The Mask of The “One-Liner” Warriors

DEMOLISHING TRADITIONS BY “ONE-LINER” WIT AND BUYING INTO PHILOSOPHIES CREATED BY “ONE-LINER” SARCASM ARE CREATING A SHALLOW, SUPERIFICAL WORLD, THAT EASILY CEDES SPACE TO THE EVIL.

Several years ago, I was watching a TV debate on a channel known for its sensational content. This debate was about “reincarnation”, i.e. past lives.  The panel consisted of a diverse variety of participants, the “star” among them being somebody who ran a “Rationalist and Sceptic Organization”.

It’s needless to say that true to the spirit of TV debates, this debate wasn’t arranged to explore and discover Truth, but to create just enough sensation.

As the debate progressed, the Rationalist and the Sceptic superhero dropped the bomb – a really penetrative argument that nobody had an answer to, and the debate was practically over.

“If you had a past life, you must have studied all your subjects in the past life, and so you do not need to study them again in this life time“, he said, following it by the roaring “laughter of conquest” that is atypical of shallow loud-mouthed smart alecs when they get into a self-congratulatory mode.

He had clearly nailed it. Not only did other panelists and anchors confirm it by joining the “laughter of conquest”, the defending panelists had no response as well.
Case solved. If there was a past-life, you had no need to re-learn everything life-time after life-time.

It is said that the great Hindu Saint Shankaracharya’s most poignant debate against Mandan Mishra lasted for 32 days. He spent 16 days debating the man, and 16 days debating his wife.

Little did Shankaracharya, Mandan Mishra and Bharti Devi know that what they spent 32 days for could be achieved through simple one-liner wise-cracks soaked in nasty humour. You just had to get those sitting in the gallery crack up with one nasty piece of humour.

Nothing is rotting the world more than this confusion between oratory and wisdom, humour and truth, joke and philosophy. The one that gets you to laugh gets you to follow his points of view. It is common for people to praise their favourite spiritual leaders and icons primarily for their articulate oratory, debating skills and wit, their ability to smash an opponent, etc.

6 years ago, a failed Indian actress, remembered most for featuring in a movie that competes for the label of “the most forgettable Hindi movies”, caught limelight by an iconic statement that reads as follows –

 “I know that all our Indian customs are based on scientific research by ancient minds where they spent decades examining and experimenting before they came up with specific rituals to ensure our well-being; so I do my own scientific research (which takes me a little less than five minutes, via Google) and the results are unmistakable.

The United Nations research states that men with the longest life expectancy are from Japan, followed by Switzerland. I am rather surprised at this result as since time immemorial we have been doing the Karva Chauth fast to make sure our men have long lives, and the results should have definitely shown by now.“

Where do such statements come from? A genuine personal belief? A vision to liberate oppressed Indian women? A brave attempt to “smash patriarchy“?

Genuine opinions have a very different flavour. They have an energy of kindness and compassion, a sense of silence and peace, a real commitment to help people understand and evolve, a sincere wish to change and transform, and hence take constructive over-tones and under-tones.

Mockery is NEVER EVER an expression of genuine opinion. Mockery is more often than not a vicious attempt to establish one’s own personal superiority – a projection of self as a “liberated lioness” as compared to the “still slave sheep” of the world.

Genuine opinions and authentic philosophies mostly feel like anti-climax. They do not stir, rouse, or create a gush of hormones. There’s no doubt that there would be few takers for genuine opinions and authentic philosophies.

If you resonate with a comment deeply that it stirs you inside-out, gives you a sense of victory, conquest, and superiority for having identified with that comment, you have in all probability hit upon “nasty wit” rather than “timeless wisdom”, and it has resonated with the dark, shadow side of you within.

Nasty remarks become remarkably popular because they resonate with the deep dark unacknowledged sides of the multitude. They speak directly to the demons inside us and crack instant friendships with them, and our inner demons oblige.

