatural force.

What? Why?

Let me take you through the steps once again:

1. All natural events are caused.

2. Causal events can't cause experience.

3. If there's anything we are sure of, it's that we have experiences of shapes and sounds and smells.

4. Therefore, these shapes and sounds must have a supernatural cause.

Or else, consciousness is a swayambhu, a self standing entity. That makes consciousness even better than god.

The Rising Sea

While the war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas is at the heart of the epic, the first few parvas have much else in them.

The Adi Parva is huge and much of it isn't about the Kurus, and even less of it is about the Pandavas. We are hundreds of pages into the Adi Parva when the snake sacrifice ends and Janamejaya settles down to hear the story of his ancestors.

It's only toward the end of the Adi Parva - more than twelve hundred pages in the P. Lal version that I am using as a reference - that the Pandavas achieve their alliance with the two Krishna's, Krishna Vasudeva, the god of all gods, and Krishnaa, i.e., Draupadi, their common wife.

The Sabha Parva focuses on the rivalry between the Pandavas and the Kauravas and ends with the iconic dice game. However, the relatively short Sabha parva is sandwiched between the long prehistory of the human race in general and the Kurus in particular as told in the Adi Parva and the various side stories of the third parva, the Vana Parva.

I am about a third into the Vana parva; that's another five hundred pages in Lal's version, most of which are occupied with Yudhishthira hearing the story of Nala and Damayanti, the value of pilgrimage and the adventures of Agastya.

It's almost as if Vyasa and his audience knew they weren't going anywhere; that they would be listening to one long story day after day. What if we take a detour for a month? There's always another month.

The Jaya is like the rising sea.

The Nutcracker and the Ocean

The rising sea isn't my metaphor. It comes from unpublished writings of the great French mathematician, Alexander Grothendieck.

Grothendieck talks about two styles of mathematical problem solving: the nutcracker and the ocean. The nutcracker is a specialized instrument with one purpose: cracking nuts. Some mathematicians are excellent nutcrackers: they know how to press upon a problem at exactly the right spot and crack! A targeted solution to a precise problem.

That wasn't Grothendieck's style. Instead, he thought of himself as the sea surrounding a rock. It might take years, decades, even centuries, but sooner or later, the rock dissolves in the ocean. And then it's as if the rock never existed. But it's not just that rock that's been taken back- many other rocks have also been subsumed by the ocean in the process.

The Jaya isn't a nutcracker. There might have been a time when it was a repository of specific answers to specific problems but that's not our time. We can only hope that it's a forgotten ocean which is slowly seeping out into the m-world. A nibble there, a shave here, we can only hope that the Jaya will help us digest the m-world one grain of sand at a time.

Anti-Occam

It's actually a great relief to know that the Jaya is a tortoise, not a hare.

I mean, if it's possible to capture the entire world in one equation, let's do so, but let's also be clear that bottling the universe in a small dabba can only serve some of our needs, not all of them.

The physicist will be happy that there's one equation to rule them all, but will it please the poet? Describing the universe in a sentence doesn't tell me why the rose in front of me is as red as it appears. It says even less about why that rose smells the way it does and it doesn't help me extract the rose's nectar at all.

Theoretical understanding has its limits, though it's awesome as long as it stays within those limits.

The Jaya is much more versatile; it offers a range of mental tools. Some are good for theoretical purposes. Others help us tell a great story. And yet others offer counsel in times of despair. As I have said before, these tools lie buried in the itihasm and it's our Grothendieck like task to rework those tools for our purposes.

By the way, while Grothendieck's algebraic geometry is as abstract as anything gets to be in the world of mathematics, it's not reductive. Grothendieck wasn't trying to reduce the world of mathematics to that of logic; instead, he ended up invented an abstract world that was even larger than the (relatively more) concrete world he was trying to understand.

It's the opposite of Occam's razor. So is the Jaya.

Four Constellations

The Taittreya upanishad ends with an awesome if cryptic invocation: "I am food, I eat him who is food."

I am reminded of that saying as I approach the m-world with the Jaya, for the Jaya is both food and the eater of the m-world. Meanwhile it too is being eaten. Those who came before us have said that the Jaya is the fifth veda, the veda which subsumes the previous four and more. By consuming the Jaya, we can chew our way through the entire canon. By consuming the Jaya, we can consume the world in which we live.

That's the hope. Let's start with a few morsels: Jaratkaru, Garuda, Damayanti and Agastya.

Q: Who are they and why are they our first course? A: They are our guides through the digestive sea.

Remember, we aren't the self-endowing creatures of Descartes' imagination. We need gurus to guide us toward knowledge.

In Indian mythology - and every other mythology - constellations are named after divine or semi-divine beings. Since we have stopped believing in humanoid gods - only humanoid robots please our fancy - we have also stopped naming the heavens with more than human forms. Isn't that strange - it's perfectly OK to name a new planet/star/galaxy in honor of a famous scientist but it's not OK to name it after a god.

Such is our arrogance.

Four Spokes

Let me ask the question once again: why Jaratkaru, Garuda, Damayanti and Agastya?

Here's one answer: because they're personifications of four themes in the Jaya that are of immense value today. Together, they are four spokes of the great wheel of the dharma, each leading to the next.

Why so?

Jaratkaru stands for time, for our obligations to the past and even more so to the future. It's his reverence for his ancestors that makes him - against his wishes - to marry Manasa and beget Astika, who is to be the saviour of the snakes.

Then there's Garuda, mortal enemy of the snakes but also the personified force of animal nature. Garuda eats snakes by the million, but he also battles the gods for supremacy. He's stronger than them.

Damayanti also battles the gods, who come to her as chance, through the rolling of dice that she can't control. Her life is turned upside down by a vengeful god. Or is it a weak husband? I still don't know if Nala is a victim or an addict.

Finally, there's the good husband-heir Agastya, who listens to his wife and his ancestors. Agastya earns his keep by drinking up oceans and taming mountains.

I had no intention of choosing them as guides when I started reading the Jaya section by section, but I ended up expanding upon their fate as if there was a hidden attraction. Now I know why: they will help us digest four important aspects of the m-world: time, nature, chance and knowledge.

Odd and Even

Jaratkaru, Garuda, Damayanti and Agastya: four spokes. Or should I say, four spokespeople, for they will be representing me in the Jaya for all of 2017.

What about next year?

Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time a young man sat down to read the longest book in the world. He read it for a day and couldn't understand a word. He read it for a week but he still couldn't understand a word. Then a month passed. No understanding. Finally, he decided - for he wasn't so young anymore - that he was going to read it for a year.

And he did. He read the book every day for a year. Every day. Days when he was happy. Days when he was sad. Days when it was light at 4:00 AM and days when it was dark at 4:00 PM. Remember, it is a really long book. The reader still didn't understand more than a couple of words, but he was now ready to share his misunderstanding.

Share, yes, but how? and with whom?

The not so young man had a clever idea: why not turn a year's worth of reading into a book? A book! Even the thought made the man feel a decade younger and a decade older at the same time.

But you see, the thought of a book is an insidious idea. It's a finicky idea, for it takes root only when the conditions are ripe. But once it latches itself onto mental soil, it doesn't let go. In fact, it spawns other ideas. Such as:

What if I read the very long book every even year and write a book with it every odd year? Eh, why not?

Two times Two

So there you go: it's taken me almost a year to have an idea that should have been obvious from the beginning. Or rather, it's two ideas that feed off each other. Wait, it gets better: it's two ideas, both of which are two ideas that feed off each other.

1. Idea one: read the mahabharata to understand the modern world. Which can also be formulated as idea one*: read the modern world to understand the mahabharata.

2. Idea two: read the mahabharata one year. Idea two*: write the mahabharata the next year.

The first idea is about space. Two spaces that start out being separate, and then they're mixed until it's hard to tell when the first ends and the other starts. Every era needs its Jaya, and not that I am about to write one, but I can dream. What's clear is that the mixing of spaces has to be irreversible - it should not be possible to turn the mixer counterclockwise and separate the two liquids.

We have to acknowledge the passage of time. Our world isn't the same as the world of Vyasa's Jaya. We can't assume that the Jaya is a battery that plugs into any time zone: unplug it from the Dwapara yuga and plug it into the twenty first century and you're ready to go. It doesn't work that way. That's why idea two is about time; it's less mixed than the spatial idea, but we know that time isn't as flexible as space.

Space, time and knowledge. That pretty much covers all there is, isn't it? No wonder the Jaya is confident that what's not in it is nowhere else.

Simplification

As we know, the Mahabharata has a Sanskrit source but it has variants in almost every Indian language and perhaps several non-Indian languages as well. It's both popular and prestigious; both Big Tradition and small-tradition.

By basing our exploration on the Jaya instead of a more obviously philosophical text, I am rejecting the castle in favour of the street. It's a self-conscious aping of the zen claim of being a direct transmission outside the scriptures. After all, the apocryphal founder of Zen - the monk Bodhidharma - was from Kanchipuram, not too far from my family seat. We need more of that direct fierceness. Enough with the gentle medium pace of academic philosophy already.

The scriptures are dead, but the story lives on in everyone. It all boils down to a famous Einstein quote: "Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler."

Note: He didn't actually say that; the original quote is much more complex and Germanic, so you could say the paraphrase is a self-justifying example of simplicity.

If modernity is a codeword for a global hydra, we can only simplify it so much. Unleashing the Jaya on the m-world strikes me as exactly the simplification without oversimplification we need.

Trumpary

What a difference this week! I write my Jayaries a few days in advance, so I am writing about Thursday's Jayary on Sunday. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has become the President of the United States, which is being taken by many of my friends as the equivalent of the apocalypse. I don't know about the apocalypse, but he has appointed a major climate denier as the head of the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) transition team. That's not good news.

Then there are those who think that Trump is a better choice than the alternative. Among my friends, this camp has two (very different) types of adherents:

1. Those who think Trump will keep the bad guys out of the country or six feet under.

2. Those who think Trump is so bad that it signals the end of the American empire.

If ever there was a world situation which calls for a Jayaric analysis, it's today's world. Will world war break out in three years? Will we muddle along for another thirty before unprecedented temperature rise makes it uninhabitable? How do egos and desires combine to produce a result no one wants? These are questions posed by the Jaya. These are also questions we should pose to ourselves today.

Causes upon causes

The Mahabharata shows that great catastrophe can emerge out of causes piling upon each other until there's a phase shift and the whole system collapses.

For example, let's consider the dice game. If only Yudhisthira hadn't built Indraprastha on top of the ashes of the Khandava forest. If only the Pandavas hadn't invited Duryodhana to the inaugural. If only Duryodhana hadn't fallen into a clear pool. If only the Pandavas hadn't made fun of him for doing so. If only Yudhisthira hadn't kept betting one possession after another.

And so on.

No single cause leads to ruin but collectively they are the undoing of the greatest civilization. You know what's even more depressing? That Duryodhana and Yudhisthira and others were acting according to their dharma. Why wouldn't a king build a great city by tearing down a forest? Why wouldn't he invite his cousins to the unveiling of a great palace? Why wouldn't they laugh cousin who has tried to kill them on several occasions? Why wouldn't that cousin recoil from the humiliation with redoubled anger? Why would that cousin show forgiveness after winning the dice game?

In other words, even with all the wisdom in the world, could they have done anything different? If not, is there any hope for us?

The M-World

Modernity, the M-word. Or should I call it the M-world? I kind of like the latter. In fact, I am going to call it the M-world from now unless I really need to spell it out.

The M-world's intense relationship with the nonhuman is essential to its shock and awe. It's a paradoxical relationship: on the one hand, we have increasingly accepted how insignificant we are relative to the cosmos. We aren't the chosen species with a special relationship with God. We are just one species on one planet in one solar system in one galaxy. Perhaps in one universe.

On the other hand, we are the masters of the earth, controlling much of its landmass for our needs, replacing forest with farm and factory and wild species with animals reared for our benefit. Human insignificance is clearly compatible with human supremacy. But how?

These aren't merely theoretical issues for the colonization of India was enabled by the mastery of technology, both material and social. No steam engines: no colonization. No steam engines: no climate change. We know at an intuitive level that the founding principles of the m-world are exhausted of all creativity, but what's next?

The honest answer is that we have no way of knowing. What we do know is that in 2016, the m-world is not synonymous with the west: when Delhi is shutting down for three days because of pollution levels that are fifteen times above the acceptable maximum, you know that the m-world is unsustainable in India.

You could say the nonhuman is resisting human colonization through the elements at its disposal: fire, water, wind and earth. If so, the task of digesting the m-world takes on an urgency well beyond the niche of Indian philosophy. The Jaya doesn't tell us how to do so, but by meditating through the m-world with the Jaya in hand might give us a few clues.

The First Interface

By the way, the Jaya also lies at the interface of the human and the nonhuman. It starts with the great snake sacrifice, when Janamejaya decides to kill every snake in the world in revenge for killing his father.

He clearly has the power to do so, the only question is whether he has the desire. That's the general human predicament today - with our coal plants and nuclear weapons, we can destroy most multicellular life on earth if we want. Of course, in doing so, we will destroy ourselves too, but that's not a sure deterrent.

Fortunately for the snakes, Janamejaya decides not to complete the nagacide, though by the time he's done, millions of snakes have perished in the fire. Janamejaya is kinder to the nonhuman world than his ancestors: if you remember, the city of Indraprastha was built on the ashes of the Khandava forest.

Arjuna and Krishna killed beast after beast as they tried to escape the raging fire. Only six creatures survived that burning; a few years later, only seven warriors survived the great war. That should tell you something about the karma.

Indeed, it strikes me that the Jaya is the story of humanity; from the emergence of a distinctively human being from the larger mass of animality to the assertion of human power over the rest of the world followed by the the inevitable collapse of that power in war. In that reading, the snake sacrifice is the last act of power before we come to our senses.

History and Itihasa

Indeed, when I think about the term itihasa, I am reminded that it's a bridge term. Not quite history and not quite a pure description of the passage of time.

History is of course, human history. In fact, for much of the last three hundred years, history was considered appropriate only for western societies, who came into historical being twice: first when Jesus was born and put a permanent marker on time, a marker we still use in the form of the labels BC and AD; and second when the m-world brought progress and freedom to the passage of time.

In contrast, societies such as India were ahistorical and static and other cultures, such as the various native cultures of the Americas and Australia were considered subhuman. History has a strange way of bringing progress to nonhistory: genocide if you're subhuman and colonization if you're ahistorical.

I digress.

Itihasa works better for me than history, for it has room for the nonhuman in it, even as they're being genocided. The nonhuman has a voice, and to speak is to be admitted into the halls of justice. That's why Maya is one of the six who escapes the wrath of Arjuna and Krishna.

In itihasa, the nonhuman can be as powerful or more powerful than the human - consider the story of Garuda, who too has a blood feud with the snakes of the world.

What's my point?

That itihasa is a good genre for exploring the human-nonhuman interface, both in the Jaya and in the m-world.

Itihasmic Style

Philosophy, doesn't come with a strict writing style, or even a specific account of truth. Or even adherence to truth itself. It is the most general discipline both in form and in content. Mathematics, which is the only other modern discipline with the same capacity for abstraction mathematics adheres strictly to the lemma-theorem-proof-repeat genre. Science writing sticks to the hypothesis-experiment-discussion model of communication.

Whatever your talents at calculation, you have no chance of getting published in a mathematics journal if you write your theorems in verse. Vyasa on the other hand, was a very good versifier. Despite what Plato says, poets can be philosophers and philosophers can be poets. Unless you're an academic philosopher: since professional philosophy aims to replicate the success of the sciences, it too hews closely to the dry academic style.

Since academic Indian philosophy is a double derivative - borrowing its intellectual gestures from western philosophy that in turn borrows its gestures from the sciences - the style of presentation is even more exaggerated; writing about Nagarjuna and Gangesa as if they were browner versions of Aquinas and Hegel. While there's no reason to continue the sutra-bhasya style of philosophical writing, it mystifies me that we have shifted wholesale to the western academic mode. It buys us a ticket into the academic rat race, but does it accomplish anything else?

Writing styles are thinking styles too. Philosophical renewal goes hand in hand with textual experimentation and the creation of new literary genres. All the more reason to shift to an itihasmic style, with all the freedom in the world to experiment with fact and fiction, myth and argument.

Mirror Mirror

Philosophy is often thought of as a mirror of nature, the abstract surface on which humans see their collective reflection. Today, that role is increasingly usurped by science, but I won't concern myself with that difference between science and philosophy; it's not a sharp distinction. Instead, I will call science "natural philosophy" and let that semantic trick serve my needs.

Indian philosophy is a cracked mirror covered with the grime of centuries. It's been shut away in a corner of the museum, away from from the public; only experts are allowed to view the rooms in which those texts are stored.

Some of my friends are trying to restore the glass to its pristine form while simultaneously showing the public a few glimpses of what it's like to see oneself in that mirror. They have a hard and difficult task ahead; more power to them. I have a different thought: give a man a mirror and he'll stare at himself all day long; teach him how to make mirrors and he will make telescopes.

Reflecting telescopes use the most sophisticated mirrors ever made and even in our robotic times, the best method to create high quality spherical mirrors is to rub two pieces of glass against each other so that they erode the imperfections off of each other.

Justifying the Jaya

That's my philosophical model: let the Jaya and modernity serve as mirror duals. The choice of modernity is obvious: it's the beast that's swallowed us and we are trying to figure out whether we can digest the beast from the inside. Why choose the Mahabharata, and not one (or several) of the millions of philosophical texts in the Indian textual corpus? I have three reasons:

1. Formal traditions are brittle: they depend on ritualized modes of technical argument and those rituals don't thrive outside the specific milieu in which they are transmitted. How many people write original commentaries on Gangesa today? In contrast, the Jaya has been adopted and adapted by every culture in every period in every medium. Formal texts belong to the ivory tower; stories to the street. The tower is more powerful while it's occupied, but the street is smarter in the face of adversity.

2. The Jaya is fun. Now that's a strange idea: how can a philosophical project be chosen for its entertainment value? There you go again with your elitism: do keep in mind that if you aren't read, you're either dead or have corporate sponsorship. Today, that means tenure at a (preferably) western university. In which case you have to do what the sponsor says, which is to slot yourself into a niche within a niche. I doubt it's possible to swallow the modern beast while begging for crumbs from the beast's C team.

3. The Jaya is creative and comprehensive: as the epic itself says, "what's not in here is nowhere else." We may not agree with the Jaya's self-assessment, but its ambition is worth emulating. Its capacity for multiple registers and literary, philosophical and religious styles is exactly what we need today. Thinking like the Jaya is more likely to give us the tools to grasp and shape modernity for our purposes.

Codewords

Explaining the Jaya's role in the mirror of nature wasn't that hard. What about modernity?

To be frank, I hate that term. It's used as a codeword for everything from Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" to the latest iPhone; what explanatory power can you expect from a term with such broad usage?

Except that codewords are useful precisely as codewords. When the gatekeeper at the secret society meeting asks you for the codeword, you don't worry about the meaning of that term; what matters to you is that uttering "Open Sesame" makes the door open for you instead of being shot dead on the spot. More benign codewords are like saying "pay attention to me." Leftists use the term "capitalism" in a similar way, as an indicator to their audience that we are now speaking about the source of all evil, and since evil surrounds us on all sides, there's no point isolating any single aspect of it.

I believe the early Christians had a similar tendency; they weren't that different from leftists, I guess.

I don't find evil lurking everywhere, so I am going to use the term "modernity" in one very specific way: to indicate the human relationship with the nonhuman world. Take note: Nonhuman + World. I didn't want to use the term "nature" for it belongs to an even more nebulous galaxy than modernity.

Fortunately, the Jaya has much to say about the human-nonhuman nexus; if you've been reading the Jayary with me, you know I have raised that issue several times this year. That's another reason to pair the Jaya off with nonhuman modernity.

Four Stomachs

While I haven't brought Agastya into history, at least I have an idea of how that's to be done.

The modern Agastya is a semi-socratic, irascible, charismatic figure who falls in love with the wrong woman and pays for his choices the hard way. He also loves teaching, which gives us plenty of opportunities to insert philosophical conversations.

I bet it will be a terrible movie; too earnest for the front benchers and too cliched for the illuminati. Fortunately, this is only the first draft of the script. R.K Studios has given me until 2020 to submit the final version.

In other words, it's time to move beyond Agastya, for I will have to step beyond the interpretive to the fictional to make that story come alive. Some manthan will be required before I can do so. In the meantime, it's time to go back to the future because the year's coming to an end and I need to ask myself what comes next.

The quick answer is that what comes next is what came before, but with a twist. If the four stages of epic gastronomy are translation, interpretation, digestion and assimilation, then what I have done over this year (mostly) is to interpret existing translations. Interpretation isn't enough: digestion followed by assimilation is what's needed.

There's a decent chance that digestion is beyond my capacity but it's got to be attempted: the first stomach is overflowing and the second stomach is full; some of that gruel has to be transferred to the third stomach before it comes out the wrong tube.

With fifty odd Jayaries left this year (fifty six after this one if you're counting), let me spend the rest of the year summarizing the first and second stomach's translation and interpretation; the goal being to send a concentrated core to the third stomach. Also known as 2017.

101

There's one last question worth posing - don't know if it can be answered - before I set Agastya aside: how to combine the philosophical and the literary while making the transition from myth to history?

Let me clarify what I mean. I started this year's Jayary with the intent of articulating what Indian philosophy meant to me through the act of reading the Jaya. While I have read only about a tenth of the epic (maybe fifteen percent) this year, I think I have a pretty decent idea of the epic style, what I have been calling its itihasm.

But translating that itihasm into our world is another matter. The Jaya has been mined for insight so many times that yet another novelistic or filmic portrayal isn't worth the effort. Sure, there are new media forms worth experimenting: I haven't seen a web native translation of the Jaya, but so what?

It's the cognitive diversity of the Jaya that makes it unique: poetry in one section, battle scene in the next, philosophical discourse two sections later and religious exposition soon after. We don't write books like that today, but we can't accept the Jaya as it is either. While we are willing to suspend mythic disbelief, the Jaya feels unbalanced as it jumps from one genre to another (of course, the term "genre" itself is a modern term).

The itihasm has to be reworked and that reworking has to be a tapasya of its own. As I said in the previous Jayary, it's the job of 2017 to begin the digestion process, but in order for that to happen, I have to render 2016 in a form that's acceptable to stomach #3.

That's the purpose of the next fifty odd days: to wrap the enigma in enough clothing that it's no longer a complete mystery. Another way of looking at it: summarise ten months of reading the Jaya in the form of an Indian Philosophy 101.

101 because it's introductory and accessible. Not 101 as in it's a history of the actual subject. That's a task for pandits and scholars. I would much rather write the 101 of a future Indian philosophy that doesn't exist yet. Think of it as speculative fiction meets knowledge seeking.

PTSD

Every Indian I know nurses a grievance. If you don't, you're:

1. Not an Indian. Congratulations. Or one of those anti-nationals, in which case you nurse a major grievance and you don't want to talk about it.

2. Not someone I know. Impossible, since I know everyone. With my mind's eye, if not the one's in front of my head.

3. In denial. Look deeper.

Some of us are angry because the Muslims and the British spoiled a perfect civilization. Some of us are angry because the Muslims and the British didn't destroy it enough. Others complain about modernity and its destructive ways.

The list is endless. I am pretty sure I have ticked off - and been ticked off - by several items on the grievance list. Jayary came out of a desire to turn grievance into gold.

What grievance and what gold?

I believe that all of us have PTSD; the sustained shock of the modern world continues to unhinge us. It doesn't matter whether we think modernity is destructive or liberating; the changes it has wrought in our lives is so deep and so dislocating that we are bound to be traumatized.

You may disagree with me but our intellectual response to this trauma has been fundamentalist. Fundamentalist not in the narrow sense of religious fundamentalism but in the broader sense of unshakeable and rigid belief. It's as easy for us to be fundamentalist about constitutional democracy as it's for us to be about ghar wapsi.

Ouroboros

People clutch at intellectual and spiritual straws in chaotic times. We combine that with a jugaadu attitude about practical matters, showing that we have no principles worth reinforcing. Jugaad leads to interesting innovations but it's mostly hideous; I remember being gifted elegant peepal-leaf plates with a chintzy rose captioned "welcome" sown at the bottom.

Jugaad penetrates our intellectual lives too, so that it's perfectly reasonable for a distinguished physicist to spend his golden years investigating the equality of the quantum vacuum and the vedantic Brahman. I have nothing against either side of the equality, but comparing them in one equation is a sign of atrophied judgment.

Fundamentalism is an alienated modernity. Jugaad is a regurgitated modernity. Neither is a creative response. The question is: what to do about it?

For a while we thought politics was the answer, that independence will cure all our maladies. Turned out to be wishful thinking. We need a new vision. Since I am a romantic - an intellectual romantic to be precise - I believe that philosophy is part of the cure, that the renewed love of wisdom will help us alchemize the shock into our system, or even better, help us make beauty out of terror.

If you have read the last few Jayaries, you know the four stages of alchemy: translate, interpret, digest and assimilate. To make matters more complicated, I am inviting double the labour: alchemize the Jaya and modernity simultaneously.

But actually, doubling makes matters easier: we can use the Jaya to digest modernity and modernity to digest the Jaya. Isn't the Ouroboros - the snake eating its own tail - one of the oldest alchemical symbols?

A Bollywood Romance

Now that we have decided that Agastya was in possession of wealth and in need of an heir, we are halfway through the journey from myth to history. Yes, there are many unanswered questions: what kind of family? Who were his parents? But those (important) details are for another occasion, when we convert the sketch into a painting.

The second half of the journey toward history is about his wife, Lopamudra. We can't have him create her out of celestial spare parts. At the same time, we can't have his car run into hers on a city street and have them start a shouting match. Or, be bridesmaid and groomsman at a friend's wedding who fall in love at first sight.

She was made by him; we could turn her into an android and make their story into an Indian version of "Her." Too obvious; let's think a little harder.

How else can a person make another person without literally making them? What if Agastya and Lopamudra were teacher and student? There's something creepy about a teacher shacking up with a student but it's been known to happen. There is something creepy about Agastya assembling Lopamudra and then marrying her.

So now we have the outlines of a Bollywood romance: Agastya is the son of a wealthy family who falls in love with one of his students. Who happens to be the daughter of a rival family. Having committed a social crime, they're excommunicated by their respective clans. The rebellious lovers have to fend for themselves in the big bad world.

Let's give it a little Romeo and Juliet flavour shall we? But which wealthy Indian family lets their son become a teacher? Hmmmm....

The Explorer

So we have decided that in our upcoming blockbuster, Agastya is Lopamudra's teacher in a Bombay college. We'll make them clash in class. Before falling in love, of course. There's a problem:

Why would a rich family let its oldest son become a teacher? You would expect a business family to make its scion join the family business. It's not as if teaching is a respected profession in moneyed circles. To make it more plausible, I am thinking we should make Agastya more of a rebel - perhaps he has crossed over to the other side and become a union person.

Perhaps I am being too reductive; even Bollywood is tiring of cliches. Business families are often strategic: they let a child blow off steam and pursue their interests before reeling them back in. Every once in awhile, that shift is precipitated by tragedy.

I remember a good friend of mine - himself the first born of a wealthy Delhi family - telling me about his cousin who was completing his Phd in physics at Caltech with Richard Feynman, only to return to Kanpur and run his family wholesale business after his father unexpectedly passed away.

Then there's Vikram Sarabhai.

In fact, you could argue that the independent minded son is the best inheritor of the throne; especially if he leaves the nest and explores the world. The explorer understands the changing currents better than the children who stay put. It's Michael, not Sonny who becomes the Godfather after the Godfather.

That's the luxury of inherited wealth - unlike the self made billionaire, the inheritor has a pot of gold waiting for him even if he meanders through life.

Lopagastya

As you might have noticed, I was struggling with the historic Agastya until I hit upon the Bollywood principle: how to cast the story so that it's easy for the hero and heroine to dance around trees while struggling against the odds?

Seems cliched doesn't it?

Not at all. Bollywood stories are often modern versions of mythic patterns. You could argue that all of Bollywood is about historicising ancient and modern Indian myths.

No art cinema for me. Now that I am under contract from R.K Films, let's summarize what we have learned about the historic Agastya and his love, Lopamudra:

1. She's from a powerful family. He's from a wealthy family. The two families don't like each other.

2. He's brilliant but mercurial; generous when happy, vindictive when mad. She's equally brilliant. Bitter on the outside and romantic on the inside.

3. He's ugly but charismatic. She's beautiful and intense. Oh, I know it's sexist but I am on contract remember. The movie's got to make money.

4. It has to be set in Mumbai of course. She's Bengali. He's Marathi.

Remember "Ankhiyon Ke Jharokhon Se?" I remember watching Sachin and Ranjita in the Hindi remake of Irving Segal's sappy classic. I am sure I can steal a montage or two from that blockbuster.

A final question before we're off to the races: what do we call them? Agastya can remain Agastya, but no one calls their daughter Lopamudra anymore. How about Lopa?

Coming into History

I guess what I am trying to do is to bring Agastya into history. It's a hard problem - Plato barely managed to bring Socrates into history and the author of the Republic was the wise man's student.

I don't mean history as a generic term which means anything that happens in the past. We'll call that calendar history and dismiss it without a second thought. I am using the term history in a specific way, of continuity in time that cognized through the written word (or an analogous mode of oral transmission) and in doing so, privileges reason over speculation and facts over belief.

Why history, why not leave the mythological sage where he belongs? Obviously, the ocean drinking can't be brought into history - that would run into our incapacity for disbelief. He can be transported into the future, as an ocean drinking spacefarer, but that's because the modern era treats the future as the ancients treated the past: as the natural repository of speculation and myth.

But, as the case of Socrates shows, bringing a mythical figure into history makes for a heady mixture. Socrates is powerful precisely because he goes into trances and receives wisdom from the muse and he demolishes the arguments of his fellow city-men. A pure mystic would be left alone to his devices - he can't harm the political order. A purely rational man wouldn't be the subversive that Socrates manages to be; plus the rational man would have escaped from the city instead of drinking hemlock - that's exactly what Aristotle did.

Historicism and Humanism

Historicizing someone is often conflated with humanizing them.

We like to humanize our heroes and villains today. Even Hitler was in diapers at some point. Combine that with aunts, girlfriends and other relatives and we have the makings of a biopic, the kind that's advertised before late night shows.

The ancient world seems to have taken the opposite tack. When introducing a hero, the epics tell us how awesome he was, how he defeated a tiger with his little finger when he was an infant - no diapers for him! - and at every stage building up the hero's supernatural resume.

Humanism and secularism have gone hand and in hand; we expect that the richest among us live lives that the poorest can understand, even if they can't enjoy such a luxurious life. No special connection to divinity, with the only exception of the artist or genius. Even that's gone now, as the most important art forms are clearly collective endeavours.

History is more objective, less about the human individual and more about the collective forces that shape our lives. For example, it's possible to talk about how rationality emerges at a certain point in history. Not rational behaviour by this person or that person, but rationality per se. While this isn't a watertight distinction by any means, novels are humanistic and non-fiction is historicist. Of course, the historical and the humanistic perspectives aren't disjoint; one and the same person could be explored through the lens of character and through the lens of material forces.

So when I say I want to historicize Agastya, I am thinking about a material world that makes him plausible.

The Keystone Event

While life isn't so neat, the lives of fictional characters often revolve around a key event; a fatal accident, a chance meeting or a fate foretold. Those events are the engine for the rest of the tale. Let's call such an event a keystone event.

The keystone event in Agastya's life is easy to identify: it's when he runs into his ancestors as they are hung upside down. That event sets up a clash between two values: the rishi's duty to his ancestors and his individual desire to pursue knowledge at all cost. Ancestor worship wins in the short run, which then forces him to find a bride - create a bride, really - and then the bride forces him to look for money and that starts him on the path to being the great digester.

Why am I saying all this?

Because the keystone event is also the key to turning myth into history. The epic doesn't say so, but Agastya is clearly at the juncture of two historical conditions: an old world in which one's duty to one's ancestors is paramount and a new world in which a rishi is free to go out and pursue knowledge for its own sake. The Buddha lies at the end of that transition.

In other words, Agastya is already within the realm of history; we just haven't seen him that way yet.

Inheritance

Agastya's predicament should be familiar to everyone who's been pressured by parents and relatives to get married. That's only the first step: once married, children are the next item on the list. "When are you going to have babies?" "You know, the house will be so full of energy." The gentle queries and the insistent questioning go hand and in hand.

Except that Agastya is blackmailed by his ancestors, not his parents. If you think your aunt's nagging is bad, it's a lot worse when the weight of time is on your shoulders. It's a metaphysical weight, for entry into heaven depends on the current generation propagating the lineage.

How can we transplant that metaphysical pressure into the mundane pressures of history? I don't think it's OK to replace ancestral responsibility with parental pressure, especially not in our liberal age when it's easy to evade or flout that pressure. Something bigger has to be at stake.

Money is the obvious solution. Power is a close second. Let's turn the obligation to the past - one's ancestors - into an obligation to the future. Make it into a matter of inheritance. What if Agastya was a scion of a wealthy family? Or worried about passing on his political power? It's a fact widely appreciated that a man wishing to pass on his wealth is in need of children.

Keystones

I believe that rishis are the keystone species of the Jaya. What's a keystone species? It's a species whose impact on its environment is disproportional to its abundance. Jaguars are keystone species. It goes without saying that humans are a keystone species. Factoid: we are about .00018% of all non-marine biomass but are responsible for 20% of global primary production, i.e., the volume of life produced per year on earth. That's a million to one ratio. With a baseline of seven billion humans we aren't just another keystone species, but an alpha keystone species.

Rishi's aren't that abundant.

There are the superstar rishis like Vashistha and Vishwamitra, and the lesser lights such as Lomasha, but even if you add in the local heros, there are no more than a thousand rishis in the directory.

