Discovering Homo Dharmicus
Quitting my full-time job was the first step to realise that I could no longer be 'Homo Economicus'. The portal is now open to discover what it takes to embody 'Homo Dharmicus'.
I vividly remember the feeling of being completely submerged inside my skin. On that special month of the year when I turned 34, I was in a mess of augustine proportions. I was shuttling between my home and the hospital. My wife had been admitted for dengue. My one-year-old son contracted a fever and I quickly joined the feverish party.
As a student of naturopathy, I preferred to let my body decide the necessary course of action without any intervention and iatrogenic effects. I stayed with my body in every waking moment as I would do to a friend going through her rough patch. I ensured that this friend was fed with minimal inputs to do routine maintenance tasks. I stood with her, as she and I pored over every physiological phenomenon that was emerging from within and without.
When I came out of my illness, my body and mind felt deeply nourished.
Perhaps the illness was a conspiracy for the body and the mind to shed its unwanted skin. Or perhaps it was a conspiracy hatched by my newborn child to help his father focus on the barest essentials of life.
Sooner than enough, it became obvious that I had lost the ability to relate to almost everything I had done before the illness took over. When my illness forced me to press Ctrl+Alt+Del, perhaps, several cache files of emotions and memories that were unnecessarily clogging my subconscious had been deleted.
No wonder I was rejoicing.
I felt the primordial kick of being left with a tabula rasa to figure out what I wanted to do. And the first thing I did was write an email to my boss saying I wanted to quit my full-time job.
On September 3rd, 2019, I wrote my resignation letter, quitting my full-time job as a product manager in an agritech startup.
Quitting my full-time job was the first step of the realization that I could no longer afford to be ‘Homo Economicus’. After an intense longing of more than eight years ever since I became obsessed with questions of meaning and freedom, the portal was finally opening up for me to discover what it really meant to live the hypothesis of a life that sought to embody ‘Homo Dharmicus’
When I first read Jack Welch's autobiography, "Straight from the Gut", during my impressionable teenage years, there was a phrase that got etched deep in my subconscious.
Jack Welch gets a call from his boss, the erstwhile GE CEO, Reg Jones. He asks Jack to meet him the next day in his office to discuss his promotion. When Jack arrives at Reg's Office, Reg doles out this piece of advice.
"You can't be a big fish in a small pond anymore. If you want to be considered for bigger things, you're going to have to come here."
Even though I was a vegetarian and had no freakin 'clue about fishing, "Big fish in a small pond" became my pet catchphrase ever since.
Back in my school days, when I first announced to my friends that I was leaving the conservative cocoon of my upbringing, Mylapore, Chennai to reach the Baniya trading shores of Tapi River and join NIT Surat for my Engineering, I remember the sound of that presumptuous voice telling his school friends,
"You can't be a big fish in a small pond anymore"
In almost every other hiring interview, whenever I wanted to impress interviewers who were curious about my job change, my response at the drop of a hat was,
"You can't be a big fish in a small pond anymore"
Today, as I revisit my life story, I realize that I hold no attachment to this phrase. I no longer need it. Thanks for all the fish!
As Kabir says, in his most famous, yet deeply misunderstood couplet
मैं मेरा घर जाळिया रे, जोगिया जी | Main mera ghar jaadiya re, jogiya ji
I burnt down my house, yogi
लियो पलीता हाथ | Liyo paleeta haath
I took up the flaming torch
कोई अगर जाळो घर आपरो रे, जोगिया जी | Koi agar jaado ghar aapro re, jogiya ji
If you scorch your own house, yogi
चलो हमारे साथ | Chalo humaare saath.
Then join me on this walk
At some point in your life, if you want to move beyond this pond-jumping business and embark on an odyssey into the infinite ocean, you have to burn down the comforts of your paycheque lifestyle.
At one level, the choice was propelled by idealism to discover newer ways of being that I hadn’t explored in the eight years of paycheque life. And at another level, the choice was driven by an existential urgency to get in touch with my inner Sherlock Holmes who was restless to discover what it meant to live a meaningful life.
The clues were everywhere. The massive collapse of our global ecosystems. The unsettling realization that most collective markers of personal success were linked directly to expanding the scope of how much energy one would consume, which in turn threatened the future of the human species.
Unlike the fictional Sherlock Holmes who refuses to believe legends until he has verified for himself, this existential Sherlock had no other choice but to investigate all the drama happening outside and inside himself to understand the struggles involved in meaning-making in an age of climate change.
And when you have this existential urgency, quitting isn’t a choice to pull away from the world as it is. It is a carpet-pulling exercise to shift the ground and see the world in a new light.
Dear Readers,
What you read above is the first chapter in which I set the context of my exploration of four purusharthas.
Do share your thoughts if you find this evocative. I am sorry to keep sharing more rough edges here. I am tempted to make this space a playful space. Do sign out if you find this too jarring for your taste.
Regards
Venky