As discussed in the previous blog A Prettier Mask Needs Extra Polishing, a celebrity expresses an opinion primarily to manage her personal or professional brand.

As the only failure in her otherwise iconic family, she had to find an alternative to be relevant, and she did.

She hit the jackpot when she, like most other celebs, made the secret discovery that turns people from being an attention-seeker to a sensation-creator overnight – she figured out how to create ripples in the world, without creating any risk for herself – a phenomena I discussed in an earlier blog Thou Shalt Not Question My Mask.

Like most of her clan, her secret sauce is – “rubbishing Hindu customs“. And what better way to rubbish a philosophy than one-liner nasty humour?

Did her statement work? 

You bet. Those fond of running down Hindu customs, those with a nose pointed to the sky which looks down upon ritual as regressive, those with a “liberated feminist outlook” – all fell for it like dominos with no choice. Her intelligence, her guts to question tradition, her sharp-witted analogy, became a model for all “modern” women, and poised a stark challenging question to those still stuck to this ancient rut of a ritual.

Since we are stepping into the domain of absurdity, let me add a bit of my own.

Suppose, you and I start teaching two students. I teach a student who has been consistently been getting 60% marks in his exams, and you start helping a student stuck at 30%.

At the end of one year, my protege scores a flying 65% and yours gets a mere 60%.

Whose teaching did a better job?

May be Karva Chauth does improve the life-span and without it, things could have been worse. Funny in the bones, isn’t it?

Okay, so now that I score at par with the starlet in absurdity, let us focus on something more serious.

Ritualistic festivals are an expression of a sentiment. It is a celebration of a relationship. Evaluating the “objective efficacy” of the Karva Chauth fasting is relevant only to the extent that a person on a death-bed can go and file a criminal suit of cheating against all those who wished him to live a hundred years but didn’t follow up on their promise!!!

Right from notions like “Vasco da Gama discovered India“, we have learnt to look at India from the eyes of a westerner. India, when looked from within India, is a different phenomenon than the West, because there is hardly any intersection between the two sets of civilization. Evaluating India from the Western standards cannot ever make any sense whatsoever.

For example, a popular wise-crack of the elitist snob – “I am spiritual, but not religious” holds perfect for Abrahamic and other religions, where religions have absolutely no spiritual significance, and are nothing more than a preparation for a fairy-tale abode in the Paradise or burning in hell FOREVER, by following codes of conduct blindly.

This “spirituality-religion dichotomy” doesn’t hold any ground with Indian traditions. Every single aspect of the Indian way of life, including religion, is interwoven around spiritual evolution. Everything in our tradition is about refining, expanding, engaging and connecting with spiritual energies.

Heck, even our wedding rituals are centred around the idea of opening up chakras and raising spiritual energies.

Indians had this knack of weaving complexity into simple processes. That’s what geniuses are supposed to do – make things easy so that even those who cannot understand the significance are not left out of sustaining advantages from their heritage.

For example, a seemingly nonsensical collection of redundant letters, called Maheshwara Sutra, that may have appeared as gibberish to a western mind, serves as a “table of index” of characters, that was used by Panini to articulate complex grammar rules in terms of pithy, crisp “sutras” aided with a lookup into this table. A lot of Sanskrit shlokas that sound like story-telling or “praising the Lord”, when replaced by appropriate numbers, reveal intriguing mathematical formulas and theorems.

India has had this brilliance of laying thoughts through a multi-layered structure of ideologies, so that every living human being, depending on where he stands with respect to his depth of understanding, found something valuable to take home.

To look at the surface, nay, to look 2 feet above the surface and mock it out is stupid even for the standards of a failed actress and her dumb admirers.

For example, the festival Shivaratri, at one level is celebrated as Shiva’s wedding, and gives rise to rituals that involve “fasting in order to manifest an ideal spouse”, while at the same time holding a totally different significance for deep yogic practitioners. Both these beliefs stand equally valid simultaneously, for those who subscribe to each of them. Mocking one in favour of another is just plain ignorance masquerading as superiority.

