Dear friends, Human Despair is indeed the predominant theme of Valmiki's "sundara kAndam". ***************** Despair degrades the human spirit absolutely. There is virtually no humanity left in a man who has lost all hope in life or himself. The despairing soul travels but one road: the road to slow self-destruction and inevitable perdition. Self-destruction and perdition take 2 forms. One is Suicide and the other, Terrorism. One is mindless violence directed against oneself. The other is indiscriminate violence unleashed upon the world at large. The pyschology and pathology of both the suicidal as well as the terrorist mind-set is portrayed vividly through the events and characters of the "sundara-kaandam" in the Valmiki Ramayana. *************** Rama's grief and despair over the separation from Sita as described by Hanuman in the "sundara-kAndam" has been briefly sketched in this series of postings earlier (Posts #4 and #5). Clearly, from the story of the Ramayana, we see how Rama's mind began seriously and steadily degrading as he waited out the days and months in the company of Lakshmana, alone in a dark, cold cave outside the capital city of Sugriva's empire in Kishkinda. Rama was forlorn, frustrated and utterly hopeless. Slowly but surely, his mind began falling apart under very great emotional distress, until it almost unhinged itself entirely. The despair of Rama was like poison -- killing him slowly, corroding away his sense of self, security and all hope in life. The loss of Sita to Rama was more than merely loss of a spouse or loved one. It was loss of meaning in life. Raison d'etre -- the very reason for his existence -- became a matter of abject and philosophical doubt for him. "Why should I continue living in this state? To what purpose this life of mine if my Sita is lost forever? What earthly purpose am I serving? What desires do I have left in life? Why must I labour forth in life, to what end, and to gain what outcomes?". Such was the dire existential vacuum -- that shoreless sea of human despair -- in which Sri Rama found himself floundering during the dark, endless days and nights he spent alone in Kishkinda. When we read these passages in the Ramayana, we are instantly able to relate to Sri Rama's predicament, and the agony of his profound despair. For it is a state which we too -- ordinary men and women of this sorry little world -- often find ourselves in, from time to time, to greater or lesser degree as we might want to imagine, in the many difficult situations we encounter along our own respective paths in the long journey of life. Despair is a universal human condition. And even God Almighty, in his avatar in the Ramayana, was powerless to except himself from it. ************** In that state of overwhelming Despair, Rama's mind underwent a dramatic and unfortunate metastasis. His despair slowly drove Rama's mind to begin entertaining inhumane thoughts which his own good nature would have under normal circumstances wholly abhorred. It drove him to thought of malice and malevolence, vengeance and mindless violence. A temporary madness seized Rama, making his mind begin harboring ideas and plots like those of a modern-day terrorist. We must turn to the passages of the "aranyA kAndam" of the Valmiki Ramayana to understand this sudden and ugly transformation of Rama's frame of mind. This is what he says in a fit of fury one day to Lakshmana: "tathAham krOdha samyukthO na nivaryO'shiya samshayah purEva may charudhatI manindatAm dishanti seetAm yadi nAdya mythileem ! sadEva gandharva manushya pannagam jagatsa-shailam parivartayAmyaham II " (III. 64.75.78 Valmiki Ramayana) "Lakshmana, I can wait no more! I am now going to take law into my hands! No scourge on earth will be so fierce and pitiless as I am going to be, I swear! "I am up now and I swear nothing is going to stop me! I am going to take full toll of all this world, all this universe! I'm going to turn it all to ashes! I will bring death and destruction everywhere! I have beseeched everyone, every creature to show me where my Sita is ... I have addressed the waters and streams, the trees, the earth, the beasts and birds, but none responds to me! None hears me or knows my grief, my despair! "And the gods too I have beseeched! They at least, O Lakshmana, who see and know everything, surely they at least should be able to tell me where perhaps Sita is now languishing, and if she is well and safe! But alas, they too remain silent and unmoved by my plight! They conceal her from me! "What should I do now but to use all the force at my command to destroy all of them! I'm going to destroy everything and everyone brutally in this world! If they will not give her back to me, I shall surely be destroyed but not before I have destroyed and wiped them all too from the face of the world!" ************** Here, in the passages of the Ramayana, we see stark confirmation of how even God's own mind, when in the grip of profound, moral despair such as what possessed Rama's, is indeed but only a step away from harboring the black thoughts and baleful ideas which in the world of the 21st century we live in today -- filled as it is with hate, bloodshed and suffering, from Iraq to Palestine, Afghanistan to Chechnya, from Bali to Serbia -- it is those very same ideas that we have come to associate with the "terrorist" mind-set, the "anarchist's" manifesto and the "suicide bomber's" armoury. In his moment of supreme despair, Rama's mind without doubt turned almost "terrorist". He swore he would destroy everything in the world and reduce it all to ashes! If we reflect deeply upon this matter, we see that this line of thinking is not all that different from that of the "suicide-bomber" today, say, in Iraq or Palestine. I have now lived and worked in Kuwait for the last 8 years. In the past 3 years, ever since the war in next-door Iraq began wildly spiralling into the deadly, unceasing cycle of mindless bloodshed it has become today, I cannot recall a single day when I opened a local newspaper in Kuwait and did not find a news-report of another "suicide-bomber" blowing up a dozen or more ordinary, innocent fellow-citizens in a crowded Baghdadi vegetable market-place or a bus-station. As I read these daily reports of grim carnage in Baghdad and the neighbouring provinces of Iraq, in Sadr City or Tikrit -- or in Nablus or elsewhere in occupied Palestine, for example -- I can't help asking myself often: "What could possibly drive a man right over the edge of humanity to think nothing at all of