An ancient inherited duty

My parents are ideologically very stiff - they are, unlike many other NRIs, staunchly against casteism, religion, tradition and authoritarianism. Their driving philosophies are simple: it is wrong to hurt others to benefit yourself and cultivating a rich life means gathering knowledge. This, as I referenced in my previous post about vegetarianism, has some roots in the Smarta tradition but it also has strong reinforcements from the Enlightenment era thinkers of Europe. My parents were as big fans of Dr. Spock’s nonviolent method of childrearing as they were of Gandhi and Nehru’s nonviolent method of nation-building. For all their flaws, they are extremely principled people who never give up on the idea that the world can and has to be better. In fact, I’d say that most of their flaws tie into this animus. They’re not selfish people, and this comes to a fault.

I was born when both my parents were 40+, so I got to see them during an era of consolidation. They had already had many of their transformative experiences by the time I was born and as a result, I didn’t see them waver on their principles very much. They had ossified them by the time I came around. For a long time through my maturation and adulthood, I found it hard to relate to them because their ideas were so fixed and I was still maturing. For me, experimentation was far more important than defending an existing set of principles. This naturally made me recalcitrant but in a lowkey way - I wasn’t interested in having outright arguments with my parents until recently. I hated the idea of arguing, so instead I retreated - thousands of miles away. It was a ‘better world’ if I didn’t argue with my parents.

We all go through crucible moments in our lives. Stressful, painful instances where many of the luxuries of life like free time are stripped away forcing us to focus exclusively on what really matters to us. It is in those moments that I think we find the ‘iron’ part of us. With an abundance of calories and time comes the ability to create an abundance of energetically expensive coping mechanisms, pretensions and lies. When that luxury is taken away, our nature is revealed. There’s a story about a Greek philosopher who pushes a potential student’s head into the water for a whole minute and asks him: “What did you want most when I was holding you down under water?”. The student responds: “Air!”. The philosopher rejects him because if he was truly meant to be a scholar, he would have said “Knowledge”.

I wandered a lot in the past few years - morally, spiritually, physically. During that time, I experienced a lot of crucible moments and I grew even further from my parents. As that enormous gap kept widening, it led not to silence, but to argument. On the surface it looked like we were arguing about things that deeply divide us: eating meat vs. not. But I look back now and realize that one level below that, we were actually fighting for the same thing: the idea that the world could be better, could be more nourishing, less frighening. And it was something that I wanted not just for myself but for everyone in my life - I wanted to bring everyone with me to this new and better world. I see myself doing this with everyone - I want to help others, I want to bring them to experience the lightness of being I found so recently. But I don’t really know how, and the more I try to do it, the more I frustrate myself and everyone else. There is an iron part of others as well that I realize is different from mine. My expectation is that I’ll help one person and that will go on to help others and slowly scale up into a transformation of the world into a better one than we have now. It’s a lot to place on a few interactions. But this is what I kept coming back to in my wandering - I will always think about how the world can be better and I will always gather knowledge. It’s when I was drowning in those crucible moments that this became clear to me - the iron part of me.

Even in my worst moments, the rationalizations I would come up with for the cruel things I did would be inflected by the language of greater justice and tempered by empathy. And after the fact, I always reckoned with how I can avoid such cruelty, what led me to that in the first place. I still to this day, seek knowledge about myself so that I can construct and live in a better world.

I am only now acknowledging how much I owe to my parents for this spine of my being. Their inheritance was not just a brahminicial tradition seated in an obsolete feudal order, it was also the optimism of rationality, science and the belief in inherent human dignity. The way the original Smarta tradition itself was a synthesis of Vedic and non-Vedic thoughts, so too is my parent’s ideology a synthesis of Indian and non-Indian thought. Those principles, as vexing as they can be, will never leave me.

I grew up as an Indian in a largely white America, and so I felt ‘of two worlds’ in my life. But this in-betweenness goes back even further, down to the roots of my cognitive being as learned in my family’s home. We were always going to be a synthesis of ideas near and far. I grow frustrated with people in my life when they don’t realize this about me - I feel the least seen when people misattribute values to me. I resented my parents for giving me a set of values that would be out of keeping with the ones that the world would label me with on a quick glance. But as I retreat from the American social game, find the friends and circle that works for me, I am ever more assured of the rightness of my posture. It is clear to me that there is nothing more important to me than to hold onto the view that the world can be better and that knowledge will get us there.