Dharma of Potential
Can we discover the svara of our inner tanpura that aligns being with doing?
For most Indians who grew up during the eighties and nineties, including me, the Industrial Age's Divine Gospel for success was the life script we followed to a T.
Study Well -->Get Good Grades -> Get Good Jobs -->Live Your Good Life.
If you've grown up in India, you would exactly know what I am talking about. You tacitly agree to play the game as a karmic payback duty for your parents' lifetime of sweat and hard work.
Your career choices get appropriated from your Ivy League cousins. Everyone, except you, gets to decide all the important choices in your life. Starting from your LIC Insurance Plan Premium to your promotion cycle to your portfolio of religious after-life insurance plans. Of course, you do get to choose things like, you know, the clothes you wear.
My life played out exactly by this life script until I met an organic farmer in a, well, business school. MBA suddenly acquired a new meaning: It became a deeply transformative journey of uncovering Myths, Biases, and Assumptions.
Today, as I look back on the question of meaning, having explored the difficult ‘pathless path' of a solopreneur for the past three years, I see two broader generative patterns that enliven me.
01. Meaning as a process of decolonization
We are a half-colonized country. We are neither settler cultures (as it happened in the case of Aborigines, or Maoris) nor are we truly indigenous cultures.
Of course, there is also a political wave that is fueling this decolonization wave in zero-sum means. Just because we find meaning in decolonizing ourselves doesn’t mean we engage in othering.
During an interaction with a correspondent on 6.6.1947, Mahatma Gandhi wrote a powerful statement that still resonates with me.
"You are gravely mistaken in assuming that as soon swaraj comes, prosperity will flood the country. If, before assuming that, you had used your imagination a bit to see that after 150 years of slavery, we would need at least half that much time to cleanse our body politic of the virus that has infiltrated every cell and pore of our being—during our subjection, you would not have found it necessary to ask me.
I am sure you will understand what I mean, namely, that far greater sacrifices will be needed after the attainment of self-government to establish good government and raise the people—than were required for the attainment of freedom by means of Satyagraha"
In many of my recent conversations with friends about India, I kept going back to this quote from Gandhi.
Perhaps, Gandhi was prescient enough to predict that this nation in the 75th year of Independence would undergo an important, albeit violent process of "decolonizing" to exhume our colonial consciousness.
In the age of Amrit Kaal, we are witnessing a grand Samudra Manthan of collectively inquiring "What does it mean to be an Indian?".
Of course, as it happens in a Samudra Manthan, massive 'halahala' vish poison is bound to come out, opening up past wounds, past hurts, and past inequities.
In this massive Samudra Manthan process, nothing is sacred, including the sacred samvidhaan, the constitution of this country.
Even though the Constitution may have been an immediate knee-jerk reaction to the aftermath of Partition, with the passage of time, everything about the Constitution is now being subjected to massive scrutiny.
Would this nation go past through this halahala we are currently swimming through and rediscover the 'amrit' (divine nectar) that would help us discover the great potential of this country? I hope so:)
Meaning as a process of producerisation of the economy.
Today, many are jumping onto Creator Economy. Many reach out to me (given that I work in agritech) asking for ways to go back to their native village and pursue organic farming. There are some who are fueled by romanticism. There are also some who are fueled by a deeper quest to imagine another life that is very much possible and are working hard to make it work.
In a half-colonized country like India, while meaning is anchored to our cultural identity, the colonized parts feed our economic lives. Can we reclaim these splintered parts and rediscover the dharma that is rooted in artha and artha that is rooted in dharma?
Perhaps, when we rediscover the harmony of doing and being, we discover strengths that allow us to stay anchored in the uncertainties of life.
Can we rediscover the inner tanpura that stays focused on the harmonious musical notes of being and doing?