However, rishis uphold the world. They invented the sacrifice and teach it to others. Without sacrifice there's no heaven. The gods depend on the rishis. But the rishis aren't the usual divinities. How do you explain a being who drinks up the ocean one day and goes begging for lunch money the next day?

You can see how the Buddha takes the rishi prototype to its logical conclusion - he's more enlightened than the gods, whose penchant for luxury is their undoing. He's poorer than a beggar, though by choice rather than circumstance. With the Buddha, humans can expel the gods to another world and become the upholders of the dharma.

I am convinced the transition from the devas to the buddhas hasn't been understood yet; in it are the seeds of an entirely different modernity than the one we currently inhabit. But we can't get there without understanding the rishis.

So what's Agastya like? What is is like to be Agastya?

Who's Agastya?

I guess we could trace his genealogy, find out who his parents were and the miraculous conditions in which he was born. That won't tell us much, for his ancestors will be as opaque to us as he is. It's always good to situate a person or an event in its context, but that's only when the context is familiar. The background information only confuses us when the context unfamiliar.

For example, Kolakowski starts his book on Marxism by saying "Marx was a German Philosopher." That's a useful insight if you know something about German philosophy between Kant and Hegel; in particular it tells you that the universal claims of Marxism originate within a certain cultural milieu. If you have no idea about German philosophy (somewhat unlikely for a person cracking open K's book), you're going to put down Kolakowski's book, exclaim "what, now I have to learn German philosophy as well!" and get back to reading the latest Chetan Bhagat thriller.

So I am not going to inquire into Agastya's antecedents. Instead, let's ask a different question: what did he look like? Was he handsome? Ugly? Tall? Squat?

I am thinking the digestor was short, burly and blunt. He reminds me of Socrates who was famously ugly. Plus, he works well with the daityas when he isn't eating them. So let's assume that Agastya is a charismatic eyesore.

The Socratic Rishi

OK, we agree - and what I really mean is I have decided and you have no choice in the matter - that Agastya is a satyric figure. Blunt nosed, fierce eyed. There's aggression in him even when he's being kind. Someone you don't want to encounter in a dark alley on a new moon night. Not because he will rob your wallet, but because he will steal your soul.

Why bother with the dark alley - the great rishi can scramble brains in broad daylight. Like Socrates, who was killed for corrupting the minds of Athenian youth.

What else?

I want to milk the analogy to Socrates further. With good reason, for Plato's teacher was a Greek rishi wasn't he? A rishi with a biography: son of a midwife, a soldier in his youth, lover of wisdom and young men and the first martyr to reason. Short as they are, these details add context to Socrates' life. Unlike Agastya, whose past adds to our bewilderment.

It's not a Greek vs Indian thing, by the way. There are enough details about the Buddha's life too: that his mother died soon after his birth, that he was a good warrior, winning his bride through his skill at arms and so on.

But I don't see the Buddha in Agastya. I see Socrates. So let's continue sketching out Agastya's life shall we?

Defeat

I don't know if it's my attention span or the enormity of the Jaya that's the culprit, but having spent almost ten months on the epic, I am barely a third of the way into the third book of the epic: the Adi Parva and the Sabha Parva are done, but the deep forest of the Vana Parva is much harder going.

The recounting of one backstory after another is proving to be my undoing: first, Nala and Damayanti, then the various pilgrimages, then Agastya's heroics and now Bhagiratha and the filling of the ocean. I know there's something important here - that's what made me reread Nala and Damayanti's travails twice - the epic isn't a grab-bag of tales stapled together, but I am not able to see the woods for the trees in the Vana Parva.

It's an admission of defeat, or more accurately, frustration.

Meanwhile, the tenth month of this year is almost up. Another way to count the waning days of 2016: today is day 296 of the year, only four more to go for 300 and after that only sixty five more days. I don't want to limp along like a lame duck president at the end of her term (we might yet get to see a her majesty). What to do next? How to end with a bang and not with a whimper?

Spitting

Self diagnosis is a dangerous task - physicians can rarely heal themselves and I am no physician. But it's not as if there's an itihasa clinic around the corner where I can have myself treated. Self diagnosis is the only diagnosis available.

Here's the first problem: the itihasa is a specific kind of object, just as the novel is a specific kind of creative object and the academic monograph is a specific kind of scholarly object. Except that there are millions of novels and monographs and there are only a few itihasas, which makes it that much harder to find out what kind of object the itihasa is. Nevertheless, what kind of object is it?

By the way, the "what is it?" can't be answered empirically. There's a cottage industry of scholars who analyse the Jaya, compare it to epics in Greece and elsewhere and travel around the world talking about the discursive strategies of Vyasa. To paraphrase Vladimir Brusiloff, the fictional Russian novelist in Wodehouse's "Clicking of Cuthbert" - I spit me of those scholars.

Which brings me to restate the problem: what kind of object is an itihasa? Takes me all the way back to one of my first Jayaries last year and it's evoking of Maria Von Trapp in the Sound of Music: how do you solve a problem like the Jaya?

Four Ways

Now that the scholars have been condemned and the Jaya is as intractable as it was a year ago, we have to ask ourselves what else can be done. A brief survey of the literature around the epic shows us four different models:

1. The translation. It's the obvious first step, making the epic more accessible in a modern language and especially so when abridged with some creativity. Another tack is to add a modifier "Jaya for X," and aim at a specific target audience such as managers or children. Translations are the standard model. We can't make much progress without a bevy of translations with differences in intent.

2. The creative interpretation. Where scholarly interpretations are analytic, creative interpretations are synthetic. Everything from Margaret Lidchi-Grassi's "The Great Golden Sacrifice to Shyam Benegal's Kalyug and Peter Brook's Mahabharata are in this category. Their enduring popularity in every medium is a sign that the epic is alive.

3. The meditation. The philosophical or political - typically contemporary - engagement with the content of the epic. Here too we find a wide range: from the dismal "Bhagavad Gita for Management" to Gurchararan Das' "The Subtlety of Being Good" to the incandescent meditations by Calasso.

4. The (re)creation. The Kamba Ramayana isn't a translation or modification of the original Ramayana. It's an entirely new text. Kamban shows that the itihasmic imagination was widespread throughout the subcontinent and Sanskrit is far from the only language for writing the epic. No one seems to have done the same for the Jaya.

Of the four, I like Kampan the most though Calasso comes a close second. Unfortunately, we can't (and don't) inhabit the Jaya's world in the way Kampan could; too much has changed. We can - as Calasso tries to - evoke that world with as much vividness as possible. What do we do after evoking that ghost?

Itihasmic Style

I realize my problems with the Jaya are cognitive: I want to suspend the last shreds of disbelief but I can't. I can't quite picture a man digesting a goat and an ocean even though it's not a problem at all to imagine the same man flying a spaceship across two galaxies and returning home for tea.

Strange isn't it, how our epistemological tastes change?

While I admit that the ocean swallower is posing a currently insurmountable problem to my imagination, I don't think it's a problem only for me. The history of imagination isn't in my head alone - it's (somewhat) objective too. The believable imagination, i.e., the ideas and metaphors that help us suspend disbelief are conditioned by the world we live in and that world isn't the Jaya's world.

Normally, that's enough to set aside a task or demote it to a lower status; to a fairy tale rather than literary fiction or to grandmotherly wisdom instead of proper philosophy.

I don't want to do that to the Jaya, for I think the itihasmic style has much to offer. Fiction while not only being fiction. Fact without only being fact. Philosophy without only being philosophy. It's a literary mode waiting to be revived.

Of course, one can't rework the Jaya. What a thought! Not in one year. Perhaps not in one lifetime. But it's possible to bite off small bits, to do several painter's studies on paper before embarking on a serious work on canvas.

Not a bad way to start tomorrow's Jayary, it being the 300th of the year.

Repetition and Interjection

I have to admit that I struggle with the repetitions in the Jaya. Consider the story of Bhagiratha: the restorer of the ocean, the man who refills the ocean after Agastya digests it.

How do you think Bhagiratha is born? If you're puzzled, let ask you a follow on question: how do you think the Pandavas were born? How about the Kauravas? Let's not forget Draupadi's birth either. And while you are at it, check your diary to see if you took notes about Nala's conception, Lopamudra's birth and Damayanti's destiny. What's in common to their coming into being?

Every single one of them was born because:

1. Their parents were childless.

2. They desired children.

3. They prayed for children.

4. The supplicated god or rishi satisfied the would-be parent's desires.

5. In due course the mother gave birth to the hero or heroine in question.

At some point you have to ask: did they not know how to do it? Were the gods created by Prajapati in order to teach humans about the birds and the bees?

I know repetition has much greater standing in an oral culture than in a written one, but why? Maybe there's a simple explanation. The term "once upon a time" is like an interjection in myths and fairy tales, like saying "ah" or "accha." It's a way of keeping the story going, of signalling that I am shifting from one register to another.

If so, the "once upon a time there was a childless king and a queen" is an extended interjection, telling the listener that a hero(ine) is about to be born; a shorthand to invoke mental frames shared between the teller and the listener. We don't write novels like that anymore, but we are still in need of invoking shared culture. What frames do we use today?

Sagara

So how did Bhagiratha fulfil his dharma? It's a much longer story than I thought it would be.

Once upon a time, there was a king name Sagara. He, like many of the kingly race, had a problem conceiving children and so he and his wives prayed to Siva for children. Siva was pleased with the king's devotion and appeared in front of them; "ask me anything," said the blue throated god.

"We need children, my lord"

"Ah. I will bless you with two sets of children. One of your wives will have sixty thousand children who will all be wiped out. The other wife will have one son who will spread your glory." The god vanished before the king or his wives could ask questions about how sixty thousand babies could emerge out of one woman.

It turns out to be easy. The queen gave birth to a seething mass, but instead of throwing them into the trash, king Sagara carefully put in a gourd, where the mass differentiated itself into sixty thousand boys. How did he feed them? Did he hire sixty thousand wet nurses?

Unfortunately, the boys were real terrors, chasing and killing people and animals at random. They dug a hole all the way down the earth, killing daityas and nagas by the thousand.

Purana 2.0

Like every other occasion when they're dealt with a problem they can't solve, the gods go to Brahma and ask him to do something about the marauding sagarikas.

I don't get it: the gods are capable of fighting vritra one day and run away from a horde of human children the next day. At the same time, they are begging Prajapati to save the lives of nagas and daityas troubled by sagara's progeny. One day they're asking Agastya to drink down the ocean so they can chase down daityas; the next day the gods are beseeching the creator to strike down daitya killing sagarikas. How does that work? Consistency is not one of their virtues.

Brahma told them not to worry: they're going to meet their match soon. A rishi of course.

One day, Sagara organizes a horse sacrifice but the horse goes missing soon after the sacrifice begins. Sagara orders his children to look for the missing horse. They look all over and can't find it anywhere. Sagara asks them to look once more.

This time they are more successful; the spot the horse in Rishi Kasyapa's ashram. Unfortunately, their detective skills are their undoing, for Kaspaya is enraged by the commotion created by the searching sagarikas. One look from the rishi and the sixty thousand are burned to a crisp.

So here it goes: king prays for children, wife gives birth to inchoate mass, children cause trouble, the world asks for relief, rishi solves the problem.

That's Agastya's story. That's Kasyapa's story. Probably every rishi's story.

I have always loved these stories but I am also beginning to get sick of them. We need Purana 2.0.

Cunning

We Indians have plenty of stereotypes for each other but none is more enduring than that of the cunning brahmin. There are other stories about brahmins of course: sometimes the brahmin is a stupid pauper, sometimes he's a dupe, and sometimes he's a wise man. But none of these have the same intensity as the stories of brahminical cunning, especially when the brahmin in question has been wronged or offended.

In these stories, the brahmin is revealed as a man - it's always a man - who gets what he wants and who is ruthless in how he goes about satisfying his desires even as he never wields weapons. These stories offer a glimpse of how society views a caste that's been in power everywhere without bearing arms.

You see that stereotype in play in the story about Kautilya and how he poured honey on a clump of kusa grass that had pricked him. You see that stereotype in the story of Agastya and the Vindhyas.

Here's what happens: Agastya walks up to the Vindhyas and despite their anger, the mountains bow before the great rishi. When the mountains bow, they lower themselves far enough to let sunlight through, which is what the gods want. But how do you keep them that way?

Agastya has a trick up his robe. The rishi blesses the Vindhyas and says: "why don't you wait until I am done with my southern journey? We can talk at leisure then." Of course, the rishi never come back - the mountain is left waiting for eternity. I guess Agastya gave up some of his freedom in doing so, but South India is a more pleasant place to live than the north anyway, right?

Swallowing the Ocean

We Indians have plenty of stereotypes for each other but none is more enduring than that of the cunning brahmin. There are other stories about brahmins of course: sometimes the brahmin is a stupid pauper, sometimes he's a dupe, and sometimes he's a wise man. But none of these have the same intensity as the stories of brahminical cunning, especially when the brahmin in question has been wronged or offended.

In these stories, the brahmin is revealed as a man - it's always a man - who gets what he wants and who is ruthless in how he goes about satisfying his desires even as he never wields weapons. These stories offer a glimpse of how society views a caste that's been in power everywhere without bearing arms.

You see that stereotype in play in the story about Kautilya and how he poured honey on a clump of kusa grass that had pricked him. You see that stereotype in the story of Agastya and the Vindhyas.

Here's what happens: Agastya walks up to the Vindhyas and despite their anger, the mountains bow before the great rishi. When the mountains bow, they lower themselves far enough to let sunlight through, which is what the gods want. But how do you keep them that way?

Agastya has a trick up his robe. The rishi blesses the Vindhyas and says: "why don't you wait until I am done with my southern journey? We can talk at leisure then." Of course, the rishi never come back - the mountain is left waiting for eternity. I guess Agastya gave up some of his freedom in doing so, but South India is a more pleasant place to live than the north anyway, right?

Ocean Dharma

Now that Agastya has swallowed and digested the ocean, the gods have a conundrum: how are they going to get the ocean back? I can imagine a UN commission on oceans pondering over a similar question: having overfished and trawled the life out of our oceans, how are we going to restore them?

Brahma has sobering advice for the repentant gods: "it's going to take a long time." I always wonder about that advice. Suppose humans vanished from the earth. How long will it take the earth to reach a new equilibrium? People have written books about the topic - they don't think it will take that long.

Which begs the question: did the gods leave the earth because they made such a mess that they couldn't live here anymore? Why should we assume the gods were protectors? When Elon Musk talks about taking millions of people to Mars, I am thinking he should be sending Indra an email.

It turns out that the dharma of ocean restoration will fall on Bhagiratha's shoulders. Who's Bhagiratha? Why is it his problem? If that question popped into your head while reading the previous sentence, you're in good company, for our perennial questioner, i.e., Yudhisthira, had the same question of Lomasha.

"Tell me all about Bhagiratha's destiny," says the Pandava king. He's got several more years to kill before the war comes knocking and what better way to spend those years than to peel one layer of time after another.

Divine Risk

I feel the god's pain. You would think life would be a continuous party being immortal and everything, but the reality is otherwise. When the daityas aren't killing them directly, they're killing them indirectly by shutting down the sacrifice. They're stuck with a massive bill after a rishi saves them from oblivion by drinking down the ocean - who's going to refill the ocean now?

Not Agastya, that's for sure. Agastya is the black hole of the ancient world: everything that passes the event horizon is gone for ever. The rishi's quite clear that the gods need to look elsewhere for their water supply.

What I don't fully understand is why the gods are concerned about the ocean at all. Is it their compassion for the earth? Do they have divine ecological sentiments that gnaw at their conscience? Or are they worried that a yet to be named ocean protector will be so angry with them that they're worried about the consequences?

Whatever the case may be, it's back to Brahma for the deities. Brahma doesn't comfort them one bit. Prajapati tells them it's going to take a long long time for the ocean to return. "You're going to have to wait until Bhagiratha takes birth."

Notice how mini-avatars are scattered throughout the epic: they're reliably incarnated every time reality suffers from an existential challenge. I want to know the divine perception of risk: how does the Ultimate decide which divinity should be incarnated? When is it OK for a minor god to take birth in human form and when does the world need a major avatar of Vishnu?

The Saviour

Here's where we left the story yesterday: the gods are worried that the killing of brahmins by the daityas will kill them too, for it's sacrifice that maintains the world and without the world, there's no heaven. The deities beseech Brahma to do something about the killing; Prajapati tells them to supplicate themselves before Agastya, for it's within the rishi's power to swallow the ocean and expose the kaleyas hiding beneath the waves.

The god's argument to Brahma echoes the hierarchy of power in the human world: yes, it's true that kings rule over their subjects and the farmer has to bow before his ruler, but it's even more true that without the farmer, there's no king. The top of the pyramid can't survive without the base.

When the gods reach Agastya's ashram, they recount how he's in the habit of saving the world from disaster. Didn't he do so when Nahusha was oppressing the world? Didn't he stop the Vindhyas from overshadowing the sun?

What they're trying to say is "we are in even bigger trouble now and only you can save us." I like how the burden of dharma is a rotating burden: sometimes it falls on gods who are importuned by rishis and humans, sometimes it falls on rishis who are importuned by gods and humans and sometimes it falls on humans who're importuned by rishis and gods. Dharma and karma are intertwined.

Modus Ponens

After Lomasha recounts Agastya's past as apocalypse averter and the god's successful attempt to enrol him once again he turns to Yudhisthira and says "that's why the wide mouthed Agastya came to the ocean shore."

Bad move.

Lomasha should have known that Yudhisthira is a like a curious child who will always pry open the why behind the why. Yudhisthira wants to know why Agastya saved the world from Nahusha and why the Vindhyas started growing higher and higher.

But first, a few words on modus ponens. It's a rule of logic that goes as follows: If A implies B and A is true, then B is true. Or a slightly different form: if you know A and you know that A implies B, then you know that B.

Children are experts at reverse engineering modus ponens. If you tell them B, they will ask "why B?" upon which the adult scrambles to invent another explanation, "because A implies B." But then the child asks "why A?" and the game goes on and on.

Yudhisthira is that child. If B = Agastya agreeing to swallow the ocean, he wants to know "why B?" Because, Lomasha says "He saved us on earlier occasions - such as when he stopped the Vindhyas from overshadowing the sun (A)."

You can't justify one fantastic achievement by quoting another; "A mountain wanting to overshadow the sun? How did that happen?" asks Yudhisthira.

A Mountain of Jealousy

Lomasha should have known that Yudhisthira wouldn't let him complete his story without filling in all the details. Now he has to tell the exiled king why the Vindhyas were so upset with the sun.

The sun was in the habit of paying homage to Mt. Meru. Every morning the sun would climb out of its cave and set out on a circular pilgrimage around the great mountain all day long. By evening time the sun would be tired and ready to rest until it was time to show bhakti the next day. The Vindhyas noticed the sun's devotion and were jealous.

Meru is a mystery to me. It's the centre of the universe but no one talks about it. Did Meru come before Prajapati or after? We don't know.

Anyways, the Vindhyas were upset with the sun. They asked him "why do you circumnavigate Meru and not us? Are we second class citizens?"

The sun didn't know what to say. "I am only doing what I have been commanded to by Prajapati. If you want my route changed you're going to have to register a complaint with my supervisor."

That angered the Vindhyas even more; they started growing and growing and blocking the sun from casting light on the earth. Farmers started losing crops for lack of sunlight. Brahmins stopped sacrificing for lack of supplies from the farmers. That's when the gods started worrying - heaven begins to teeter when sacrifices stop.

So the gods approached Agastya and said: "can you do something about the Vindhyas?"

Curiosity

When the scene fades to black, Yudhisthira asks Lomasha to tell him more about Agastya's exploits. What did this great rishi achieve? What can I learn from him?

I find Yudhisthira's curiosity his most endearing trait. Everyone, i.e., everyone who's read or heard or watched the Mahabharata, knows Dharmaraja for his kindness and his sense of justice. It's the standard template for the Pandava king. What we don't learn until we read the epic from beginning to end is the extent to which the epic is pushed forward by his questions.

He too is part Socrates, except that he isn't ironic; he isn't trying to reveal the contradictions in his interlocutor's position. Yudhisthira has a more basic kind of curiosity - "tell me how and why something happened?"

Yudhisthira's curiosity and despair drive all the digressions in this parva; from the story of Nala to the importance of pilgrimage and the strange life of Agastya, it's Yudhisthira who wants to know the inner nature of things. Yes, it's true that the man is stuck for thirteen years in a forest and he's got to keep himself busy, but so what: he too could be out hunting and drinking like some of his brothers.

We know that Yudhisthira prefers discussing metaphysical questions with visiting rishis to ruling the empire, but once again, that's his historical identity, the wise king's robe that's been draped on him since antiquity. I find the childlike curiosity refreshing, a playful counterpart to wisdom and sagacity.

Daityas

Why does Vishnu side with Indra over Vritra? I don't see any difference between the devas and the daityas. The underlying facts are clear: Vritra wants Indra's throne and Indra does not want to give it up. In the same way that Ilvala wants a son like Indra and no brahmin wants to help him get one. As it turns out, Vritra is more powerful than Indra, perhaps more learned as well. One could argue that the anti-gods are better than the gods.

Is the battle between them merely a power struggle that's now been turned into a morality play? There's something comfortable about the metaphysical struggle between GOOD and EVIL. If God is unceasingly good and the devil is unceasingly evil, we know whom to support. But what do we do when the devil is kinder and wiser and the god acts like a vengeful tyrant?

Here's a shocking possibility: instead of being the metaphysical ground, the basis upon which everything else is constructed, what if god (or God) is trapped in the cycle of samsara like the rest of us? And not only God, but also the laws of physics or logic or whatever else one might substitute for God after secularizing the truth.

A few hundred years ago, Descartes inaugurated what's now called modern philosophy by embarking upon an inquiry based on radical doubt. He asked himself "what remains certain when everything else is open to doubt?" We know where he ended: cogito ergo sum. The thinking consciousness remains certain even as the devil corrupts everything else. Well, what if certainty is the wrong design constraint? Why not let the devil have his due?

Kaleyas

After Indra kills Vritra, his supporters - the Kaleyas - run away and hide in the ocean. There they gather strength and plot vengeance. A few years pass and everyone's forgotten that these danavas even exist; the oceans are vast and deep and who knows what creatures hide there?

The danavas slink out at night, attacking isolated ashrams first, devouring the fruit and root eating rishis like a late night raid on the chocolate stash and as they're emboldened, the danavas attack sacrificial fires and ashrams wherever they find them. Some brahmins have their lives sucked out of them, leaving only their skeletons wrapped in skin. Others are torn to shreds as if tossed by a psychopathic writer upset with his stories.

As I see it, the danavas are nothing but Kshatriyas in disguise, taking revenge on Parasurama's children. When warriors are let loose on the earth without constraint, what else will they do besides plunder and kill? Which dharma will protect us from their violence?

Inevitably, the sacrifices take a hit. No brahmin wants to conduct a yagna out in the open, for in doing so, he's signing his own death warrant. The situation is so bad that the devas head over to Vaikunta to complain to Vishnu.

We can't find the Kaleyas in the middle of this vast ocean, o lord, and they are slowly killing all the brahmins in the world. Help us!

The Ocean Swallower

You might think Indra and the gods go to Vishnu out of kindness; that they're concerned about the brahmins who're being killed every night. You would be wrong. Their concern is self-preservation.

As Indra tells it, once the brahmins are gone, the world is gone and once the world is gone, the heavens are gone. It's the tapasya of the rishis that keeps everything going and without it, the gods would be nothing but figments of our imagination. It's that tapasya that gives the gods life.

It's an astonishing admission.

Behind it is an even greater fear: what if the danavas stop their crude assault on the rishis and launch a subtler campaign to take over their minds? What if the tapasya of the rishis is transformed into commodity worship?

As we know, their fears have come true. Instead of worshipping gods, we worship machines. While the one god remains in his heaven, we have replaced the three hundred and thirty crore gods with three hundred and thirty billion machines, whom we worship day and night, just as I am doing as I write these words. The takeover is complete.

Vishnu considers the god's plight and then he says: as long as the kakeyas are hiding in the ocean, you can't touch them. So find someone who can make the ocean disappear; I have the perfect ocean drinker - Agastya.

The rishi is about to shift from retail to wholesale daitya-digesting.

Ilvala and Vatapi

So this Ilvala is actually a pretty reasonable daitya. He wants a son as powerful as Indra, and to be frank, no one can blame him. Indra is known to rub out his rivals, chief among whom are the daityas. In that ancient world, children are insurance against all kinds of enemies: space and time if you're a rishi, Indra if you're a daitya and your next door neighbour if you're a village chieftain. Children protect you in this world and the next.

Don't Ilvala and Agastya problems mirror each other? Agastya has tapasya but he doesn't have money, while Ilvala has money but not enough tapasya. If only the two of them had met each other a few years ago! Agastya would have taken from Vishwamitra's book and created an Indra like progeny for Ilvala and Ilvala in turn would have provided as many beds and mattresses as Agastya and Lopamudra desired.

If only. Ilvala couldn't find a rishi or a brahmin with the aukatto create an Indraino and the miffed daitya king decides to kill all visiting brahmins in frustration. That works out well for Ilvala, but what about Vatapi? Why does he assent to be turned into a goat, killed and resurrected? I wouldn't want my head chopped off even if I knew I was coming back in one piece a few hours later. Why not ask Vatapi to take the form of a dragon and make him swallow the visiting brahmin or burn him to a cinder?

Reconstitution

So here's the story so far: Agastya needs money for a down payment on his house. Despite the outward glory, every king he approaches for a loan is broke. Ilvala is the only ruler with extra cash. Ilvala is still smarting at the brahmin genus for not providing an Indra-like son.

Ilvala resorts to killing them off one by one by an incredibly complicated procedure: turning his brother into a goat, slaughtering and feeding that goat to visiting brahmins and recalling that goat from the dead after it's made its way to the guest's stomach. As a much later wag would say: "what an idea sirji."

Agastya isn't just another brahmin though. He's a maharishi. After eating a meal of goat curry, Agastya rubs his stomach in satisfaction. When Ilvala calls for his brother, nothing happens. No tearing of guts, no splattered blood. Nothing. Agastya looks at Ilvala and says "he's been digested you know, there's no reconstituting him."

I am thinking thermodynamically here: that chewing and swallowing a goat is still within the ambit of reversible processes, but digestion introduces so much entropy that even a daitya king can't reverse the transformation. The second law is the mother of all gods.

Having acidified Vatapi, Agastya turns to Ilvala with a sly smile: "what about that loan we were talking about before we sat down to eat?" It's got to be the most outrageous request that a pauper has ever made to his banker.

A Warm Bed

Amazingly, Agastya's brazen request works: Ilvala is willing to furnish a loan at very low interest rates. So low that it might be considered a gift rather than a loan. Why the change of heart? How can Ilvala forgive his brother's killer?

Some of Ilvala's generosity must be due to fear. After all, a rishi who can digest a daitya has to have other fearsome powers. You don't want to mess with kind of tapasya. Or perhaps Ilvala was renewing his desire for an Indra like child; surely Agastya had the power to bestow such a son on him.

The gold-endowed, daitya digested Agastya goes back to Lopamudra. The entire trip didn't take him that long - perhaps it took place in dream time, for the Jaya says the riches were transported back to Agastya's ashram in the twinkling of an eye. The house and bed desired by Lopamudra must have been constructed in the next twinkle while Agastya is still walking from the parking lot to the house.

Lopamudra welcomes Agastya to his house with a seductive whisper "the time has come; beget a son upon me!" Ever the rishi, Agastya responds back with a choice: "do you want ten thousand sons or one son who's the equivalent of ten thousand?" Isn't that a no-brainer? Who would want ten thousand sons? Unsurprisingly, Lopamudra opts for one son.

Agastya leaves for the forest soon after Lopamudra is declared pregnant and with that exit, we will also leave Agastya and Lopamudra and transfer our affections back to Yudhisthira for a moment.

An Indian Socrates

Incest is a running theme in the old world. Pharaoh's married their siblings. Zeus and Hera are brother and sister. In both cases, who else would a god marry? Prajapati chases after his daughter. The divinity of these myths is an elemental divinity, far removed from the kindly old man ruling from up above.

Nevertheless, Agastya's combination of parenting and engineering design is unique in the history of family business. Let's start with Lopamudra's birth. Agastya assembles her out of grade-A parts, but he doesn't give birth to her; for that he has to find surrogate parents. The king and queen of Vidarbha are glad to receive Agastya's blessing and soon Lopamudra is born.

In this episode and elsewhere, Agastya comes across as an earthy Indian Socrates. I don't know if you remember, but Socrates was the son of a midwife, and in his questioning, he calls himself the midwife of wisdom. Like other aging midwives, Socrates is barren, but he has the gift of birthing wisdom in others. Another way of putting it: Socrates is drunk on the muses and receives transmission through them, but he doesn't have the manual power to bring those ideas to life on his own - he needs interlocutors. Just as the blind Homer was the composer of the Greek epics, the barren Socrates was the midwife of Greek philosophy.

Not that Socrates wasn't fleshy. The ancient sources say that Socrates was ugly, satyr like; snub nosed and squat. He was a fantastic soldier in his youth and could still drink his young lovers and friends under the table in his old age. Agastya is Socrates with his fleshy parts intact. For that reason alone, we might want to look closely at the rishi.

Bedtime

The Kshatriya-Brahmana tension runs throughout the Jaya and its universe. Kshatriyas depend on Brahmanas for knowledge, for access to divinity and for advice. Brahmanas need Kshatriyas for protection and influence. You would think that's a mutually beneficial relationship and it is on most occasions, but every once in a while it falls apart spectacularly. Like when the brahmin Parasurama kills twenty one generations of kshatriyas.

Agastya has a more cordial relationship with the kingly set but it's not stress free. The king of Vidarbha would have remained childless without Agastya's intervention, but he doesn't want his luminous daughter to be married to a vagabond rishi. How can a queen marry a hermit? But how's he going to say no without inviting curses? Vidarbha as a problem.

Fortunately for the king, Lopamudra is more than happy to be married to the great rishi. Who knows, she might prefer the freedom of the himalayan skies to the gilded cage of the royal palace. Lopamudra divests her royal finery and takes to barks and rags. Looks fetching too, which works out for everyone, especially Agastya.

Even a barkista has her limits: she is happy wearing rags, she's happy subsisting on fruits and herbs, but she isn't about to sleep with her husband on stony ground. Lopamudra wants a proper bed for their nighttime activities.

Now Agastya has a problem: where's he going to find a bed?

Debt Control

When Lopamudra asks Agastya to get her a proper bed, the rishi is flummoxed. Where's he going to get the money for a richly upholstered bed? Who's going to pay for the cushions and sheets?

Lopamudra: "Why don't you use your tapas to create a bed for us?" She didn't say it, but I can hear her think "if you can make a wife for yourself, the least you can do is make a home that goes along with it."

Yes, but making a wife is part of Agastya's debt to his ancestors. In repaying that debt, Agastya doesn't incur new obligations. The assembly of Lopamudra doesn't draw down his spiritual bank balance. But making a bed; that's a different matter, a frivolous waste of spiritual power.

I see a problem here: if Lopamudra was created to satisfy Agastya's desire to have children and her precondition for sleeping with him is a bed worth sleeping on, why does he rack up spiritual debts by fulfilling her desires? Lopamudra hints at that contradiction, when she says to the rishi: "Listen, I only come to you when I can become pregnant. It's that time of the month; if you want children, we need to get going pronto."

Makes me think that she wasn't pining away for her husband. Or is she? The epic says she was a devoted wife and he was a doting husband. They took good care of each other. But doting plus devoted do not equal desire. Love and lust don't obey the same rules.

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Debt Relief

As we learnt, you can pay for a wife without incurring a debt but you can't clothe and feed her without doing so. It's a situation ripe for Marxist, Freudian and Postcolonial analyses, but we will let that slide. Let someone else write about the discursive dialectics of vedic wifemaking and get their book burned in Pune. Sometimes a wife is just a wife. Plus, Lopamudra is an exceptional wife and she's in heat: no way Agastya is going to let this opportunity go.

Then comes Agastya's Kisa Gotami moment.

If you remember, Gotami is the bereaved mother who brings her dead son to the Buddha and asks him to revive him. The Buddha says to her: "sure, I will do so as soon as you bring me a mustard seed from a house that hasn't lost a near and dear one." Gotami agrees, only to find out that every house has its secret sorrow. She returns seedless and asks to be accepted into the Buddhist order. Moral of the story:

1. Suffering is universal.

2. Children are no insurance against suffering.

3. Only the dharma offers protection.

Do I believe the Buddha's line? Not as much as he would like and not as little as his detractors would like. But we aren't talking about the Buddha, are we?

Agastya, like Kisa Gotami, runs from king to king asking for a gift-loan to buy himself a nice house and a nice bed. Everywhere he goes, the kings welcome him with great pomp only to reveal that their treasuries are broke; that even a small loan will pinch some family that doesn't have a great rishi or famous king in its lineage.

The only king running a surplus is the daitya king Ilvala, the brother of the infamous Vatapi. Agastya's daitya digesting is about to begin.

Supernatural

Divinity has at least two forms: supernatural and hypernatural. Supernatural divinity transcends the known order of the universe, for example, by creating the universe in the first place or intervening in our lives after breaking the usual laws of causality. That's how milk appears on statues and the Sai Baba creates watches out of thin air.

Of course, the supernatural deity has a hard time explaining why we are never able to break the laws that bind us. Rationalists have it easy; most demonstrations of supernatural intervention are easy to refute. A good magician can replicate most of those tricks. Tricks aren't the only obstacle. Can God turn 2+2 into 5? If not, why not? If yes, what does it even mean to break the laws of logic?

