India is a nightmare. But it is also a dream.
5000 years of a singular wave in the ocean of existence. It is a dream. Made up of fragments, us, innumerable, countless, insignificant, disposable, dispensible. Indira's net, we are dreaming a dream.
This might not be unique about India. I've not been to China, but I'd imagine China too is a dream, of a similar manifest and size. Of course, every life, every city, every nation is a dream, but I feel that at some point the quantity of time the thread has remained unbroken translates into a qualitative difference in the incomprehensible massiveness of the quilt it gets woven into.
So what I'm saying is - the 2000 year old civilizations are also dreams, and so are the nascent 300 old nations. They're not worse or better dreams. They're just different. I happen to dream in a 5000 year old, likely older still, dream, and that's what I can talk of.
India is a dream. It is a nightmare too, but it is a dream.
Religion is a big part of it. Without Hinduism, this would've been a thread of existence, but not necessarily a dream. Other cultures (understandably) tend to view their non-native religion in the same light as their mother religion, and of late it is cultures for whom the experience of Hinduism is completely alien are the ones that are writing the narratives that get passed off as conventional wisdom. Thus the immensity, the overarchingness, and the tenderness of Hinduism is lost to the millions, including Indians, educated on conventional education.
No worries though, nothing is lost, because there are a billion people that haven't read those books, and are just living the dream. It is a nightmare sometimes, and the threat is never far, but it is a dream.
Why bring education into it? Because it so shrivelled, what gets passed off as philosophy nowadays. No, it was not better in the old times, this is not a call to past glory. The dream realizes its transientness - there is not conception of progress or regress in Hinduism - it is all a cycle, time doesn't really have a meaning in this timeless dream.
Once, long time ago, a much younger me was reading a very old book, I forget which one, when I realized that people have not changed at all since word has been recorded. We are the same as the people who lived a few millienia ago. Take a person, could be from anywhere in the world which had some form of a civilization, not necessarily India, and he'll be totally at home in the modern day world. Sure, they might struggle to arrange for a plumber using their phone, but conceptually there is nothing in this world they wouldn't have the mental capacity to understand.
This entire notion of progress, of time's arrow moving forward, this is all a shrivelled conception which likely originated when the less imaginative amongst us took over the reins of education. I can even understand the mechanism - the people least in touch with the world, like myself, your author, are the ones most likely to go off writing, or collating writing about the world. The more imaginative ones are just living the dream.
A particularly silly form of this conceit comes to play in the "I only believe in science" types. It takes a total lack of imagination, a total losing touch with the ridiculousness and the immensity and the inexplicablility of existence to be certain that what is manifest is all that is.
I don't believe in a big bearded guy in the sky, firstly because that's not my god, my gods (I'm a Hindu) are more innumerable and colorfully dressed, but jest aside, I don't believe in the lack of god either. We just don't have enough evidence to make a strong claim either way. The insistence, the conviction, that the universe has to follow logic is not only illogical, it is also completely out of touch with reality (if one'd allow oneself to be touched by it).
Manav, who are you railing against, who are you trying to convince, and of what?
Nothing. The dream's I've dreaming has been telling me to go on a rant about this for a while, and today I did. I didn't even come to the part which I, the ego, wanted to write about, but that's fine, I've learnt not to come in the way of the dream when it's dreaming.
When I was a kid I saw the Matrix. I was mindblown.
A few years later, I read the Gita. That is when I was truly mindblown – the Matrix has nothing on it. It doesn't matter if you believe in god or not, it is mindblowing either way.
If you believe in god, it is god speaking to "Neo", to each one of us, individually, while speaking to all of us collectively.
If you don't believe in god, then you realize that a billion people have been living their day to day lives for thousands of years in a much richer sci-fi conception than the best ever sci-fi movie than the modern world has made.
Some of you might go and read the Gita spurred by this (I don't know if anyone will ever read this, but let's assume). You might read it, and then not find anything in it.
This is to be expected. If you're not in India, then you'd not be able to connect the dots. Foreign folks, for no fault of their own, often have a very distorted view of what Hinduism is (just like I'd have a very distorted view of their culture), and would miss either the immensity or the mundanity of Gita, where both of them are essential. And if you're in India, you may have likely have imbibed its message already without your ever knowing about or even touching the Gita.
But let's imagine you read more. The more you read, the more you'd find how incomprehensibly immense Hinduism is. It sounds like bean counting to try and enumerate its immensity, and it can only be felt once one opens their eyes to the sublimeness of it, it is the water in which we're swimming.
I'd read an anecdote once, I don't know if it's true. An Indian noble laureate, when 17, went to their grandfather, and confided in them - "I don't believe in our gods, or gods in general, and I'm concerned I'm not being a honest about my lack of belief". To which their grandfather replied, "Lol, there is nothing to worry about, looks like you just belong to the atheist branch of Hinduism".
Like all incisive jests, it is partial. Most people who inherit Hinduism as a religion live their lives in fluid flexibility of belief, disbelief; caring for its minuate, and completely disregarding it. There are many different ways ("मार्ग") one can choose to live your life in accordance and harmony with the dream, and some of them don't even ask for faith.
It is not also a whatever goes. If you don't let yourself be immersed in the dream and keep waking yourself up to test if you're asleep or dreaming, you'll just not have the dream. Even placebo needs to be passed off as medicine to be effective.
I have written all these words, and these are all original thoughts, and after writing them down I just now realize that I'm just expounding on "माया". Which illustrates my point - the dream has been going on for 5000 years, and has already had had time to dream of all that I can dream.
This does not mean inaction, nor does this mean action. What it means cannot be put in shorter or more incisive words than "कर्म करो फल की चिंता मत करो". What is action, what is inaction, what is appropriate action, all of these are very simple things that one can know, but not from the words that mention them. Words will just left one writhing in definitional twists.
If you're born in India, you might be lucky. I was born here, and I feel lucky. This is not a praise, no, for dreams can be nightmares too, but India is a dream, and I'm dreaming it.