To Those Who Once Chose To Lose
Riding the zero within and without Bihar! Without a maddening and persistent passion to know, it would have been impossible to extract the decimal system out of the deepest recess of nature!
Preface
As my native land, Bihar, is getting devasted by a puny invisible virus, I am writing these words with tears welling up. I felt forced to delve into my manuscript lying dormant as the dead bodies wash up or are being buried in shallow graves on the banks of the rivers in Bihar.
Before I started writing this book, I googled shunya; the image below was one of the google hits. Shunya, that is, the zero, was plucked out of the human mind and planted in the Himalayan foothills of Bihar. Many would have difficulty believing me, but trust me, we all survive and make meaning in the “modern” world on the fruits from the trees planted in Bihar. Can you imagine modernity without its zeros and ones?
The image above is of the ‘Shunya Mudra,’ and it also symbolizes the number 3 for me.1 It is not the science that fascinates me about mudras and mantras; it is the narratives that come with these ancient techniques. To understand shunya, nothingness, or emptiness, one needs first to get the 3s right! In Sanskrit, alphabets are the basic constituents of the mind that we create for ourselves. The first letter of the Sanskrit alphabet, ‘अ (a),’ contains the shape of the number 3 in it. The first letter symbolizes the primordial consciousness underlying everything in the universe; it is the Shiva.
Among all the Indian states, there is just one state with the shape 3 forged in it, and that is Bihar. One needs to get inside the B and take the I away from the 3.
The intriguing realization is this: Had I not ventured out to the foreign land and parachuted in the city where I live now, New Haven, I would not have understood Bihar the way I do now.
Watching the pandemic trample Bihar and India from New Haven, the miasma created by a puny virus has veiled the universal consciousness and trapped sunk the intelligence in the sandy bed of the Ganges in that godforsaken land, the land where the seed for an unparalleled human flourishing was once planted.2 Hope it is the seeds that are shriveling and getting destroyed rather than the tree. Hope the travesty that has fallen on Bihar does not suck out the spirit of its people.
I started working on this book when a young man from India asked to explain how my native land descended into a dark place with such illustrious history.
Preface [by My Dad]
“How are you doing in your Connect-i-cut?” I would say that, and then I would give a raucous chuckle. What a name! What a name! You are taken away from me so that knowledge could purify your mind, and you get to learn your true self; the purification of your being is destined to take place in that region of the world.
“Dad, what do you mean? What do you mean by the purification of my being?”
“You need to realize that you are not this body, you are not your mind, you are not your bhava (emotion). You need to cut your connection with your body, your mind, and your emotions. That’s why I find it funny that destiny has taken you to the land of “Connect I Cut.” I would say very much like your native land, Bihar. And I am just imposing my interpretation of what you told me about Bihar and the meaning of its name.”
I still remember the day when I had picked him up and tossed him on the palang in my room for stealing the can of milk powder that I had bought for my sister’s newborn. Five of us lived in a one-bedroom house: one room and a living room or what we call a drawing-room in India. His mother had just brought him to the city; he was not more than five or six. My wife was an obstinate one; she was not schooled, but she came from once a well-off family fallen on hard times; her dad was a school teacher chased and imprisoned by the British, and she was hellbent on educating her children. Our eldest son was sent to live with my younger brother in Tatanagar, and she was not very happy about it. She herself had never been to any school, but she was not illiterate; she knew how to read and write; her mother was enchanted by Gandhi's movement and had learned the value of basic education and had ensured that her daughters knew how to read and write.
It was a mere happenstance that I learned about the meaning of the word ‘Champa.’ Words had come alive at a certain point in my life--something that I would leave for another book—and then my curiosity knew no bounds. Life felt like a jigsaw puzzle to be solved, and there was no looking back then. But I had already spent more than 8 decades on this planet, and I was ready to leave anytime; though, I chose to stay back to take care of my grandsons. You would, however, be surprised to know that I have barely talked to my youngest one for the last 15 years. Not because we did not want to talk, but because we both had lost our distinct minds! We were two bodies in one mind!
I was born in a village named Pipra to an utterly honest and arrogant person. I always knew how dangerous the combination was, but it was a different kind of time then. I could never muster the courage to tell my dad, while he was alive, that it was not good to have such an acute sense of righteousness. When my own son told me the same thing. I felt so proud of him:
Papaji, apne acche hone pe itna gumaan hona sahi nahi hain (Dad, it is not good to be so proud of one’s own righteousness).
The very first time I felt that I had done something good in life was when my youngest requested me to feel proud of his brothers rather than of him. And it was he who taught me through his numerous phone calls and WhatsApp chats about my state Bihar, my district, my block, and my village.