Here's a Turing test for divinity: if my system of - ___ fill in the blanks: magic, technology, alien intervention - can't be distinguished from divine intervention then I am a god. By that standard, many aspects of the modern world are divine. So yesterday's divinity is today's disruptive business.

Supernatural divinity can't compete with technology. Supernatural intervention is special, a one time suspension of business as usual. Technology on the other hand, is business as usual. Most of us prefer business as usual to miracles.

When supernatural business turns into business as usual, divinity is left with no option but to retreat from the universe by transcending it. The god's eye view of the cosmos is also the absentee landlord's view of the cosmos.

I started this Jayary with two modifications of the word "natural." What about hypernatural? What is that? We will get to it tomorrow.

Hypernatural

I will be back to Agastya and Parasurama in a moment, but do indulge me as I explore this new territory of religiosity that's been nudged open by reading the Jaya.

The supernatural is fast disappearing and all that's left is the cat's smile, or what's known as the God's Eye View of the World, which we encounter primarily through the natural scientist's claim toward objectivity, the disinterested witness. A god (or GOD) who stays away from the natural functioning of the universe and intervenes on very special occasions is - and forgive me if it offends your sensibilities - is exactly like Pontius Pilate; he's washed his hands off his creation.

In this view, if Christ is the son of the God who's left but has left his representative on earth, the scientist is the son of Christ, the official representative of the empire after God and his son have left town but still want to keep tabs on what's happening back on the ranch.

Hypernaturalism is different: it's an intensification of the real world, a divine version of augmented reality. The rishis are all hypernaturalists, for what is tapasya if isn't an intensification of our bodily existence. In this view, transcendence is achieved not by leaving this world, or studying it from nowhere, but by perfecting oneself in it.

But what does this perfection mean? Is it any more viable than supernaturalism? That's a question for another day.

Parasurama

Let's take a break from Agastya and look at Parasurama. I find him the least appealing of the various avatars of Vishnu: his claim to avatarhood is the killing of twenty one generations of Kshatriyas. So much so that the twenty second generation of Kshatriyas were fathered by Brahmins in congress with Kshatriya women. There's a little problem with this story: who fathered generations two through twenty one if he killed each generation of Kshatriya men? He wouldn't have killed the children of Brahmins, but if there were no Kshatriya men left to father the next generation, where did they come from?

Parasurama is also the first fully human avatar. All the previous avatars of Vishnu were (mostly animal) beings that performed a single task: saving us from the floods, killing a terrorizing demon, supporting the churning of the ocean. Parasurama is the first avatar who takes his anger out on other humans. He's the signal that nature is no longer the problem: it's other humans. That seed will grow into a terrible tree in the Mahabharata.

I find it instructive that avatars are time bound; it's more like a job than a personality type. Not only do they die as Krishna did, their avatarhood itself is delimited. When Parasurama meets Rama and challenges him to lift and string his bow, it's Rama who is Vishnu incarnated and shows him his Vishwarupa. Parasurama has to bow before the new avatar. Kshatriyas are on the ascendant.

The Daitya Digester

The rishis are strange; like the gods, they have extraordinary powers but unlike the gods, they have a personality. They have great compassion but are easy to anger; it's easy for an arrogant king to be cursed by a rishi. In short, we can write novels about them in every possible genre.

Consider Agastya, the first rishi to cross the Vindhyas. I like the story of Agastya and Vatapi. It seems Ilvala the Daitya king wanted a son who was greater than Indra, but no brahmin was able to deliver that blessing. I find it amazing that such a blessing is considered within the realm of possibility: how can a human - brahmin or otherwise - help anyone acquire an heir who's greater than the greatest god?

Anyway, Ilvala is pissed off with all brahmins and wants to kill them all. Like a daitya Parasurama. Except he does it retail rather than wholesale. His brother Vatapi is a shapeshifter and can take on any human or animal shape he desires. Ilvala in turn has the ability to summon any being, dead or alive.

So Ilvala asks his brother to turn into a goat, which he slaughters and serves to visiting brahmins. When the brahmin is done, Ilvala summons his brother from the dead, tearing through the brahmin's guts in the process. Which, of course, kills the visiting priest. As I said, Ilvala's believes in retail murder but what a technique!

Unfortunately for Ilvala and even more unfortunately for Vatapi, Agastya's gut instincts are sharper than the daityas.

Agastya's Dilemma

From a modern liberal's perspective, Agastya's life is pretty messed up. He's taking a stroll when he notices a cluster of tied-up hung over a pit. The ever solicitous Agastya asks these men if they have a problem, seeing as the aam aadmi doesn't like to be tied up and hung over a pit filled with creepy crawlies. Of course they have a problem. He's their problem.

If you've been paying attention to the Jaya, you know what's coming. Flash quiz: under what conditions does a man see a gaggle of men trapped in a cave or stuck over a pit? Hint: Jaratkaru.

Of course they are his ancestors, unhappy that the ascetic Agastya isn't furthering the lineage. All that tapasya is fantastic - it helps the A-man digest daitya-goats before they can tear him apart, but that daitya proof stomach doesn't do much for Agastya's predecessors. They're the past and as we all know, the past depends on the future. Without a future, the past begins to fade. Children are the life insurance of the rishi world. Plus, they're useful when a genocidal king decides to kill all snakes in the world.

Agastya is sympathetic to his ancestor's predicament and promises to do something about it. But how? He's a rishi; he isn't buying no life insurance. Remember Vishwamitra. What does a rishi do when faced with a challenging problem? Say, the gods are refusing admission to your candidate just because he's a living man? Simple: create a heaven of your own.

Similarly: what does a rishi do when forced to produce children with a wife he doesn't have? Create a wife of your own.

Frankenstein's Wife

Frankenstein: even the name incites a little twinge of horror. The machinic monster is an enduring myth of the modern era. Whether it's the all too real fear of robots taking away our jobs or the less likely fear of robots eating our children, we are consumed by the fear of machines even as we use them every waking moment of our lives.

The rishi is more open to cyborg existence than us mortals. If you've been reading, you know that Agastya has an ancestor problem; his progenitors are unhappy (which you would be too if you were hung head first into a pit) that Agastya hasn't furthered the lineage yet. That should be an easy problem to solve isn't it? Surely there are any number of parents who will marry their daughter off to a daitya dissolving rishi?

But Agastya is a headstrong man. He doesn't want any wife; he wants a sparring partner, a lover and an ally, someone who will share the joys and frustrations of rishic existence and leave him alone when that rishic existence is at its most engrossing. Plus, she has to be ready to spend her days clad in bark. Imagine an advertisement that goes:

Needed, Harvard PhD.

1. Can work eighty hours a week.

2. Willing to teach schoolchildren.

3. Skilled in firearms and guerilla warfare.

4. Eager to travel to remote areas in the Andes and Afghanistan.

5. Looks good in barkware.

The CIA probably hired a few with those qualifications, but they have a ton of money. Agastya is a poor rishi. Frustrated after an extended job search fails to uncover viable candidates, Agastya decides to create a wife for himself.

Frankenstein, meet Adam.

Design and Development

Everything's fair in love and war and to be frank, not much distinguishes the two. We are reading an epic - like every epic I know - in which love leads to war and war leads to love. So it's not surprising that every trick known to humankind has been recorded in the book of love.

Still, Agastya's method has to got to be one of the more original contributions to the Annals of Seduction. Having tried and failed in the marriage sweepstakes, Agastya makes a bold move: he creates a wife for himself out of the best parts he can assemble.

Having built the prototype in-house, Agastya outsources the production. There's always been more money in design than in manufacturing. Fortunately, the king of Vidarbha is thirsting for progeny, so Agastya approaches them with a deal: I will give you a daughter as long as I can come back to reclaim her when she's of age.

That's how Lopamudra is born. She grows up to be the most beautiful woman in the world and just as the king was hoping Agastya will forget her in his tapasya, the rishi comes back to claim Lopamudra as his wife. Can a man marry a robot he manufactures in his basement? Does that qualify as incest?

Well, no one seems to mind Agastya's switching of roles. What they do care about is his lack of riches.

One Hundred and One Days

265 is a nice round number. In a normal year, it would be a hundred shy of the new year, but this is a leap year. That honour belongs to 266, but I will pretend as if every year is three hundred and sixty five days. I am sure at some point a legislator in Texas sponsored a bill declaring that God made the year 365 days long, just before shoehorning pi into 3.14. Then again, the good Hindu that I am it might be better to start an auspicious task with a 101 days in the bank.

So what's that auspicious task?

When I started writing the Jayary this year, I said to myself that I will use the Jayar to articulate Indian philosophy as I understand it. Two thirds of the way through the year, it strikes me that the march of civilization has treated religion worse than philosophy. Why not spend the next hundred and one days digging for the buried remnants of that religion?

As soon as I asked myself that question, I thought of Roberto Calasso. Isn't that his project: to mine the past for the origins of religion and philosophy in literature? I am pretty sure it is; and he finds the mining a lot easier in the Indian past that he imagines from his window in Milan than the Western past he encounters when he leaves the building.

I am not a miner. Digging is not my thing, even as I consider Calasso one of the wonders of our world. Moles and rats have done their duty. I am looking for some other animal to serve as a mascot for the churning of religion and philosophy. Is it Kurma, the tortoise on which the ocean is churned? Or Vasuki, the snake whose ends are pulled by the gods and the demons? I am leaning toward Vasuki, but we have another hundred and one days to find out.

Stages of Religion

I am not a Muslim but it seems to me that Allah is the logical culmination of an entire line of development: a God that's as different from us as possible while remaining in relation with humanity. While Christianity is heading in that direction, it still admits that Jesus is the son of God, a fleshy being who's of the same category as the divine. There's no such possibility in Islam - Mohammed is a prophet, not a divinity.

Contrast that God with the sporadically earthly deities such as Vishnu and the sporadically divine humans such as the Pandavas we have met in the Jaya. Then there are figures such as the rishis who draw respect from both manavas and devas. The border between the human and divine seems porous, even as the devas are on their way out and humans on the way in.

It's no surprise to me that no major world religion has arisen after Islam; later religious traditions such as Sikhism are influential in some parts of the world, but they haven't challenged the dominant religions for market share. It's as if religious ideas developed in two stages: an enormous upswell of insights and intuitions from prehistoric times to the times of the Buddha followed by a period of consolidation for a thousand years - roughly between the Buddha and Mohammed.

I don't think my pre-consolidation/consolidation/post-consolidation division will pass muster with professional scholars of religion. It serves as a heuristic for me and the Jayary because the Jaya gives us insight into the pre-consolidation phase of religion, especially if you cut the main characters - the Pandavas and the Kauravas - out of the story.

The God who forgot Himself

I kind of like the easy commerce between the various shades of humanity and divinity and how one can go from divine to human and the other way around. The rishis are a particularly interesting go-between: beings with supernatural powers who scare the gods with their tapas but also great devotees of the gods. How can they be both? Is there a hint that tapas, karma and dharma are greater than the gods themselves?

Sometimes the encounter between divine and human is tangled in the extreme. Let's take the story of Parasurama's stand-off with Rama. It's a story of two avatars except that Parasurama's avatar has ended -even as the man himself remains alive- and Rama's avatar has started.

In his pride, Parasurama challenges Rama to string the bow that the sixth avatar used to kill the Kshatriyas twenty one times over. Not only does Rama rise to the challenge, he reveals his true form to Parasurama after doing so (behold, I am Vishnu!), just as Krishna was to do so later with the Kauravas when they tried to seize him.

Which makes for an interesting question: how is it possible to for an avatar to not recognize his successor? What kind of amnesia would prevent God from recognizing her own divinity? "The God who forgot himself." That would be a good title for a short story reworking the meeting between Av 6 and Av 7.

The Pilgrimage Machine

It's time to stop thinking about pilgrimage - writing more will take me into a long detour away from the main story and I want to get back to the Pandavas. Closing out, I can say that reading the Jaya has thrown up two unexpected surprises: reading Nala and Damayanti's story made me reflect on the relationship between love, chance and divinity, and later, the great emphasis on pilgrimage and the importance of tirthas for religion.

Of course, travel to pilgrimage sites is central to the practice of most Indian religions and I am not the first person to think about sacred geography. However, I think that the traditional idea of sacred space is being destroyed by modern development - and while its primary effect is physical (how sacred can the world be when you cut down its forests and blare jagrans from the temples that remain?), we shouldn't underestimate the mental distance between us and the pilgrims of the Jaya.

When our primary model of the world is that of a machine, it becomes impossible to see particular places as sacred or powerful. There's no going back to performing sacrifices to one deity on a full moon night and prayers to another deity on the new moon night. That combination of ritual, belief and altered consciousness is gone for ever. What's left is textual, fundamentalist (or threatening to be fundamentalist) belief which is such thin gruel that I can't imagine it satisfying our religious urges.

So how can we be religious again?

Sticky Stories

I thought I was done with pilgrimage but I was wrong - it's sticking to me on the way out the door.

When Parasurama was done with his carnage of the Kshatriyas, he filled five lakes with the blood of the men he had killed. Gruesome, isn't it? After doing so, Parasurama concentrated his mind on the gods. Pleased with his devotion, they asked him what he wanted.

Parasurama said "Forgive my violence, which I committed in a wrathful state. If my penance has any value, turn these five lakes into tirthas, so that the misdeeds of those who come here are purified and absolved."

The gods were polite in response - remember that Parasurama was one of them. He was an avatar of Vishnu and we saw earlier that another tirtha, Dima, was created out of Vishnu's penance after he had killed the Danavas and the Daityas.

The gods assured Parasurama that his wrath was justified and that the Kshatriyas had brought the violence upon themselves and so there was no problem whatsoever in transforming the lakes of blood into a holy site.

Presto.

So why is this sticking to me? Because I am wondering whether our current understanding of divinity as primarily peaceful is horrendously wrong. When I read James Lovelock's thoughts about Gaia's revenge, I am reminded of Parasurama and his cleansing of the earth of all Kshatriyas. Except that this time around it might be more than Kshatriyas getting cleansed.

Back to Back Digressions

In P. Lal's version of the Jaya - the one I am following - the discussion of tirthas and pilgrimages takes up about a hundred pages. That discussion is back to back with Nala and Damayanti's story, which also takes up over a hundred pages, so no one can accuse the Mahabharata of half-hearted digressions.

A modern reader exposed to back to back book length digressions is bound to wonder, "what's the logic behind:"

1. Such long digressions.

2. Having a long discourse on pilgrimage follow a love story.

There are several answers to these questions, the most obvious of which is Yudhisthira's depression - which is why he has to be introduced to Nala and Damayanti, whose nadir was worse than his but whose renewed zenith was a cause for hope; and now that he isn't depressed but in a mood to engage the world, why not start that engagement auspiciously, i.e., by going on an extended pilgrimage? The exiled king has several years to kill after all.

Still, I can imagine a flashback or two or a quick lesson, but a hundred pages a pop seems a bit much doesn't it? So why? I would say that up to first order, the answers to the above two questions fall under one of three categories:

1. There's no logic to it: these Indians were idiots with no idea how to tell a good story. Another version of the same: the books were written over hundreds of years and are full of interpolations.

2. These Indians were superhumans whose logic and mental capacity is beyond our understanding.

3. There's a logic and it's within our understanding.

The Algebra of Digressions

Does a digression within a digression bring us back to the main story or does it open a third level of understanding? In other words, what's the algebra of digressions? Here's a theorem I want to state:

If there's no algebra of digressions, all Indians are idiots

You might think I am an idiot to state such a theorem but bear with me, will you. Consider the rules of morphology for a moment. Many words in English have irregular plurals. For example, the word "life," whose plural is "lives" not "lifes." However, if you go to the dentist's office and notice a stack of LIFE magazines, you won't call that a stack of LIVES, but a stack of LIFE'S. The exception to the exception is back to the regular form.

Morphology is fine, but what about hundred page digressions?

Recall my tripartite division of digressive logic: idiots/superhumans/logical.

I am not inclined to conclude Indians were terrible at telling stories; in fact, if history is any guide, they were pretty good storytellers, seeing as how so many stories the world over are of Indian origin. If you accept that statement and if you accept the theorem in italics, you must necessarily conclude that there's an algebra of digressions.

There's a superhuman element to the ancients, but only because we have lost some of their talents. Memory is one of them: it's rare to find a scholar today who has memorized dozens of texts, while prodigious feats of memory were relatively common in the ancient world. The great thing about telling a story to an audience with a well trained memory is that you can expect them to layer the digressions into the main story as they hear you speaking.

Yudhisthira was jolted out of his depression by Nala and Damayanti's story and then the recounting of all the tirthas brought him into a heightened state of engagement within the main story. Two digressions don't bring you back to the original state, but it brings you close enough. Added bonus: the difference between the starting point and the end point is a positive difference, for now Yudhisthira is happy and calm.

Philosophy's poor cousin

I keep griping about how philosophy has lost its way, that it's become a specialized academic discipline instead of being the guide that we all deserve, whether layperson or expert. I am not backing out from that claim; if anything it feels even truer today than when I started writing a daily Jayary in January. However, my reading and rereading of Damayanti and Nala's story and the more recent engagement with the idea of pilgrimage has strengthened the conviction that philosophy is better off than religion, which is even more poorly served.

Yudhisthira can ask a genuine question about pilgrimage because it's a living act for him; he has plenty of forests and temples and waters for him to mark the presence of the divine.

What do we have?

Narada mentions two exceptionally important pilgrimages - one to Dami where Vishnu went to cleanse himself after killing the danavas and the daityas, and the second to Vadava where Brahma, the devas, the yakshas, the daityas and the rakshasas arrive to pay their obeisance to Vishnu.

Think about it for a second: Vishnu, who is the object of pilgrimage by the daityas and the rakshasas at Vadava is the one performing the pilgrimage at Dami for killing those very daityas and rakshasas. It tells us that pilgrimage is prior to Vishnu; he too has to submit to karma at some level, however subtle. It also tells us that there's no permanent division between good and evil, making those terms suspect in the description of divinity.

So what is it to worship the divine when the divine itself is embedded in the warp and weft of the world? Don't like the thought that divinity is of the same species as we are?

Tirtha

Narada and Pulastya recount the merits of one tirtha after another - believe me, it's a very long list with specific instructions on what rites to perform in each one. The tirtha's are spread throughout the country, suggesting that sacred geography predates and supersedes political arrangements.

The epic says that Bhishma took Pulastya's advice to heart and visited all the tirthas in his time. Of course, that prompts the question: when did he do it? Couldn't have been before he was recognized as Shantanu's son. I can't imagine him having any free time after he was installed as regent. So, did he leave town after he gave up the throne and handed over power to Satyavati's lineage? Or did he wait until his step-brothers were old enough to rule on their own? Or even later, after Pandu and Dhritarashtra took over the kingdom?

Bhishma the king-in-waiting was at war with his rivals. Bhishma the pilgrim roamed the country, visiting tirthas. I like that juxtaposition: the warrior prince and the matted pilgrim. I like the freedom that comes from the abdication of power. I remember being surprised when I heard that the great Mauryan emperor Chandragupta died as a monk in Karnataka.

A society that allows kings to become mendicants has the makings of a great society. A society that encourages the transition has figured out a fundamental truth.

The Ritual Mind

While not everyone in the modern world is a theoretical physicist or a mathematician, everyone who's reading this sentence has added and subtracted numbers, struggled with word problems and generally being socialized into the mathematical view of the world, i.e., that objects can be measured numerically and that numerical measure in turn can be fed into calculations of scientific or economic value. It's a mental stance we understand even if we don't succeed in mastering.

Now contrast that with Yudhisthira's reception of the litany of pilgrimages. Add to that litany the rites one performs at each one of the tirthas. Does it make any sense?

Humans are ritual creatures. Everyone alive has a favourite ritual or two: brushing one's teeth first thing in the morning or after the first cup of coffee. Sleeping on the right hand side of the bed. Eating the same cereal every day. These are rituals too, but unlike Yudhisthira, these rituals aren't a framework for understanding the rest of the universe.

The fact that I brush my teeth after my first cup of coffee on the days I don't run and brush my teeth first thing on the days I run isn't of cosmic importance or even a sociological fact worth commenting upon. In contrast, if 17% of all male runners brush their teeth first thing in the morning on the days they run while they brush their teeth after coffee the days they don't run - that would be a fact worth commenting upon.

Numbers have value in our cosmology. Rituals, not so much. Sacrifices are rituals. Mantras are rituals. Pilgrimages are rituals. Religious insight is impossible without rituals.

The First Question

Who asked the first question?

We know who gave the first answer: it was Prajapati, who said "DA" in response to the devas, asuras and manavas worries.

Doesn't that mean the first question was asked by one of those three beings? Not so fast; I said Prajapati gave the first answer and it was "DA." That doesn't mean the first answer was given for the first time to the three anxious species.

There's reason to believe that the first answer might have been given by Prajapati to himself. For at the beginning, when he was all alone, Prajapati said to himself, "I am all alone" and he gave himself a body. Wasn't that the first desire, the first question and the first answer? Because of which we have all been fated to be born, grow old and die.

Since we aren't Prajapati, we are always asking a question for the nth time. When Yudhisthira asks Narada about the importance of pilgrimages, Narada says:

"Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, your ancestor Bhishma was performing puja at the banks of the Ganga. The rishi Pulastya was so pleased with Bhishma's efforts that he came up to the Kuru prince and said:

"I am pleased with your efforts. Ask me anything and I will answer."

The awestruck Bhishma said to the glowing rishi:

"Mahatma, tell me one just one thing and I will be happy: what is the purpose of pilgrimage? Why should we roam the earth offering our homage to the gods?"

"You see" said Narada to Yudhisthira, "this question has a past in your family."

Pilgrimage

What I like about Yudhisthira is that he's good at asking questions and seeking advice. He isn't like Duryodhana who rarely listens. We find Yudhisthira answering questions only under special circumstances: when he's tested by the Yaksa, when he's queried by Dharma, i.e., when he's answering questions as a seeker rather than a king.

So when Dharmaraja asks Narada "why should we go on pilgrimages?" I take his attitude seriously. He wants a genuine answer. So does Bhishma when he asks the same question of Pulastya.

Why should we go on pilgrimages?

It's a axial question, a question around which we can construct an entire universe of inquiry. I want to know Pulastya's answer to this axial question, but I don't want to read the answer until I have taken a few minutes to explore it myself.

Why should we go on pilgrimage? What is a pilgrimage?

Pilgrimage makes no sense in the liberal culture we inhabit. Religion is a private affair, at best a special relation between a worshipper and his deity and at worst lip service one performs at home before cutting down a forest and or launching yet another subprime loan. That liberal attitude voids the purpose of a pilgrimage even if you pay Gold Star Travels fifty lakh rupees to take you to all one thousand and eight holy places on earth.

Dharma is not private. It's not about psychology, even as it includes psychology. Dharma blankets the world. Pilgrimage is a special kind of karma, action that's also also knowledge, and knowledge that's reaffirmed in the act of doing so. The temples we visit are the coordinate marks of that knowledge.

Who said knowledge is in our head? It's there in the world, which is both inside and outside. Akam and puram as Tamilians would say. The pilgrim is a witness to the world. Let's see what Pulastya has to say about it.

Controlled Worship and Free Worship

I was surprised by Pulastya's answer to Bhishma's question about pilgrimages. Positively surprised. While there's a long list of pilgrimages in Pulastya's answer, his basic message is:

1. Pilgrimages are open to everyone, unlike yagnas that only the rich can afford.

2. Pilgrimages are even more efficacious than yagnas.

What's a yagna?

It's a sacrifice under prescribed conditions, a ritual in which everything from the amount of ghee to be poured on the sacrificial fire to the payment to the presiding brahmins is set in stone. Yagna is controlled action.

In contrast, a pilgrimage is free action, a movement in which the pilgrim is allowed to pay his respect to the gods in whichever way, as long as he transports himself from one holy site to another. Interestingly, the pilgrimage that Pulastya cites as one of great power is the one at Puskhara, the only place in India where Brahma is still worshipped.

I am wondering if there was a slow movement away from pilgrimage to natural sites of worship - marked by water or a tree or some other natural object - to worship within temples to the worship of texts. It's a movement away from the worship of divinity to the worship of a representation of divinity. Was that the cause of the gods leaving the earth or the result?

The tussle between controlled work and free work is not one that afflicts religion alone. Consider science: it costs a lot of money to run laboratory experiments, but it costs nothing to look at the stars. One of the dangers of light pollution is that it takes away the experience of nature from us ordinary folk. Only those who have access to space observatories can become astronomers today.

The Magical Forest

Pushkara is a magical forest. It seems that visiting it on a full moon night of Kartika is equal to spending a hundred years doing the agnihotra . A powerful pilgrimage if you're to ask me.

What makes it so powerful?

Did you notice that Pushkara is a forest? Pulastya says it's an extremely difficult place to reach and even more difficult to live. It's in this dense forest that Prajapati made his home and where he remains to this day, even as the forest has been replaced by desert.

Is it any surprise that the oldest of the gods, Prajapati Brahma, has almost vanished from the earth? Where would he live, now that the forests are almost gone? Perhaps in the Amazon or in Borneo, but even there we are cutting down virgin forests for palm oil. Can't imagine a worse trade-off.

I am only now beginning to understand the specific character of every sacrifice and every pilgrimage. Why visit this temple on that night? What's so special? We live within clock time and metered space and in doing so, we have forgotten the differences that are internal to time and space. Here and there we experience the pull of spatial and temporal difference; when we can't sleep because of jetlag or when we find ourselves weeping after looking at an old photograph of the house into which we were born. Those exceptions only make the rule: life is the same for us in Beijing and Bangalore and Boston.

What is like to inhabit the earth with special instructions for specific times of the year and specific places on the map?

The Shapeshifter

Now that Nala and Damayanti are reunited, we can move back to the main story. Arjuna is out acquiring fearsome weapons from Shiva and his father. That leaves Yudhisthira and the other three Pandavas in the Kamyaka forest along with Draupadi.

The third Pandava is the life of the party; without him Draupadi feels suffocated by Yudhisthira's righteousness and Bhima's aggression. It's Arjuna who brings song and dance into their lives, the Pandava who makes them laugh.

As I hear the Pandavas recount their love for Dhananjaya, I suspect that the family can't survive and prosper for too long without Arjuna's presence. Of the six, three are indispensable: Yudhisthira, because he contributes integrity; Arjuna, because he makes them laugh and Draupadi, because she's their collective face. Head, heart and self. Unlike Nala, Yudhisthira never abandons Draupadi. He couldn't have survived for a day without her. But Arjuna vanishes and reappears often, and without Krishna to stabilize him, the third brother could have caused the downfall of the Pandavas.

Along with Draupadi's power and Yudhisthira's silence, I find the paradox of Arjuna's ambidextrousness one of the more interesting themes in the epic. He can fight with both of his hands; he's both warrior and poet, he's a lover of women who becomes a eunuch for a year. He's the fiercest of warriors who hurls his weapons on the battlefield.

If Krishna is the maha-shapeshifter, Arjuna is the mini-shapeshifter.

Revisions

The more I read the Jaya, the more I revise my understanding of its basic premise. Like everyone else, I was transfixed by its ending; of a war so violent that it destroyed both the winners and the losers. That apocalypse was the point of reference for beginning the Jayary (background question: we might be living in such a time ourselves?) but the last eight months of reading have brought a completely different perspective.

The new outlook doesn't contradict the previous one, but it's a significant departure. I believe that we haven't paid much attention to the beginning of the Jaya, of which I want to point out two salient features:

1. The epic starts with a snake sacrifice

2. The gods are in continuous retreat

In other words, the gods are defeated - or more likely, made irrelevant - and nature is subjugated right at the beginning. So what's new here - haven't I been reading the Jaya with this lens for some time now? Yes, but it's only now that I have realized that the tragic logic of humanity might be built into the epic and not just into my reading of it.

The lesson of the epic might not be that greed causes destruction, but that leaving humanity in charge of the earth is a recipe for catastrophe. Greed is curable; one day we might even have a pill for it. On the other hand, the victory of humanity is seen as a good thing by most people. Yes, I know we are all environmentalists now, but who among us is willing to forego vaccines or live amongst hyenas? We can't go back to that state and we don't want to.

The Jaya says: great, go ahead and enjoy the fruits of your victory for awhile, but replacing Khandavaprastha by Indraprastha is going to bring ruin upon all of you sooner or later.

I think Yudhisthira understands this fundamental dilemma.

Forests and Temples

As we resume the story from where Nala and Damayanti left it, we overhear Yudhisthira's sighs. He's unhappy about Arjuna's absence, but knows that the third Pandava is their only link to the divine world. Meanwhile, the Pandavas are hunting the forest down to nothing.

Is that the real worry: that our connection to the gods is sporadic and our relation to nature exploitative? Am I reading too much? Probably, but I am convinced that the earth has to be densely packed with forests and temples; without the two forming a grid, we have no compass whatsoever.

Kadu Malleswara: the lord of the forested hill. That was the temple which founded the part of Bangalore where I lived for many years. The temple where Shivaji's son Sambhaji was married. Today there's no forest and the temple abuts a busy road which one crosses at the point of death. How long can we live this way?

Yudhisthira has a version of this worry too: how can long can they live in exile? When will Arjuna come back? Fortunately, the Pandava king has divine wellwishers. The sage Narada appears and grants the Pandavas the license to ask him anything.

Yudhisthira asks the sage: what's the purpose of pilgrimage. Why should we navigate the earth, visiting one temple after another? Why indeed. Should the earth be a carpet woven with forests and beaded with temples? Is that what we need to save ourselves?

The Trojan Agent

Nala and Damayanti's troubles start when Nala encounters the gods. Agni and Indra and Yama desire Damayanti, just as Nala does. In fact, they have a clever plan: knowing full well that Nala and Damayanti are fated for each other, they make him their emissary.

It's a Trojan horse within a Trojan horse move. The gods make him their agent so that in doing so, Nala becomes their servant rather than their competitor. Nala agrees to do so since that will give him the magic powers to enter Damayanti's quarters without being noticed. Both sides are playing games.

Games and gambling are closely related, so much so that most forms of gambling are also games. Gaming offers a way for the clever to compete against the strong. If you set aside any preconceived notion of right and wrong, isn't that what happened between Sakuni and Yudhisthira?

Is Nala clever or is he strong in his chess match against the gods? On the surface, neither. All he has is love, and he's lucky in that Damayanti loves him back. It's her cleverness that rescues Nala from his gambling debts, both against the gods and against his brother. Of course, she has to pay for her cleverness: how can a mere woman take on the gods and win?

The Measure of Man

At the end of the Lord of the Rings, when the bad guys have been defeated, the elves, dwarves and wizards realise that the age of the immortals has ended and the age of men is about to start. Evil, aka Sauron, has been defeated but even in victory it's defeat for everyone else except for one species.

Here's what I am thinking: as human beings consolidated their hold over the earth, they slowly drove everyone else to the sidelines. The animals were the first to go, driven into the shrinking forests as they were replaced by farms and cities. The gods might have been the next, replaced by the One God in some places and by nothing in others.

There's no measure of mankind but man.

Nala and Damayanti's story appears right in the middle of that transition. The gods are still powerful and can hound anyone who flouts their mandate but at the end they have to give in. By the end of the story, the gods are umpires rather than players.

The Jaya lies further along the conquest of the earth; the gods are almost entirely gone: only Krishna remains and he's already on his way to becoming the god of all gods, whose truth is only visible to his chosen human friend and partner Arjuna. The idea of humanity is viable only when the conquest is over.

By the way, without humanity there's no such thing as "human rights" or any of the other good things we cherish. It's only by ending the age of others that we inaugurate the age of man.

Damayanti and Nala

Damayanti.

We don't call the story Damayanti and Nala, but that's what it is; not just because I am projecting my present day moral concerns on the past but also because that's how the story is told.

Most of the action in the story happens to Damayanti. She's the one who outwits the gods and selects Nala over the divine trio. While Nala has a relatively easy transition from being king to pauper to charioteer, Damayanti undergoes one trial after another.

After Nala leaves her, she's almost swallowed by a python, molested by the hunter who saves her from the python and then the party of merchants who lend her a measure of security is assaulted by a herd of wild elephants.

That's only the negative side of the ledger. On the plus side, she's the one who figures out how to draw Nala out of his hiding place - from ordering a fake swayamvara to finding the right Brahmins to carry her message, it's Damayanti's doing.

So here's a thought: if Nala and Damayanti's story is told to Yudhisthira as a tale of a man who lost even more than Dharmaraja did, perhaps Damayanti and Nala's story should be told to Draupadi as the tale of a woman who lost more than Draupadi did.

Fair is fair.

Anti-Babel

One of the great myths of the twentieth century, perhaps the greatest one, was the idea that all humans speak the same language, that all stories are ultimately one story. This idea runs through Turing's universal computer, Chomsky's universal grammar, Campbell's universal myth and any number of lesser redactions of the anti-tower of Babel.

Of course, every idea has it's origins in India, doesn't it? We had spacecraft while others were riding donkeys and when they weren't busy traveling to Mars, the ancient rishis encoded the mysteries of quantum mechanics in metered verse.

Why verse? Why not prose? Don't ask me.

If there's only one language and only one story, then it's obvious that the Jaya is that story, told in the only language that remains when the gods remove the power of speech from every other tongue.

Actually, why wait for an entire language. It's said that once when the gods, demons and humans went to Prajapati for advice, he uttered a syllable in response: DA. The answer to all their woes were found in that one syllable. All languages and all stories are buried in that one syllable. The one that stands for all: isn't that the essence of the anti-babel myth?

Researchers in Texas and elsewhere are building single pixel cameras, thinking that the one pixel could stand for the whole visual world. They should go to Brahma for advice: he demonstrated a long long time ago that one syllable is enough.

