Saturday, April 22, 2017

What is Politics?

Life is a graph - where everything is connected in some way.. or rather in many ways..  to everything else. Politics, is the act of finding a weak link and creating a divide. First it starts with naming one side as A and the other as B. Then you either cut or discredit any graph connections that go from one side to another. So either you are a A or a B.  You have to take sides.  And across this potential voltage gradient, the politician sits and generates power and money and everything else.

So for instance someone decides that he is "poor" .. Then based on that attribute he divides the world into "rich" and "poor". Anything "rich" is the other.. Is bad. The poor, he says, are tormented. And he says that because he is tormented. And hence the poor must fight. Thus is born communism.

The same principle hold for the Aryan-Dravidian divide created by the Tamil Nadu Kazhaga Katchis.  Suddenly something is Aryan or Dravidian. And if it is both, it has to be given to one side.. and then either praised or denigrated.

But reality is a bitch .. It keeps forming connections across the void created by politics. Not only in the dimension that the politician chose to create the divide - but on an infinite other dimensions that the politician doesn't even know about.  The rich people can have poor relatives. The  Tamil Kings (who are marked Dravidian) were Vedic practitioners (which has been marked by the politician as Aryan).

 Such inconveniences continuously threaten the politician and his job is to sit on the fence and chop any such attempt.

Advaita - non dualism - on the other hand is the principle that everything exists in oneness. That the oneness transcends any apparent material graph connection - which the politician manipulates. Advaita is the apparent division that removes all divisions.  While all politicians aim for oneness, they aim for it by acts of war - by destroying all cross links and destroying all people on the other side or who are trying to create a bridge to the other side.

The cunning among the readers would then ask "Isn't Advaita also a divide? Should we not, you know, live in peace and accept everyone? and live in love and harmony and all that?"  This absurd naivety is the beginning of soft-theology ideologies which in a matter of time get their heads chopped off by people who do not wait for you to spin your yarn of oneness on them.  The history of the world shows traces of innumerable civilizations that have fallen prey to such "softness". I am sure a countless others have disappeared without even that hint that they ever existed.

And Advaita is not liberalism either. Liberalism says "everything is fuzzy" .and so "anything goes". Let us "eat, drink and be merry". While secularism is cunning, liberalism is plain stupid. Everything that politics creates is false, but that does not mean that reality does not exist. It does not mean that a speeding car won't flatten you if you stand in it's path. The investigation into what is reality is science - Dharma. Sanatana Dharma is the investigation into that which is real for ever.

Fighting against this movement of politics - whether it comes in the name of  race or gender or religion is Advaita. Sanatana Hindu Dharma is not yet another political division. It is the "division" between those who divide and those who unite. It is the division to end divisions.  It is the living demonstration of 10,000 religions that have co-existed without large scale massacre and war for the past ten thousand years. So much so that the political religions who cannot understand the differences in ideologies between them have branded them as "one single religion" - Hinduism.