Bhakti

Dear Colonel:

First of all, I’m highly impressed to see an Indian army man saying:

“SO WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL???? For each such sacrifice there are plenty others guzzling beer and playing Tambola on Saturdays. Ask half the Fauji Officers on this list what they do on Saturdays, ask how much each is willing to shed from his or her salary for the unfortunate ones…”

This is a rare intellectual response, and frankly, I do not expect many Indian army officers to possess much of an intellectual or philosophical caliber. Whatever intellect they may have possessed when they joined the army, the regimentation and the hierarchical mentality that is drilled into them during their stay in the army, extinguishes it thoroughly and finishes their ability to think independently.

By design, an army cannot function if you do not follow the orders of your immediate superior blindly. It will become anarchy if you allow the freedom of questioning your superior in the army. Where as, in the civilized world of intellect and philosophy, freedom of thought and the freedom to question the unquestioned is the pre-condition.

If Galileo did not challenge the Church that claimed for two thousand years that earth was flat and the sun revolved around it, there would be no progress to the next step of civilization. Similarly, we challenge the status quo everyday, and take the next step towards our civilization. The typewriter was shattered by MS DOS of Bill Gates, and the MS DOS was shattered by Windows, and the Windows will be shattered someday by Artificial Intelligence. This is the process of civilization of man.

But the army, unfortunately, is a non-civilian field. You are not expected to be civil. You are in fact expected to be savage, live in the jungles and the mountains and the uninhabited areas and kill the enemy. There is no room for civilization.

Cultism (tantric vidya) is of several kinds. Nationalism is one of them. Brainwash young, inexperienced men, and send them on the frontiers to get butchered. Bhakti.

Do not question God in a crowd of blind, cultist bhakts, and do not question nationalism in a crowd of fools. They both will lynch you to your death.  

Questioning is not allowed. Thinking is not allowed. Not in religion. Not in the army.

The government of India in its annual budget this month has allocated Rs. 141,000 crores for defence expenditure, a 35% increase over last year, in the midst of an economic recession.

But one cannot blame India alone for behaving like a buffoon. We live in an imperfect world. The very fact that armed forces exist in our world, is proof enough of our uncivilization. It is still the law of the jungle, where every morning when sunshine breaks, the lion knows it must run faster than the slowest deer in order to eat, and the deer knows it must run faster than the fastest lion in order to stay alive.

Violence, let us understand, is the most basic instinct of all wild animals, including man. You cannot change this reality by raising your voice against it. It is pointless and a waste of time. To achieve something on the front of non-violence, you will have to change the DNA of man. It is a battle against nature, and no army can win it.

But there is still hope. The hope that a nuclear war will happen in a few hundred years or sooner. All it needs is one mad man at the top. And the mathematical probability of that occurrence cannot be more than a few hundred years.