I have to say that the anti-babel has lost its hold after possessing me for decades. Like Nala freed from the clutches of Kala, I want to look beyond monolithic unity. That's why I want to retell Nala and Damayanti's story as told to Yudhisthira as the story of Damayanti and Nala as told to Draupadi. I knew I was looking for a clue, a sign of some sort while rereading D and N's story. I think I have found one in the inversion of the cast.

Having said that, I don't think I can start the retelling without preparation. Today's Jayary is the 250th of the year. Time to get back to the main story.

Beauty

Brihadasva's recital of Nala and Damayanti's story is meant to act as a salve, but if I were Yudhisthira, it might make me alternately anxious and jealous. Let's look at how the story starts: with a catalogue of Nala's virtues. Nala is a fierce warrior, generous to Brahmins and truthful as they come, but most importantly, his beauty is unparalleled in the world of men.

Similarly, Damayanti is the most beautiful woman in the world. Her eyes, her skin, her figure and her gait are all described as the most sensual thing anyone has ever seen. It's inevitable that such beauties should home in on to each other. Indeed, they fall in love sight unseen because every herald, swan and passing hermit is convinced that the only other person suitable as a husband or a wife to Damayanti and Nala is Nala and Damayanti.

In contrast, Yudhisthira is praised for his kindness, his sense of justice and every once in awhile for his powerful frame. Not once is he described as the handsomest man on earth. In his family, that honour belongs to Arjuna, who's the artist and the star. That's why it's Arjuna who snags Draupadi, the most beautiful woman of her age.

Don't you think that Yudhisthira might feel a pang of jealousy upon hearing of the gravitational pull between Nala and Damayanti and knowing (even if he tries to ignore it) the similar attraction between Arjuna and Draupadi?

The Taming of Love 1

Nala and Damayanti's story is about love. Their story is also about chance. What do the two have to do with each other? Here's a thought: the taming of chance goes hand in hand with the taming of love.

Some people think love makes the world go around. Other's think it's an irrational emotion that's best set aside. There's the possibility that love makes the world go around precisely because it's irrational.

What could make love irrational? The first reason - and the staple of Bollywood movies - one of the lovers is not a suitable candidate because they're too poor, too rowdy or too old for the other person. Usually it's the guy though every once in awhile the powers that be release a movie with a cinderella situation.

In other words, if marriage is a family affair and the rational thing to do is to marry within your social class for the sake of preserving property and status, the irrational thing to do is to marry outside the bounds of social propriety.

The second reason - the Hollywood version of the tale - is when the lovers decide to live together or marry within a few minutes of seeing each other. Especially if they're too young. How young? That depends - Juliet was all of thirteen years old when she fell for Montague's son.

In the modern era, marriage is between individuals, not families. On the other hand, we are supposed to sample the terrain before settling down, and the rational thing to do is to settle with someone who has the same educational level and earning potential. The irrational thing is to make babies when you're sixteen.

In both the familial and individual models of mating, rationality is on the side of risk mitigation, of minimizing the chances of suffering from a bad match.

The Taming of Love 2

There are two ways of mitigating risk. One is to create institutions that manage risk for us. Arranged marriage is a risk management system. Instead of mating being decided by youthful hormones, it's decided by older, less volatile brains. The risk averse shouldn't start a business with their cocaine dealer, so why should they start a business with their oxytocin dealer? Instead, have your family find you a solid boy or girl from your own caste.

Unfortunately, these social institutions are 'local' - they work best when the families are neighbours and have other common social markers such as caste. We moderns don't believe in such localisms. We want universal tools. There's only one universal tool that's been shown to work time and again. You guessed it right: numbers. If social institutions are the drug of the locavores, data is the drug of the cosmopolitans. From shaadi.com to Tinder, love and lust are pawns of zeros and ones.

The shift from social institutions to statistical institutions is the marker of modernity, both in the taming of chance and in the taming of love. Or getting back to our starstruck lovers, Nala and Damayanti act irrationally in falling in love sight unseen. In fact, their love is so irrational that they don't even listen to the gods in doing so. Forget the taming of chance, they flout the dice gods openly. Is it any surprise that their love is tested by Kala - it doesn't fall apart, but who knows, it might have in a different Jaya in a parallel universe - through the act of gambling? It's only when Nala has learned the numerical arts from Rituparna that he can regain his love.

Seconds

When you read a story for the second time, it throws up questions that didn't strike you the first time around. Nala and Damayanti's story is no different; it poses puzzles that don't reveal themselves as puzzles until their puzzledom is made obvious. Let's start with the pre-story. As we will see, nothing about Nala and Damayanti can be taken for granted, starting with its inception within the epic.

Q: Why was Nala and Damayanti's tale recited?

A: Because the sage Brihadasva took pity on Yudhisthira after notcing his depression.

Q: But why is Nala's story relevant to Yudhisthira?

A: Because the ruler of the Nishadas lost his kingdom to his brother after a game of dice, just like Yudhisthira.

Q: But didn't he gain it back after learning the art of gambling from Rituparna?

A: Yes he did.

Q: So why isn't Yudhisthira enrolling himself in an advanced course on probability? Why is he pining for his warrior brother Arjuna instead?

A: We don't know.

I am not convinced by the half-hearted claim in the Jaya that Nala's story is an antidote for Dharmaraja's woes. Having read it closely, Nala's story is not about Nala's loss at all. It's a love story, remember. The real plot of the story is Nala's rejection of Damayanti in the forest and the suffering they have to undergo before they're together once again. Incidentally, all of the detective work that reveals Nala's identity is instigated by Damayanti. It's her story more than it's his.

Is Brihadasva obliquely trying to send a message to Yudhisthira about his treatment of Draupadi? Is he asking her to listen to his wife? Nala and Damayanti might have had a more equal marriage than the Pandavas.

Katharaga

Is Nala and Damayanti's story a romance or a lesson in kingship lost and regained? Is it both? There's no definite answer; in fact, there can't be one for there's no single way of hearing the story. Indeed, in an oral telling, the suta can decide to emphasize the romance and downplay the power struggle. Or the opposite; it's the teller's choice.

When storytelling is more like singing a Hindustani or Carnatic raga and less like writing a linear account on paper, the suta has much more freedom to mould the current telling to suit his needs. There's no canonical text - only a template.

It's not just the supply side that's different when the story is a template; the listener is not the same as a reader either. An audience of rasika's, i.e., of people who have cultivated the same literary milieu as the suta brings much to the telling. They can signal their pleasure and displeasure; they can add embellishments of their own, or even better, at a time when memory was both more prodigious than it's today and the stories part of a common pool rather than the writer's intellectual property, a listener today could well be a teller tomorrow. Isn't that what happens to the Jaya itself: the suta Ugrashrava recites the tale just as he heard it recited by Vaisampayana at the end of the snake sacrifice, who heard it from Vyasa himself.

The oral form also explains the delight the epic takes (and it shares that delight with most ancient story cycles) in layering one story inside another like a Russian doll, especially the instructional story. Today, we use footnotes to mark an aside, but an aside makes sense only when there's a linear structure to the main narrative, as is the case in most written scholarship and even in fiction.

What if there's no main narrative: what if every story is one node in a network of stories? It's a commonplace idea in the internet era: who thinks of discrete pieces of content anymore? However, what's changed is that the internet is the internet oftext; it's not a throwback to oral traditions, but a mutation in the concept of writing.

All of this is to say that as I reread the story of Damayanti and Nala (perhaps in preparation for a retelling) I want to reread it not as an oral story within a story, but as a written story within a story. Our condition is the written condition, and it's in that condition that we have to explore new forms of narrative both for literary and philosophical purposes.

Playing with Fire

The oral word is like a puff of smoke released into the air from the speaker's mouth. But then again, where there's smoke there's fire right? Who is the fire?

Again and again, we hear the Jaya express the fire is Agni, that speech, knowledge and power need Agni as witness. How did humans get access to fire and what price did we have to pay for it?

It's a question that's been asked wherever questions are there for the asking and answered in as many ways, but there's a common thread to the answer: we never go unpunished. The Greek gods were cruel in the extreme: Prometheus is chained to a rock and has his liver eaten by an eagle for eternity.

The Jaya is arguably as cruel, except that here humans cut a deal with the divine. Agni demands the sacrifice of Khandava. In return we get a cleared forest on whose ashes Yudhisthira builds a great city.

Therein lies the genesis of Nala and Damayanti's story. People and gods are still in close contact: they make deals, they sleep with each other, but you know, just like the relationship between India and the United States, even when we sleep with each other we know who's boss. Not as an absolute rule of course; some humans have an upper hand over some gods and some Indians have an upper hand over some Americans, but the balance of power is clear to everyone.

Sometimes you sell your goods to the wrong buyer. Some deals go sour. When that happens, feuds break out. These fights are often settled over the bodies of women. Damayanti. Draupadi. And countless others. Is Agni a witness to these sacrifices too?

The Object of Power

When Brihadasva arrives in the forest, Yudhisthira is moping. Why wouldn't he? He's lost his kingdom. His brother's aren't happy with his leadership and his wife is aflame with anger. Isn't that a king's lot? No wonder it's lonely at the top.

I am fascinated by the dual nature of power. On the one hand, it gives you the authority the control other people's lives. On the other, it makes it impossible to have truly intimate relationships. There's a surface reason for that distance: a king can't repose absolute trust anyone and they certainly can't repose trust in him, for to be a king is to betray everyone else for the purposes of statecraft.

But that's only the surface psychology of kingship. There's a deeper epistemological reason: to be an effective king, one has to see human affairs objectively, i.e., to see people as they are without any romantic illusions and to seem them as objects to be manipulated.

That objectivity imposes distance by its very nature. The puppet master can't become friends with his puppets. Isn't that the reason why the gods left the earth? As they discovered their responsibilities as sovereign, they needed a better vantage point to see the world objectively, to create - literally - the god's eye view of the world.

Of course, kings are people too and give in to their human desires. Both Yudhisthira and Nala gamble away their throne, but that's not the complete story. Nala and Damayanti's tragedy is also a consequence of the god's lingering desire to be on earth. It's not just the humans who are fallen; it's the gods as well. No wonder there's a movement to merge the gods into the one God who rules them all.

A Darker Romance

Unlike the Jaya which ends in tragedy, Nala and Damayanti's story is an uplifting tale of love and liberty lost and regained. It's meant to be a pick-me-up, encouraging Yudhisthira by recounting how others have lost their kingdom before him, only to win it back by force of arithmetic.

What if the story within the story was as tragic as the larger tale? What if Nala had ended his charioteer avatar with excellent gambling skills and won the dice game, only to find that Pushkara wasn't willing to hand over a kingdom because of an errant dice throw?

Worse, what if Damayanti had given up on Nala and remarried? What if her swayamvara was for real? Imagine a world in which Rituparna wins her hand and asks Bahuka-Nala to become her charioteer for life.

Even worse, what if Damayanti had succumbed to the snake and the hunter's assault in the forest and never made it out of the jungle? So many counterfactual possibilities. We can take them up one after the other if we want to recreate a Nala-Damayanti version of Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style.

I am not ready to go that far yet; I am still in the act of re-reading, not re-writing Nala and Damayanti's account. However, I think it can be reread in a much darker mood, a mood that matches the violence about to be unleashed in the main epic.

Dosas and Burgers

We don't know what Yudhisthira felt as he was hearing Nala and Damayanti's story, but we know that it was meant to raise his spirits. Let's make raise one more meta-level and ask ourselves whether there's any reason for us to read this story; is there some inner sadness that might be removed or at least temporarily banished?

I do have a reason, but first let me tell you an anecdote.

You might have heard of these Guinness book contests where people try to eat as many burgers or hot dogs as possible in ten minutes. We Indians love the Guinness book - I can't tell you how many random achievements are held by desis even as we return medal-less from the Olympics.

There was once a hot dog eating contest in which the organizer held a gun to the contestant's head and said if they eat less than ten dogs they're going to be shot. That went on for a few years until an intrepid restaurant owner marketed a different plan. He said "we don't have to eat hot dogs anymore! Dosas are tastier!"

Soon everyone realized the dosa entrepreneur was right and they set aside their hot dogs and sat down to eat their dosas. A few more years passed. People being people, they bored of eating dosas every meal. Some even had fond memories of sausages, frankfurters and hot dogs eaten beneath watchful guards carrying Enfield rifles.

Then one day, a new restaurant opened; it sold desi hot dogs cooked in ghee. No bullets for the laggards either. Everyone rushed to eat the exotic dish. The desi hot dog was such a hit that soon the country was awash in desi hot dogs, desi burgers and desi fried chicken.

Some traditionalists were aghast. How can you give up nutritious dosas for this foreign crap? Some of them got together and petitioned the government. After the third petition, the government created a new ministry of desi dosas and other handicraft foods with stalls near the state capital in every state. A more aggressive bunch started lynching people who were accused of cooking beef dosas for the crowd who wanted the best of both worlds.

Meanwhile, the desi industry was being run into the ground. Even the lazy bureaucrat who ran the desi dosa ministry ate his lunches in the burger joint across the street. Meanwhile, the mango man was left holding the bill for the boring dosas, the fattening burgers and the inedible dosa manchurian.

In case you were wondering that's the story of India's encounter with the west. We can't go back to prehistory. Nor, for that matter, can we eat our Vedic dosas during the intermission of anauthentic Nala and Damayanti movie with its obligatory bhangra pop scenes. On the flip side, KFC will kill us even faster.

So what to do? How to tell the story between the dosa and the burger? How can we make it palatable, even delicious and nutritious? If we can't tell a good love story, who can?

Instructional Stories

There's an ancient genre of instructional storytelling where the official recipient of the message is a king or a prince. Nala and Damayanti's story falls into that camp. The Panchatantra was a manual for princes. What about the Arabian Nights, told by a brave princess in conditions of extreme duress? The longest Parva in the Mahabharata, the Shanti Parva has Bhishma instructing Yudhisthira on the ways of power.

And how can we forget the Ramayana's ending where the dying Ravana imparts his wisdom to Rama? Minus the abduction of other people's wives of course - Rama figures out it's much easier to kick your wife out of her house than to bring another man's wife into yours.

Why is a king the target of so much instruction? I guess they have a tough job. There's no guarantee that genetics insures either wisdom or cleverness. Then again, the princely setting might just be a ploy to get us ordinary folks interested - if the lesson good enough for Yudhisthira, it should be good enough for me, right?

Now that kings have disappeared, we have to rewrite the instructional manual. We can't have it be written for deposed despots. CEO's are a better bet, as legions of gurus and snake oil salesman have discovered over the last fifty years. But why stop at the bosses? If the people are sovereign shouldn't the story be addressed to the people?

By people, I don't mean the wretched of the earth in whose name the jholawalas fight the good fight. I mean people as rulers, the species that's inherited this earth. How can we tell the story of Nala and Damayanti for this hyperobject?

The Story Tree

The movie is almost over; Nala and Damayanti are reunited. It's only a matter of time before Nala uses his newly found probabilistic skills to regain his kingdom. And then there's nothing to do except to marvel at the royal couple's beauty and wisdom until time, the destroyer of all things, has his way with both of them. There's a lesson lurking in fine print: arithmetic can help us conquer physical time, but it's no match - not yet! - for metaphysical time.

Fortunately, we don't have to wait around while Nala and Damayanti die of old age. Or for the universe to end in heat death. The movie is a movie within a movie: when the final credits roll onto the screen, we know that the camera is going to fade away from Nala's serene face and shine its light on Yudhisthira's creased brow.

What lessons on kingship will Dharmaraja learn? Is he going to be happy or sad after hearing that others have also loved and lost as he did? Is he going to sign up for Statistics 101? If he does, who's going to teach him? Duryodhana has Sakuni heading his analytics team, but we don't know who is managing Yudhisthira's data gathering operations. I am guessing that role is rightfully Krishna's, but I am not sure.

The epic hides its mysteries.

Isn't that one of the great charms of the epic, that it's a universe of stories? When we peel one layer off, there's always another one with a fresh coat of paint underneath. Every drop of blood shed by the demon Raktabeeja gave rise to another Raktabeeja who fought just as fiercely. The Jaya is like a floral Raktabeeja; every time we pull out one story from its recesses, it springs forth into a fully formed tree.

Brotherhood

The story ends quickly, as if Vyasa is done with love and eager to return to Yudhisthira's preoccupations with war.

Nala leaves Vidarbha with a noisy retinue and newly acquired gambling skills. Arriving in Nishada, Nala challenges his brother Pushkara to a game of dice.

Nala to Pushkara: "I stake everything I have on this single throw: Damayanti, my soldiers, myself. Stake your kingdom or fight with me on the battleground. One of us will be the unchallenged king for the rest of our lives."

Pushkara is more than happy to play the dice. It's Damayanti he wants for he has everything else. Plus, he favours his chances against Nala.

Of course, we know that fate is on Nala's side now. Pushkara hasn't been improving his understanding of the law of large numbers while Nala has been reading the latest papers on fat tails and uniform convergence. In one throw Nala regains everything he's lost. With a sly smile, Nala whispers to Pushkara "it wasn't you who won against me four years ago! It was Kala!"

Fortunately for Pushkara, Nala is magnanimous in victory. Instead of enslaving his brother, Nala embraces him and accompanies Pushkara on a celebratory procession to the principality that's been reserved for his brother. May be it's just Vyasa telling us that this feud is over and it's time to get back to the main story.

As Vyasa's spotlight moves back to the exiled Pandava king, we have a decision on our hands: should we follow Vyasa as I promised a couple of months ago, or should I reread Nala and Damayanti's story as I promised last week. Either way, I am keeping one promise and breaking the other.

Production Ready?

Now that Nala and Damayanti have been returned to the collective story consciousness, we can look back and inspect the tale with a professional eye. Suppose you had discovered the lover's chronicle in a musty old book in one of those condemned bookstores in Bangalore, would you rush to the closest movie studio and pitch the story to the waiting producers or thrust it away in a mental corner as cute but fanciful account?

Note: By condemned bookstore I don't mean a bookstore that's been condemned, but a store full of condemned books. It's different from a used book store which resells books as individual objects. A condemned bookstore occupies a Trishanku space between a used bookstore and a kabadiwala where books are sold as much by weight as by content.

Nala and Damayanti has many things going for its blockbuster chances - not least the possibility of casting the leading stars as its hero and heroine. Who would I cast? If I had an entire array of Bollywood stars at my disposal, I think I would go for Dev Anand and Madhubala. Damayanti is harder to cast: she has to be vulnerable and strong at the same time. Perhaps Rekha. If I was going international like Peter Brook, I think I would do Will Smith and Salma Hayek.

But: is it really a love story? Duh - of course it's a love story, isn't it? I am not so sure. I am thinking of a darker, more noirish Nala-Damayanti which resembles the Tamil epic Silappadikaram with Damayanti playing Kannagi with a detective twist.

So many choices. As you can see, I am definitely of the "dash the script to the producer" persuasion. But why?

A Charming Romance

So what's so special about the Nala-Damayanti story? You could say it has everything: love, family, conflict, defeat and restitution and in that it's a complete story as stories go. We can relate to their tale of love and loss even today, for it's mostly a story about humans despite the crucial role played by a jealous divinity. The divinity is not one of the usual suspects such as Indra and Agni, but Kala, who is a personified version of time. Who doesn't struggle against time, and even when we win a reprieve, who doesn't know that our victory is temporary?

One reason why Nala and Damayanti's story is charming is it's detective elements: where's Nala? what made him turn into a loser? Then there's the role played by chance and the struggle against the ravages of time.

Nevertheless, it's real charm is because it's a romance, a love between two near equals (remember how Nala cooks for Damayanti?) who fall in love and remain in love despite all the troubles that visit them. Don't we all wish such happiness?

Having said that, I think the love between the two could be darker; in a different time, Damayanti would have had a second swayamvara a lot sooner and for good reasons. Or else, as I suggested at the end of the previous Jayary, Nala's loss could have ended in tragedy. What if his brother had killed him?

These are some of the questions that come to my mind as I begin re-reading their story.

A Digestive Dilemma

I keep wanting to tell Nala and Damayanti's story but each time I do so, I am tripped up by it like a piece of burning coal I have swallowed and can't digest or spit out. The digestive dilemma is simple: what does it even mean to read the Jaya today? Or to write it?

It's not a new problem, for it's the self-appointed task that started my reading project more than a year ago now, a project that has intensified this year with the daily Jayary. However, it's a problem that's become deeper and harder as I read.

Underlying those difficulties is a diagnosis: the problem isn't one of translation, i.e., of asking how to learn from these texts in today's world. The problem is much deeper, to ask ourselves how to inherit a tradition that has been severely disrupted by the forces of the modern world?

European and American writers and scholars have the same problem; their familiar world is also being disrupted, but at least they have a continuous five hundred year old tradition they can develop. Starting with Cervantes and Shakespeare in literature, Galileo in Science and Descartes in philosophy there's a sense of what it means to be cultured.

Now imagine that person reading a much older text, say, the bible. For all the clash between the church and the state and between science and revelation, a western scholar can read the bible with all the apparatus that's been developed within their culture: from literary sensibility and linguistic analysis to philosophical grammar.

What do we have in response? How can we even read the Jaya in the absence of continuity? I am not saying it's a futile task; rather, I am saying it's a great challenge, but one we should approach with an understanding of its enormity.

Damayanti Holmes

Where there's smoke there's fire. But how do you know it? What if it's dry ice instead? There's only one way to solve the problem, best summarised by Sherlock Holmes' famous saying: "How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"

Damayanti is one step ahead of Sherlock. She doesn't wait for the data to appear at her doorstep; instead she entices it to come to Vidarbha with the ruse of a swayamvara. Having brought Rituparna and Bahuka to her father's court, Damayanti runs some field experiments to see if Bahuka is indeed Nala.

In the first experiment, she sends her companion, Kesini, to check on Bahuka's cooking. He's a magical cook, turning water into wine (I know, I know, it's the wrong religion) without even touching the pots. One impossibility removed.

Then she asks Kesini to sneak her a morsel of Bahuka's cooking without his noticing. The spoonful of meat tastes exactly like Nala's dishes. More power to Nala - it's clear he used to cook for Damayanti all the time. Another impossibility removed.

Then Damayanti sends her twin children to Bahuka, who gathers them in his lap and weeps like they were his own blood before sending them away. The impossibles are vanishing fast.

Damayanti Holmes is convinced that Bahuka is none other than Nala. Now she faces a different problem: the smoke has led her to the fire, but you can't cook on smoke. The fire needs to reveal itself.

Reunited at Last

Damayanti persuades her parents that Bahuka is none other than Nala and goes to his quarters.

"Do you know a man who abandoned his wife after she's been with him throughout his trials? Is there anyone else besides Raja Nala who's done so?" asks Damayanti of Bahuka.

Bahuka replies: "It was not Nala who rejected you; it was Kala who took over my body and made me do his bidding. I have ejected him and he's no longer in control."

He doesn't stop there though, for a doubt is nagging him. Remember, Nala and Damayanti's chronicle is one of chance and uncertainty. Dice are responsible for Nala losing his kingdom. Damayanti has to overcome her doubts in order to narrow upon Bahuka as Nala in disguise. The doubts don't end there: Nala is worried that Damayanti has given up on Nala, that with the swayamvara she's making herself available to other kings. "Are you still mine?" says Bahuka to Damayanti.

If I were her, I would ask him what right he has to pose that question. The insanity defence only goes so far.

Damayanti invokes the gods as witness and declares that she's been faithful to Nala the entire time. That she hasn't committed infidelity even in her dreams. The gods corroborate her testimony. Nala's convinced; he invokes the Naga king Karkotaka's blessing and is restored to his original form. After four long years of separation, Nala and Damayanti are reunited.

Time and Number

Bahuka aka Nala chariots his way toward Vidarbha with Rituparna in tow. The horses are running so fast that a yojana passes between the time when Rituparna's upper garment flies off and the shirtless king asks his charioteer to stop and recover the piece of cloth. There's no turning back.

A few minutes later, they pass a Vibhataka tree. Rituparna says to Bahuka: "do you know that the tree has four crore leaves and twenty three hundred fruits?" Nala-Bahuka is astonished at the king's computing facility; it will come in handy when he has to play a return game of dice with his brother. Bahuka suggests a deal: if the king will teach him the art of counting, he will teach the king the art of horsemanship.

Not a bad trade. The king agrees and in a twinkling of an eye the two exchange skills. No ten thousand hours of mathematical or equestrian practice for them. I wish I could trade skills at that speed.

As soon as Nala gains mastery over numbers, his energy rises and ejects Kala out of his body. The time-lord emerges coughing and spitting; he's been digesting the Naga Karkotaka's poison for days. Nala is about to curse the exorcised occupier when Kala begs him not to; that every future listener of Nala's story will be redeemed if the charioteer-king refrains from cursing the time-lord.

Nala stops his lips from moving. Why? Is it his desire to go down in posterity? His innate kindness? Or is it that he possesses mathematical skills that will tame chance for eternity?

I underestimated the Jaya, thinking that it didn't know about the laws of probability. Looks like I was wrong: Rituparna's numbers will help Nala conquer time and chance.

The Reader's Dilemma

We know how Nala and Damayanti's story is about to end even if we don't know the details. In short: all's well that ends well. And then what? I guess it's back to the Yudhisthira in the forest; time to plot the Pandavas return to power even if it takes many more years.

I have a different problem: how to read Nala and Damayanti's story? What kind of question is it: didn't I just read it? In fact, didn't I just read and write about it? Sure I did, but that's an uncritical idea of reading, of reading as a uniform act that doesn't differentiate between a text composed five thousand years ago and the latest Pokemon Go manual. We can't imagine reading to be an unstructured field, as if the ability to register letters on paper is enough to consider oneself a successful reader. I call that the "ordinary fallacy," i.e., that reading is an ordinary act.

By the way, we don't expect to be ordinary readers of scientific or mathematical texts. No one considers the reading of Grothendieck's works on algebraic geometry to be the same act of reading as reading War and Peace, even if we agree that both are fantastic creative achievements in their respective realms.

Once we set aside the ordinary fallacy, it's clear that we can't read Nala and Damayanti as ordinary readers. How else can we make sense of time-possession, the interplay between chance and destiny, the relationship between gods and humans? To read those episodes as factual would be a lie, for we don't believe in such facts anymore. To read those episodes as myth is another lie, for that's to condemn the insights as primitive fancy. So what do we do?

You might say, fair enough, but why ask that question of Nala and Damayanti? Why not ask it of the epic as a whole? What's true of the lover's story is true of the Jaya isn't it? Yes, in principle, but once again look at our task as a task of reading: it's hard enough to pass one's eyes over the entirety of the epic, let alone read it. The story within the story of Nala and Damayanti is easier to grasp with our reading minds and in doing so, we can begin the task of rereading and rewriting the lover's predicament as a way of making the story our own.

Rereading

The Mahabharata is the story of all existence, not just of this human family or that species of god, but of all existence as such.

It's not a revelation, i.e., a disclosure of the truth from up above. It's most definitely our story; we are bound in it, we live in it. The story lives within and through us; it's something we already know even if we don't know how to give it expression. That's Vyasa's dharma, the poet who expresses what we are already, the poet who wraps our lives so tightly within the story that no gap is left between us and the tale. Even then we need reminders and so the Viswarupadarshan before the war exposes in a flash what's been indicated throughout.

Why are we so forgetful? Perhaps because we are not ready for that darshan. We are not ready even to be ready for that darshan. Fortunately, the epic helps us by suggesting pieces of the whole that serve as footholds.

Everyone has their own path up the mountain. In my travels so far, I have discerned three footholds: the story of Garuda, the snake sacrifice and the story of Nala and Damayanti. Of the three, Nala and Damayanti's story is closest to us, for it's about humans falling in love, falling out and then crawling their way back. I am thinking I need to reread it once again after this round's finished as a way of crawling my way up the epic.

Almost to the Finish Line

I said to myself that I am going to reread and retell Nala and Damayanti's story like a ruminant extracting nutrition in stages. I got ahead of myself for I have to tell the story first. To be frank, I have been delaying this section, for it's the most delicious part of the lover's tale: we know that Nala and Damayanti are about to be reunited but we don't know how.

It's most Damayanti's doing. She calls for a swayamvara in a day's time knowing that the only person who can get to Vidarbha at express pace is Nala; who else can command his chariot at that speed?

When Rituparna arrives in Vidarbha, he sees no signs of a swayamvara. There's no sign of festivity, no competing rajas, no fanfare. The visiting king is puzzled but concludes that the swayamvara is over and some lucky king has won the bride. He proceeds to congratulate Bhima on a successful wedding, except that Bhima doesn't know a thing - remember that the whole event has been hatched in secret by Damayanti!

Fortunately, Bhima allays Rituparna's anxieties by inviting him into the royal palace and entertaining him.

Meanwhile, Damayanti is on the lookout for Nala. She sees Rituparna alight from the chariot along with Bahuka and Varshneya and wonders which one of the three is Nala. Surely it can't be Rituparna - Nala wouldn't be able to impersonate a ruling king. It has to be Bahuka or Varshneya. Which one of them is it?

Identity Crisis

We are surrounded by our identity like a second skin. Signatures, photographs, passwords, ID cards, biometrics, phone numbers, email addresses, the list of identifying characteristics is endless. When I send an email, I type it out and then wait as a system of identities verifies the bonafides of the message before it reaches my recipient. My email ID and my correspondent's email ID are merely the endpoints in this vast chain of authentication and identification, which also includes IP addresses, encryption keys, server IDs and other electronic signatures.

What about a time when identities were rare and fickle? What did people do when their message had only one intended recipient? Of course, that happens today as well: a salary check also has only one intended recipient; the president's intelligence briefing has only one recipient, but that's different from the ancient situation in one crucial respect: we know who the intended recipient is, we just want to make sure no one else has access to my secrets. Damayanti has a different problem: she doesn't know who Nala is, even if he's standing right in front of her. Yet, she has to craft a message that he and he alone can decipher.

Like many other messages, this one is a story. Of a woman asking her absent husband why he left her. Why did he abandon the one person who kept her faith in him? What atrocity did she commit in this lifetime or the previous one that she had to suffer its consequences this time around.

Of course, everyone can understand this story, but only Nala is moved to tears by it and tells the visiting Brahmin to convey his response: that the suffering wife should be patient for a little while longer and forgive her husband despite all his failings. Haven't we heard that message a thousand times. But Nala means it.

Being Someone Else

It's hard for us to truly pretend to be someone other than who we are; perhaps a hardened criminal or a spy has access to multiple identities and the desire to use them. Even that might vanish in a few decades when biometric identification becomes fool proof. Besides, who wants to be someone else?

Do you think Hillary Clinton would be Hillary if she could wear a different brand of make-up and pretend to be a Christian housewife in Idaho? We are all building personal brands now and for that to be successful, it's absolutely crucial that our identities match across contexts and circumstances.

Am I being too harsh? It's relatively easy to create a couple of new secret identities online and it might even be desirable if you want to troll or stalk someone. Perhaps the identity game has shifted mediums from the physical to the digital.

But despite all beliefs to the contrary, the digital is not the physical. It's not as real. It's not as diverse. It's not as surprising. In fact, it's a highly controlled environment. Anonymity in the digital world is better than no anonymity whatsoever, but it's nowhere near as fulfilling as anonymity and privacy in the physical world.

The Jaya thrives in fluid identities: multiple identities, mistaken identities, you name it, the Jaya has it. Karna, Arjuna, Shikhandi, Nala: each one of them spends time being a different person. I wonder if we should institute an identity holiday, say a couple of weeks every year when we can shed our current skin and become someone else.

Luck and Genius

A functioning system rewards competence. A well trained doctor with a good bedside manner will always find a ready clientele. She doesn't have to be spectacularly good at her job; as long as she's accurate at diagnosing common ailments and delivers her judgments with compassion, there will be a line outside her door.

Competence is useless when you're outside an existing system and need a way in or want to create a new system of your own. Merely competent mathematicians wouldn't have made their way from Kumbakonam to Cambridge. The outsider needs to be a mahatma and even then he needs a dose of luck that eludes the ordinary genius.

Fortunately, Nala - as Bahuka, the charioteer - has both. He's an exceptionally skilled charioteer; a horse whisperer who can make them run faster than anyone else. That's like being a crack machine learning engineer today, someone who can make computers yield insights invisible to the rest of us. In fact, he's so good that his old charioteer Varshneya suspects that Bahuka might really be Nala in disguise (side note: if Nala was so good with horses, why did he need a charioteer?) .

Rituparna trusts Nala to get him into Vidarbha in a day, for that's the deadline imposed by Damayanti for her faux swayamvara. The dice are being loaded in Nala's favour now: knowing that Nala is a better warrior than any of his rivals, Damayanti poses a challenge that she knows will bring Nala out of the woodwork. It reminds me of Penelope and Odysseus at the end of another epic.

Incidentally, the Jaya doesn't balk at Damayanti attempt at remarriage. Women in the Jaya had more autonomy than their successors.

Context is Everything

Context is everything. There are bacteria that help you digest food when they're in your gut but turn into septic poison when they exit the gut and enter your blood. Birds that peck ticks and other insects off the skin of large mammals also peck at open wounds. It all depends on deshakala.

Nala gets a first hand lesson in deshakala as he wanders the forest after abandoning Damayanti. Noticing a snake caught in the middle of a raging fire, Nala rushes to save it from the flames. It's no ordinary snake; it's Karkotaka the king of the Nagas, who's been frozen at that spot for ages because of Narada's curse. Only Nala can release him from that curse.

Karkotaka bites Nala as soon as he's rescued from the fire. You can never trust a snake can you. Except that the bite isn't intended for Nala, but his tormentor, who will suffer from the snake's poison until he's exorcised. The poison turns Nala black (it's the original anti-Fair and Lovely cream) so that he can pretend to be the charioteer Bahuka and gain employment with Rituparna, the king of Ayodhya's.