My village: Pipra.
My Prakhand: Govindganj,
My Block: Areraj
My District: Champaran (the forest of Magnolia, Champa).
Let me explain each of these words.
Pipra: a fig tree. It was a fig tree below which Siddharth had become the Buddha--the one who knows how little he knows.3
Buddha, Buddh, Buddhi, and Buddhu. The only one who has learned the art of forgiveness—Schama—only they can have the courage to drop their egos and live on the daan of others.
Areraj: One of Ashoka's edicts on iron pillars is found there. It has a temple dedicated to the blissful form of Shiva: Someshwar. And though many think that Soma was some fruit juice, my son told me that it is a kind of chemical that gets released in the human brain when it finds itself in a blissful state, and it is impossible to be in such a state with any sectarian thoughts and ideas. A sustained and healthful blissfulness is impossible without having the idea of ‘Vashudhaive Kutumbakam (the whole world is your family).’4
Champaran: the forest of Magnolia. The forest that gave rise to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, which made the udghoshna (announcement) of ‘Aham Brahmasmi.’
aham brahmāsmi - "I am Brahman" or "I am Divine (something that expands by contracting and grows to gradually make things glow in blissfulness)"[7] (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10 of the Yajur Veda)
My youngest one also made me aware of the connection between Vietnam and my godforsaken poor district of Champaran. I had heard of Vietnam, but then that country came alive when I found out about the connection with my district: the ancient name of Vietnam was Champa. Champaran is also the district where George Orwell saw the light for the very first time.
Bihar: the land where people choose to lose for all to win!5 Bihar was the land where Buddha roamed for more than 40 years after his salvation.
Bihar used to be Devbhoomi—it’s the land that allowed human minds to take the loftiest flights imaginable, and where some silent hollered: Soham (सो ऽहम्) (I Am That!).
How canonically paradoxical that an immigrant and a recently ‘minted’ American is making such a claim. It’s good that life is paradoxical. Had it been straight, life would have been eaten alive by some. The greed of some is so insatiable!
Chapter 1: Death of My Father
In my father's death, I learned about how Bihar’s crumbling infrastructure and dysfunctional state are imposing huge costs on its people. My father was in good health until he started to have some chest pain. After waiting for around 2 weeks, he was taken to a nearby hospital. No sooner than he reached there, he wanted to leave. He was afraid that the hospital could find multiple reasons to hold him hostage with the streams of tests and diagnoses. At the insistence of some who were acquainted with him, he did allow the hospital to run a few tests, but as soon as he started to feel worse, he asked my nephew to take him back.
Intuiting something was amiss, my nephew requested his dad to call and request me to talk to his grandpa while massaging his feet. It was already quite late there, and as I was in a public park with a colleague of mine, my phone was on mute, and I didn’t notice any call. As soon as I came back, another call came from my brother. My brother was crying and told me that our dad had left his body.
While the people of Bihar protected his dignity, my father left his body much before his time. Had Bihar been a better-managed state, my dad would have still been alive.
Because he was almost always in debt, he never bothered to inform us, and we never bothered to ask him how much money he earned. He was a clerk, so my guess was not much. I moved to Yale, and Yale turned my situation into that apocryphal monkey with his hand caught in a bottle--all that monkey needed to do was to let go of the sweet that he was holding in his fist, and he would have been free. I felt like that for a long time until just a week before his death. I was getting a sense that the sweet ball of knowledge in my fist had started to give in to the pressure, and I was finally able to pull some morsels out in my hand.
Fortunately, I was able to convey that to my dad:
“Remember, Papaji; I told you that I have been going on morning walk regularly with an older professor at Yale. I shared your poem with him; he loved it. I was telling him how it took me 20 years to understand your poem. You have managed to squeeze so much in just one poem--the gist of the Vedas, Buddha, and Jains.”
I could see my father smile in his non-characteristic self-effacing manner. His voice was trembling, and I could smell fear in it, and I started to miss not being around him immensely. I was already tired after a few Zoom sessions, and to numb my senses, I cycled to a nearby wine shop and bought a bottle of wine from Spain (notice the pain in Spain). I was still a little intoxicated, felt like sitting and meditating but could not bring myself to do that. My mind kept going back to Bihar and how the whole society was gradually sucking prana out of its people. I met a few Biharis in the US, but nothing concrete emerged from my meetings and discussions with them; it is hard to bring those seeking victory over others to feel real compassion for those fallen in tough times. A desire for victory over others makes many naturally suspicious, envious, and tribalistic, always ready to prove to the world how great they are.