In the Indian thought, the path to divinity starts from where you stand, without requiring you to be, become, or do anything that you do not want to.

It can be safely assumed that the Indian thought was NOT for the shallow, the superficial, the mean, the malicious and the absurd.

Yes, a lot of super-star spiritual gurus have also formed their careers by spending a life-time mocking Hindu rituals, because that’s the easy way out to super-stardom, especially super-stardom in the global arena. Nothing makes you an international super-hero faster than mocking India and Hindus.

Every Hindu ritual serves two purposes –

(a) a celebration of a sentiment, and

(b) an evolution of spiritual energies,

and no wannabe aspiring attention seeker has any legitimate authority to comment on a Hindu ritual or festival. They just don’t qualify to do so.

To the dismay of those who want to mock Hindu rituals just because it doesn’t make sense to them, let them know that this is just one of the zillions of things under the sky that exist without seeking their permission or comprehension.

Most modern-day philosophers, the “one-liner warriors” are a product of hate, bitterness, and an eternal search for elusive attention.

Nothing brings people closer than a sense of shared emotional outrage, and a sense of hate, resentment, mockery, directed against a common target.

The spiritual leaders of today know this pretty well. There have been spiritual leaders who used “jokes” as their trump cards, and had people eating out of their hands. They know that in order to get people to follow you like a slave for eternity, all they need to do is to get them to laugh at jokes that are aimed to mock specific points.

Those who laugh and mock together stay together.

If you could get an auditorium full of audience to laugh and mock together at a specific thought or ideology, they are forever yours.

Most of what we see around us is not the “ability to reason”, but a “pretense of reason”, and wannabe Masters of human beings know this better than anybody else. They know that the entire effort of establishing the TRUTH is futile. What gets people to follow you blindly is – humour, entertainment, jokes, wise-cracks, triggers to inner hate, anger and resentment. Touch those buttons and you get willingly compliant slaves.

Next time you are blown away by a one-liner, a witticism, a satire, a joke, that makes you feel you have discovered something profound, rushes a surge of adrenaline and testosterone know that you just made an immense contribution to the destruction of this world – by dumbing down the world a little more, and making easy for the evil to occupy the centre-stage.

Nothing is more dangerous at this point than to encourage cheap jokes being passed as Truths and Philosophies of life.

Reason and argument are much more sacrosanct than we make them out to. The quest for truth is much more intense and requires a lot more dedication and commitment than a loud hilarious laughter at a malicious joke.

As I have often said, the humans of 21st century are no better than the Roman mobs of the yore, who could only think about their daily bread and their daily circus. In the 21st century, we have even allowed these daily circus to define the ideologies and philosophies we live by.

When somebody makes us laugh, they control a lot of stuff within us that we may not even realize.

That is what has made comedy the mass weapon of control and destruction in our modern times, and we really really need to watch out for it.

If I had a chance to tell something to that erudite Rationalist and Sceptic on the TV debate, I would ask him a few simple questions –

How much does he remember who all he met at the age of 1?

How much does he remember what all he did when he was 6 months hold?

How much does he remember the moment he was taking birth?

What chance do we have to remember something supposedly from before our birth, from a previous life-time, if we cannot remember a lot even from this birth? Hell, people don’t remember what they studied in their last year’s curriculum, what chance does remembering the curriculum of a previous life-time hold?

It is not about whether you agree with a philosophy or not, but it is important to ensure that a philosophy is argued within the confines of its own framework, its own axioms, its own hypothesis, and its own postulates. 

It’s not about what you believe, but it is important how did you get to believe that.

Are your beliefs an outcome of a deep exploration or an adoption of something that resonated with, something that made you laugh, something that had your hormones gush?

There is a dire need to bring more depth and intensity to our narratives, and we need to stand strongly for it.