Rituparna is an expert diceman; he will end up teaching Nala how to game the system in his favour. In return for what? Horsemanship, I suppose. Charioteers seem to play a mixed role in the epic. They're lower in the social scale, yet both Karna and Krishna are charioteers. Skill with horses must have value even if it's secondary to bearing arms.

The Taming of Chance

The philosopher Ian Hacking has a wonderful book called The Taming of Chance in which he details how the fuzzy concepts of chance, fortune and uncertainty were slowly turned into the precise understanding of probability and statistics.

There are many factors that helped turn the pre-modern world into the modern world. One myth starts with the Copernican revolution that overturned man's centrality to the scheme of the universe. I am not convinced by that myth, for reasons that will take me too far afield so let me stop with the briefest of summaries of my disagreement: our modern world coincides with the cresting of the anthropocene, of near absolute human control over the rest of the earth. Despite what the Copernicans say, we live in the most anthropocentric of eras, not the least.

Instead, let me offer an alternate theory: the taming of chance is the central fact of the anthropocene. We do so in a hundred different ways: social institutions that encourage the rule of the law, insurance and social security policies that make old age and death more bearable, vaccines and pesticides that deliver health and food with some reliability.

What we have gained in reliability, we have lost in richness. Coincidence and contingency don't convince us either in science or in literature. What's the likelihood that a passing brahmin would run into Damayanti while she's sunning herself with her mistress? What's the likelihood that Nala will run into the one snake whose bite will turn him into a charioteer? Literature depends on the suspension of disbelief - unless it's explicitly mythological or fabulous - and today we can't suspend our disbelief in the face of piled on coincidences. How do we tell our fables today then?

Nadir

As every second rate writing coach will tell you, every story needs a conflict to get us interested and a resolution of that conflict to keep us happy. It's true that life is one thing after another and then we are dead, but stories pretend otherwise.

In Nala and Damayanti's story, the conflict arises from the clash between gods and men: how can a mere mortal aspire to what's the gods due? That conflict plays itself out in two climactic moments, one for each protagonist: the first moment is when Nala loses his kingdom to his brother; the second moment is when Damayanti finds herself abandoned by her saviors after she's abandoned by Nala and assaulted by a python, a hunter and some wild elephants.

Damayanti's climax is drawn out in comparison with Nala's, but it's her choice of Nala over the gods that sparks the conflict. Like Draupadi, Damayanti's story points to a time when women must have had more agency than they do in the main storyline.

Damayanti's serial abandonment is the lowest point of the story. From then on, we know that things are going to get better for both of them, as the imaginary rishis tell Damayanti and the Naga king tells Nala. While they are yet to become king and queen, they're only one step removed from the throne: Nala is the king of Ayodhya's charioteer and Damayanti is the princess' companion.

It's only a matter of time before they're revealed as who they are in real life and then they can go on to live happily ever after.

A Wedding in Reverse

The North Indian Hindu wedding has a certain rhythm to it: the groom arrives on horseback, the bride and the groom circumnavigate the fire seven times and then the two leave with the bride in all her finery, given away by her father to her husband. As a thousand Bollywood movies have shown us, it's a time of sadness; the departing bride cries the entire way as she leaves her parental womb for another nest where her womb will be tested. It tells us that marriage is primarily about labour and property and that a woman's body is the fulcrum around which revolve the economic, sexual and political order.

Damayanti enjoys that departure in reverse. A visiting Brahmin recognizes her beauty and asks if he could wipe the dust off her brow, for if she's Damayanti, she has a birthmark that identifies her to anyone who can see it. When the dust is removed and the birthmark duly revealed, it's clear to everyone that it's Nala's wife who's been serving the Chedi princess. Fortunately, she's been treated like a friend, not a servant.

Restored to her full majesty, Damayanti asks that she be returned to Bhima's kingdom to be reunited with her children. A long procession of soldiers and maidservants accompany the royal palanquin back to her father's home in a reversal of the wedding procession.

I have been thinking that before photographs, thumbprints and other likenesses, how did people validate their identity? Anonymity cuts both ways: the ancient king could slip into a commoner's clothes and mingle with the masses in a way that Barack Obama will never be able to do so, but if fate or misfortune separates you from your throne, how do you prove that you are indeed the king? Did royal babies get a secret seal or tattoo that marked their identity?

Song Sequence

Having escaped from the python and the hunter's clutches, Damayanti finds herself alone in a forest teeming with tigers, elephants, demons and ghouls. How will she survive her ordeal? Who will protect her? What do we make of the man who left her alone in that condition?

Amazingly, Damayanti doesn't spend time venting her anger. Instead, what follows is one of the longest sections in this parva where Damayanti bears full witness to her grief. She's missing her husband and lover and she doesn't know where he's gone and where she can find him.

She carroms from grove to grove, asking tigers and other wild beasts where Nala is hiding. The beasts have no time for her grief; who knows what sorrow they're carrying? She chances upon an ashram and asks the rishis if they know Nala's whereabouts. The rishis assure her that Nala will return to his full glory and then they vanish, taking the ashram with them. Is she in a dream? Is her entire tale of misfortune a dream? We don't know.

Reading the section makes me understand why Bollywood movies have songs, for some emotions can only be expressed in verse. Who hasn't loved and lost a friend, a partner, a son or a daughter? And who hasn't felt the poverty of prose when only poetry can express our anguish? It's perfectly fine to pause the reign of narrative for song.

Reasons

Human conceit says nothing wrong happens without a reason, even if it's a malevolent reason. It's so much more gratifying to believe that the gods are working against us than to believe that our failures are entirely due to chance. Especially if the human in question is a hero or otherwise powerful. How can such a person be defeated by the roll of dice? Especially a fair roll of dice?

The role of chance is even more suspect when misfortune piles upon misfortune. A python crushing the life out of Damayanti is bad luck. Being saved by a hunter with lust in his eyes is misfortune. When she escapes the first two dangers and finds a caravan of kind strangers she feels her luck is turning.

Alas, the very next day the caravan is destroyed by a herd of wild elephants: their horses, elephants and men crushed under the elephants' rutting feet, their wares scattered in the lake, the traveling merchants are forced to recreate their fortunes from scratch.

Surely that can't be due to chance? Why were they so unlucky? Why did their fortunes change overnight? It's obvious to the surviving travelers that Damayanti is the source of their woe.

Fortunately, Damayanti is one step ahead; she reasons that she's the epicentre of bad luck and vanishes into the forest before she's lynched.

Daedalus

As she's making her lonely way through the forest, Damayanti asks herself "Why am I such a loser? Whom did I wrong?" and doesn't find an obvious answer to her question. "I haven't ever hurt anyone, in word or deed, or even in thought, so why am I beset by calamity? Did I offend someone powerful?"

As soon as she asks the last question, the answer is obvious to her. It's her spurning of the devas that turned the wheels of fortune against her and Nala. Why did she choose a mortal over a divinity? We tend to view luck as a liberating and joyous force, but it can be dangerous too.

A heroine can invite divine luck and shift the inexorable law of karma in her favour, but she can also invite divine retribution and end of up headless in a gutter. Proximity to power has its advantages and disadvantages. You're much more likely to be poisoned if you're the king's second in command than if you're a farmer in the boondocks.

Fortunately, Damayanti avoids the worst of fates and ends up the servant-companion of the princess of Chedi. Her terms of employment are clear: she won't wash anyone's feet, she won't submit to any man and she will be treated with respect.

Her employer, the Queen Mother of Chedi agrees to these terms. Why does she do so? Hasn't there always been a glut of employable young women who won't complain about their treatment? Why hire an uppity servant.

Loser

After a few weeks of continuous gambling, Nala has nothing left to lose. His kingdom, his ministers, his palaces and jewellery are all gone. His children have been spirited away to safety along with a deadly chariot, which will come handy later. All he has left are the clothes on his body and his wife, Damayanti.

Of course, it's the wife that the brother wants. Pushkara asks Nala to stake her. We don't know whether his game face looks like Prem Chopra or James Bond, but it's villainous. What's with these men and their brother's wives? It's one thing to go after your enemy's women like Ravana or Paris but coveting your brother's wife has got to be a bad idea.

Fortunately, Nala isn't like Yudhisthira. He refuses to bring Damayanti into the arena. Instead, the vanquished king takes off his finery and leaves the city with his wife. It's going to be a long and hungry exile, for Pushkara has warned his subjects not to feed or clothe the wandering couple. No one comes to Nala's aid.

Interesting isn't it. Nala might have been the greatest of kings, kind and benevolent but once power changes hands, no one comes to his aid even if they might feel like doing so. Of course, we also know how he lost power: by losing his mind. We know that power buys loyalty. A defeated king has a chance only if he's seen as a victim of malice or bad luck. Why would anyone support a loser?

Loneliness

There's an existentialist myth that men are born alone, die alone and for the most part they live alone. Think Camus' murderous stranger or Holden Caulfield's teenage angst. Existentialism is gendered like everything else: it's always men who are born alone and live out their lives trapped in a bubble of their own making. Can you imagine a woman wandering alone on a beach and murdering a stranger on a whim? While permanent isolation was considered characteristically human by the existentialists, it's a historically limited experience; rare before the modern era everywhere and rare outside the west still.

Having said that, Nala's experience in exile comes close to the existentialist anti-hero's isolation. Unlike Camus' stranger, whose alienation is unremarkable - the story of everyman - Nala's alienation descends from a divine curse, from his possession by Kala. Having lost his wit and wisdom under the influence of divine madness, Nala is abandoned by his friends and well-wishers. Nala's loneliness is the enforced alienation of the powerless, of the man behind bars. Only Damayanti stays by his side.

Not for long though. Just as his subjects have deserted Nala, he deserts the one person who is attached to him. The epic supplies a reason: "why should she suffer with me?" says Nala, talking to himself as Damayanti is in an exhausted slumber. "Wouldn't she be better off by herself, at her father's or in some other king's service?" While Nala's reason is somewhat convincing, the epic doesn't believe it. It says "the Kala possessed king abandoned his wife, leaving her all alone amongst the snakes and the beasts." Even the oppressed find time to injure someone more powerless.

Time and Memory

Kala, as we know, is time, and we know that time destroys everything. Love dries out, memories fade, friends turn into enemies, enemies turn into allies and everything and everyone turns into dust. That's the effect of time on the external world. What about the internal world?

Nala's fate offers a clue. Kala enters Nala's being and turns the king against himself, makes him forget who he is. It's an ancient rebuke to Descartes' famous Cogito Ergo Sum. If time makes you forget who you are, then either the premise or the conclusion of Descartes' claim is mistaken. Either there's no I who is thinking or there's no I who exists. However you look at it, the necessary link between thinking, being and the self is broken.

When a man has forgotten himself, can he remember anyone else? Jaya's answer seems to be in the negative. Nala leaves the forest rest house that offered shelter to the royal couple. Wrenched from love's soft grip, Nala abandons Damayanti while she is sleeping on the rest house floor and vanishes, leaving her to the mercy of the forest and its perils.

Nala is no longer himself, he's an automaton at the command of Kala. Not a happy automaton, for he remembers Damayanti at every step. His love for Damayanti calls him back, not once, not twice, but three times. Their love is strong but unfortunately, Kala is stronger.

Damayanti

When Damayanti wakes up, she notices Nala's absence. She's all alone. Perhaps he went foraging for food? Not a chance; she knows the man's possessed. If he's gone he's gone.

For a while, Damayanti gives way to her grief. We don't know what she's grieving for - is it her abandonment in the forest by her husband after their exile or is it her abandonment in the city when her husband loses his mind and then his possessions? She knows that Nala has vanished once he starts gambling away his kingdom and doesn't listen to his advisors or his wife. It's only a matter of time before he abandons her too.

After voicing her sorrow and her anger, Damayanti realizes she has to negotiate the forest on her own. Her queenly existence hasn't prepared her for the dangers of the jungle. In rapid succession she falls prey to a hungry python and then to the hunter who rescues her from the python's clutches.

It's an interesting contrast of images: while Draupadi's clothes are uncoiled by Dushasana, and she escapes her fate when Krishna makes the coil infinitely long, Damayanti is crushed by the python's coils and escapes only when the hunter chops the snake's head off.

When he does so - out of kindness - the hunter notices the beautiful woman underneath the serpent and falls in lust immediately. Damayanti knows what he wants even as the hunter inquires after Damayanti's health. Fortunately for her, the hunter is no Dushasana: he is burned to cinder by Damayanti's fierce chastity. Or perhaps that's the story we are being told. In the real world things turn out differently.

Divine Uncertainty

Uncertainty doesn't mix well with divinity. Whether you're a Bayesian or a Frequentist, it's hard to square the all-knowing, all-powerful nature of godliness with the vagaries of chance. Bayesians are subjectivists about chance, i.e., they believe that probability comes from the strength of beliefs we have about an event. Will the coin land heads or tails? A Bayesian believes he's a fifty percent chance of being right when he guesses, so he won't accept a wager different from 1:1 if he thinks the coin is fair.

Would Indra have any doubts about the outcome?

I don't believe so: the rain god knows exactly what's going to happen since he can observe my hand holding the coin and the wind conditions and every other variable and even if that fails because of quantum fluctuations, he will intervene at the last moment and set the world in accordance with his beliefs. To be a god (or God) is to make the world conform to your image.

What about the frequentist?

He believes the coin is fair because it lands heads about half the time as you keep tossing it again and again. Again, Indra doesn't need to observe the procession of heads and tails. His eyes are sharp enough that he can take a mental photo a nanosecond before the coin settles, and that picture will tell him exactly what's happening.

So what does an epic about the intermixture of gods and men do about the outcome of events? Why does it have so many dice games?

Chance and Power

Neither Draupadi nor Damayanti gamble (at least in the open) and yet they suffer the consequences of their husband's gambling addiction; in fact, they suffer more than their husbands. Power means several things, but among its chief uses is the ability to weather uncertainty - with a caveat I will come to later.

Consider climate change. It's mostly been caused by carbon emissions from people in the rich countries of the world with upstarts such as China and India catching up fast. Yet, these rich people, i.e., the populations of the wealthy countries as a whole and the well off amongst the developing world, are the ones most likely to weather the consequences of climate change (pun intended). They have the money to buy air conditioners and houses further inland while the poor of our species and every unfortunate creature of other species fend for themselves.

In other words, when misfortune strikes the elite, they can outsource their liabilities to the remaining 99%. It's the opposite of a just world; enough to make us doubt in a benevolent deity, or worse, start believing in a malevolent deity.

However, there's a caveat; I should have said that the elite survive normal downturns better than the proles, but in doing so, not only do they skim off the fat of the toiling millions, they also accumulate the resentments of the riff-raff.

Power insures short term stability but opens itself to extreme instability in the long run. That's in the nature of pyramids. Remember that the ones at the top have a longer way to fall when the whole structure collapses. That's what happened to the dinosaurs. That's what will happen to us one day.

This is the last theoretical jayary on chance and uncertainty. I will be back to Damayanti's woes starting tomorrow.

Safety First

After pleading with Nala to no effect, Damayanti realises that he's not about to stop gambling. He's been playing as a man possessed - which he is! - for days and neither his citizens nor his ministers or his wife have managed to get through to him.

Which makes me wonder: was there an ancient code for king-replacement? When was it OK to remove a king from his throne? When he's old and senile? When he's clearly incompetent or indisposed? What, if any, was the accepted procedure for removing a king from power, either temporarily or permanently. When was a coup or assassination justified?

Damayanti knows that the situation is going from bad to worse so she calls for Nala's charioteer Varshneya and asks him to take her children to Vidarbha for safety. Who knows what the man will gamble away?

Strangely, Yudhisthira didn't stake his children even though Draupadi had given birth to children with all five Pandavas by then. Abhimanyu would have been about three years old at the time of the sabha. Why didn't Yudhisthira hand over the children along with his brothers and wife? It's possible he would have done so, but the first round of gambling stopped with Draupadi's molestation. Or is the staking of children is unthinkable? We don't know. The next generation of the Kuru dynasty play almost no role in the story - Abhimanyu is the only one who makes a substantial appearance.

Damayanti asks Varshneya to take her children on Nala's semi-divine chariot and horses and then she offers him free agency: he could enter into employment in Vidharbha or go wherever he chooses. Varshneya chooses free agency and takes employment with the Raja of Ayodhya. The description of Varshneya employment opportunities isn't particularly interesting on its own, but it's one of the few places where the Jaya describes the life of someone outside the elite.

Error

We don't expect life to be full of surprises. When I pick up a bottle, it slips into my palm and stays there. We don't expect struggle with it, which we would have if it was made out of lead or stuck to the table with crazy glue. That normality is what makes life possible - imagine if every moment was beset with the fear of dragons - and it makes us all too vulnerable to the moment of surprise when it happens.

You drive to work on the same route every day and you're used to humming in tune with your favourite radio station and dreaming seventeen different methods of pushing your boss off a cliff, but then one day a car shifts lanes while you were in dream number 14 and before you know it you're in an ambulance on the way to the graveyard. All it takes is one mistake.

Nala makes that mistake after twelve years of patient stalking by Kala. He doesn't wash his feet after urinating and performs his evening rituals in an unclean state. That's all Kala needs to possess Nala, enter his mind and convince him to gamble his kingdom away to his brother Puskara. No one can convince Nala to stop his madness, not even Damayanti. Kala is the master of both fate and circumstance. All he needs is an opening to trap you into a circumstance beyond your control and soon fate takes over.

Angry Gods

Why was Kala so angry with Damayanti and Nala? Kala says he's upset with Damayanti for choosing a mortal over a divinity, but why would a divinity want a mortal in the first place? Even Kala has his limits though: he can't just kill or curse Nala. He has to wait for the right moment when a ritual error gives him an opening. There's a logic to the supernatural, as if heaven has unmoored itself from the earth but not so much that it doesn't partake of its essence. I find that situation fascinating: Nala's world lies between heaven - entirely divine - and our earth - entirely mortal. It's a world in which gods mix with humans and other beings often enough that their presence is unremarkable.

We can't believe in Nala's world; in fact, it's the definition of myth and fantasy. The only way to believe in Nala and Damayanti's story today is to turn it into a psychological narrative such as a dream or a science fiction narrative starring aliens visiting the planet. Both have their followers. Freudian psychology spawned an entire industry analysing dreams, myths and other psychic realities. The Freudian tide has ebbed now, but the "2001: A Space Odyssey" idea of aliens visiting the earth and turning us from beast to man is still very much alive.

I don't like either of these explanations; both are contrived. The sacred landscape visited by the gods feels ordinary to me, where by "ordinary" I mean that it's unremarkable, "the way things are." It's not experienced as half-real as dreams are; it's not experienced as a paranoid fantasy as alien invasions are. I can't imagine assimilating the lived reality of Nala and Damayanti into a psychic or extraterrestrial matrix.

Repetition

Nala's story is a lot like Yudhisthira's, or perhaps we should say it's the other way around. Yudhisthira has a jealous cousin. Nala has a jealous brother. Nala is challenged to a dice game. Yudhisthira is challenged to a dice game. Nala loses all his possessions. Yudhisthira loses all his possessions. It is almost the same story except for Nala being the victim of a God's wrath rather than a cousin's greed.

We can't get away with such obvious repetition anymore, certainly not in a written setting. The formulaic character of much ancient storytelling is lost upon us; it feels like needless duplication. That feeling is not restricted to stories alone; it's also present in our opposition to the memorization of multiplication tables and lists of random facts. Liberal education emphasizes principles over particulars.

Politicians can give the same speech in different campaign stops but no writer can tell a story in which the same misfortune strikes two different people. Unless they happened to be the same person in parallel universes or a story of twins separated at birth who get the same flavour of ice-cream at the same time every week.

Now there's a difference between oral and written literatures. Oral literatures thrive on repetition: it jogs our memories, serves as a semantic connect between episodes that might be heard days or months apart from each other and in general serves as an auditory frame that lends unity to the narrative enterprise.

So how do we tell Nala's story differently today? How can we transform the repetition into delight?

Risk

Risk, chance, uncertainty and contingency are at the heart of our world-straddling civilization. Credit drives every business in the world, from mom and pop stores to startups and giant corporations and every act of credit is also an act of risk. Will I default? Will I pay my credit card bill on time? Will I pay my credit card debt but only after it has accumulated interest? Our economy depends on avoiding the first, tolerating the second and welcoming the third. The stock market is a supercharged version of risk tolerance, except that decisions about risk and reward are now made at the speed of light.

I get the feeling that the Jaya hasn't mastered risk in the same way we have. Both dice games are rigged. Shakuni doesn't win because of his capacity to compute the probabilities better than Yudhisthira - otherwise how would he have won every single throw? In the modern gambling den such as the Vegas casino, the house mostly wins, but only in the long run. In fact, it's the local unpredictability of the throw that makes gambling so addictive. If you lost every single time, you would a) go broke soon or b) leave because it's the same negative result every single time. Gambling addiction is in direct proportion to the fluctuation of loss and victory and the dopamine rush that sends into our limbic cortex.

Why were Nala and Yudhisthira addicted to gambling then, especially when they were losing one throw after another? The Jaya explains the addictive behaviour through the means of spirit possession or some other extra-natural intervention. The idea that chance can lead to obsession isn't fully explored.

Swayamvara

Swayamvara. When a horde of kings descend on a fellow ruler's capital and joust with each other with the hope of winning his daughter's hand. Except, her choice is final. She has to approve of the winner. Even if it has elements of rams butting their heads against each other, it feels saner than some modern mating rituals. Then again, not everyone can afford a swayamvara. What happens to their daughters? Who fought over them?

Now that the gods have enlisted Nala as their agent, the screen credits start rolling. Damayanti's father calls for a swayamvara; kings from all over the land roll into town. Swayamvaras weren't peaceful. Draupadi's suitors were drunk or stoned most of the time. I am guessing the event is somewhere between a fete and an orgy; the kings drink and fight and wait for their turn at the contest, whatever it might be.

When all the kings are seated, Damayanti notices that there are five Nala clones: the man himself and the four gods he's representing. She doesn't know how to distinguish the original from the copy (sidenote: can a god ever be a fake?) when she remembers that the gods have no earthly markers. In the story of Sukanya, she weeds out her mortal husband from the Ashwin twins by noticing that two of the look-alikes leave no footprints. As we know, the gods don't blink either.

Damayanti chooses not to take the detective route. Instead, she takes the path of love: she's given herself fully to the king of the Nishada's. How can she spend her life with someone else? When the gods realise the extent of her devotion, they disclose themselves to her. Sometimes love reveals the truth; sometimes truth reveals itself to love.

The Matrix Made Flesh

I am still thinking about Damayanti's decision to choose Nala over one of the gods. Wait, that's not the only puzzling outcome: what about the gods being jealous of Nala's beauty and tricking him into becoming their representative. And before that, what about the gods desiring Damayanti. Why would an immortal desire a mortal, especially when there are plenty of desirable immortals? Why would a mortal, given a chance, not choose an immortal?

None of this makes sense to us. To the extent that we believe in God or gods, they're these infinitely powerful distant beings. Entirely not-human, out of this world, how can they ever find us attractive? We no longer accept the anthropomorphism of being the chosen species, but that's both a lighter and a heavier burden than Damayanti's. Lighter, because we don't have to fend off gods in addition to all the unwanted attention from humans. Damayanti's gods are not on earth but they are close by and constantly visiting us like powerful guests who overstay their welcome but can't be kicked out without incurring their wrath. In contrast, the one God is very very far away; in fact he's outside the universe altogether.

Our burden is heavier than Damayanti because the One God has chosen us. He's pointing a finger at us from his perch outside the universe: "I choose you." Forget the Sistine Chapel God who's a hair's breadth away from Adam; the only God who can choose us today is one who can denote: think of him as a pointer in C or some other programming language except that the program has escaped the confines of the computer and is speaking to us (from where? where do we hear him?). That's a pretty powerful God: the matrix made flesh. What would Damayanti do if she was desired by Him?

Death, Fate and Circumstance

Time is a constant presence in our lives but Time with a capital T is mercifully less so, for its invariably the bearer of bad news. Death, Fate and Circumstance; these are the three forms in which Time reveals itself to us.

Death is the far horizon that we can't even begin to understand; it's easier for me to imagine what it's like to be a bacterium or a bat than what it's like for me to be dead even as I know that it will greet me with open arms one day. Death is the black hole of language and perception for every thought that enters its grip is swallowed, never to be seen again.

Fate is the near horizon, the rishi's curse, the god's decree: immovable, impenetrable, it reduces to mere playthings. It was fate that lead Parikshit to decorate a meditating rishi with a snake. It was fate that led turned Devadatta into Bhishma. On the other side of Fate is Death, waiting patiently for it has all the time in the world. Parikshit built a great palace, he sacrificed to all the gods but death was waiting for him on the final day.

Then there's circumstance, which is like a jack-in-the-box, ready to spring upon us if the conditions are ripe; like Karna finding Duryodhana when his brothers reject him. Some events lie at the cusp of fate and circumstance. Yudhisthira's failure at the gambling table was circumstance, but once Draupadi was dragged into the Sabha, it became fate.

Kali and Dvapara are the keepers of fate as well as circumstance. They're upset with Damayanti for choosing a mortal over a god. The returning (and defeated) gods tell the timekeepers that the couple was married with their blessing but the two aren't in a mood to listen. They can't unleash fate against Damayanti since she didn't act against dharma, but they are going to create the circumstances in which Nala and Damayanti will rush headlong into fate on their own.

Still, the gap between fate and circumstance is large enough for hope to slip in between. It's a true test of character.

Preattraction

As it happens every so often in these ancient tales, Nala and Damayanti are pre-attracted to each other. They have heard rumours of each other's beauty, their mutual suitability and whether they feel it or not, the suta makes us feel they are fated for each other.

The pace of the romance picks up a notch when Nala is ambling in his palace garden and he chances upon some swans. Nala grabs one of them but the swan implores Nala not to kill him. In return for sparing his life, the swan promises to fly with his flock to Damayanti's garden and whisper sweet nothings about Nala in her ear.

I had to read that passage a few times to fully grasp its import: why would a king randomly grab a swan with the intent of killing it? Surely it's not for food or even for the sport of killing a big mammal. Were these Kshatriyas so fond of killing that they couldn't stop themselves from slaughter even while relaxing?

I don't that was the point of the story, but it does illustrate the principle of debt. By the time the Jaya is written, all trees and animals are in debt to man; if he chooses, an entire forest can be sacrificed to Agni and replaced by marble palaces. Nature is in permanent debt to us and every time it falls back on its payments, we lop off an appendage or two to show who's boss.

The swan, unlike other men, keeps his word. He alights in Damayanti's garden and starts singing Nala's praises. Before we know it, she's has fallen in love with him, sight unseen. I don't know what to make of that act: is it the most romantic thing I have heard or a silly gesture? Either way, it's an impossible act to commit today with our constant access to Tinder and Snapchat.

How can we tell the story of their falling in love, making sure to keep the magical elements while giving the improbabilities a modern garb?

Traces

Once upon a time, the gods lived on earth. Then they left for the heavens. We don't know why. Perhaps the dinosaurs weren't welcoming enough. Perhaps the last ice age was too cold. Perhaps they were bored. It's hard to tie the gods down; they're nomadic by nature, the original sramanas. We don't know much about this time, since the Jaya begins with the Ikshvaku race of kings, after the gods have left.

However, the Jaya tells us that the gods haven't left entirely. They are still fond of earthly pleasures. In modern terms, this is the age of micromanagement; the factory has been moved from Pittsburgh to Guangzhou but the bosses back home want to keep close tabs on the assembly line. In this era, the gods pick favourites, they fight over women (and sometimes over men), they instigate wars and keep kings in their place.

But these men frighten them; some of them are more beautiful, more powerful, more cruel and more cunning than the gods. Damayanti's beauty is so intense that both the gods and kings beat a path to her swayamvara. Except that the gods know their cause is doomed: Nala is so clearly superior to them in wit and wisdom that they have no chance against him. Indra, Varuna and Agni have a brilliant idea: why not make Nala into their messenger? He's desperate to cast his eyes on his love and will do anything for that occasion. Clever trick.

Nala lives in a world in which the gods have left but their traces are still scratched on every bark. One day, the traces will vanish, leaving only a monotheistic God who's so distant that we can only pray to him to send his son to us. Then that son also recedes and all we are left with is a human world for which we aren't prepared.

Infinite Flexibility

Is Dharma infinitely flexible? Are there any rules or patterns or is it completely made up? Is it so context dependent that we can never hope to systematise it? These questions attain peak importance during the war parvas, but the Nala-Damayanti story introduces them in a very different context.

First, let's start with the gods. Damayanti is desired by Indra, Agni, Varuna and Yama but those four gods are worried about losing out to Nala. In their cleverness. their devadharma, they ask Nala to take their case to Damayanti, using his desire to set his eyes upon her as a pretext to draft him in their cause. How can he claim Damayanti for himself if he's their representative?

Damayanti is no fool. When asked by Nala to choose one of the gods, she says they are deserving of worship but her love is Nala's alone. You can see that the gods are already a little estranged from human affairs - even as they desire us, we are no longer willing to give of ourselves in the way they desire. I am reminded of Ramakrishna's famous statement about merging with the divine: "I want to taste the sugar, not become sugar."

Damayanti has a counter offer: she says she only wants Nala but since he has become the divine yenta, she wants all of them to come to her swayamvara, where she will choose her true love. The caveat being: she'll marry whoever she believes to be Nala and if she's in error and chooses one of the gods, so be it. The story of Sukanya develops this idea even further.

Unlike bhakti which reveals the divine through intense love, kama reveals a human soulmate. Damayanti is confident that Nala will be revealed by her kamadharma. In this passage alone, Dharma is revealed to have both game-theoretic and contractual aspects. I am sure it's not possible to capture it in a small set of laws, but with any luck the Jaya as a whole is a comprehensive exposition.

What if Damayanti was in error? It's not the first time we have been blinded by love. I am wondering whether the gods would have fought each other over Damayanti if she had chosen one of them instead. Or perhaps we can imagine her marrying all four of them, like a divine Draupadi. We will never know, since Damayanti's love was true in every sense of that term.

Preemptive Bondage

There are so many ways of being bound. Nala is bound to the devas once he's asked by them to be their representative. Damayanti is bound to Nala because of the swan's whispered promises. Who's bound to Damayanti? Perhaps Nala; perhaps the kama inflamed devas, but possessive love can unspool as quickly as it binds.

As it often happens, the hardest task falls on woman. Having given her heart to Nala, Damayanti has to find a way to be bound to him and not to a fickle divinity. It's a test of her cleverness as much as her love. She's the hero of the story so far, not her lover in waiting.

There's a north Indian festival called Raksha Bandhan when women tie strings around their brothers in return for their support. The brother, like the father before him, is a "licensed protector," a man who's more likely on average to take her side than her assailants. The brother plays an important role because he's likely to be alive for longer than the father which means that he can intervene when things go wrong with the in-laws.

Of course, that depends on the woman knowing her place and not asserting herself. She's liable to be killed by the licensed protectors if she raises her head or her voice too much as the recent honor killings have shown. Raksha bandhan is a symbolic protection racket in which security is offered in return for submission.

When I was a child and young adult in Delhi there was this practice of pre-emptive raksha-bandhaning where women would tie a rakhi around the wrists of the local thugs and bullies with the hope that they would see themselves as protectors rather than assailants. It was a reasonably successful solution because of the strong cultural codes around the ritual.

Damayanti's clever interpretation of the dharma reminds me of the preemptive strikes by the neighbourhood girls; like Damayanti, they used an acceptable interpretation of dharma to achieve a measure of safety and independence. We can do better though.

Nala and Damayanti

We will soon be hearing Nala's story, the tale of another great king like Yudhisthira who lost his love and his kingdom before regaining it all. I am never convinced that hearing about another person's misery makes mine any better and I bet kings are even less likely to be mollified by listening to a story of redemption.

Yudhisthira is an emperor who has lost his throne, and he's an emperor prone to reflection. But he's also an emperor and which emperor wants to be compared with other mortals even when that mortal is another king? Do you think Stalin would have been happy listening to the woes of Napoleon in 1815 after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. I doubt it.

Still, we are obliged to suspend our disbelief and listen to Nala and Damayanti's journey. But before I start recounting it in my own words, here's another thought: why isn't it Damayanti and Nala's story? Why is it that Nala's suffering counts for more than Damayanti's? Or, coming back to our own heroes, why does Yudhisthira's fate inspire more tragic reflection than Draupadi's? After all, the eldest Pandava wasn't dragged from his chambers and assaulted.

There's inequality even in suffering, an inverted hierarchy that's a mirror image of the hierarchy of power. Just as the glory of a victorious king is greater than that of the merely successful writer or athlete, the fall of a king is lamented more than the bankrupt merchant or the abused wife. There's no escaping inequality, in good times and in bad times.

The Soulmate

Who among us hasn't dreamed of a soulmate, a companion of matching beauty and grace? Even better if in the process of finding that perfect partner, our bodies were upgraded to the perfection only attained by gods and movie stars. The Soulmate is one of three romances that we carry in our minds as we struggle through life, the other two being "The Buddha" i.e., becoming a human being who has either transformed himself into a god, or, forming a blend with the Soulmate, becomes intimate with the divine as lovers do; and "The Hero," i.e., the all conquering warrior to whom the entire world pays homage.

Of the three, The Soulmate is the most democratic. How many of us can hope to make the world submit before us? We are all Walter Mittys. How many of us can expect to have mystical, philosophical, poetic or scientific insight that renders the universe transparent? Both wisdom and power are rare and are acknowledged to be so. Love, on the other hand, seems within reach. Dating sites, friends and family, Tinder and Shaadi.com: a significant percentage of the modern economy is devoted to finding exactly the right person for us.

