Utility or futility ?

 

  

Picture credits - Ip.Panda.org

Whenever I’m caught up in a moral quandary, my mother’s “childhood chronicles” have always come in handy. My mother has lived a warm and endearing childhood by loitering around and learning from the most kind and sensibly principled souls, the “unbiased way of life”, which most of the time allows her to sight the right and bust the confusions if any. On the other side, my life up till now, that has been encased with innumerable anomalous events, which were both amusing and bemusing at different times, has indeed persuaded me to shape all my beliefs and principles in a way that has strongly dissuaded me to be of the world and this hardship of not being able to tune in with the world has put me under constant contemplation about the accuracy of my doctrines.

One gloomy afternoon, it was raining cats and dogs, I was in my living room reading a philosophical book and my mother was sitting beside me peeling some fresh peas, when I happened to read through an ideology that fanned and validated the monastic dogmas in me, which said, “be active in the world but be not of the world”. Thrilled by this, I instantly conveyed the same to my mother, who nodded with a calm grin and agreed that I was well equipped with the right know-how about the existence but at the same time lacked the core knowledge that was restricting me from reaping its maximum utility. Taking advantage of the opportunity to introduce me to my deficiency, awareness about which, my mother believed would amplify the benefits of all that I had learnt and known in life, she began narrating the story of her childhood friend Arundhati (name changed), whose life she had witnessed in close proximity and grasped the paramount skill to a balanced life.     

It is an organic phenomenon, for the progeny to inherit the traits of the progenitor. Arundhati, among both her parents, had inherited her father’s characteristics in major proportion and a very little of her mother’s. Her father was featured with some universally admired monkish characteristics like uttermost earnestness and placidity fortified with vivid virtues and righteousness. But simultaneously he was also overwhelmingly timid and submissive that in turn had molded him into a person of alleviated inner fortitude and extreme diffidence, disallowing him to practice those Godly traits in its absolute form, thereby, transforming a boon into curse.

On the flipside, Arundhati’s mother was a person of strong integrity, with intense courage and justness that involuntarily made her rebellious to any kind of immorality. Due to this nature of hers, there were repeated disagreements between her and her husband because, often, his submissiveness coaxed him to easily compromise on his virtues and also fall prey to deceits. Arundhati’s mother possessed this rare quality of modifying her virtues with each situation, without compromising on its chastity. She was shrewd enough to understand ,no learning in life had a common application, each lesson possessed various shades to it and practicing the appropriate shade depending on the situation could only turn it into an asset which otherwise would negate its real purpose and that made her the sole protector of her family from all the evils and unrighteousness.         

As a successor of her father’s lineage, Arundhati grew up to be a tender-hearted virtuous human who kept others first and self next. Unlike her mother, she could not manage to judge the need and extent to which one could give ground to in a particular situation which often landed her in discomfiture and pain. Since childhood, her soft and timid nature was a temptation for the people around her to taunt every act of hers as they were sure of getting away with it effortlessly. With the passing years, though Arundhati evolved into pious women with polished uprightness, it did not benefit either her or anyone else as she was devoid of its pragmatic execution and her unnecessary submissiveness added to its futility.

“Rigidity at the time of flexibility and flexibility at the time of rigidity, culminates in defeat”, an unerring principle which Arundhati’s mother, her savior, constantly advocated to her every time she was deeply pained for blindly yielding to an unworthy circumstance, however, she never built an aptitude to grasp its essence. By the time she attained adulthood, Arundhati had already deprived herself of major watersheds of life where the magnitude of damage was endurable, but only until she got married.

Arundhati was persuaded to marry her father’s close acquaintance’s son, who was a young widower, dwelling in England. Her father’s erroneous understanding about humanity lured him to unconsciously promise his friend about marrying his beloved daughter to his only son, even after knowing that this marriage was only to pander to the baseless desire of his friend and his wife who wanted their offspring, Rama Rao to have another wife for the sake of satisfying the societal conservatism. Mr. Rama Rao, who had unwillingly yielded to his parents’ relentless plead for remarriage was thoughtful enough to confess to Arundhati about how indifferent he was to this union and even if she consented to marry him, he would still return back to England without her. Despite being aware of this fact, her virtues veiled by ignorance did not allow her to do anything that would break her father’s word and dignity.

In spite of constant protests by her mother, Arundhati refused to retreat from her decision of compromising the rest of her life for an unfounded cause covered in a façade of sympathy. A week after marriage, Rama Rao left to England leaving Arundhati in absolute ambiguity. She took months to grasp her new reality which left her in deep remorse as she knew; this time, her irresponsible discharge of righteousness had propelled her into an irreversible condition. With the passing years, she gradually thawed to her new life of “married merely as a daughter-in-law” and Rama Rao was stubborn enough to not acknowledge her existence even in the letters written to his parents as it was just restricted to knowing their welfare and informing about his.

On her mother’s suggestion, Arundhati began teaching in a school which gradually developed into her purpose of life as it provided immense solace and also gave her another chance to notice the intricacies of life morals through the eyes of young budding earthlings, which transformed each day of hers’ into an eye opener because it forced her to realize and accept that even though she was blessed with rich virtues, she lacked “the fulcrum”, that morphed her boon into curse.

Reminiscing the memories of her warm friend, my teary eyed mother took me in her arms and said “If at all I’ve had a chance to add value to anything, anybody or even to myself in life, through my beliefs or principles, it has to be attributed to Arundhati, as she has knowingly or unknowingly illuminated me with an elite intelligence that verily forms ‘the nucleus’ of a balanced life. Being the eye witness of her journey, has embellished my beliefs with a flawless piece of wisdom that knowledge in any form, doesn’t involve universal application. But the universal key for unlocking the constructive purpose of any knowledge is “Discretion”. Practice of a specific lesson, devoid of discretion, will only nullify its valuable shade. Lack of discrimination in implementing anything we know, entails vanity of its core purpose. We are ought to view every event as discrete and develop the savvy to judge the right shade of a particular knowledge, without altering its crux and then counter it, as, this happens to be the elemental principle for amplifying the enormity of any awareness. So never forget, “Discretion is the key to avoid paying destruction as the fee”.

The minute she finished talking, the first thing I did was, looked in her eyes, took her hand and made a promise for lifetime that I would never pay destruction as a fee as I now know the key.

Simple thoughts to live well

To begin or end, construct or destruct, hold on or let go, reveal or conceal, respond or ignore, continue or terminate, allow or disallow, be active or passive, be bound or free, be sensitive or insensitive; every move in life is subject to discretion only to witness its optimistic effect.

Allow the ‘dawn of discretion’ to avoid the ‘dusk of knowledge’.