Dorna; A Selfish Icon of Guru

गुरूर्ब्रह्मा गुरूर्विष्णु र्गुरूदेवो महेश्वरः।

गुरुः साक्षात परं ब्रह्म तस्मै श्री गुरवे नमः॥

Guru Brahma Gurur Vishnu

Guru Devo Maheshwaraha

Guru Saakshat Para Brahma

Tasmai Sree Gurave Namaha

Meaning: Guru is verily the representative of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. He creates, sustains knowledge and destroys the weeds of ignorance. I salute such a Guru.

This above mantra really glorifies the Teachers Day and this is our culture- purely eastern culture. However, I’m not satisfied with such clichés. Let me trace out the myths.

According to the Mahabharat, one day, Pandavas are out hunting, and their dog wanders off and comes upon Ekalavya. The dog starts barking and to shut him up Eklavya shoots seven arrows around his mouth and zips it up. The dog is not hurt and returns whimpering to the Pandavas. They are amazed at this extraordinary feat. Eklavya informs them innocently that he is Dorna’s pupil. Arjun, Dorna’s star student, is shocked to hear that his teacher has a secret pupil, who might pose a challenge to him.

Dorna is just as puzzeled when he hears this and goes to see his invisible pupil, who is honored and delighted to see his teacher.

‘If you are my pupil, then you will have to pay me my teacher’s fee,’ says Dorna.

‘Command me, my guru,’ says Ekalavya. There is nothing I shall not give my guru.’

‘Give me your right thumb,’ commands Dorna.

Eklavya keeps his promise, cuts off his thumb and gives it to his supposed teacher. Arjun is relieved.

We are horrified at Dorna’s command which imprints an image of ruthless teacher forever in our eyes.

Eklavya’s foolish act has been glorified as an icon of a good student. The Mahabharata has so many references of the teacher student relationship. When Arjuna is in the war against Kauravas, he hesitates to fight against of his teacher and relatives. But Krishna, tactfully persuades him by giving long speech of eternity.

While tracing back to the Upanisads and Purans, we can find several examples of selfish relationship between the teacher and the student. So, today, we have commoditized this relation on the same base. There are only few people who truly respect his/her teachers. If Dorna type teachers exist in our society, Krishna’s suggestion to Arjun in the battlefield is cent percent pragmatic.

We people are selfish by nature; you and me, all. We are often guided by sinister desire. It is the desire to be honored, to be loved, to be respected, to be profited and many more. When we see obstacles on the way of fulfilling such desires, we don’t see any bond as such. Here, I don’t mean to disrespect my teachers or, the students. But it is the fact that the teacher student relation itself is give and take relation and in such relation bond becomes commodity.

They say, “A guru is he who changes the life with his knowledge.” I agree with this. There are many gurus in our life who directly and indirectly involve in changing our life. No one can success alone. Behind everyone’s success there is a queue of people who have worked as scaffolding. They are all our gurus and we must respect them.

Dorna is selfish icon of guru who asks the thumb of Eklavya to make his pupil Arjun victorious since he has given his words to all. He gets scared with Eklavya’s skill on arrow shooting. On the one hand, he denies teaching Eklavya due to his lower caste; and on the other hand he asks for his thumb. What can be so devilish act than this which we are worshipping as Guru. It’s time to change our perspective on the word Guru. A beggar, a tinker, a musketeer can be guru in different situations. Parents can’t be guru only by giving birth of children. They should fulfill minimum responsibility of parenthood. In place of parents, children can be a guru of their parents. We should break the statues of generalization. A student can be a guru for his teacher.  A true reciprocity must be there in between teacher and the students. Teachers are selling their ideas, skills and knowledge and the students are buying them in the skyrocketing prices. Therefore, after buying and selling, there is no bond at all. It’s a straightforward matter between teachers and the students as it is in between the dealer and the customer.

Anyway, modern technology has not only isolated the people from human relation, it sometimes helped to bring people together. On this auspicious occasion of Guru Purnima, many students have used the wall of Facebook to remember their teachers. Besides, there might be phone calls, sms, emails twits, skypes etc. thanks to this technology. It sometimes sucks and sometimes rocks. It rocks today. Thanks to all my students.

In my life, there are many gurus who have really inspired, taught and pushed me ahead on my journey.  I, heartily, salute them.

Pilgrimage

It was June 15, 2013. We rode on a long bus to Kedarnath and  Badrinath,  on the northern part of India, a famous pilgrimage of Hindus. There were 35 people in the bus including old, young, men and women. They were singing religious songs, hymns and prayers. Some of them were murmuring the names of Hindu deities.

After one day’s comfortable ride on the bus, it began raining. We had full faith on the god; so that we continued our journey. The rain didn’t stop. Drizzling changed into downpour with lightening. Terror surged in us. The visibility became poorer and poorer and driving became dangerous. The situation was almost aggravated. Lightening and thundering was like a bombarding and we were like recently escaped soldiers from the war.

Soon, there appeared a heavy flood in the Ganga River. There were landslides on the way. Telephone networks were disconnected. Roads blocked. Thousands of vehicles; cars buses, motor bikes stuck on the way. A kind of hysteric cry could be heard. We could see the wobbling buses on the flow of the river. We were reciting the names of the gods. I took the booklet of hanuman chalisa and murmured “Sree guru charana saroj raja nija mana mukura sudhari…” Some of them were calling the names of Shive and Ram. 

We waited long to see the clear sky and dry roads. The raining continued for three days. Since roads were swamped away by the landslides, we had to spend all time in the bus. It was remote hill and no houses were near about. We didn’t have food and water. We shared the food brought by some intelligent senior citizens. At the mid-night, we heard the terror mixed cry. We became alert. There appeared three dark skinned full boned men. We couldn’t speak. They started asking money, jewelry and mobile phones showing pistols. Most of the people in the bus were old and were not able to defend themselves. They could only wish Rama had appeared to save the life of his followers. They robbed everything and ran away. Senior citizens were saying that it was ‘Prabhu’s Lila’ which nobody could stop.