These apps in turn ride on a widespread fantasy: every Bollywood movie ever made suggests that every one of us has the capacity to woo that impossibly fair skinned girl carrying seven pitchers of water on her head while helping an old lady and breaking into song soon afterward.

Paradoxically, the great lovers - imagine Romeo and Juliet or Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia in Bobby - are the humans most visibly different from us: better looking, better behaved, luckier in every sense of that word. They are both targets of aspiration and the most human manifestation of divine beauty, talent and power. Their divinity helps them find each other and fall in love instantaneously, as if fate had ordained their union. Their humanness forces a necessary element of suffering into the story, a trial or two to prove that they aren't gods. Nala and Damayanti are no exception to this rule.

Storytime

How two beautiful people met, fell in love, suffered, recovered their fortunes, suffered and recovered one more time and fell in love all over again.

It's the oldest story in the world and the story we want to tell about our own lives. It's the story of Nala and Damayanti. The story within a story has a teller and a listener; the visiting rishi Brhadvasa and the exiled king Yudhisthira. We are time-traveling eavesdroppers listening in to their conversation from an undisclosed vantage point; a perspective that's designed to enlighten us without disturbing the speaker and hearer. It reminds us that the Jaya is always a story to be heard, not a story to be read.

Imagine the two of them sitting under a giant tree in the late afternoon. The day's hunt is over. The deer have been slaughtered and served to the Pandavas and their cohorts after being blessed by Brahmins. The wooden vessels have been put away. Draupadi and Bhima are off to the side, one napping and the other fuming silently. We don't know what Nakula and Sahadeva are doing, but that's because we never know what they're doing. They're known to us only by their absence.

The king and his visitor have a few hours to confer before the evening deliberations start: should we attack the Kauravas? Why do you persist in honouring your gambling debts? Yudhisthira knows Draupadi will be asking difficult questions in the waning sunlight so he wants to dissolve his sorrows in story before heading back to face his family's interrogation.

The City, the Village and the Forest

The history of civilization is mostly the history of cities and the countryside whose surplus feeds the urban monster. Cities rule our cosmopolitan dreams. The countryside is flyover country. Here's an untested and most likely wrong theory of mine: in the age of financial capital, the state is increasingly being replaced by a network of cities whose denizens hop from airport to airport sipping martinis in first class.

The flip side of the urban romance is the myth of the noble villager, the hard working, straight talking, simple living laborer whose sweat fills our bowls. That rugged farmer is the star of the Gandhian Ram Rajya and the American pastoral.

Do you see something missing in this pretty picture? Where are the trees? Where's the forest? All the wilderness has been squeezed between the empire of metal and the empire of grass.

The Jaya is an interesting antidote to this urban-rural civilization. There's almost no mention of village life in it; when the heroes leave the city, they enter the forest. The great hermitages and their demonic stalkers seek refuge amongst the trees. Can we imagine a world without farms? Where forests disclose their secrets in return for our care?

Janamejaya asks the suta how the Pandavas fed themselves in the forest. It seems they subsisted on their daily deer hunt - which they ate only after offering to their retinue of Brahmins. How many deer did the forest hold? What forest can afford a ten thousand humans hunting black buck every day? It's better that Arjuna's arrows rain upon his enemies than on the shrinking fauna.

The Steadfast Man

Yudhisthira follows the Dharma even in exile. When Krishna visits him in the forest and turns livid with anger at the condition of the deer-skin clad Pandavas, the blue skinned god promises to kill all the Kauravas and reinstall Dharmaraja as the legitimate king. Yudhisthira assents to Krishna's promise but extracts one in return: that the killing happen only after the thirteen years of exile have transpired. After all Yudhisthira has promised that he will remain in the forest for thirteen years.

I am of two minds about Yudhisthira's steadfastness. On the one hand, it's admirable to see a man whose word is his bond, a man who keeps his vows even upon the pain of death. It's the same fierceness that compelled the Sikhs to go their deaths when the Moghuls persecuted them. But how can we give so much authority to a word? Where does a promise get its power? Isn't it possible that the same allegiance to Dharma can turn fundamentalist and privilege the law over life, texts over people? Is Yudhisthira's rigidity the precursor of a future social order in which everyone is condemned to live and die in an oppressive hierarchy codified by law?

Meanwhile, Dhritarashtra is worried that these word-rich and wealth-poor nephews of his will descend upon his progeny and destroy them. Perhaps there's something to Yudhisthira's dharma; his promise-keeping attracts the best warriors to fight for him.

The Head and the Heart

If Yudhisthira is the head of the Pandavas, Arjuna is their heart. He's the bad boy of the clan, the sensitive warrior who also finds time to seduce apsaras and have fun on the side. He's the reason Draupadi married them all, and he's the reason Krishna makes the long trek from Dwaraka every so often. What would the Pandavas be without the two Krishna's?

(If I push the Family == Person analogy a little further, I might say that Bhima is their trunk, the twins the legs and adding a dollop of metaphysics, Draupadi their self. )

They need him even more than usual in their penurious state, since he's the only one of the five who can attract the gods and learn the secret of their divine weapons. That's why Yudhisthira sends Arjuna off to Shiva's abode in search of the Pasupata weapon. Fortunately, Arjuna doesn't complain about yet another quest: the third Pandava isn't the type who loves hanging out in the forest listening to discourses on metaphysics.

Meanwhile Bhima is stuck with Yudhisthira and Draupadi in the forest and can't stop complaining. "Why did you gamble away our fortune?"says Bhima, pointing an accusing finger at Yudhisthira, "and having done so, why do you have to keep your promise? Just say the word and I will kill all the Kauravas. Should have done that in the sabha itself, but Arjuna prevented me from crushing them." All thoughts in the Pandava family end with Arjuna.

Of course, we know what Yudhisthira says in response: "I can't lie, I can't break my promises, I can't step outside Dharma, blah blah blah." Terribly boring, but I also understand why his brothers obey his commands, for such unalloyed goodness is easy to trust.

The Antidepressant

Yudhisthira is understandably depressed. He lost his kingdom on account of the one rash act of his life - makes me think that it's better to indulge in small doses than to go on a wild bender - and while he enjoys the vacation from the daily pressure of governance, he's also losing support within his family. His beloved wife is intensely critical of their decision to stay in exile. Why wouldn't she, didn't the Kauravas inscribe hisfailings on her body?

Draupadi's lament is finding support with Bhima, who's itching for battle, and I have to wonder whether Yudhisthira has a sneaking support for the two. Since when did kings stick to principle? Principle be damned, but there's the worry about having the strength to fight their cousins in open warfare. How will they match the akshauhini's (remember what Stalin said about the Pope: "how many divisions has he got?") of well paid and pampered soldiers of the Kauravas?

Yudhisthira has no recourse but to send his other warrior brother to the heavens for special attention. It might be a good idea anyway to get Arjuna out of the forest before he can join Draupadi and Bhima in changing Dharmaraja's mind.

Without meaning to do so, Yudhisthira has collected worries like bees. No wonder the stress is getting to him.

A visiting rishi soothes his mind with a tale: "you thought your plight was terrible; well let me tell you the story of another king who lost even more and suffered even more than you have. You have four brothers; he had none. You have your wife. He lost his beloved. In comparison to Nala, you're fortunate indeed."

Thus starts the tale of Nala and Damayanti. One of the great love stories of all time folded within the Jaya as a great king's antidepressant.

One Last Reflection

I am going to get back to reading the Jaya section by section tomorrow, but let me offer one last reflection on what I have learned so far.

Many years ago when George W. Bush was still governor of Texas and vying for the Republican nomination for President, he was asked "who's your favorite philosopher?" Dubya's answer was "Christ," for which he received much criticism in the liberal media. In sophisticated circles, no one can admit to being transformed by the son of God; Locke, Kant and Hobbes are safe answers to "what's your favorite philosopher?," Rousseau or Spinoza if you want to be risky and Marx if you want to be cool. Unless you live in a state where Marx is the only acceptable answer.

In any case, anyone who declares that Jesus/Buddha/Mohammed/Nanak is their favorite philosopher is no longer taken seriously by the intelligentsia. The vanguard's distrust of gurus is a double edged sword: while there's good reason to focus on modern thinkers (their ideas lie at the foundations of today's world after all), it's also setting aside the thought that philosophy can serve as a moral and spiritual guide.

If philosophy can't turn you into a better human being and doesn't even aspire to doing so, then it's no longer a mass medium. It's territory is encroached upon in two directions: by novels, music and other mass media designed to transport us into imagined worlds and by scientific and technological discoveries that increasingly dictate what we believe to be true. Who cares for abstract nonsense that neither tells us how the world is nor does it help us imagine how it ought to be?

If there's one reason to read the Jaya, it's to revive the possibilities for philosophical imagination, to go back to a world in which IS and OUGHT were bound together in a gripping tale. Does it have the answers to our questions today? Absolutely not, but its monumental chutzpah remains an inspiration.

The Sun's Arrows

Earlier this year, the temperature in parts of north India reached 50 degrees celsius. When it's that hot, the sun doesn't spread light, it pierces us with its photonic arrows. Dhritarashtra uses that very simile when he contemplates the awesome weaponed Arjuna confronting his enemies on the battlefield. Nothing is certain besides death, taxes and Arjuna's fury. There's nowhere to hide when his arrows rain upon the battlefield like the June sun in the Thar desert.

Dhritarashtra is worried that Arjuna is a complete warrior: he's in the prime of his life unlike Bhishma and Drona, he's measured where Karna is impulsive and he has the blessings of the gods as well as his peers. Death might forgive you for a while if you have been sacrificing to the gods, but Arjuna's arrows do not show any mercy. Dhritarashtra knows that no one can withstand such a master of destruction.

We have to remember that Arjuna is a messenger of death, that despite his reluctance on the battlefield it's his duty to wipe the slate clean. It's in that light that we have to read the Gita; when Krishna reveals his Vishwarupa to Arjuna, it's to reveal the terrible mask the hero will don in the eighteen days that follow. No wonder Dhananjaya receives the deadly weapons from the God of destruction.

I am still grappling with a nausea inducing thought: that the near complete destruction of mankind (the gender is important here) including the good guys, is the course of Dharma, that our presence on earth is so evil that we have to be removed root and branch.

The Shot that Rang Around the World

If you remember (and why wouldn't you?), the first world war started when the Serbian anarchist Gustav Princip - these days he would be called a terrorist - assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The world powers were already at each other's throats and with the inevitable Austro-Hungarian declaration of war against Serbia and Russia's intervention on the Serbian side, the dominos fell in a rush as the European powers were drawn into an unwanted war. The shot that rang around the world indeed.

We believe modern states are rational institutions that aren't forced into foolishness by individual events. Yet, both after Princip's accidental celebrity (he targeted the royal couple after they had taken the wrong turn in his direction) and after 9/11, we were witness to the instability of imperial ambition. Great power is no more sober than a schoolyard bully. The jury is still out whether a butterfly flying in the Amazon causes rain in Beijing, but a bullet fired in Beijing might well be the end of the Amazon one day.

As Dhritarashtra talks to Sanjaya, it's made clear that Draupadi's molestation is the turning point in the epic; there's no going back after attempted rape. Brothers who could have been close friends or casual rivals are now sworn enemies. Of course, the royal house is unstable to begin with; there's only room for one family at the top, but the battle for succession can be 'solved' in-house. Why start a war when poison will do as well? None of those options are available after the dice game. Public bloodshed is the only acceptable sacrifice.

Violent Dreams #7

Once we are done with God(s), we only have ourselves to blame for all the violence in this world. If the European enlightenment celebrated the death of God and the emergence of the individual human being and his control over the the world, we can now turn that relationship upside down, and demand that the individual human being has responsibility for care of this world. Whether the divinity is dead or alive, we can't run away from our dharma.

Enough with the metaphysics, what about violence in the Jaya? Blood is spilled throughout the epic, so it's hard to pick one episode over another. Some episodes are well known and discussed threadbare - is there anything new to be said about Draupadi's vastraharan? Instead, I am going to focus on two lesser known episodes - the snake sacrifice and Pandu's killing of rishi Kindama.

Less known you said - hasn't everyone heard of these two killings? Yep, less known. It's true that everyone who's heard or read the Mahabharata story knows how Pandu was cursed by the dying sage and why Janamejaya unleashed his anger on the snakes, but we have only heard those stories in passing. The underlying mechanics isn't captured by the abridged stories we hear. There's a twist in both tales that reveals much about the nature of violence.

Violent Dreams #8

You might remember the story of how Chanakya met Chandragupta Maurya: the king in waiting saw a man pouring sugar on a clump of grass and asked him why he was wasting all that sweetness. Chanakya responded that by doing so, ants will swarm upon that clump and eat it down to nothing. It seems a blade of grass had pricked the haughty Brahmin and he was using sugar as his weapon for exacting revenge. As Chandragupta was himself smarting from his humiliation in the hands of the Nandas, he knew immediately that Chanakya would be a perfect advisor.

Revenge can emerge full blown from very little as long as there's a seed of humiliation and enough anger in the soil to act as fertilizer.

When Utanka was tasked by his Guru's wife to get her the queen's earrings by sundown, he moved heaven an earth to acquire them. The snake king Taksaka stole them from him at the last moment, preventing Utanka from keeping his promise. In turn, an angry Utanka went to Janamejaya's court and asked him why he wasn't conducting a snake sacrifice to revenge his father's death in the hands of Taksaka. Before you know it, millions of snakes were on their way to a fiery death.

You might think that mass killing just because of a thwarted wish is a bit too much, but my suspicion is that violence often emerges from such small provocations. It is inherently unstable; bloodshed flares from the smallest action if the conditions are appropriate. Isn't that what happened when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated a hundred years ago? Yes, war is politics by other means, but who said politics was rational?

Violent Dreams #9

Neither Pandu nor Dhritarashtra had normal children. The latter's boys were born in an incubator, divided into hundred pots after Gandhari gave birth to a heaving mass of flesh. Pandu's situation was even more miraculous: since he was cursed to be celibate, Kunti and Madri had to invoke the gods to have surrogate children. Somewhat suspicious births, if I may say so myself. No wonder there's a war over succession.

Things might have turned out differently if Pandu hadn't shot the rishi Kindama while he was making love to his wife. Most of us are aghast at the thought that a king would slay a sacred figure, but hunting is violent by its very nature.

Pandu doesn't understand why he's being cursed. He complains that a king is within his rights to kill a deer by any means - by the force of his arms or by his trickery in trapping the unfortunate creature. How can that be condemned? Will we start cursing tigers for hunting?

The rishi's response is instructive: why kill an animal while it's in the middle of courtship? Even a king's violence has limits. That's why Pandu is cursed to be celibate rather than being killed by the wrath of the dying sage. Hidden within the rishi's anger lies a dilemma: violence is an ineradicable part of human existence but does it have boundaries? Can humans violate the rest of nature as we please? Are there legitimate outlets for our violence? If so, what are they?

Violent Dreams #10

Here's a modern paradox: very few of us kill, yet more beings are killed than ever before. Unlike Arjuna and Bhima who spent much of their time practicing their deadly skills, killing both animals and men in large numbers throughout their lives, most of us never lift a weapon. Armies of conscripts have been replaced by professional armies the world over. I don't know about others, but I am physically incapable of executing an arrested enemy, whatever his crimes might have been.

As for killing animals for food, the closest we get to it is the plastic wrapped sausages in the supermarket freezer. Most of us would instinctively recoil if handed a knife and asked to slit the throat of a tied up pig. Yet, something like sixty four billion animals were killed for human consumption in 2015, a number that's rising every day. The number of chickens killed for our pleasure has more than doubled in the last twenty years.

To restate the puzzle: our attitudes toward the rights over other human beings and the moral worth of other species has increased steadily over the last two hundred years. At the same time, the number of humans killed wholesale and the number of animals killed in every which way has also increased.

It is as if dharma has a greater hold on our minds while adharma has a greater hold on our hands. One of my primary reasons for reading the Jaya was to understand this simultaneous expansion of our moral circle and of inhumane violence. How is that possible? Reading and reflecting upon the epic has given me a lot of insight into this dilemna, but it still feels wrong.

However, I can't keep puzzling away. There's work to be done: the rest of the epic beckons. Starting tomorrow, I am getting back to reading it section by section for the next five months.

Violent Dreams #4

We now have an idea as to why our ancestors demand progeny - having created this new wonderful new creature called man, we can't drop the ball by not having children.

Think about it as interest on a cosmic debt: the creator went out on a limb by fashioning us in his image (wrong religion, but who cares) and the only way we can pay down the principal is by multiplying. Defaulters go to hell and take their entire lineage with them.

That gives me an idea as to why the gods demand sacrifice. It's the way we prove to them we are human. It's a maintenance fee. In one of Plato's first dialogue's Socrates probes his interlocutor (who's about to conduct a sacrifice) on the nature of justice. Is the just person the one who's loved by the gods or does one become just by loving the gods? If the former, what makes you loved? If the latter, what's it about love that makes it just? Socrates' respondent didn't have an answer to these questions.

Socrates' questions were piercing, but they were also looking for a static answer to an intrinsically dynamic question. Justice isn't a state, it's a way of being. The Indian sacrifice recognized that - by continuously sacrificing to the gods, the sacrificer keeps turning the wheel of history.

Violent Dreams #5

So why are the gods so violent? From what I can tell, there are exactly two kind of gods: there's the One God who's generally peaceful but exacts terrible retribution against those who disagree with Him. There's another version of the One God, which is the God of infinite peace and love. This God is non-interventionist by nature, entering into history only when things are going terribly, or when his son chooses to grace us with his presence.

The One God invites an obvious question: why do you allow so much violence in this world? If you're the sole creator, why make the world this way? Plus, isn't there a contradiction between being infinitely powerful and loving on the one hand and all the evil and suffering on the other?

The polytheist doesn't have the same problems because in her world, the gods can take sides. Zeus can favor one hero while Poseidon favors another. Or, even better, the Gods need not be benign - they can be devas as well as asuras with pitched battles fought between the two.

Isn't that a scary thought? A group of beings infinitely more powerful than us who have no qualms about laying waste to worlds on end.

However I look at it, violence is the single largest problem for religion, and makes it that much more likely that God(s) is an anthropomorphic projection of humans on to the unknown.

Violent Dreams #6

The deadliest slur that a scientist can unleash upon another is "anthropomorphic." Scientists who pipe music into greenhouses are called anthropomorphic. Scientists who read emotions and suffering in dogs and sheep are called anthropomorphic. More generally, anyone who ventures in the direction of biological or cosmic purpose is anthropomorphic.

The other end of the line from anthropomorphism (at least in the popular imagination, if not the scientific one) is materialism, which we all believe to be the reigning ideology of the sciences. The current consensus seems to be: the world is dead. God is dead. We are rocks rumbling around gasballs awaiting heat death.

In other words, one way to solve the problem of violence is to say there's no such thing, for we are just a blooming buzzing confusion of carbon molecules.

Of course, to each action, there's a reaction, even if it's not equal and opposite. Ever since materialism took hold in the seventeenth century, romantics, religionists and opportunists of every kind has opposed this *inhumane* ideology. It's impossible to be taken seriously as a heterodox thinker today without entering into the gladiatorial arena against the materialist beast.

But even the heterodox thinker has to expand beyond the anthropic; it's much easier to convince other nerds that everything is conscious and sentient (what's called panpsychism) than only humans are conscious and sentient. We are more likely to be rocky beings buzzing around gaseous beings than the chosen species of God.

More Possibilities

I am suggesting that we abandon our search for philosophical principles and focus more on an elemental list of stories, the idea being that a storehouse of alternatives is better than a single alternative.

If you're reading carefully, you might say: isn't the storehouse of stories just an alternative way of saying "the underlying principle of stories," and if so, aren't we back to the task of principle discovery?

In fact, that's a move which has yielded much insight in the last fifty years. I am thinking of Chomsky's approach to language, which first postulates a storehouse of language - he calls it the language organ - and then proceeds to discover the principles underlying the storehouse - he calls it the universal grammar.

I am taking a different route - in my view, the analogy to design and architecture leads to a better foundation for our storehouse than the discovery of universal principles, but it's going to take me to far afield to defend that claim right now. Indeed, setting aside its content, the frame of the Jaya is very much an architectural achievement, with a major story serving as the skeleton for the minor stories. If all goes well, I will articulate that position in detail in the second summary period at the end of this year.

Let me now turn to one particular topic where the Jaya has much to contribute: violence.

Violent Dreams #1

As an apex predator, humans haven't been preyed upon for a very long time. In fact, the only place where we are still threatened by monsters are in dreams and stories. It's true that people still die of snake-bite and bee-stings but the numbers are trivial compared to our population. Even hunter-gatherers, with all the dangers of being gored by a cornered bull or wayward arrow, aren't looking out for a tiger or lion every minute of their lives.

We can still experience fear in the wild - try camping amongst the grizzly bears in Alaska and you'll know the different between cute and terrifying - but it's a boutique experience; in the future, bored rich people will pay a lot of money to an Inuit community for the pleasure of being eaten by the last surviving polar bear.

In settled human society, i.e., life for most of us for all of history, the real danger from the natural world is disease, not predation. We are no longer worried about lions but avian flu might kill us all. About twenty thousand people died of snake-bite in 2015. In contrast, more than half a million people died of malaria alone and another two hundred million were infected. Germs are our real competition, but they don't populate our dreams. Why not?

Violent Dreams #2

I have this theory - maybe it's just a myth I am making up right now- that the end of predation is also the beginning of history; time stops flowing continuously and is now marked by events, rituals and sacrifices. We become a people and celebrate our superiority over nature by constructing a lineage for ourselves. So in this myth, human history starts and natural history ends when we are no longer food.

We so take our supremacy for granted that it's not even worth remarking; there's no need to celebrate our victory over a bear king or the final decimation of monkey empire. From blue whales to bald eagles, animals are a source of fascination, of romantic celebration and targets of disdain and unremitting cruelty, but they're no longer our enemies.

That's where we are in history today, but the Jaya still retains the animal past; back in the jungle, it was possible for a lost pilgrim to be devoured by wolves. At the same time, the Jaya also decisively signals a human future. Our lordship over the earth is taken for granted, and in turn, the lordship of kings over us is taken for granted. It's in that spirit that I read the Jaya, with its recounting of the Ikshavaku lineage at the very beginning.

Violent Dreams #3

Having discovered history, we are trapped by it. History flatters us, it separates us from those beasts we domesticate for work and pleasure, but it demands worship from us in return. How else can we prove that we are human, that we truly exist?

The minute we stop worshipping history, we slip back into animality. Many years later, when Europeans colonized the rest of the world in the name of a different god of history, they looked down upon everyone else in that very fashion while claiming to bring civilization to the rest of us. In the future, when some humans merge with computers, they will condemn the rest as worse than beasts.

We haven't reached that stage of history in the Jaya yet. For now, we are happy worshipping it in two forms: as our ancestors and as our gods.

Here's one theory of violence: bloodshed is inevitable whenever we stop worshipping history, i.e., by not sacrificing to the gods and not pleasing our ancestors by having children. When Jaratkaru is assailed by his ancestors for not having children, he's accused of breaking two pacts: a biological pact that every creature makes with its progeny and a historical pact that humans make with their predecessors. The two are related, but they aren't the same.

Second Summary

Indian philosophy doesn't have a future. What do I mean by that?Future, for me, signifies a stream of human activity - creative as well as scholarly -that's continuous with the past, referring back to an identifiable group of ancestors even as it seeks to go further than they ever imagined. Every future has a past. I have talked about two pasts (or should I say two pastimes):

1. The civilizational past imagined during the nineteenth century and strengthened during the independence struggle. We might as well call it the "The Idea of India," i.e., a civilization incubated between the Indus and the Brahmaputra that's culminated in the modern nation state of the same name.

2. The departmental past imagined post-independence with the goal of getting tenure at Oxford and Harvard.

Neither of these ideas has a future. The idea of India has turned flesh and now exists as a nation-state. With that material success has also come imaginative failure; the only people who care about connecting the present with the historic past are people who wear brown shorts. It's as if creationism is the only viable theory of biology.

The departmental idea was stillborn. Who cares about the The Journal of Indian Philosophy? Imagine a world dominated by China in which the vast majority of current academia, from Aristotle's ethics to Kant's critiques to Newtonian mechanics, Marxist economics and startup wisdom is bundled into one department of Greek Philosophy and taught primarily as a philological exercise. Who in his right mind would want to send his daughter to study this masala?

So what do we do? Fortunately, I can expand the first line of this section into: Indian philosophy doesn't have a future, but it has possibilities.

Possibilities

If you're like me, stories are elemental, imbibed -literally- with mother's milk. The story form with all it's twists and surprises, its concern for fact as well as fantasy, is more durable than argument. What if the basic elements of philosophy are stories rather than principles?

The itihasm is a storyhouse, a warehouse of stories; behind it lies the idea that philosophy can be best done by starting from a set of atomic stories. If so, the itihasm is an alternative to the standard philosophical model of reducing a subject to its principles, a model that's been popular in the west since Aristotle and with considerable following in India as well.

That said, I believe Indian thinkers took the philosophical story further than anyone else, and the popularity of these stories drenches the landscape with metaphysical insight. In other words, just as American teenagers (used to) learn how to take apart and fix cars over summer vacations, we learned how to illustrate and explain difficult philosophical concepts with the right story. The Jaya is the culmination of that cultural expertise.

In reviving the fortunes of Indian philosophy, we should pay attention to style as much as content. The story-form is a stylistic device with enormous potential, especially on the web. Just as cell phones transformed communication while we were waiting for landlines to arrive, I believe the web and experiments with hypertext will give Indian philosophical ideas a platform the hardcover never did.

Holding Infinity

The Jaya is - among other things - a vision of infinity, culminating in Krishna's revelation of the Vishwarupa on the battlefield. While the Jaya's vision is terrifying, there are other, less frightening poetic visions of infinity as well. For example, in a poem that many of us have read, William Blake says:

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour."

Not a bad exhortation, but missing some crucial details. How does one hold infinity in the palm of one's hand? Georg Cantor had a very specific answer to that question that's kept many of us busy, but there's also a more general answer: to hold infinity in the palm of one's hand is to hold a book, and the Jaya would add, "if you were to hold one infinite book then you might as well hold me." The itihasa is confident about its palm primacy, for it says that if the choice is between holding the Vedas and holding the Mahabharata in one's hand, you would be stupid not to take the second option.

What the secret of the Jaya's confidence? How does it hold infinity better than anything else? Or does it?

That's the question I want to explore. And the itihasm of stories is the key to the answer.

A First Summary

As a graduate student, I attended a talk by an Indian activist who was on a victory tour, i.e., making their way around the United States on the invitation of concerned expatriates. It's easier to sell anything back home - yoga, rainwater harvesting, zero - when it's found some takers out west.

I don't remember who she was or what she said, or even whether it was a he or a she - an occupational hazard for a PhD candidate, but this one wasn't tied to my dissertation (why was I attending the talk then? bad student karma) - but I was struck by one of her lines: if we replaced per capita GDP (Gross National Product) with per capita GSC (Gross Stories Created), India would be the richest country in the world.

Indian stories are seeds that have spread far and wide and sprouted into impressive forests elsewhere. From the Christianized Buddhism of Barlaam and Josophat to the death defying bravery of Scheherazade, kathas have been borne by mental winds to the four corners of the world.

That geographic dispersal is a great opportunity to become a seed collector and invite the tales of the world back to India and refertilize our imagination; since stories are always grafted, the new seedlings need to be grafted onto existing trees. That's the Jaya. I think of the itihasm as a nursery for seedlings within an old forest.

Apoha

Now I know two things about what needs to be done:

1. Ultimate Goal: merge with the itihasm.

2. Starting Point: reading the Jaya.

All that's left is to fill in the blanks between alpha and omega. Should be trivial.

Before I get too full of myself, let me say a couple of lines about what I don't want to do. As any apoha theorist will tell you, concepts, theories and startups succeed - or more likely, fail - because of their discipline, or lack of it, in keeping things out.

An itihasm can't be a blank cheque for anything and everything. That can only lead to spaceships in the Veda and the quantum mechanical Brahman.

Retired Indian physicists aren't the only thinkers prone to overreach. Soon after I started reading Wolfram's “A New Kind of Science,” I realized that he's maximally anti-apohic, since not only does he claim to revolutionize physics (duh!) but in doing so he relaid the foundations of mathematics and computing and by and by also overturned accepted theories of biology, social science and chocolate making.

When you claim everything you convince no one. I am trying to stay clear of two extremes:

• There's no pretense that what I am saying is an official commentary in a long lineage stretching back to a prehistoric past.

• There's no pretense that what I am saying is a disciplinary exercise which will be published in peer reviewed journals

The Great Wall of India

One of the romantic tropes of modern India is that there's an unbroken line from our current time back to a glorious past. I am not immune from that romance even as I recognize that it's a conservative idea (isn't all romanticism conservative?) with the intent of building a great wall of India, a mental wall stronger than the physical barriers that have failed us again and again over the millennia.

I have a problem with walls. I like being influenced by the outside world. Forget a solid barrier, I am not even convinced by Gandhi's famous claim of wanting to throw open the windows of his home to the winds of the world without being swept off his feet. I want to be swept off my feet. Why walk when you can fly?

The great wall of India spawns some strange dreams - for example, the dream that says itihasa is history, a recounting of facts, so that Rama crossed the bridge to Lanka with his simian cohort somewhere around Rameswaram. That's when you realize that imagination beats knowledge any day.

Of course, a creative approach to history isn't uniquely Indian. We learned how to do so from medieval and modern Europeans who constructed a fantastic history connecting themselves to both the original religion (i.e., Christianity) and the original culture (Greeks). Having saved themselves twice, they set out to save the world by bringing their original religion and culture to all the heathens. We know how that ended for everyone else.

Unsurprisingly, Indians facing this double assault from out west decided to construct a great history for themselves; we beastly people with a beastly religion had to build a great wall between 1857 and 1947, but it needs to be broken down now. Itihasm is a better response than historicism.

The Department of Darsana

The great wall of India was built with the intention of distilling the Indian essence within its boundaries, for buying enough time so that we can build an intellectual and spiritual empire to compete with the western empire that had finally relinquished it's hold on us. Of course, the wall was more a sieve than a barrier but that's only to be expected of such an ambitious undertaking.

Like its industrial counterpart, the high barrier to entry was partly successful and we have created a strong export driven industry of gurus and other spiritual entrepreneurs. Of course, if the idea was to create an entirely new form of civilization behind the wall, the policy has been an abysmal failure.

Meanwhile, a more modest effort was under way to make connections across the mental boundary. Scholars such as Bimal Matilal and J.N Mohanty embraced a disciplinary view of Indian Philosophy. In their marketing campaign, reason - like Dakshayani before her - landed on earth in several locations; not only Greece as the imperial history would have it, but also in India and China.

It's a known fact that reason thrives best in lands where there's tenure, well funded learned societies and peer-reviewed journals, so the discipline of Indian philosophy went about creating all three conditions for success.

Some of my best friends follow reason's traces across the Gangetic plain, but to be frank, I find this departmental model even less interesting than the great wall. At least the wall was an attempt to remake an entire culture in the pursuit of a vanishing dream. Who can get excited about a cross-cultural theory of inference in Gangesa and Hume with an impact factor of 4.3?

Apauruseya

Who creates the itihasm? Does it spring forth fully formed from Prajapati's navel? Is it forged word by word, image by image in the factories of Harvard and MIT? Some itihasmic texts have clearly defined authors: Darwin's Origin, Newton's Principia. Others have less definite sources: the Bible and the Jaya being good examples. When I say "less definite," I don't mean the lack of a recognizable human author, though that's also the case with the Jaya and the Bible. I mean that the very idea of authorship is unstable when it comes to these texts.

What does it mean for God to write a text and even if HE did, what kind of being is God that he might even be considered an author? Is it even possible to point to God? There's a reason why traditional Jews don't name God; they call him G_d, for he can't be named. He isn't the reference of any symbol or word.

The argument against authorship is also an argument against anyone who thinks the world is created by God, for what does it even mean for an unnameable, un-pointable entity to be a creator?

In short, G_d cannot be definite, as in neither can he fall within a definition, for that would mean there's something outside the scope of the divine, since a definition marks what's inside its scope and what's outside - a definition without an outside isn't a definition. But surely there's nothing outside G_d, for that would limit his scope. Nor can G_d be outlined like a child's drawing on a sidewalk. How can an unnameable, un-pointable entity be an author?

How can an indefinite being be a creator or author? It's better to assume that itihasms are apauruseya, authorless. Not only is that a better hypothesis for the logical reasons I have outlined in the previous few paragraphs, it's better for experiential reasons as well. To the extent my imagination is my imagination, I own it and I can do with it as I please. The personalimagination is like a teenager's room: it says in bold letters "do not enter." Who wants to live in another person's world? If an itihasm has to make room for everyone, it should be owned by no-one.

Melancholy

The Jaya is a tragedy, at least in the colloquial sense of that term, though it doesn't end in the death of the main character. Arjuna, unlike Hamlet, survives his soliloquy on the battlefield. Maybe we should step outside the literary categories imposed on us by Aristotle; tragedy is driven by the actions of one or more characters. The Mahabharata suggests a different source for the adverse outcome: Dukkha, the great suffering imposed on us by the very fact of our existence. It's a mood befitting an itihasm.

I have a different mood as I confront the task of understanding the itihasm: melancholy. I can't go back in time to consult its makers and the our knowledge of those times is so fragmentary that any attempt to grok the Jaya in its original setting is bound to be an imposition of our prejudice.

Scratch that.

The alternative is to recreate the Jaya in the world we live in today, which is an even more sobering task. Information and knowledge have proliferated like weeds; who's going to tame the field? Can we look over the shoulder of Google's deep learning engine as it serves up snake oil salesmen in Tallahassee and love and lust in Bangalore. Can we request that engine to survey the itihasm and extract nuggets for us to munch upon?

