There is this Theme of Fate and Destiny that Sri Aurobindo explores throughout his Writings and Poetry, and he has this Aphorism: “God’s laughter is sometimes very coarse and unfit for polite ears; He is not satisfied with being Molière, He must needs also be Aristophanes and Rabelais”.
I am thinking about all this in the context of the Tamil Nadu State Election Results announced today. There was this actor called Rajinikanth who had the prospect of becoming the state’s leader for a long time, but ultimately remained indecisive and didn’t enter politics.
There’s this speech of his where he says that just like an individual may have his own fate and an entire people of the state have their own collective destiny and when the destiny of the individual and the people as a whole come together, things eventually happen. It made me feel at least that he tried to think a little bit deep before making a decision, and all that, but this other actor, who was elected as leader of the state today, didn’t show any tiny bit of meaningful, thoughtful thinking whatsoever, but with blind decisiveness jumped into the political competition and was rewarded.
I mean, is God being comical like Sri Aurobindo says in the aphorism here, is the fate of a group of people on how they are to be governed for the next five years can also be decided so comically cos the individual who tried to have some genuine reflection about individual and collective destiny remained ponderous and indecisive, but the unthinking instinctive type was rewarded. Wouldn’t the thinking man feel that all his thoughts are useless and that one should just blindly act without any genuine thought whatsoever?
[Aphorism 81: https://incarnateword.in/cwsa/12/jnana#p81]
Fate is a complex play of forces, both individual and collective. Regional and national, or what we may say collective destinies, are far more complex than individual. They also follow long curves of Time. Imagine, for example, what the Hindus must have gone through the centuries from 1500 till just about a century ago, facing one humiliation after another following the acceptance of Mayavada and subordinating the Gita. It is only very recently, after nearly 600 years, that we see some kind of a resurgence of the once mainstream thought and culture of the land. It is a sign that the winds have begun to blow in a certain direction. But politics is still the most difficult fortress to break through the falsehood. The entire Aryan-Dravidian narrative was the seed of falsehood propagated by the British and picked up by the local politics of Tamil Nadu, whereas at one point, it was the lighthouse that powered the engines of knowledge. Now, for the first time, this great divide that seemed almost unbreakable has been breached. That done, it gives a chance and hope for change over the years or decades to come.
My own feeling is that the sudden and unexpected entry of the famous filmstar into TN politics is mainly an instrument to dislodge the deeply entrenched false narratives of the divide between the northern and southern parts of India. It is the unexpectedness, the lack of past experience, that suddenly turned him into a beacon of hope for the people of Tamil Nadu who were getting sick and tired of the ‘Dravidian plank’. If he uses this God-given opportunity, then he will wear the crown of the future. If he does not and goes the same old way, then he himself will be blown away and new faces and instruments emerge.
After all, that is what Fate has been doing by sending both Rajnikant and then Annamalai into the field. It is itself a sign. It means things are brewing inside and when people are ready, the true leader of the future will emerge.
Why should we act blindly because things didn’t happen as we would want them to? One should act according to one’s deepest truth, even if failure is certain, for it is by action that we bring the future nearer to us, even if we do not reap the fruits of our labour. The last laugh of God is yet to come. The last scene is yet to be enacted in the political drama of the nation.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