I couldn’t tolerate the situation. As soon as they got off the bus, I, too, lurked out and followed them. When they were descending the slope, I threw the stones at them and injured two, three of them. Soon, there came other passengers. All we went in a group to chase them and returned whatever they robbed before. The injured ones were crying and begging for their life. Two boys pee in their mouth. We giggled. We forgot where we were. We spent three days and nights without food and water, though some of them drank filthy water from the nearby pond made up of the collected raindrops.

On the fourth day, a group of people in a uniform came to rescue us. They took the old people on the plane. Those who had strong bone were helped to cross the obstacle with the help of rope. We had some breads and water to make us alive. Finally, we reached to the shelter made by the Indian police to rescue pilgrimages. For the first time we knew that there were thousands of people missing. Their relatives were there in search of them.

The rescue team drove us up to Nepal boarder, Rupaidiya. There was a crowd of people. They offered us garlands as if we were the brave soldiers who were returning after the victory in a bloody war with India. 

A Moment in an Eternity; A Collection of Gems by Tulsi Thapa

“A Moment in an Eternity” is a brief collection of poems written in the Japanese Hyaku style. This book is the soul and mind of the poet. Mr Tulsi Thapa, being a true genius and a veteran of the modern thought, he hardly appears in the media. Life is a mystery and we keep on unfolding the mysteries of it. Some people are artistic to document it in different forms of art and some of them remain isolated like Robinson Cruso’s Island. Tulsi Thapa is mixture of both. Despite the fact that his island is little bit visible, it is too much engaging.

“The Beginning” is the first step of his powerful images surging in the mind of the readers. I like to use the word ‘Good Beginning’ having reins and showing the direction of the self not the horse. When we are able to show the right direction to ourselves, our journey can be a wonderful experience.

Tulsi Thapa’s poems do not follow the rigid chronology of orderly writing like Dr. Samuel Johnson’s decorum. His writing can better represent the picture of an orchestra where everything falls from different direction, yet in a complete order. In his another poem, Thapa has given a blurred vision of the historical tower Dharahara:

Oh tower! Your height

Has now no history

You make us so dizzy.

History can be rewritten and changed by those who have power. The original height of the tower has become a mystery which may create dizziness in all the viewers. Furthermore, there are many other historical monuments in the country which have been disfigured and blurred in the pages of history. There is no final history as Foucault says.

Similarly, “Excavation”, “Rani Pokhari”, “Kathmandu”, “Pokhara “are other poems where the poet ignites the light of the history in relation to the present.  Kathmandu is personified, “who has a soul, warm and bold.” Rani Pokhari is raising a question to the people:

Why is this bar to my fate

When I am imprisoned

 In my own depth?

The word imprisoned may denote the history of Rani Pokhari which has been imprisoned in the musty books as she is encircled by the iron bar. ‘pokhara is the icon of Machhapuchhre who is standing like wounded soldier with  full of scars on its body and its blood  flooded in the Fewa Lake. This poem is also environment friendly. These days, the Machhapuchhre is becoming a huge skeleton and its crooked bones are visible. The white blood of it could be seen on the lake.

The poet asks the question of identity several times in the poems. In “Identification” he writes:

Born, it was me

Now he who is living

It’s not me, and not me.

When we grow old we lose our true self. We become artificial like plastic dolls in the showcase. We live the life of intense hypocrite. Our identity gets smeared and bleared. We hand on different batches of identity like a member of a political party, a manager of the bank, a husband of x, a teacher, a student etc. This identity keeps on changing. We can’t live our true self. So the poet says, “Now who is living, it’s not me and not me.” Great philosopher Heidegger’s idea of ‘nothingness’ can be seen in his poem entitled “The Mind”:

Take out everything from here

 When there is nothing

You really are there.

The poet is talking about the existence of a being out of nothing. Heidegger says, “What is the nothing? Our very first approach to this question has something unusual about it. In our asking we posit the nothing in advance as something that “is” such and such; we posit it as a being” (What is Metaphysics?,  3). Here, we only can realize our existence in the complete negation of conscious being. Similarly, his other poems ‘loneliness’, ‘Non- Existent’, ‘Man’ explore the meaning of human existence in a real sense. “Man” is the reflection of the true confused man of today like the confused army in the battlefield.

For non-living things

Its living being

Among themselves always confusing.

In this poem, he doesn’t see much difference between living and non-living thing except the latter is only the ‘difference marker’ to the first. J. Krishnamurti says, “We are aware that there is the conscious and unconscious mind, but most of us function only on the conscious level and our whole life is practically limited to that. We never pay attention to the deeper level of unconscious mind which creates confusion on the self”.  (The First and Last freedom, 202-206)

 As Krishnamurti says that we are only living with our conscious self, Thapa states “only the living being” differs from the non-living. However, we always are confusing in our true self, identity and on the issues of complete freedom.

Thapa’s poetry has no boundaries. There is not a single subject that he left untouched. In a small booklet, he has preserved the cosmos of mesmerizing ideas. He has raised the issues of humanism, democracy, environment, science and tradition. With the use of vivid imagery and economic use of the words, Thapa stands as a mountain; though mute for the commoners, an orator for the people like Devkota.

References:

Krishnamurti, J. The First and Last freedom. Chennai; Krishnamurti Foundation India, 2001.

Adams, Hazard , Leroy Searle. Ed. Critical Theory since 1965. London; Oxford University press, 1985.