I doubt it.

Walking into the Street

Stories are more powerful than dissertations. That's the lesson I have learned after spending several years bringing Indian philosophy into the modern world, both in everyday life and in academia. That's why I shifted my focus from analytical texts to the Mahabharata last year and when I started the daily Jayary on January 1st of this year, I did so with the explicit thought of using my reading to articulate a street metaphysics, i.e., philosophy as a way of life. The itihasm is nothing but a storehouse of street metaphysics.

Of course, one could argue that street metaphysics lies at the heart of philosophy and certainly at its origins both East and West. Socrates accosted his peers on open ground, not in the ivory tower. Pierre Hadot has a wonderful book called (surprise!) "Philosophy as a Way of Life" where he investigates the practice of philosophy in ancient Greece and its lineage holders. You can guess his thesis from the subtitle of the book: "Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault."

I might even be so bold to claim that street metaphysics has a better future than its ivory towered cousin. No one cares about the work of professional philosophers even as we live in a world drenched with - mostly unstated - philosophical assumptions. Isn't itihasm the best place to renew one's connection with a living philosophy?

War

There's never been a time without war. War is both the worst thing we do to each other and the crucible of every possible innovation. Militarists and pornographers have been the earliest adopters of every new technology. Not just material technology but also social technologies - if one can use the term technology for new forms of social organization; one theory of why human hunter-gatherer societies are relatively egalitarian is that everyone possesses weapons, so that less powerful members can band together and shoot arrows at their oppressors. In contrast, agricultural societies (where the weapons are controlled by the lord and his soldiers) are as unequal as they get.

OK, gun culture might be NRA propaganda, but what's clear is that war and violence are endemic to human life; there's never been a time without violence and there's unlikely to be one in the future. Why is it that philosophy never engages with war directly? Unlike literature, where some of the greatest stories ever told - from the Jaya to War and Peace - have been war stories. While literature has borne witness to the both the suffering and liberation of war, philosophy stands mutely by the sidelines. There's talk about the ethics of warfare, of what's a just war, of the treatment of noncombatants, but there's no talk of war itself.

I find that strange. After all, when we talk about the philosophy of mind or the philosophy of mathematics, we don't (only) talk about how mathematics should be written or the ethics of human experiments. Then again, there isn't a thriving philosophy of sex either. There's plenty of philosophical talk about peace and justice but almost nothing in comparison about violence and war. Is it that sex and violence are such primal emotions that reason and argument have nothing to say about them?

That's another reason to read the Jaya and to probe the limits of Dharma, for among other things, the Jaya is a thorough exploration of war itself, with the Gita being a direct philosophical and religious engagement with the nature of war.

Desire

We call them Rakshasas, but instead of thinking of them as demons, it's better to follow Purushottam Lal's advice and call them anti-gods, as in a group of beings who are in existential struggle with the gods but aren't any more evil, or perhaps only a little bit more evil.

The distinction between demons and anti-gods is important, for they are the models for the Kauravas; in fact, the epic says the anti-gods were born in Kaurava form to cause mischief on earth. But the Kauravas are also generous, just rulers and their greed is only directed to their cousins. As far as the common folks are concerned, do they really care whether they're ruled by one wing of the family or the other?

Similarly, it's not clear whether it matters to humans whether they pray to the gods or the anti-gods. It's clear that the latter lost out in a cosmic struggle, but winner's aren't always morally superior.

Agni is the witness to this struggle, as he is to every sacrifice and every consecration. Only he can certify the validity - validity as in sat, both existence and truth - of a relationship. The rakshasa Puloman puts Agni in a bind, when he asks the fire god to certify Bhrigu's marriage to Puloma. She was promised to the rakshasa first and Puloman's desire for the sage's wife remains undiminished.

Here's another way of thinking about Agni's conundrum: should he certify the law, which decrees that Puloma's father changed his mind and gave his daughter away to Bhrigu. But the sage isn't bound to anyone - he seeks desirelessness and freedom from every bond. If not, should fire certify the rakshasa's desire, knowing that the rakshasa will bind himself to Puloma like no sage can ever do. What is more sacred? More importantly, what would she want if given the choice?

Lineage

"I think therefore I am." With that famous line, Descartes announced his radical skepticism about knowledge of the external world. He got us worried into thinking the devil might intervene between the objects out there and experience in here, dying of snakebite soon after he fools us into seeing the snake for a rope. Even those of us who don't believe in the devil are ready to accept that our brains are faulty, that we have no reliable access to the world out there, that psychopathology is endemic to our species. Isn't that what Freud said, channeling Descartes into his psychological unconscious?

While we remember the Frenchman for his skepticism, we don't recognize that he represents a clean break from the past. Indeed, if I can rely on my consciousness and my consciousness alone, I can't depend on any of the usual determinants of validity: neither family nor faith has the aura of truth they enjoyed in the pre-modern era. Instead, I can only rely on my own experience.

Consider the question "Who am I?" After Descartes, we can only look to ourselves to answer that question. I am Rajesh; I like reading and writing; I like bad puns and so on. Compare that answer with what Yudhisthira might have answered if he had been asked.

He would have said "I am Yudhisthira, son of Pandu, son of Vichitavirya, son of Santanu." Instead of "I think therefore I am" he would say "I am a son therefore I am." You didn't really exist until you yoked yourself to your ancestors and propagated the lineage by having children. Isn't that what the childless Jaratkaru discovered, that despite his tapasya and learning, his world hung by a thread gnawed by hungry rats?

We now try to replace lineage by history, hoping that an abstraction like Europe or India will help us come into existence. I am not so sure. Blood is more reliable.

The Itihasm

It's been a interesting fortnight days teasing out single-word themes from the Jaya. Why one word? There's a simple answer: it's the easiest way to focus the scarcest of 21st century resources - our attention - on a topic that I find interesting. Plus it's easy enough to expand one word into a few hundred words.

I can easily continue upon this one-word trend, but it's time to move on to the topic that I have been itching to cover: the cosmic nature of the Jaya's imagination. The Jaya, famously, has everything in it, from the birth of the universe to the art of seduction. Forgetting the details for the moment, let's ask an obvious if mostly unasked question:

What does it mean to imagine everything? That too at once.

In other words, what's the “secret of the epic imagination?” Except that I prefer itihasas to epics and since I like to coin new phrases, I am going to call the imagination proper to the Jaya “itihasm,” a universe of the imagination (itihasmic rhymes with cosmic).

How can we capture an entire universe in our imagination? What does it mean to be itihasmic?

It's not that easy to be itihasmic but every culture needs some as a blueprint for its collective imagination. That's why we have the Jaya, the Pali Tipitakas, the Analects, the Bible and the Koran, Plato's dialogues, Aristotle's metaphysics and in the modern era, Don Quixote, Newton's Principia, Darwin's Origin of Species and Marx's Capital. The truth of these texts is irrelevant to their itihasic value, for we can only think and imagine the world through these texts - even if our purpose is to falsify them.

Having spent about half of June picking out one-word themes I have gathered from the Jaya, I am going to spend the rest of month asking what it means to be itihasic and why the details are less important than the ambition and courage of the itihasic imagination. In other words, the hardest part is putting up an itihasm; the rest follows from the original imagination, just as Western philosophy famously consists of footnotes to Plato.

Absence

You're probably a discerning reader so I don't need to tell you that what's left out is often as important as what you include. If you term an event the world series of bungee jumping but all the athletes are paid up members of the bungee jumping club of lower Manhattan, I can only conclude one of two things: you're adopting the ever popular startup mantra of "today Manhattan, tomorrow the world" or that you simply don't care about anyone who lives across the East river and beyond.

The problem is that absence makes for terrible evidence. While enjoying the elastic acrobatics of the denizens of lower Manhattan, we don't know why the bungee circle of Greater Boston and the All Karnataka Bungee Jumping Association weren't invited to the world series. Absentees are often incapable of voicing their displeasure; that's why thugs intimidate and kill witnesses before the boss's trial.

So when does an absence count more than another absence? Especially an absence within a story?

It's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Every story has to omit an infinitely greater number of details than it can include, so it's not surprising that most things are absent from it. We don't expect a story about robots on Mars to include details about the battle of Plassey.

Expect. That's the key word here. Absences are tailormade for Bayesian (or more generally, subjective) explanations. Consider a school photograph with forty nine children in uniform, smiling as if they were threatened with caning if they didn't. The photo is missing one person. Let me offer two choices as to who that person can be:

1. The President of the United States

2. The fiftieth child on the roster.

Who do you think is the more likely absence? If you guessed the President, you would be right. Duh!

I have fun hunting for absences in a long story like the Jaya; it's like a negative detective story, where we go looking for something that we know we can't find. One absence that I have talked about a lot is that of Yudhisthira. Except for the game of dice where he overplays his hand, Yudhisthira lets his brothers conquer, seduce and wrestle a kingdom for the missing king.

How can an absence be so powerful?

Difference

When Uttanka descended into the Naga kingdom, he saw entire cities made of gold. Flowering trees and murmuring streams sweetened the air. Everywhere he looked, Uttanka saw Naga men and women enjoying themselves on their bejewelled parapets.

Looking at all the wealth on display, Uttanka wondered why Taksaka had to steal his earrings? What monumental greed made the Naga king add another bauble to his vast horde? The Soviet soldiers who entered Germany in 1945 had the same question; even after enduring several years of relentless bombing, wartime Germany was a land of plenty in comparison to the grinding poverty of the Ukrainian and Russian countryside. Why did they have to invade us, wondered the invading soldiers.

Difference is always a source of tension, for even when we tolerate the presence of others, we find ways of making them lesser than us. Identities are easily wounded and slights, both real and imagined, can easily trigger murderous violence. Then there's the even bigger problem of certain identities being defined through their exploitation of others - think of southern white culture and its relationship to slavery and plantations, or closer home, caste culture and its relationship to dalits and adivasis.

Worse (yes, worse), consider the possibility that "human" is defined in contrast with "animal" and the "natural." The Jaya hints at that forming human identity as it bookends the violence between the Kauravas and the Pandavas between two genocides of non-humanity - the burning of the Khandava forest and the sacrifice of snakes.

In-Between

The past is rich and deep, revealing its wisdom to the genuine seeker. It's also hopelessly conservative, celebrating tradition even when it's oppressive and demanding respect even when it's ignorant. The future is shallow, half-formed with hope and speculation and sometimes revolutionary in the worse possible way. Only in the future can we imagine a fascist death star orbiting a dead planet.

Those of who reflect upon time are stuck between these two poles, often rushing headlong into an idyllic future, only to retreat back into a mythic past. Then there are those who set aside time altogether, preferring to meditate upon eternal truths. As far as I can tell, we are either imprisoned in time, constrained by history and our limited imagination or we are frozen in a timeless desert. Both death and deathlessness are terrible in their own way.

So where does the Jaya live? Does it live in the past or does it live in the future? Is it timeless? The default interpretation places the Jaya in the past, except that we also want it peering over our shoulder and whisper maxims in our ear as we meander. When we say that the Bhagavad Gita speaks to us or that we absorb life lessons from reading the Mahabharata, we imagine it placed on a mat by one of the grieving wives on the nineteenth day and then rolled up and sent via priority mail to our doorstep. If Amazon can deliver packages via drone today, it's only a matter of time that Amazon 2.0 sends ancient texts via time machine.

Then there's the science fiction Mahabharata of swords replaced by light sabers, which is only good for hollywood blockbusters funded by the Ambani brothers. One shouldn't forget the timeless lessons of the Gita as propounded by management theorists, cricketers, retired scientists and ex-presidents of the nation.

Is there any other choice? Is there a middle path between death and deathlessness, between being a good boy learning my lessons and a radical book burner?

One Word

Capricious. I like the word "capricious," it sounds like what it means. There's so much capriciousness in the Jaya. Sarama's son passes by the brothers of Janamejaya and is beaten up for no reason. The injured dog runs back to his mother, who curses Janamejaya's family. Now Janamejaya is worried and he starts looking for a rishi who can revoke the curse. Capricious brothers. Why did they have to beat up an innocent dog? Try explaining that to anyone in power.

Way back when, I desired to own a pair of tinted glasses, the kind that are dark in the sun and transparent in the shade. After much cajoling, my parents got me one. I wore it to school thinking I was an order of magnitude cooler than before. Soon afterward, a much older boy who had never noticed me before walked over and said "Your glasses look a lot like mine. Why are you copying me?" Then he grabbed my glasses, threw them on the ground and stepped on them.

What do we do in the face of such capriciousness? We pray to the gods. What if the gods themselves are capricious? Here you are, enjoying an evening of faith, celebrating a god your family has worshipped for generations and before you know it, your entire ancestry has been condemned by the deity's jealous brother. Or you unwittingly insult a rishi passing by and find yourself a toad. Uncertainty causes ulcers.

Instability is a gnawing worry, which is why I understand the charms of monotheism. When there's one god to rule them all, you don't have to make deals with all the middlemen. No bargaining - there's a fixed price for salvation and once the One God blesses your efforts, no one else can spoil the party.

One God, One State, One Law. Except when that one god disappears, the one state tortures you and the one law sides with the torturer. Then you're in real trouble.

Bondage

Continuing my reflections on one-word themes.....

Bondage. Bandhan. Who talks about bondage today? We live in a world of freedom, of making choices and exercising autonomy. Why would anyone want to submit either to another person to some higher authority?

The rishi Dhaumya had three disciples; Aruni was one of them. When Dhaumya was out surveying his fields, he noticed that an irrigation channel was breached. He asked Aruni to fix him. Finding himself unable to fix the leak and bound by his guru's command, Aruni did the next best thing - he lay down between the two sides of the breach to stop the flow of water with his own body. Better to die of pneumonia than to deny his guru's wishes. Like Aruni, many others have submitted themselves to their teachers and lived lives of great happiness and glory.

That was a long long time ago, but bandhan was a fact of life even in the eighteenth century. I recall the story of Banda Bahadur who submitted himself to Guru Gobind Singh and became the head of the Sikh panth after his guru's death. These men and women who submitted themselves to their faith weren't stupid or cultish; they saw great value in being bound to each other and the promise of a better life in this world and beyond.

Solidarity is hard to create without submission, without the setting aside of one's smaller self in the service of a larger vision. However, submission sits uncomfortably within a rational idea of freedom grounded in life in a rationally ordered society. But aren't we submitting to the god of reason? Why else would we voluntarily agree to the service of facts and logic? Our worship of reason strikes me as an interiorization of a submission to faith or guru.

Then there's the undeniable fact that we aren't rational creatures. We are creatures of emotion and emotion works through the body; even the transmission of rational understanding is smoothened by the bond between teacher and student. When that emotion isn't available in a liberative context, it's captured by fascists and nativists. That's real slavery.

Philosophy as Literature

About a decade ago, I attended a talk by U.R. Ananthamurthy, the well known Kannada writer. While he wrote his novels in Kannada, he was also a professor of English and was clearly very well versed in classical Indian literature.

After he gave the talk I asked him a question - it's content isn't germane - about why he hadn't included Nagarjuna (the well known Buddhist philosopher) in his exploration of the issue, seeing as Nagarjuna had made similar arguments. Before Ananthamurthy could answer that question, a scholar sitting behind me dismissed the question with derision, saying that invoking classical Indian texts without appropriate precedent is ahistorical - while invoking Derrida or Foucault is perfectly reasonable.

It's a strange argument, for one can counter history with geography and ask why one unthinkingly accepts the validity of Frenchmen in India. Why can we annihilate space but not time? Or is it that the history of the west is universal history while Indians are barely within history, let alone have universal lessons to impart to anyone else.

I think back to that debate whenever I ask myself how to approach Indian philosophical ideas today. Time hangs heavily upon philosophy while space is barely acknowledged, or worse, it's used to put non-western cultures in their proper place. We talk about Asian philosophy even when it's as analytic as Bertrand Russell, but proper analytic philosophy needs antecedents in Oxford and Cambridge.

There's only one alternative as far as I can see: to invoke the spirit of Indian philosophy as literature, to deliberately flout the language of precedent and historicity. After all no one condemned Joyce for rewriting Ulysses the way he wanted. What kind of literature should it be?

My answer is obvious: itihasa is where we should focus our efforts.

Anger

Every story has a backstory, a white cloth hung on the walls of an empty room. It's blank slate is deceptive, making you feel that you can write whatever you want on it, but look carefully, it's forcing you to write on its surface; you're trapped within its four walls.

The backstory is made out of facts, but it's also made out of emotions. The facts are dispensable but the mood is essential. As I reread the epic starting with the Adi Parva, I am beginning to discern the elemental moods that form its background. Loyalty is one of those elemental moods and the bondage that comes from loyalty animates much of the epic.

Anger is another.

What do you do to the person who thwarts your progress? How do you show your anger?

The ancients were bound to their promises and curses await the man who fails to keep his promises. Having promised my guru's wife that I will bring a queen's earrings to her by sun down, I can't rest until I bring her my offering. When the snake king tricks me and steals the jewels, I have to chase him down to the bottom of the earth.

The flip side of loyalty is anger and rage at broken promises and unfulfilled vows. That anger is so sharp, even its residue is enough to demand a snake sacrifice.

A New Look

Change is good. As I switch from reading to reflecting in June, I am also taking the opportunity to switch email providers - back to Mailchimp after a couple of trials elsewhere. Why? Because Mailchimp is awesome, but also because I want to start including podcasts and videos at some point and it's a lot easier to do it here than anywhere else.

The Story of Life

I am death, destroyer of worlds

With that, we begin our journey within a journey. If there's one thing the Jaya understands, it's the mercilessness of time and the inevitability of death. After the war is over, Dhritarashtra tells Sanjaya that the carnage wasn't his fault, that his sons exploited his love.

"When Draupadi was dragged into the hall by Dushasana, I knew war was inevitable," says the blind king in the middle of recounting the main storyline in a combination of lament and listing out the contents. "Eighteen akshauhini's of warriors died and only ten survived and at the end of it all, the kingdom is Yudhisthira's once again. Why did this happen"

Sanjaya is even less sympathetic to Dhritarashtra than Krishna was to Arjuna. "There's no point in crying, my lord; even the greatest of kings who conquered all four corner of the earth, performed great sacrifices and honoured their ancestors are all dead. Kala will always have his due."

We are a self-obsessed species, always glorifying our existence. The march of time is a constant reminder that all our efforts will dissipate. So what does one do: give up all hope or fight a futile battle? There's a third way: to tell a great story. A story is nothing less than life hitching a ride on the back of time.

Vyasa is the timekeeper of the human race. The Jaya is his attempt to commemorate his yuga with a story so complete that we never need leave its boundaries. But even Vyasa can't destroy time - at the end of our yuga, the Jaya will vanish.

Collapse

Here's a frightening thought: that the very nature of civilization is to end in violent collapse, or at the very least, suffer terminal decline after a catastrophic event.

Let's take a look at the modern period. Native American civilizations across the Americas collapsed after their encounter with the Europeans. MLK Jr famously said that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice, but that's (arguably) true only when you look at the fate of African-Americans in the United States. What would he say if told that the Americas had upwards of hundred million people of whom only a few hundred thousand survived the European encounter?

Now, collapse isn't unique to humans. An asteroid might have wiped out most of life on earth, but there's something cautionary about the way civilizations collapse - through violence that happens at a peak of sophistication and complexity, perhaps even caused by that sophistication. Our current sophistication is driven by a global use of fossil fuels and as we all know, it sure looks like we're heading toward collapse.

So what's the moral here? That civilization itself is prone to boom and bust cycles. We have heard that said about capitalist expansion, but what if capitalism is just a bubble accelerator?

From what I can see, the Jaya is keenly aware of this possibility, so add bubble logic to the list of topics we will cover in our month long review.

Contents

Everything is a story, including the contents of the story you're about to tell. Especially when the contents unfold into another set of contents and the new summary introduces us to yet another tale in which the suta tells the full story. Borges wrote a short fable about exactitude in science in which a society becomes so good at mapmaking that its maps can no longer be distinguished from the territory. Here's what Borges says:

"In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. "

Now imagine a culture in which stories have attained perfection. Even the gods have certified their storymaking glory. A meeting is called by their parliament to honour their achievements and in that meeting a collective decision is made to compose the greatest story ever told, a story so large that it will cover the universe. A special act is passed with a large appropriation for the king of stories. The lawmakers delegate the task to a distinguished team of scholars, poets and scientists under the leadership of their most venerable sage.

When the storymaking team meets in the central hall of parliament they pose the most basic question of all: how should we tell this story? After a long debate, they arrive at a simple answer:

1. Announce that you're about to tell a story.

2. Unspool the announcement in one hundred and eight bullet points.

3. Expand each bullet point into a short chapter.

4. Collect all the short chapters in a small book.

5. Call the book "An Important Announcement"

6. Repeat with variations until an entire world is built out of announcements within announcements within announcements.

7. Announce that the world has been built.

It's a little silly, but it's also profound.

I have been working on a re-interpretation/re-narration of the Mahabharata called “Jayary.” Here are the first few episodes in that series. If you like what you see, do subscribe!

Jayary: The First Few Episodes

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Glossary (in order of appearance):

Espanola, New Mexico: Small town in the South Western state of New Mexico in the US. Trivia fact: Yogi Bhajan had his headquarters there. New Mexico is also the site of the first nuclear test and infamous for UFO sightings.

Mahabharata, Jaya: Names for the Mahabharata, the epic about which I am writing for a year.

Matthew: One of the Christian gospels.

Drona: Preceptor of the Kauravas and Pandavas. Slighted by Drupada.

Drupada: King of the Pancalas. Father of Draupadi, the wife of the five Pandavas.

Ekalavya: Tribal prince, perhaps the most talented bowsman in the world. Drona first rejected him and then asked for his thumb as Guru Dakshina, the offering to one’s guru.

Karna: Oldest Pandava, born in questionable circumstances and was abandoned by his mother Kunti (also the birth mother of three of the five Pandavas). Brought up by a charioteer, becomes Duryodhana’s right hand man.

Draupadi: Wife of the five Pandavas whose hand was won by Arjuna.

Krishna: Eighth avatar of Vishnu, dear friend and charioteer of Arjuna.

Visvarupa: The cosmic view of Krishna as the lord of the universe.

Yudhisthira: Oldest of the official Pandavas, born to Kunti and Yama/Dharma, the god of Death. known for his honesty and uprightness.

Duryodhana: Oldest of the Kauravas, man of great appetites and great generosity.

Arjuna: Youngest of Kunti’s children, born to Kunti and Indra, the king of the gods. Greatest warrior of all.

Gandhi: M.K. Gandhi, iconic figure, leader of the Indian independence struggle.

Kisa Gotami: Orphaned woman whose child is killed by a snake. One of the Buddha’s first female disciples.

Buddha: Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. Best known Indian ever.

Trishanku: King who wants to ascend to heaven in his own body. Fails big time.

Ravana: Bad guy in the other great itihasa, the Ramayana.

Ultimatum Game: Important game in behavioral economics.

Kurukshetra: site of the great battle in the Mahabharata.

Asking

I was in New Mexico for much of the summer of 2004, staying near Espanola in a beautiful hacienda with a large courtyard. The walls of the courtyard were red and white stucco, matching the dryness outside the compound. The New Mexico landscape had a minimal beauty — scrubland with deep fissures that looked like a frozen stormy ocean. I would take long walks in the dryness, undulating along with the land, listening to the wind and wondering what it would be like to die and have ones bones bake into the earth. Then there was the sky. It was breathtaking. I once saw simultaneous rainbows framed by thunderstorms in opposing quadrants as the sun beat down the middle. No wonder so many UFOs land in that desert. The landscape sent my subconscious into overdrive. One night, I dreamt of a five foot hole in the corner of the courtyard guarded by a giant spider. As I approached the hole, the gatekeeper stepped aside and let me in. Past the hallway was a warren of interlinked rooms filled with treasures, each having its own minder. It was a museum of the unconscious that went on for miles. Over that summer I dreamt again and again of that spider’s web, visiting several rooms in open wonder.

The Mahabharata reminds me of that underground museum. “Ask and ye shall receive” says the bible (Matthew 7:7) and in that spirit, the epic rewards the patient explorer with insight. The Mahabharata also challenges the virtue of mere asking at every step. Drona asks for his fair share from Drupada and is mocked for doing so; how can a mere brahmin ask a king for a share of the kingdom? In turn, Drona rejects Ekalavya; how can a mere tribal approach the king’s preceptor for his teachings? The outsider has to pay a heavy price. Karna, the chief outsider in the epic, is rejected again and again. He is spurned by the Pandavas, pushing him firmly into the Kaurava camp. Finally, even Krishna is rebuffed when Yudhisthira sends him to the Kurus for a last attempt at a diplomatic resolution. Karna aids Duryodhana in his spectacular rejection of the Pandava offer. Rejection begets rejection as the epic moves towards its fratricidal conclusion.

Asking is hard, even when the ask is rightfully mine. The bitterness of denial is hard to swallow. You see that in Drona as he makes the Pandavas subdue Drupada for his guru dakshina. You see that in Duryodhana’s violence toward Draupadi. He remembers her rejection during the swayamvara. The Jaya layers one insult upon another as accumulated slights lead toward war.

When polite requests don’t produce results, we resort to threats and ultimatums. Krishna knows that well. He reveals his Visvarupa twice in the Mahabharata; once after the talks with the Kauravas fail and once during the Bhagavad Gita. The first revelation occurs after Duryodhana rejects the Pandavas request for five villages. The second revelation occurs after Arjuna refuses to fight. While the Pandava’s final offer is absurdly low, it’s also an ultimatum for war. Duryodhana rejects the offer, upon which Krishna reveals his Visvarupa. Despite the cosmic vista, Duryodhana is deaf to the voice of reason. War is now inevitable. Krishna’s response reminds of the line in the Godfather (the book, not the movie) when Don Corleone leaves the bargaining table saying “I can’t reason with him.” That’s the signal for inevitable bloodshed. Arjuna rejecting his duty to fight is another ultimatum, though in doing so, Arjuna hopes to prevent war. While Krishna doesn’t say so explicitly, it’s obvious he’s saying “Look, I too tried to sue for peace and failed. What do you expect to achieve by laying down arms?” You never know; many centuries later, Gandhi achieved much by fasting, which too is an ultimatum.

Ultimatums are terrible weapons; words with greater consequences than arrows and missiles. They are democratic weapons, as valuable to the powerless as they’re to the powerful. Words with such power have to be treated with great respect. It’s rare to see such respect, which is why I love the Kisa Gotami story. Gautama’s interaction with Kisa Gotami is one of the more dramatic encounters in the Buddha’s life, conveying deep sympathy for the plight of women while imparting a fundamental lesson.

Kisa Gotami was an orphan who achieved success by marrying into a wealthy family. How did an orphan manage to do that? The story says that the patriarch of the family noticed her great piety and gave his son in marriage to her. I wonder. Some of these ancient tales exaggerate the rise and fall of great beings. The Buddha was a world conquering king before he became a wandering sage. Asoka kills his enemies by the millions before he repents. One wonders if these are facts or dramatic license. Whatever.

Life was on the upswing for Kisa Gotami when her first born son dies after being bitten by a snake; you can only imagine what that means both as a mother losing a child and as an Indian woman losing her male child. Especially a woman who had worked hard to improve her lot. The loss and the fear must have been overpowering. The grief-stricken Gotami comes to the Buddha in great distress, demanding that he bring her son back to life. Ultimatum number three in this essay goes somewhat like this:

Kisa Gotami (dead son in her arms): blessed one, please revive my boy! Buddha: bring me a handful of mustard seeds and I will do so. KG: Sure! Buddha: Except that the seeds should come from a house that hasn’t lost a child, a husband, a parent or a friend.

You can hear echoes of the Buddha’s lesson in Jesus’ exhortation “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”

Of course, Gotami fails in her task. Everywhere she goes, she hears the same lament of loss and suffering. Life is precious precisely because it is always slipping away. As Yudhisthira says — to his father Dharma disguised as a yaksa — there’s nothing more eye-opening than the reality of our passing and our denial of that fact. Instead of facing our impermanence directly, we blame the messenger. We hold on to our possessions with ferocity as if we can ship them to the afterworld.

Heaven and Earth

Life in this world. Life in the eternal. The Chinese have a saying that humans are stuck between heaven and earth. The story of Trishanku from the other great itihasa makes that saying even more vivid — having failed ascending to heaven in his earthly body and protected by a great sage’s ardor from falling down to a certain death, Trishanku is literally stuck between celestial and temporal spheres.

The dharma traditions, of which both the Buddha and the Mahabharata are high points, are deeply insightful about the dialectic between relative wellbeing and the ultimate nature of freedom. Relative wellbeing is absolutely crucial; we are creatures of flesh and blood that need food, shelter and love. As parents, siblings and friends, we desire that our loved ones grow up to be happy and prosperous. At the same time the tradition warns us about the impermanence of existence. Too much attachment to one’s possessions leads to one of several failed states:

1. The Trishanku fate of being stuck for ever

2. The Duryodhana kind of genocidal war

3. The Ravana kind of unbridled lust

The tradition counsels harmony between the relative pursuit of wealth and the absolute pursuit of freedom. Much more so in the Jaya than in the Buddha, but I read both as advocating a middle path between the temporal and the eternal. Not the specific middle path advocated by the Buddha, but a larger cultural intuition that says extreme attachment (or lack thereof) to any temporal possession is harmful. If you can’t even give away five villages out of five thousand you got a problem.

In talking about the middle path, the Mahabharata intertwines the ethical and the metaphysical. On the one hand, it shows how Duryodhana flouts every norm of fairness in rejecting every peace offerings. That’s when Krishna reveals his Visvarupa for the first time, as a marker of the ethical problem of fairness. Then, when Arjuna hands in his ultimatum, Krishna reveals his Visvarupa again, pointing out the ontological error in being too attached to one’s body. It’s the same logic revealed by the same divinity in two different realms.

Let’s stick with fairness in the temporal realm. Fairness is a subtle concept, whose complexity is masked by the fact that we have an innate grasp over it. It’s present in children all over the world (how many times have you heard a child say “no fair” or its translated equivalent) and part and parcel of our social infrastructure. The Jaya uses game-theoretic metaphors for fairness to great effect. Whenever I see someone asking for his due or gambling away his fortune in the Jaya, I feel like whipping out my copy of Von Neumann and Morgenstern. Behavioral economics has exploded in the last few decades and among its many investigations is a deep exploration of fairness. One of my favorites is the ultimatum game.

In the ultimatum game, the researcher sits two subjects — let’s call them A and B — at a table and hands A 100 rupees. He then asks A to offer B some subset of the 100 (at least 1 rupee) to B. If B accepts A’s offer, they both get to keep what they have; if B rejects A’s offer, they have to return the 100 rupees to the researcher.

So much for the setting. Here’s how a rational economist (RE) might reason about the outcome: according to the RE, A should make the smallest possible offer of 1 rupee to B and B should take that offer.

Why?

Here’s a simple answer: In the RE model of human behavior, A and B are both looking to maximize their wealth. That certainly works for A; if he offers B one rupee, he is maximizing his wealth. Further, B knows that A is a wealth maximizer and therefore, he should expect to maximize his own wealth conditional upon A’s desire to maximize his wealth. If he refuses A’s offer they both get zero, and in particular B gets zero. Since 0 < 1, B should take whatever A is willing to share.

In reality, it never happens that way. People often share close to 50% and most B’s walk away from the table if less than 30% is on offer. Moral of the story: we want our transactions to be relatively fair. Theory and practice differ dramatically.

The stripped down version above is a summary of laboratory experiments where A and B are playing for free money. No one had to work for the 100 rupees. Then why should it matter if I was offered 50% or 1% by the other guy? If I am walking on the street and see a hundred one rupee notes on the road and the wind blows 99 of them toward the person walking next to me and only one rupee toward me, I wouldn’t be upset at all if my neighbor grabbed 99% of the loot. Why am I so much more unwilling to take a free offering from another person? These are questions that gets us into deep issues about agency, of our relative judgments of chance versus causation and other philosophical issues that I can’t address in this essay. Let me stick to ultimatums.

The Leviathan

The ultimatum game is backed by an ultimatum — the researcher’s threat to take all the cash away if the participants can’t agree upon their shares. Most people seem to take that threat seriously, offering a reasonable share of the prize to their fellow player. That ultimatum is at the heart of the “Leviathan,” Hobbes’ phrase for the modern state’s monopoly over violence. According to some, the state’s capacity to enforce contracts and punish offenders is one reason we are law-abiding citizens.

If only the ultimatum game was an accurate description of reality! It’s hard to take the game seriously in a world where the richest one hundred people have more wealth than the bottom three billion. We might walk off the game show if offered less than 30% but we keep playing for less than .1% in the real world. Where did we go wrong?

As usual, the Mahabharata has some clues to the answer. In the Jaya, every ultimatum leads to more violence, not less, even when backed by the supreme backer — Lord Krishna himself. The leviathan is a failure and in showing so, Jaya teaches us the true ways of power. The average person might be happy with 50% of the pie but empires are ruled by those who want to grab the entire pie for themselves. Duryodhana rejects Krishna’s final offer because he understands the logic of his own position — his capacity to extract loyalty from Karna and Drona and endless other minor warriors and kings is dependent on his endless hunger for power and being seen so. In their eyes, Yudhisthira is a fool for settling for less. Today’s monopolistic corporations and their bosses understand that logic all too well. They know that we go to work for Jobs and Zuckerberg not despite their hunger for domination but because of their hunger for domination.

The Jaya also teaches us that imperial systems are unstable, that with all their wisdom, skill and power, empires can end in utter destruction. Seeming stability — enforced by the leviathan — is blown apart by accumulated resentment and competition. From a probabilistic point of view, the leviathan works well when the distribution doesn’t have fat tails and we can assume the law of large numbers. Indeed, much of the motivation for the taming of chance came from an interest in creating a science of governance. Be careful of the assumptions though — bad mathematical assumptions can lead to bad governance! The greatest leviathan of all is human civilization as a whole and if current trends are any indicator, we are heading for another Kurukshetra.

