NEO-HEROISM OF POST-MODERN TIMES by Dr Jernail S. Anand

When people are suffering through a period of struggle, fighting for a higher ideal, you get leaders who can look back and forth, like Janus, and create a respectable space for themselves, and their people in the future. But, when the times are good, we get leaders who manoeuvre their victory, because people are busy in their luxuries, riding on whose mad dreams, they rise to power, and then squander the fruits of the labour of their predecessors. For a simple comparison, let us think of the sons and daughters of a poor household, who have to sweat it out in life, and they become doctors and lawyers, and bring laurels to the their family and even to the country they belong.  But, on other extreme, there are sons and daughters of a rich man, who sweat it out  squandering that wealth, finally ending up as 'lost to society'. When you are born with a silver spoon, there is every possibility of your losing it by the end of your term. The sons and daughters of the rich, who live on luxury of their parents, play ducks and drakes with unearned wealth, and do not care for the society and its norms, do everything the society considers foul, and, no wonder, end up as murderers and smugglers. If the parents had used the principle of “artificial scarcity” for these ‘blessed’ kids, and forced them to earn their own living, rather than live on the luxury of their parents, they too would have joined the life stream as valuable men and women. Rich people, who do not bring up their offspring like this, deny the society, sometimes best people who could have emerged from their ranks.

Was Ravana the sole manifestation of Evil? He had ten heads. It is more symbolic than real. Ten heads means ten or twenty and even more, may be thousands, because, he was manifest evil, which lived in the minds of the people. Every person harbours evil, and when we put it together, we need some emblematic figure.Call it Ravana. So, was Kamsa, the manifestation of Evil. Was Duryodhana the only foul mind in the Kaurava camp? He was the head of a whole body of evil structured in the Kauravas. And, in this evil,the greatest part was played by the ‘Pratigya’ (Vow) of Bhishma. Guru Daron, and great men, who did not utter a word when Draupaudi was being molested, were all a part of the evil which manifested in Duryodhana and Dusashana, and even in Karna. In a way, Duryodhana was the face of this morally corrupt world.

If we look down the ages, in ninth or tenth centuries, we find the warriors who were regarded as the best of men. Odysseus, Hector, Achilles. The Romans have warriors like Caesar who represent the popular mind of those times. In the period of Enlightenment, followed by Victorian period, we come to see, a world which loved writing. And, we see the heroes of this world were Poets, Philosophers and Novelists, like Gorky and Tolstoy. They manifested the popular mindset. People loved their writings, because they epitomised their mental and moral aspirations. Today, we are confronting a world in which every man is drained ofidealism. Good has flowed out of our veins. Junk has made a permanent home in our blood vessels. And it is stinking with ambition, success, passion for wealth, and a blind wish to topple everything that is good in our society, including subversion of all that was good and lofty in the past.

The present times are the times of luxury and people have reaped the fruits of a long spell of suffering and hard work on ideas, ideologies and philosophy. Here we have a whole population which believes in wealth creation, and success, and they need   leaders who manifest this public passion. People who do not care for any moral considerations, for whom human life is a ‘deal’ and it is ‘energy’ which electrifies the internal wiring of the world, if these people elect leaders like Trump, they cannot be blamed for doing what they are doing. Leaders like Bibi are the manifestation of the people’s passion for commercial one upmanship, arrogance of power, and trampling all that is good under their feet. The fight of the mighties with countries like Ukraine and Iran sends a shivering message: The good is in steep minority. But it has the guts to stand up to the unified evil of the world, manifest in a few leaders.

THE NEO-HEROISM OF 21STCENTURY

Every age has its own heroes. The 20th century had Mahtama Gandhi, Jawahar Lal Nehru, and Rabindra Nath Tagore. The 21st century is entirely different from the  20th century. It  is the century of loss of values, loss of vision, and loss of idealism. It ist a chaotic society which needs someone who can give a face to its moral anarchy. It is futile to  look up to men, who could grow beyond their personal obsessions, and give a positive turn to human angst. If every age has its heroes, it has its villains too. The present century a suffers from the loss of language and meaning too. Education that is being served to the young students  has lost its moral anchoring. The world is dreaming of becoming Lanka, the City of Gold once again. Can a sane person become a part of this mad dream? There is one more bigger question: Is this dream really mad? Does goodness, values, integrity, honesty have any chance beyond their academic relevance as a good old past? I wonder.

Moreover, in 1975, when Amitabh came up as an odd mix of heroism tempered with villainy, in Deewar, over the times, the line diving heroism and villainy has dissolved. These are times when evil has acquired respectability, and men who are only good, and not evil when required, lose their security deposits. This is a strange world andthe people who lead this chaotic world, are only those who can manifest this odd mix of heroism and villainy. The truth of these times is in conflict with the truth of previous centuries. And anyone who wants to succeed, has to acquire the charismatic qualities of neo-heroism, which manifest the Indian tradition of ‘tam sam dand bhed’ [success at all costs].If morality and ethics are the warf and woof of Indian ethos, we should not forget that these ethos belong to the general run of society, who were impressed by the teachings of saints and sages down the ages. Kings had their moral guides, but how many listened  to the sane advice of the moral philosophers?

Even today, a king has to represent the general ethos of the society, which has lost faith in goodness, honesty, integrity, and even truth. Moral philosophers cannot epitomize their dreams of success and luxury. A king who manifests their new found values, (which is the truth of the present century) must manifest all that is good and bad in their dreams. Those who want Gandhi and Nehru and Tagore and their philosphies to guide the population of the 21st century, are perhaps too idealistic, or do not understand the dynamics of time. Time does not flow backwards. Evil has to be given its due simply because good is getting of currency. This is the essential lesson of Neo-Heroism which every one aspiring to lead the nation must absorb.

Dr. Jernail S. Anand, with 200 books to his credit [18 epics] is a Chandigarh-based top ranking presence in the contemporary world literature, a polymath, and a vital architect of the 21st century ethical literature whose seminal work ‘Lustus: The Prince of Darkness’ challenges the moral complacency of our era.  Founding President of the International Academy of Ethics, and Laureate of Charter of Morava [Serbia], Seneca [Italy], Franz Kafka [Germany, Ukraine, Czeck Rep] and Maxim Gorky [Russia] Soka Ikeda and Mahakavi Bharati (India) Awards, his name is inscribed on the Poets’ Rock in Serbia.