It is extremely devastating to watch the unfolding devastation among the people in the region that once redefined the very definition of victory and defeat and in the process humanized us like none before or after.
The idea of defeat was turned onto its head, used as a vehicle to launch the human spirit to the height the world, IMHO, has yet to see again! People get trapped in their pursuit to win, and they do not even realize that. In Bihar, those who understood that aspect of reality started to do the opposite of all that our mind craves for: it craves to look beautiful by clothing itself, some people relinquished clothes; we like eating animals, some became vegetarian; we like to have sex, some abstained from it; we love our family, some left them; we like to eat well, some decided to eat just bare minimum to survive; we like the diversity of things, some lived colorless life. In no other society, in my knowledge, such indulgence in contradictions has taken place. For what purpose?
By practicing the balancing act of not succumbing to contradictions of things, Nature or Prakriti or Shakti let you come inside her, guide you inside her and impregnate your minds with ideas about her! You should by now not be surprised when I tell you that the famous book, Kama Sutra, was also written in the land of Bihar!
It was a land where mere existence was the source of orgasmic experience. When you are in tune with nature, even a slight breeze will leave you in awe; you would find all-pervasive beauty ejaculative, and the ejaculation will happen in your mind! Bihar was and can be a magical land once more if we can impregnate it with the desire to know and know it all at any cost!
The purpose was to know the nature of our being. In doing the opposite of our natural tendencies, they first weakened their minds and then looked at the world without the mind. I will let this idea sink inside you. How can one look at the world without one’s mind? One can. Stay on. I will tell you.
Bihar is that land where people dived so deep inside and went to the depth that no one other set of people has ever reached.
Should you be surprised that in that land, they pulled the number system, crushed it to create a dot, and colored the whole world in the color of a dot?
You should not be.
Just imagine such a society and its people! It was a land where some people knew how to live like the shadow of a mango tree on the stairs of the house. Some knew how to speak loud through their silence, and you can hear that silence all the way in Japan even today.
In my assessment of things, without the commitment, with a maddening passion, to know for a long period of time, it would have been impossible to extract a decimal system out of the deepest recess of nature.
The modern world is built on the ideas created in the land of Bihar--which in the present geography would consist of Bihar, Eastern UP, WB, and Bangladesh. And it is that story that most people are unaware of.
This is the book my father would have written had he received the kind of education I have received over the last 20 years. He was a quintessential Bihari, he seldom stepped out of Bihar, and yet he would throw his hand in the air and would declare: Show me a person more content and happier than me! And yet he was poor and almost died poor. This is a book dedicated to my parents.
[…TO BE CONTINUED]
[Tantatively Titled Chapters]
CHAPTER 1: Death of My Father
CHAPTER 2: 1619, Haiti Revolution, and Bihar
CHAPTER 3: Mithais, the History of Sugar in Bihar
CHAPTER 4: Shunya and Aryabhata: A Day Trip Khagaul
CHAPTER 7: Yajnavalkya, Buddha, and Mahavira
CHAPTER 6: Adi Shankara in Bihar
CHAPTER 7: The Shapes of Numbers To Come
CHAPTER 8: Baarood (Gun Powder)
CHAPTER 9: Khaskhas: the Opium Production
CHAPTER 10: The Mandar Parvat: Manthan at Yale
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Disclaimer: Nothing I have written here is set in stone. I am putting these ideas to start a conversation, to bring people to talk, discuss, and debate the issues captured here. Give me feedback, and it will help me learn, and I will keep updating this article.
The number ‘Three’ or 3 lies hidden in the word for woman, Stree (स्त्री): A woman is a tree; a woman is 3, and a woman is the provenance of all that we see.
As late as May 2019, one of the sharpest European minds was paraphrased: If god is dead, then time is everything. Such obsequiousness to the gauntlet thrown by nature--the apparent limit imposed by time, is a kind of capitulation that makes me think about what has taken out the steam off the flight of our collective imaginations that likes of Taotzu, Buddha, Mahavir, Gorakh, Aryabhata, and many others all displayed a long, long time ago.
Only an advanced society can produce individuals who aspire to transcend limits imposed by nature!
अयं निजः परो वेति गणना लघुचेतसाम्। ( ayaṃ nijaḥ paro veti gaṇanā laghucetasām) उदारचरितानां तु वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम्॥ ( udāracaritānāṃ tu vasudhaiva kuṭumbakam )
“Some are dear, others strangers, the petty-minded think so. For the generous, the whole Earth is a family.” This verse of Maha Upanishad is engraved in the entrance hall of the parliament of India.
Defeat and loss make you empathize with the poor and downtrodden. It is a source of compassion! Have undefended hearts!