Originally published at blog.jayary.com.

Before a climber attempts to scale a peak, he consults other mountaineers, asks them about potential pitfalls and inquires about routes that make the climb easier. No one ever climbs a mountain for the first time. It’s sheer foolishness to set out from one’s door in jeans and T-shirt and expect to scale Sagarmatha in a week. As I approach the Mahabharata, I am circling the mountain, looking for tracks left by generations of scholars and writers. I am also finding it useful to put on a surveyor’s hat, scouting the landscape for key features and making a rough assessment before the campaign starts in earnest.

The first question the surveyor might ask is whether the entity being surveyed exists at all. Is the Jaya a single text? Of course, individual chapters and verses exist, but in what way does it all come together? Is it really multiple narratives stitched together in a shotgun wedding or does it have a deeper unity?

Asking these questions leaves us vulnerable to a metaphysical trap. To start with, there’s the philosophical question about the unity of any utterance whatsoever. What makes a word into a word, a sentence into a sentence and a conversation into a conversation? Is the unity a property of the words themselves or is the unity in the mind of the speaker(s)? Can we construct the world of a text from the inside, gluing word to word, sentence to sentence, chapter to chapter until the book stands on its own or does the book always need support from the outside, a ground of shared cultural knowledge on which it stands?

There’s no settled answer to these questions even for a single sentence, let alone a text the size of the Mahabharata. While my sympathies are with the text-is-always-in-a-context crowd, I can see when the opposing view makes sense. When it comes to a single work of fiction by a identifiable modern author — say, Dickens’ David Copperfield — we can pretend as if the text has its own internal unity, that it can be fully understood from within. That’s the way we read David Copperfield as ordinary readers who aren’t literary theorists — we crack open the book to the bookmark and keep reading until we fall asleep. In fact, the act of reading a modern work of fiction depends on the fiction that we are entering a self-contained world. A world we can understand without reference to other texts, even by the same author.

A website is another matter. We are always clicking on links, zig-zagging back and forth from one tab to another. The Mahabharata is more like a website than a modern novel. It doesn’t live in a hermetically sealed world; instead it continuously refers back and forth to itself and to other texts and its unity makes sense only because it synthesizes the imagination and insights of an entire culture. Websites, however, are not experienced as single texts. Even at first glance, David Copperfield is different from davidcopperfield.com. Is the MbH a unity? Yes. Is it the same kind of unity as David Copperfield? No. Is it the same kind of disunity as davidcopperfield.com? No.

Then what kind of unity is it?

I am going to duck that question. For my purposes, we can replace these metaphysical questions about the true nature of sentences with a cognitive prescription about the attitude one brings to a text. We read David Copperfield as if it was a stand-alone autonomous text, a monad in the universe of books. We should read the Mahabharata as if it’s a maximally connected node in the text-graph, a text that’s connected to most other nodes. Both are idealizations, but they are idealizations that serve a purpose. As good readers, we want to immerse ourselves in the text and adopt a cognitive attitude that helps us do so. A linear attitude serves us well when approaching David Copperfield. A nonlinear attitude serves us well when approaching the Mahabharata. Shifting our gaze from metaphysics to cognition also helps us recognize that we are constantly assessing the unity of objects we encounter. Consider the two houses in the figure below:

It’s clear that the house on the left is a finished product. It’s equally clear that the house on the right is unfinished. The unity of the former and the incompleteness of the latter are immediately obvious to us. That innate capacity to perceive coherence and incompleteness can be cultivated. A good scientist knows where a theory is complete and where it’s lacking in essential features; for example, we know that classical mechanics is complete in some aspects and incomplete in others. A nose for detecting incompleteness and the talent for filling in the gaps is crucial to a research career. That talent might come in handy while exploring the Jaya, since I believe that the Mahabharata is a dynamic unity similar to the book of nature; it too is complete in some aspects and incomplete in others. It may even need to be completely rewritten for the current era.

Back to the mountain. The Mahabharata is enormous, and its size makes it hard to grasp its unity. In of itself, size is not the best measure of monumentality — surely Wikipedia is much much bigger — but no one considers Wikipedia to be a unified text, even if all articles look alike. Dictionaries and encyclopedias aren’t texts even if they’re bound within two covers. No one ever reads Wikipedia, they only read a particular article to which they have been led by a search engine.

The Mahabharata has been termed an ancient Wikipedia by some scholars, which is why they have whittled it down to a critical edition or discern a narrative core of about eight thousand verses. That line of inquiry also leads to the conclusion that the Jaya wasn’t written by a single individual. Who cares? All that proves is that the monadic model is a bad one, that we need other models of unity. Instead of David Copperfield, let’s compare the MbH to textbooks in physics or mathematics, such as Bourbaki in mathematics or the Landau Lifshitz series in physics. They clearly bear the stamp of a unique author (or authorial collective). No one besides the Bourbakistas could have written Bourbaki and no one besides Landau could have written the famous physics books, but in no way are they presenting their work in the way that Charles Dickens is the author of David Copperfield.

While the analogy to mathematics and physics helps, the Jaya defeats this analogy as well. Bourbaki doesn’t have the same cognitive attitude as Vyasa. Bourbaki isn’t telling us a story; they’re describing mathematical truths. Jaya can’t get away with that claim. While it has some of the qualities of collective wisdom, it is also — clearly — a story. It’s that conjunction of literary and analytic registers that makes the unity of the Mahabharata a tough nut to crack.

While thinking about that puzzle, I was reminded of the Sound of Music. Toward the beginning of that cheesy classic, Maria von Trapp’s colleagues burst into lyrical commentary:

How do we solve a problem like Maria?

If you have seen the movie, you know why the nuns are perplexed. Maria might have given her life over to God but she shows too much independence and spirit to be cloistered. Truth be told, even her shift cuts closer to her figure than the shapeless robes worn by the other nuns. The rest of the movie is a chronicle of how her free spirit is tamed, paradoxically, by leaving the nunnery, turning into a governess and then a hausfrau. By the end of the movie, the problem has been solved, but not before the nuns demonstrate their courage by hiding the von Trapp family from the Nazis.

That song came to my mind as I start knocking on the Mahabharata’s door. Is it a problem to be solved? Can it be tamed into a “Mahabharata for the Modern World” or “Eighteen Management Lessons from Krishna?” A quick trip through bookstores in Bangalore makes it clear there’s a Bhagavad Gita for X for almost all X. From product managers to schoolchildren preparing for entrance exams, there’s something in Krishna’s Viswarupa for everyone. Is that what we want from the great epic — the itihasa as karma cola?

While I am sounding like an elitist scold, the history of the Jaya is one of appropriation. Every narrator of the epic starting with Vaisampayana himself has narrated the Mahabharata with his or her own twist. My grandmother would slip in a couple of life lessons every time she recited an episode.

The tradition says that the Mahabharata is the fifth veda, containing all the insights of the other four and then some, open to everyone and not just twice born men. That’s not the only important difference; the four vedas are Sruti whose mantras were heard by the great rsis; nothing can be changed from that point onward. The Mahabharata is more active, it’s never (only) heard, it’s always told. A.K. Ramanujan said that no Indian reads the Mahabharata for the first time, for it’s always heard at bedtime or on other occasions. There’s a corollary to that claim: that the Mahabharata is always passed down from speaker to hearer, a meme that breathes life into every mind that encounters the story. I might add an additional caveat — that until a person narrates the Mahabharata she doesn’t know it.

How does one tell the Jaya?

Vyasa himself faced that problem. He had the story in his head, but suffering from writers block, he didn’t know if he could ever get it out. Ganesa is his alter-ego, eager to write it down, but prone to haste, which is why he has to be advised to stop and understand before he moves on to the next sloka. Together, the poet and the elephant-god are a perfect couple, a volcano emitting lava combined with a smith who forges that molten metal into a river of poetry. From the very beginning, the epic queries the relationship between the creator and the scribe and the challenges of writing in several registers.

Like the nunnery in the Sound of Music, the itihasa can be a forbidding castle; of rooms within rooms and hidden staircases that play snakes and ladders with our mind. Its profusion is a sign of great energy, of artistic creativity and epistemic freedom. The contemporary narrator faces a doubled edged sword; one the one hand, it’s easy to cut ourselves off from the roots of the Mahabharata in the name of modernization, by making the story more palatable to our tastes. At the same time, no teller can narrate the same tale; every narration has to be embedded in Desakala, in its own place and time.

How does one tell the Jaya?

It’s not a problem of abridgment, of turning a hundred thousand stanzas into a novel sized book. It’s about recognizing and respecting the registers in which the Jaya is narrated — from the action packed story to the philosophical and religious discourses to the various verse forms and narrative digressions. The Mahabharata transitions seamlessly between these registers, combining narrative, dialog, discourse and action into one tapestry. The universality of register is the source of the Mahabharata’s claim that what’s not here is nowhere else.

Consider the Yaksa Prasna, a famous scene in the Vana Parva, where Yudhisthira is questioned on his knowledge of Dharma by a celestial being. The episode is at the cusp of an important development. The thirteenth year of the Pandava’s exile is about to begin. They’re forced to remain incognito or risk losing their kingdom. Much happens in that year, culminating in the decision to go to war. Between these action packed scenes is a deep philosophical discourse in a bucolic setting. The last of the thirty three questions posed by the Yaksa to Dharmaraja is a real beauty (I am paraphrasing loosely, and I have only excerpted one part of that question):

Yaksa: What is the greatest wonder in the world?

Yudhisthira: That countless beings die everyday but no one ever thinks he’s mortal.

The Yaksa Prasna is a tiny breather before the action quickens, as the twelve years of relatively peaceful exile turn into the cat and mouse chase of the thirteenth year. If you listen carefully, you can hear hints of an even more famous dialog later in the epic, the Bhagavad Gita between Krishna and Yudhisthira’s brother Arjuna. While the topic is the same — the nature of the Dharma — the Gita switches the roles of the human being and the divinity; the man is the questioner and the God is the one answering questions. Consistent with the recursive structure of Jaya, the Gita is also a breather, a vision of infinity before the thirteenth year of exile turns into eighteen days of slaughter.

Jaya uses these transitions to great effect, almost as a z-axis of wisdom to the x-y plane of the main narrative, incomparably better than showing educational films during the intermission of a long Bollywood movie. Unlike the educational films, which everyone recognizes as filler and heads to the bathroom or the popcorn stand, the Mahabharata convinces us that edification and entertainment are part of the same itihasa.

We don’t write texts like that anymore, and in saying so, I am not suggesting nostalgia for the good old days; I am making a factual statement. One of the hallmarks of modern textual production is the separation of register. We write novels that are entirely fiction and scientific treatises that are entirely fact. The twain shall never meet. Tolstoy comes close to mixing registers in his writings, but many readers consider his moral counsel boring and sanctimonious (Gandhi might have been an exception) and they haven’t stood the test of time in the way his novels have.

Today, factual writing is dominated by scientific inquiry and communication. Except that we don’t see it as writing at all. The act of writing is almost erased from the act of scientific communication, as if one brain in a vat is telepathically addressing another brain in a vat. It takes some energy to realize that writing equations is also a form of writing. Equations, like poetry, are compressions of thought that take great imagination and creativity. Unfortunately, the two compression schemes have diverged, so that most people who write equations well aren’t people who turn a pithy phrase. It’s partly a consequence of how we train scientists: the ten thousand hours it takes to learn mathematics well eats into the ten thousand hours it takes to write sparkling prose. Then there’s the unrelenting pressure to specialize, not only in one’s professional role but also in the cognitive skills that we choose to cultivate.

For these reasons, I don’t think we can recount the Mahabharata without special effort. Knowing Sanskrit isn’t a solution, because modern Sanskrit speakers have also internalized the separation between equations and entertainment. A gap has opened between thinking and writing and like Ganesa himself, we also have to stop and reflect before we proceed. Cultivating a synthetic mindset is key to narrating the Jaya.

Originally published at blog.jayary.com.

Cast:

Parikshit: grandson of Arjuna, ruler of the Kuru empire. Doesn’t take snakes seriously.

Janamejaya: son of Parikshit. Takes snakes too seriously. Siva: One of the trinity, presides over the end of times.

Surendra Sharma: Comic poet.

George Bush: American President.

George W. Bush: Another American President.

Content

As we enter this itihasa, we see a sign saying “beware of men wearing snakes,” reminding us that Siva, the destroyer of worlds, wears one around his neck. What is the Mahabharata if it isn’t the chronicle of destruction in eighteen days, the bookend to genesis which only took seven? I know that the bible treats the end of days a little differently, for once the world ends there’s no new beginning, but we Hindus are never that absolute in our judgments. Seven warriors and one god survived the great war. Their world limped along until the god was shot through his toe.

The Jaya opens to a bucolic scene of sages sitting in tranquility, waiting for the suta to recount the great story. Peace reigns over the earth, although, as is usual with the Mahabharata, violence isn’t far away. The itihasa is recounted by a famous suta, a bard who heard it during another gristly event, a sacrifice of a world within a world. A sacrifice caused by the folly of a king who didn’t read the sign at the door. What was Parikshit thinking, hanging a snake on a meditating sage? Then as now, a man in deep meditation covered with termites and surrounded by snakes would have been a strangely serene sight. Why disturb that stillness? Why would a king break the peace and awaken the earth’s fury?

Kings have always thought themselves invincible. Even in an alien forest a king expects his due from beast and man. A king, as I see him, is a prototype, an icon of humanity’s victory over the earth. Before kings, there were tribal chieftains and warlords but they didn’t command the material resources and the firepower to subdue the forests. It was kings and their empires who created civilization by clearing forests and building palaces and playgrounds.

The era of kings has ended, being replaced by a diffuse form of power that we call democracy. Presidents and prime ministers rule in the name of the people. Contrast Asoka’s stupas that proclaim his majesty in first person singular, “I, Piyadassi…,” with the Indian constitution, which equally majestically says in first person plural, “We the people of India…” The prototype has done its duty, to be replaced by the assembly line. The sovereignty of the king has been supplanted by the sovereignty of the people. Who are these “people”? We don’t really know, but we are mostly content referring to them as society. “Society” is one of the viral terms of the modern era, with all its charms of elections and newspapers, but in our social state we have forgotten the original assertion of power over the earth, of the king who isn’t afraid of men wearing snakes.

The king may have more individual power but the factory has far greater collective force. Free markets exert control at a scale that Alexander couldn’t even imagine. Having forgotten the prototype from which it was stamped, society takes its dominance for granted, building roads and skyscrapers, lumping tree and snake and toad and deer into the catch all phrase natural resources. In our amnesia, we live blindly between two abstractions: society and nature, one the guarantor of rights and responsibilities and the other the energy source for all our exploits. Jaya talks about this dominion again and again.

Back to Parikshit; we can forgive him, for he was thirsty and hungry. Hungry men are liable to commit hasty acts. The suta tells us that Parikshit paid for his irritation with his life. The sage’s son cursed the king, consigning him to death by snakebite. If that was all, the story would have ended even before it started, as it would be if you or I had been bitten by a snake and died on the way to the hospital. The Jaya is wiser in the ways of power; it knows that one bite leads to another. Janamejaya desired revenge, not just on the snake that bit his father but on all snakes.

The Mahabharata is replete with sons taking revenge for their father’s tribulations. At the very end of the great war, another sage’s son almost ends the world outright by unleashing the greatest weapon of all. It took a wily god to keep the world spinning. That sage’s son was known as a second Siva, having one fourth of Rudra in him. Beware of men wearing snakes!

We will deal with his anger later.

I was in college when the first president Bush started the first gulf war. While my memory of that war garbles scenes of burnt out Iraqi tanks, refugees streaming out of Baghdad and Mosul and Colin Powell talking to reporters, I vividly remember an event a few months later. It was the October of 1991. The cold war was over. India was changing. On campus, the usual anglocentric crowd wasn’t as influential as before. For the first time, the cultural secretary was someone who spoke Hindi rather than English. Under his influence, the annual college festival removed one of the Wodehousian public school rituals from the festival roster and replaced it with a hasya kavi sammelan, a gathering of comic poets.

We attracted some of the best Hindi comic poets to the meeting. I was told that getting them from the train station was quite the ordeal. With a few hours to kill on the train ride to Kanpur, some of them had started drinking and were tipsy by the time they disembarked. An impromptu poetry competition started on the platform as they egged each other into delivering the best railway poem. The students in attendance had to extricate the traveling bards from their fans and spirit them to campus in time to entertain the paying customers. The mood on campus was boorish that cool October evening as we sat down to listen to comic poetry. The first few poets were unmemorable but when Surendra Sharma came to the stage, I took notice. As a child, I used to hear him on TV, poking gentle fun at politicians on the single Doordarshan channel, well before soap operas and news shows and a channel for every fetish.

Sharmaji started slowly in his sing-song voice, but then picked up steam.

Let me tell you something:

It’s come to my notice that

There’s been a war

Between America and Iraq

I heard on the radio

The Americans

Fought fought and fought

All the way from the border

To Baghdad

I heard on the radio

When the fighting ended

And the guns were down

Three hundred Americans

lay Dead

I asked myself:

What war is this?

In my country

Three hundred people die

When there’s a fight

At the cigarette shop

Indeed, a year after he said those words riots broke out at paanwala shops across North India as vandals tore down a medieval mosque with the intent of replacing it with a temple. Many more than three hundred people died in that battle.

Bush won the war but didn’t take out Saddam. He should have learned from Hollywood; Rocky wins only when he delivers a knockout punch. Without the knockout under his belt, Bush lost the presidency in 1992. It was left to his son to take revenge, starting the second war under the flimsiest of pretexts. Dubya rejected his father’s patrician veneer but he captured Saddam and won a second term.

I think Surendra Sharma would have created even more comic relief out of the son’s war. He would have written three poems between the train station and the campus. What Sharmaji left out in his poem, though he must have known quite well, is that at least half a million Iraqis died in the first gulf war and the sanctions that followed. As for the second war, the full accounting is yet to be done but the ratio of American to Iraqi deaths is at least 1:100. Janamejaya would have appreciated the ratio. The Jaya is first recounted at the sacrifice Janamejaya organized to kill all the snakes in the world. He too wanted to avenge his father.

Originally published at www.jayary.com.

Then there are the great abridgments from Rajagopalachari where I first read it (but as A.K Ramanujan said, no Indian ever reads the Mahabharata for the first time — I heard the stories from my grandmother before I could read a word), R.K Narayan and K.M Munshi’s Krishnavatara.

Still, I find something missing. After all, the MbH is not just a story, though it’s a gripping tale, it’s not just a philosophical treatise, though it’s filled with philosophical insights, it’s not just a religious treatise even though it’s of immense importance to Hindus and it’s not just a history though it’s depicting life of a certain time and place. In it’s own words, what’s not here is nowhere else; it’s both the map and the territory.

I want to understand what mad ambition can lead to the creation of such a monument, the literary skill that can mix metaphysics in one chapter with realpolitik in the next and finally, speculating on what the ‘mahabharata mind’ mind would do when faced with the existential and philosophical quandaries of the present day. So for the next year, my newsletters will take the MbH one small bite at a time. I will not treat the text with a false sacredness that’s all too common; it stands on it’s own merits. Obsequiousness is not the same as reverence. I am not going to translate it, though at times I might do so. I am not going to engage with the text directly. The epic is best seen from the corner of one’s eye, through an inner peripheral vision which is better at detecting change than foveal vision.

My real task is to convince myself first and then you, the reader, that the ideas, the mood and the insights of the epic are still important today. Shouldn’t take much convincing — there’s no other major work of literature I know that starts with millions of people and ends with exactly seven survivors. Everyone else dies in a battle over power and control over nature, a zero sum game with a vengeance. Seems familiar doesn’t it?

Among its many names, the Mahabharata’s called Jaya (victory). I suppose just reading such a massive text is a sign of victory. I am not sure if I will be able to read it all in a year, but it’s not a linear text; digressions are central to the story and I plan on taking several digressions. Don’t be surprised if there’s a sideshow on big data or mathematical logic; they too need to be dissolved into this ocean. Think about it as an explorer’s diary, or as I call it, a Jayary. I will publish the Jayary over here every week. I will also send it as a weekly newsletter. I hope my exploration will be of some interest to both my Indian and non-Indian readers. I look forward to your feedback and encouragement.

Revenge

The Jayary series is available online. This week's newsletter is available here. I will be editing and correcting the online versions throughout the year though obviously the newsletter will remain fixed once and for all.

Cast

Parikshit: grandson of Arjuna, ruler of the Kuru empire. Doesn’t take snakes seriously.

Janamejaya: son of Parikshit. Takes snakes too seriously.

Siva: One of the trinity, presides over the end of times.

Surendra Sharma: Comic poet.

George Bush: American President.

George W. Bush: Another American President.

Content

As we enter this itihasa, we see a sign saying “beware of men wearing snakes,” reminding us that Siva, the destroyer of worlds, wears one around his neck. What is the Mahabharata if it isn’t the chronicle of destruction in eighteen days, the bookend to genesis which only took seven? I know that the bible treats the end of days a little differently, for once the world ends there’s no new beginning, but we Hindus are never that absolute in our judgments. Seven warriors and one god survived the great war. Their world limped along until the god was shot through his toe.

The Jaya opens to a bucolic scene of sages sitting in tranquility, waiting for the suta to recount the great story. Peace reigns over the earth, although, as is usual with the Mahabharata, violence isn’t far away. The itihasa is recounted by a famous suta, a bard who heard it during another gristly event, a sacrifice of a world within a world. A sacrifice caused by the folly of a king who didn’t read the sign at the door. What was Parikshit thinking, hanging a snake on a meditating sage? Then as now, a man in deep meditation covered with termites and surrounded by snakes would have been a strangely serene sight. Why disturb that stillness? Why would a king break the peace and awaken the earth's fury?

Kings have always thought themselves invincible. Even in an alien forest a king expects his due from beast and man. A king, as I see him, is a prototype, an icon of humanity’s victory over the earth. Before kings, there were tribal chieftains and warlords but they didn’t command the material resources and the firepower to subdue the forests. It was kings and their empires who created civilization by clearing forests and building palaces and playgrounds.

The era of kings has ended, being replaced by a diffuse form of power that we call democracy. Presidents and prime ministers rule in the name of the people. Contrast Asoka’s stupas that proclaim his majesty in first person singular, “I, Piyadassi…,” with the Indian constitution, which equally majestically says in first person plural, “We the people of India…” The prototype has done its duty, to be replaced by the assembly line. The sovereignty of the king has been supplanted by the sovereignty of the people. Who are these "people"? We don't really know, but we are mostly content referring to them as society. "Society" is one of the viral terms of the modern era, with all its charms of elections and newspapers, but in our social state we have forgotten the original assertion of power over the earth, of the king who isn’t afraid of men wearing snakes.

The king may have more individual power but the factory has far greater collective force. Free markets exert control at a scale that Alexander couldn’t even imagine. Having forgotten the prototype from which it was stamped, society takes its dominance for granted, building roads and skyscrapers, lumping tree and snake and toad and deer into the catch all phrase natural resources. In our amnesia, we live blindly between two abstractions: society and nature, one the guarantor of rights and responsibilities and the other the energy source for all our exploits. Jaya talks about this dominion again and again.

Back to Parikshit; we can forgive him, for he was thirsty and hungry. Hungry men are liable to commit hasty acts. The suta tells us that Parikshit paid for his irritation with his life. The sage’s son cursed the king, consigning him to death by snakebite. If that was all, the story would have ended even before it started, as it would be if you or I had been bitten by a snake and died on the way to the hospital. The Jaya is wiser in the ways of power; it knows that one bite leads to another. Janamejaya desired revenge, not just on the snake that bit his father but on all snakes.

The Mahabharata is replete with sons taking revenge for their father’s tribulations. At the very end of the great war, another sage’s son almost ends the world outright by unleashing the greatest weapon of all. It took a wily god to keep the world spinning. That sage’s son was known as a second Siva, having one fourth of Rudra in him. Beware of men wearing snakes!

We will deal with his anger later.

I was in college when the first president Bush started the first gulf war. While my memory of that war garbles scenes of burnt out Iraqi tanks, refugees streaming out of Baghdad and Mosul and Colin Powell talking to reporters, I vividly remember an event a few months later. It was the October of 1991. The cold war was over. India was changing. On campus, the usual anglocentric crowd wasn’t as influential as before. For the first time, the cultural secretary was someone who spoke Hindi rather than English. Under his influence, the annual college festival removed one of the Wodehousian public school rituals from the festival roster and replaced it with a hasya kavi sammelan, a gathering of comic poets.

We attracted some of the best Hindi comic poets to the meeting. I was told that getting them from the train station was quite the ordeal. With a few hours to kill on the train ride to Kanpur, some of them had started drinking and were tipsy by the time they disembarked. An impromptu poetry competition started on the platform as they egged each other into delivering the best railway poem. The students in attendance had to extricate the traveling bards from their fans and spirit them to campus in time to entertain the paying customers. The mood on campus was boorish that cool October evening as we sat down to listen to comic poetry. The first few poets were unmemorable but when Surendra Sharma came to the stage, I took notice. As a child, I used to hear him on TV, poking gentle fun at politicians on the single Doordarshan channel, well before soap operas and news shows and a channel for every fetish.

Sharmaji started slowly in his sing-song voice, but then picked up steam.

Let me tell you something:
It’s come to my notice that
There’s been a war
Between
America and Iraq

I heard on the radio
The Americans
Fought fought and fought
All the way from the border
To Baghdad

I heard on the radio
When the fighting ended
And the guns were down
Three hundred Americans lay
Dead

I asked myself:
What war is this?
In my country
Three hundred people die
When there’s a fight
At the cigarette shop

Indeed, a year after he said those words riots broke out at paanwala shops across North India as vandals tore down a medieval mosque with the intent of replacing it with a temple. Many more than three hundred people died in that battle.

Bush won the war but didn’t take out Saddam. He should have learned from Hollywood; Rocky wins only when he delivers a knockout punch. Without the knockout under his belt, Bush lost the presidency in 1992. It was left to his son to take revenge, starting the second war under the flimsiest of pretexts. Dubya rejected his father's patrician veneer but he captured Saddam and won a second term.

I think Surendra Sharma would have created even more comic relief out of the son’s war. He would have written three poems between the train station and the campus. What Sharmaji left out in his poem, though he must have known quite well, is that at least half a million Iraqis died in the first gulf war and the sanctions that followed. As for the second war, the full accounting is yet to be done but the ratio of American to Iraqi deaths is at least 1:100. Janamejaya would have appreciated the ratio. The Jaya is first recounted at the sacrifice Janamejaya organized to kill all the snakes in the world. He too wanted to avenge his father.

What is not here

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I don't recall a time when I wasn't fascinated with the Mahabharata, it's multiplicity of stories and insights and the immense synthesis of an entire civilizations understanding of life, the universe and everything else. I have some facility with Sanskrit and my bookshelves are lined with translations and transcreations of the epic. Ganguli's five volumes from the late Victorian era to the Gita Press version in Sanskrit and Hindi, Van Buitenen's unfinished translation from Chicago, Masoom Raza's script for the B.R Chopra T.V version, the unfinished Clay Sanskrit Library translation, Purushottam Lal's transcreation in the Writer's Workshop (one of my most cherished possessions: fifteen handbound volumes signed by Lal himself with his exquisite calligraphy and illustrated with Patra paintings commissioned just for the purpose), and more recently, Bibek Debroy's ten volumes from Penguin and Carol Satyamurti's blank verse rendering from Norton.

Then there are the great abridgments from Rajagopalachari where I first read it (but as A.K Ramanujan said, no Indian ever reads the Mahabharata for the first time - I heard the stories from my grandmother before I could read a word), R.K Narayan and K.M Munshi's Krishnavatara.

Still, I find something missing. After all, the MbH is not just a story, though it's a gripping tale, it's not just a philosophical treatise, though it's filled with philosophical insights, it's not just a religious treatise even though it's of immense importance to Hindus and it's not just a history though it's depicting life of a certain time and place. In it's own words, what's not here is nowhere else; it's both the map and the territory.

I want to understand what mad ambition can lead to the creation of such a monument, the literary skill that can mix metaphysics in one chapter with realpolitik in the next and finally, speculating on what the 'mahabharata mind' mind would do when faced with the existential and philosophical quandaries of the present day. So for the next year, my newsletters will take the MbH one small bite at a time. I will not treat the text with a false sacredness that's all too common; it stands on it's own merits. Obsequiousness is not the same as reverence. I am not going to translate it, though at times I might do so. I am not going to engage with the text directly. The epic is best seen from the corner of one's eye, through an inner peripheral vision which is better at detecting change than foveal vision.

My real task is to convince myself first and then you, the reader, that the ideas, the mood and the insights of the epic are still important today. Shouldn't take much convincing - there's no other major work of literature I know that starts with millions of people and ends with exactly seven survivors. Everyone else dies in a battle over power and control over nature, a zero sum game with a vengeance. Seems familiar doesn't it?

Among its many names, the Mahabharata's called Jaya (victory). I suppose just reading such a massive text is a sign of victory. I am not sure if I will be able to read it all in a year, but it's not a linear text; digressions are central to the story and I plan on taking several digressions. Don't be surprised if there's a sideshow on big data or mathematical logic; they too need to be dissolved into this ocean. Think about it as an explorer's diary, or as I call it, a Jayary. I will publish the Jayary online every week. I will also send it as a weekly newsletter (this one). I hope my exploration will be of some interest to both my Indian and non-Indian readers. I look forward to your feedback and encouragement.

In the best of all possible worlds, the cosmic Ram Rajya, the world is good and all of us mirror that goodness. The streets are clean, there's no crime, citizens are kind to each other; misfortune, if at all it strikes, is quickly corrected by the state and the people. "God is in his heaven and everything's right with the world."

The logician always aims for Ram Rajya, for the perfect conjunction of mind and matter. The probabilist is suspicious of perfection. To a probabilist, too much belief in a just world can be a problem in of itself. In fact, to a probabilist, the inherent goodness of the world only appears to be a liberal idea, it's actually a very conservative one.

The reason is simple, it has to do with how the logician and the probabilist handle imperfection. What happens when you see beggars on the street? The logician is unwilling to doubt his faith; in his view, signs of imperfection are the fault of the imperfect. The beggar is poor because he's lazy. Even worse, imperfection is a sign of real malevolence. Imperfection is the mark of the devil. If so, there's only one solution: get rid of the offending spots. Burn the slums and kill the beggars.

Like scorned lovers, evidence of imperfection turns the faithful into fundamentalists. This is not a merely theoretical observation; experimental studies have shown that people who believe in the just world hypothesis are more likely to blame the poor and the needy for their condition than people who believe in luck. The moral of the story: in our social engineering, we should design societies that they are robust with respect to dice throwing.

The Mahabharata figured out the dangers of faith before anyone else. It's no surprise to me that a dice game is at the heart of the story. In the conventional narrative, Yudhisthira is a perfect human, Dharmaraja, except for his addiction to gambling. He literally gambles his kingdom away. Let me offer a counter narrative, that gambling redeems him or else he might have well turned out to be a monster. If he hadn't played against the Kauravas, he would have remained an unchallenged ruler; that's a recipe for totalitarianism. Instead, Yudhi experiences first hand what happens when the dice are loaded against you. I think it makes him a better king.

But now that we have our own nation, the violation of the moral commons is a matter of deep concern. If the erosion of legitimacy was only about the reputation of netas and babus it would be perfectly fine, but it is eroding the nation itself. We are one of the great civilizations of the world that emerged from a long shadow sixty five years ago. Sedition charges, encounter deaths, wholesale corruption, utter destruction of the environment, each one of these removes its share of bricks from the national edifice. How did we fall so far so fast?

The only thing to which I can take recourse is

yada yada hi dharmasya
glanir bhavati bharata
abhyutthanam adharmasya
tadatmanam srjamy aham

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Now, you may think that this unapologetic Indianism is a cute affectation on Chandra’s part, and may be it is that too, but I also think that it is a sign of growing confidence amongst Indians that they can engage with modernity on their own terms. In fact, I am going to come out and declare that the match is over and the visiting team has won, i.e.,

(a) India, as a culture, has swallowed and digested western modernity.

(b) From now on, the most innovative philosophical, intellectual and cultural trends are increasingly going to come from places like India.

For example, I find that young women in Bangalore look good in Indian as well as Western clothes. Earlier generations of middle class women carried themselves well in Indian clothes and awkwardly in western clothes (if at all they wore them), but now jeans and shirts seem to fit quite naturally on them. Now that indigenous aesthetic preferences have started raising their head, you can see a vast variety of hybrid Indo-western clothes on the streets of Bangalore, clothes that will look strange on Western women. We all know that womens bodies are the terrain on which cultural battles are fought, so it will be interesting to see the shifts in preferred body types as Indian women and their aesthetic choices become normative the world over.

Men on the other hand, still seem to prefer awful shapeless polyester pants; the ones with three pleats and a ragged crease running down the middle. I am sure there’s a moral to be drawn there.

While we digested the west by reading western novels, watching western movies and TV programs, and most importantly, by living in western countries, the west is getting increasingly isolated from trends in other parts of the world. I have yet to meet a class of American and European intellectuals (not individuals) who, as a matter of course, have read the Mahabharata or know the names of the last two Indian Prime Ministers.

I am not saying that India is going to win the clash of civilizations or anything remotely like that. In fact, the situation is rather sad. Europe retreats into a self imposed permanent vacation, with thirty five hour work weeks, and the US bombs one country after the other, the possibility of a universal civilization is becoming increasingly remote. Unlike my postmodern and postcolonial friends, I am still sold on universal values and rights.

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