Womanly Tales

I cannot take any credit whatsoever for the title of this blog post even as I imagine it perhaps delights you as much as it does me. This is the title of a book I am reading by Gurcharan Das. I also cannot take any credit for how this book found me – once again, I am grateful to the selective genius of Deepan when it comes to researching and picking books that are simply too good to miss.
And miss, I have most of the wonderful delights literature has to offer, given my penchant for re-reading the same (and handful) classics over and over again.
What got me interested in this book in particular is that it’s like fusion music – One takes a old classic sound and then weaves into it some contemporary sounds and see what comes of the effort. Gurcharan Das decided to go on a quest to understand the role of morality in modern day lives (especially business) and decided to go digging in the Mahabharata, the fifth Veda.
Now I can read, watch and listen to anything about the Mahabharata – given that it’s one of those few classics that I thumb through on a daily basis.
I have just begun reading this book and so will use my blog to share my thoughts as I read through. Today let’s talk about moral case #1 – Duryodhana’s envy. I found this a rather most intriguing place for Gurcharan Das to start despite it being quite the obvious. The conflict in the Mahabharata is primarily that of Duryodhana and without his envy we might not have had the glorious story we have today.
Is envy a good thing or a bad thing? If bad, then when we experience envy is it really possible to dismiss it? As most moral conditions, there is no easy or simple answer. Worser still is the inauspicious fate of being lured by simplistic solutions. I do not attempt to answer this here in the post. However I do want to justapose this moral condition with a television series we watched on the BBC where Sebastian Faulks analysed the role of a snob in English Literature. (The recording is no longer available in iPlayer but if there’s an associated book I strongly recommend reading it.)
Mr Faulks contends that the use of snobs in English literature enabled writers to discuss the trysts of social mobility. Without snobbery, he says, we would have no social mobility. It is a fascinating point and to illustrate he picked on Mr.Darcy (yes, the one & only from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice) to speak to this moral condition. The novel begins with Mr.Darcy painted most deliberately as a glorious snob, so much so that this character seems to have lit a perennial fire for the career of Colin Firth who played this character in the BBC drama adaptation. (However, having said this, I do not mean to take anything away from the many talents of Mr.Firth whose acting I thoroughly enjoy)
As a fan of Mr.Darcy like perhaps the rest of the female population that keeps this Jane Austin classic one of top 10 most downloaded books ever, I was a bit put off to hear Mr. Faulks call him a snob. However that’s what he starts out to be and through that the author finds a glorious opening to bring about change and transformation that makes the book a thoroughly good read. Mr. Darcy is not the only snob out there. There are many other snobs in literature, portrayed in greyer shades – but snobs are a vital tool an author has in order to breath transformation into a plot.
Duryodhana’s envy is the same quandary upside down. He is not a snob but is consumed by envy for what he cannot be or have. It’s a very different condition to write to. Duryodhana’s envy was also complete – a perfect imperfection that in many ways constrained the author of the Mahabharata, along with its readers, to feel like there was only one way to go with this and that was towards total destruction. This feeling of impending doom is what binds each of us to the Mahabharata and through this justifies Gurcharan Das’ pursuit of the subtle art of dharma and the difficulty of being good within this classic story. While Darcy’s snobbery enabled transformation towards the good, Duryodhana’s envy constricts us like a boa constrictor does it’s victim – it is a slow and painful death that aims to squeeze out the imperfections, small and great, that exist in us. It is our daily, monthly, yearly detox, a la Krishna style.
There are no victories in sight, nor any transformations based on emotions such as love. Moral conditions often have nothing to do with social mobility (or for that matter economic or political mobility). There is a certain truth in how easy it is to be bad and moral conditions often address these fundamental good and bad elements that are in us – like our DNA.
Recently I heard of a Chinese minister give up the consumption of shark fins because he believed in the good of promoting harmony between man and nature. Moral conditions help throw light on the relationship between man and his nature – Nature, as trees and animals are just an external manifestation of something intrinsic to all of us inside. Like the Chinese, we need to strive for harmony as we listen to what we really are made up of.