The poor and dispossesed are forced to stay in a bubble

The Psychology of Acceptance is perhaps what I will call my next book. No, it will not be about some high-falutin rarified spiritual air that many of us urban Indians pretend to breathe. It will not be about Acceptance as an act of grace and relinquishment and submitting to the higher good.

It will be about a silent Indian epidemic. It will be about Apathy masquerading as Acceptance. It will be about fear and whatstheuseness rewriting itself to sound in our own heads and to others as “I float above all irritants”. And so, basically, it will be about how to stay in the bubble. Perhaps in earlier years, only the rich and famous got to stay in a bubble — the safety of money, power, brashness for bypassing the daily indignities and riddles of urban Indian life.

And at the other end of the spectrum, the poor and the dispossessed stayed perforce in a bubble — with little or no access to resources, consideration and fairness. In current times, though, it’s apnay jaisa types who are learning to create a bubble — of acceptance.
 
Let’s see what-all what-all situations, as they say, we are now forced to accept without a whimper — at the personal, neighbourhood, city, and country level (the following examples are fiction and any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental, wagerah-wagerah).

Tied, barking, starved, sitting in their own poo/pee pets right in your neighbourhood. Yawwn, so what’s new? You may have taken stabs at setting something right in that picture, but the complete lack of interest/outrage/guts from anyone else around you (except strident FB posts) as also the realization that there really is no outside agency that you can appeal to, makes you form a bubble. Inside that bubble you say, that misbegotten creature is born with wonky karma. Better luck next life, pal.

And if you want to make that bubble stronger, you even give yourself brownie points for “being a non-interfering” person. Or take that cement-brick maker, his unit sitting ukidwa as we call it in Marathi (squatting for morning motions) on a piece of sluggish water (formerly known as Ramnadi), violating green zone norms and starting up his noise and peevish black smoke at 4 am.

You may have tried to ‘do something’, but then someone from his gang drops you an early evening visit asking what your problem is, lady, and suddenly everyone around who was muttering angrily about the noise and dirt and loss of sleep, quickly becomes part of the scenery, and you too decide it’s bubble time!

Shut your windows, program your music system to come on when his whaaa whaaa noise comes on, and forget your notional and now rather hypothetical concern for that river-that-was. How does the psychology of acceptance change you, as a person, a city, a nation? Do you become more beatifically tolerant? Not at all… you find someone or something that you can bully and bawl-out instead.

As Sahir or someone put it in one of his poems: “Jisko dekho, jab dekho kamjor ko dabaata hai.” Either your own hapless family, or the maid or the watchman or some passing salesman.

And then there are other people that you can throw your weight at too — it never fails to amaze me how young people having aparty at night are the prime targets of our neighbourhood aunties and uncles, but outright uncivic, boorish elements are given no grief at all. It’s just safer, I suppose, to not go for the jugular of the ungoverned and ungovernable creeps around us.

And on a slightly different note, what the heck are such things about: “We should be especially grateful for having to deal with annoying people and difficult situations, because without them we would have nothing to work with.

Without them, how could we practice patience, exertion, mindfulness, loving-kindness or compassion? It is by dealing with such challenges that we grow and develop. So we should be very grateful to have them”— Judy Lief, “Train Your Mind: Be Grateful to Everyone” What hooey! Lady, I could give you an instant list of people on whom you could practice patience, exertion, mindfulness, compassion, yada yada yada: all the nice people around you. So don’t pull us into yet another example of the psychology of acceptance and fluff it up as ‘it’s GOOD to have annoyances around”.

Now if someone steals this Psychology of Acceptance book idea and proposed title of mine and overnight churns out 1 lakh words (in dodgy, barely-there English) and boom! gets it published as book of the year and sells the movie rights hither and thither, then…err…I will accept that too.