A biased question on the Chinese...

 The late Sardar Khushwant Singh, who passed only a year short of a century thanks to his robust lifestyle and his daily dose of the tipple, was well known as a formidable and outspoken character, full of wit.  Indian of my generation would probably remember that in the last couple of decades of his life, having given up editorship of venerable newspapers and magazines and mostly focusing on writing his later books, he still used to pen a regular column in newspapers such as the Hindustan Times.  In the moniker for that column, his image was shown sitting inside a light bulb, almost as if inviting brickbats to be thrown at him, and fittingly the title of the column was 'With malice towards one and all'.  So Singh was very upfront about his views and hardly gave two hoots that people would accuse him of writing maliciously.

In the same vein, let's get this out of the way first thing: This post is written with a pronounced bias as regards the Chinese character, and yes, it has a lot of generalizations.  So those looking for some politically correct and totally balanced narrative, kindly look elsewhere.  The titular question I'm asking today is: When was the last time you met/read about/heard about a generous Chinese?  A down to earth Chinese, yes.  A gritty Chinese, yes.  An aggressive Chinese, by all means!  A crafty Chinese, of course!  But a generous Chinese?  In real life?  In anecdotes?  In literature? Ummm.... well...  Is that a contradiction in terms?  An oxymoron, perchance?  

More seriously, does it have something to do with the ethos of 20th and 21st century Chinese people?  In the early part of this century, when I traveled to China a few times on work, I was intrigued with certain expressions used by English-speaking Chinese.  To be fair, they stated that the English terms they spoke were only close approximations of certain Chinese language terms, and not really equivalent.  Even so, one particular expression that I remember is: "clever".  So where in the normal course of conversation someone in another part of the world may use a term like 'intelligent' or 'wise', my Chinese interlocutors invariably used the term "clever".  I was fairly new to the country and its people at that time, so didn't consider it polite to either point out the dissonance or ask their reasons too clearly.  But the few times I referred to it, they just couldn't make out any difference between 'clever', as they used it, and intelligent or wise, one who could have a thinking mind yet not use it for personal advantage, for instance.

Much later, it struck me that the Chinese considered cleverness as the singular facet of intelligence.  For certain Chinese, not to generalize, it's the cleverness, or perhaps the ability to use intelligence for personal gain, which is the foremost.  And perhaps they just cannot fathom why someone who has the brains would forego personal gain and use it to benefit someone else, which is the hallmark of generosity.

And this is not to trivialize how the Chinese thinking may've evolved to such ethos.  They've doubtless passed through many travails since the ancient times that Chinese civilization was one of only four, along with India, Mesopotamia and Egypt, progressing westwards.  After their empires petered out into weak monarchies, like many others before and around them, they were dominated by a series of forces.  Even as late as 19th and early 20th century, they were pushed around by such powers as the British, with the Opium Wars imposed on them and turning a few generation of Chinese into addicts, and the Japanese during the second World War with a series of untold horrors including Nanking.

So have such travails inculcated in the Chinese a core ethos of cleverness, a conviction that the world will take them for a ride unless they deal 'cleverly' with all?  Is that the reason that the Chinese are so dichotomous, spouting homilies for peace and a just order with a straight face and then turning around and heaping exactly the opposite on their supposed opponents?  Is that why they've been at loggerheads increasingly with everyone, starting with Mao who was an expert in pitting Chinese against Chinese to foster an internecine war in the interests of a communist 'Cultural Revolution', another complete contradiction in terms as there was nothing cultural about it but only a revolution by the seemingly uncultured with a thin veneer of intelligentsia?  And it's not only in the geopolitical arena that the Chinese have acted 'cleverly', but also in the commercial arena, lulling the then world economic powers by providing a 'factory to the world' and later trying to dominate the very economic machine of the world by leveraging its demography.

Know thy enemy, the 'clever' advised, perhaps including that mythical Chinese general Sun Tzu.  So any effort at first understanding deeply the psyche and ethos of the Chinese, before engaging with them in any arena, seems the most 'clever' strategy to adopt for anyone...

