What Tamil Nadu can learn from Amma stickers and Chennai floods
The flood waters are slowly receding. In conversations I find that there are very few people, areas and homes where the flood had negligible impact. Apart from all the images of bravery, rescue and valour, there were three other images that will be remembered for entirely different reasons. These reached to the whole world thanks to social and print media.
One was of the chief minister Jayalalithaa's stickers on bags of relief supplies, another a poster of the CM rescuing a child as a scene from Baahubali, and the third would be MK Stalin from the Opposition donating supplies with his father's image on the bag. The images went to every part of the globe and were sent back many times over with dominant emotions of derision, laughter and anger.
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| The infamous Jaya-Baahubali poster. |
My identity as a Tamilian supersedes my identity as an Indian and I hung my head down in shame. When people laughed at the leadership in Tamil Nadu, they were laughing at the state and me and that was shameful.
Tamil poetess Avaiyar said our knowledge is but a fistful of sand and mine is mostly around Tamil Nadu's history and the way the mind works. The deep sense of shame made me turn to these familiar friends to make sense of why this gross sycophancy happened.
In Tamil Nadu's history are the roots that have fed the fruits of current behaviour. Understanding our past will help us comprehend as well as change the present. After all, pesticide nourished roots leach them into the fruit.
Stripped of all the accouterments, religion and governments are systems to keep us in order. An order where we are not allowed to take or violate the property of others. Property here is our bodies (which is why rape and murder are offenses) and our physical property (link this back to our two epics - don't go after that which is not yours, be it relationships or land).
Religion and government become meta-systems to safeguard this. Vedic hymns are replete with metaphors of the clan chief being equal to Indra, and how they must be viewed as such. The Pallava kings used religious symbols like the Varaha avatar and Somaskanda to promote their reassurance that they too will save the world and be gentle parents to the Tamil country.
The kings were representatives of the Gods on earth and if Gods had focused devotees who could get them to descend from heavens and do their bidding (like Parvati), the king's conscience keeper was the poet.
Karunanidhi and Jayalalitha will know their Purananuru anthology better than me, but they have forgotten to practice the power to engage with the poets of today.
Poems - and small 4-10 lines at that have stopped battles, reminded kings of their own mortality, reminded them of arrogant kings like Hiranyakashipu and Mahabali that Vishnu subdued, and used metaphor to convey this subtly. This was in the 3rd century.
By the 10th century, economic and commercial prosperity raised the stakes higher as petty kings desired to become emperors in a land with limited space. Poets had become more content in composing eulogies. The ones that help us today to chronologically date the battles of the kings but we have no poetry that pricks the king's conscience.
Whole towns begin to have names of kings - Tirunelveli/Palayamkottai, where the MLA who created the Baahubali-Jayalalitha poster lives, was renamed Sri Vallabha Chaturvedi Mangalam in honour of a Pandya king. Manali was named after a Pallava king, Simhavishnu.
Temple offerings and festivals that we still celebrate were funded and started in the king's name - in Srirangam, for example. In Tiruvotriyur, necklaces, doors, vessels gifted to the temple were named after the king.
Districts, roads (Tiruvotriyur had two - one for the king, another for his minister) were named after kings, and this was a favourite pastime of Raja Raja Chola . If ministers created townships, they, like in Madambakkam today were named after the founder.
It was okay to remember the one who spent the money on the project rather than those from whom it came. It was okay to put one fellow human being on a pedestal and worship them.
What's more, places like Tirukoshtiyur often had name changes whenever a king visited and definitely when the ruling dynasty changed. So, today, either in political posters or in the offices of bureaucrats, images of the CM are more visible than the state emblem itself.
Our history, therefore, tells us that this sycophancy in politics is a deeper disease that a few posts on social media will not cure.
It also tells us that when leaders become motivated by greed and insecurity, they will encourage this and focus on the short-term. It also tells us that we, the common people, encourage this when we give our power away to another human being.
None of the temples, roads, deities, villages which the Pandya and Chola kings named after themselves survive in the same name with the same memory.
Is there a lesson for us here? Younger students are already forgetting the freedom struggle, why should we be surprised? In the relentless march of time, individual identities and persons will eventually be forgotten.
In the old days it was in centuries, today with a billion pieces of information to distract us, it will be in decades and for the next generation it will be in days.
We must change ourselves and the way our mind works before we pass the anger, positive energy, or even blame to others. If history tells giving our powers away to others, in general, and sycophancy and self-aggrandizement is the reality, the way the mind works must change first.
My hope for each of us who forwarded the three images is that we ask ourselves when do we give our power away to others. At work (let my boss decide or Infosys naming buildings after its founders), in a traffic jam (they can't drive fast vs. I could have left early), and even at religious discourses where the speaker is quoting from texts that say we can be who we want if we try (wow, he is so intelligent and knowledgeable and I know nothing).
Politicians will continue to be motivated by insecurity and fear to see everything around them as a prey or a predator. We can choose to give our power to them and feel angry or turn that anger to behaving differently and not just thinking differently.
For history text book writers, change the way we teach and write about history. I don't become a more patriotic Indian if I remember five key dates but if I can understand the past to make sense of the present and then help it to change my behaviour, the state can be a better place.
The sun has begun to shine again, will the sun of wisdom shine on us soon?