strapping kilograms of lethal RDX around his waist, walk into a crowded souk swarming with hundreds of his own brethren, and then, in an instant within the wink of an eye, detonate himself and all of them too --- all of those poor innocent men, women and children -- unto death?" The answer to that question I come up with always is: Despair. The "suicide-bomber" of the modern time, much like Sri Rama in the passages of Srimadh Valmiki Ramayana, I often find myself reflecting, is really not a man in rage but a man in terminal Despair in life. His rage springs not so much from loss of sanity but from loss of hope in life, and loss of faith in the world as a place worth cherishing or preserving. The "suicide-bomber's" violence is nothing but despair that has turned itself into suicidal rage at the world. Like Sri Rama, the poor Iraqi "suicide-bomber" has had his own family taken away from him -- a wife perhaps killed during a military bombing, a child buried perhaps beneath beneath the rubble of a school-building hit by sudden rocket-attacks, an old mother who fled home to escape sectarian street- violence and never returned and has never been seen anywhere since.... Those are the sort of life-events in which the "suicide-bomber" too lost his loved ones, and has since then plunged into despair and a life-weariness so deep and painful that he daily seeks escape from it but simply cannot see a way out of it. He must hence find a way out of it either in suicide or violent, rampant destruction... All this is in fact exactly as the Valmiki Ramayana describes a human mind will react when caught up in life in a vortex of soul-destroying despair... *************** Fortunately, for Sri Rama in the Ramayana, in the moment of extreme distress and despair when he teetered precariously between humanity and sub-humanity -- when he was caught in the cross-fire of emotions good and evil, when he almost succumbed to the mindless rage of a terrorist mind-set -- fortunately, he had his brother Lakshmana beside him to prevail upon him with sage counsel and exercise a measure of soothing, calming, sane influence. In the story of the Ramayana, when it seems as though Rama would simply go over the brink of despair, and give way to the rage and violence seething within him, we see his brother Lakshmana stepping in right in time and pulling his brother away from the very edge of tragic disaster which the other brother otherwise would have certainly plunged into headlong in a free-fall of moral degradation, as it were. ************* It is here that we must briefly digress. We must pause to examine a line, a phrase from the famous Tamil hymn of the Vaishnavite faith, the TiruppAvai of AndAl. In the TiruppAvai, there is a well-known stanza in which an extraordinary poetic phrase appears -- one of the most quotable of lines, in fact, in the whole hymn: "pOginraarai pOgAmal kaathu..." Now, in the specific thematic context of the TiruppAvai itself, this line has been quite copiously commentated upon by several scholars of Tamil literature, Vaishnavite theologians and Vedantic philosophers. But our present interest in this phrase is not so much the theological or philosophical angle as it is in its literal interpretation and application in the context of the "sundara-kaandam" and the theme of human Despair presently discoursed upon. The literal meaning of the phrase "pOginraarai pOgAmal kaathu..." means in simple English, "Pulling someone back, just in the nick of time, from going away". It means rescuing someone at the very last moment; saving someone from going down a road to destruction; effecting the rescue of someone at the very last minute from grave moral disaster. Now, when he saw his brother Rama sinking in despair and his mind being slowly disfigured to begin resembling the darkest side of a "terrorist's" personality, Lakshmana immediately knew he had to step in and play the restraining role of a moral estoppel. In other words -- or more accurately, in the words of the TiruppAvai -- Lakshmana knew he must pull Rama back from the brink of a grave personal disaster -- i.e. "pOginraarai pOgAmal kaathu..." Thus, it is that we see in the Ramayana, it falls to the lot of Lakshmana, the younger brother, to save and comfort the elder Rama. It is a somewhat unusual incident in the Ramayana since throughout the epic on many occasions, it is hotheaded and reckless Lakshmana who is often reined in and reprimanded by Rama for folly. But here the wonted position is reversed. Lakshmana thus tells his brother: (III. 65. 4-6/66.18-19) "ekasya naaparAdaath lOkaan hartUm tvamarhasi budhischa tE mahAprAgnya devairapi duranvayA shOkEnAbhi prasUptam tE gnAyanam sambhOdhayAm-yaham" "Do not become a stranger to your own innate good nature, Rama! Ravana has taken away your wife, but why do you wish to punish the whole world and universe of life for it? Is it the real you, the inner and true man within Rama, who is saying these things as you do now? "Give up this boiling rage! Let us instead go about now to somehow search and find Sita. Unable to bear your grief, your despair, Rama, you have allowed yourself and your good sense to go to sleep. Beware! Go no further down this path! Pull back! This is not the way for you to go. The world , the gods, the creatures of the forests at large are not responsible for your plight. They do not deserve to be the target of your rage. They are not the cause of your despair and condition... "I'm only trying to awaken you, Rama, that's all. I'm not trying to reprimand or redeem you, my dear brother! Arise, shake off these grim thoughts that are unworthy of you!" *************** It is one of the most beautiful scenes described in the Ramayana -- this particular scene where the Lord Almighty in his avatar as Sri Rama is pulled away from the edge of a moral precipice -- the perilous road that leads to a "terrorist" way of thinking, to the "terrorist" mind-set and moral position in life --- at the very last minute indeed by Lakshmana. And if ever we need no more than a single poetic phrase to describe fully that poignant scene of the Ramayana, we need look no further than borrow from the TiruppAvai and say: "pOginraarai pOgAmal kaathu..." (to be continued) Regards, daasan, Sudarshan MK Warm Regards, Sudarshan " A life is perhaps worth nothing; but nothing certainly is worth as much as life". (Andre Malraux) __________________________________________________________ Yahoo! India Answers: Share what you know. 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