With Malice towards... (with due apologies to Khushwant).

Coincidences...

It sometimes happens with probably all of us that we're thinking of something and then, either instantly or after a short time, we see some manifestation of our internal thoughts in the material realm i.e. the very thing happens or is seen by us.  (And I'm not talking about supposedly random marketing links appearing on our Facebook page or stream right after we've viewed, and not even clicked, a certain product on Amazon! 😁 That's the art and science of AI-driven user manipulation as so tellingly expounded by industry insiders in the recent Netflix documentary 'Social Dilemma'.)

There are various spiritual explanations for this phenomenon.  Some hold that all of us are just flowing in a collective stream of consciousness, and so seemingly random thoughts are not really random but are plucked out of that same stream.  And so, since the collective consciousness, for want of a better word, is aware of such plucking, we're then presented with the next logical evolution of that thought in the material world, either as a thing discovered or a happening.  This is perhaps why it's said that 'Watch your thoughts, they become... your destiny'.  This view also holds that all inventions are actually discoveries, of things or properties of nature lying dormant, sometimes in plain sight, till someone seemingly stumbles upon them in a flash of inspiration, even though after a lot of research and efforts.

Lately, I've been ruminating on a few minor... ummm... injustices life seems to have handed me.  Typical thoughts in a mid-life crisis (on the lines of 'I've done so much for others, what have I got in return' yada yada yada), which have the potential to turn any once energetic young person into a bitter old man, snapping at those around him to take out the frustration seemingly for minor slights or irritants, mostly unjustified considering life's bounties and good fortune.  To avoid continuing down the usual path of self-pity and then anger, I started to train my mind on Bhagavad Gita's core philosophy of 'Karmanyevadhikarastay ma faleshu kadachana...' i.e. you only have a right to the action, not to the fruits thereof.  it's good to remember that this, probably the most well known verse of the Gita, also extolls the virtues of ceaseless action (after all, we all have to 'pay our dues' to this earth) by ending with 'Ma tay sangoastvakarmani' i.e. don't let yourself fall prey to inaction.

Now, one aspect of Karm Yog, epitomised by the above action, is the rising of the Karta inside us.  Action often fuels the feeling of 'I have done this' in our ego, much against the admonition in the above verse of not taking credit for our actions.  In this, what may perhaps come to our rescue is the other side of the coin, Bhakti Yog, which advises us to dedicate all our actions, and the results of such actions, to the almighty.  (There's a beautiful song by Ramprasad, the 18th century devotee of goddess Kali: 'Shokoli tomari ichchha... Aami jontro tumi jontri...' i.e. I'm only an instrument in your hands.). Once we deduce that, one, nothing is actually done by us but we only pluck the actions out of collective consciousness as an instrument, and two, that as a corollary we don't have a right to the fruits of such actions, then the rising ego should be well controlled.  So the right way seens to be to dedicate all our actions, and the fruits of such actions, to the almighty, while continuing to act out our part in this worldly drama.  (And just a drama it is, as the Maya philosophy tells us.)

Now, while I'm in the process of thinking all this through, what should I come across but the very thought in writing which aligns with the same throught process!  Having 'coincidentally' risen a bit early and thus having a few minutes extra in hand before my morning walk, I decide to read an extra page of my daily Gita read. (I tend to 'ration' meaningful readings, so as not to cram my mind but be able to understand a bit as I go along.). The last verse on the last page I read today (of 'Yatharth Gita', an interpretation by Swami Adgadananda) is verse 29 of chapter 13, which goes like this:

Voila - what a coincidence! Once we understand that it's nature which performs all actions, and that we're actually non-doer or non-agent, that opens up a whole new way of looking at and dealing with the world.  Now to actually put this in action (pun intended) is the challenge... Didn't someone say that life is a lifelong self-improvement project? (Well, that someone's wife also said that a husband is a lifelong improvement project for a wife, but let's not go there at the moment...😁)

Now, that I was inspired to put pen to paper (or, more aptly, keyboard to screen) to put down these thoughts, is that also a mere coincidence or...