Loving your fate can be a political solution
Here is a perspicacious prediction. The past decade’s overseeded harvest of shady scholars, pop historians, Vedic verbalissimos and Lit-fest liberals straining the credibility and credulity of both nasty nativists and secular skeptics over personality politics, heritage and ideology, will be in storage by the year’s end. A profusion of slavish hagiographies and self-congratulatory biographies (note the oxymoron, seriously), which has been chuffing the bottom lines of publishers and ideological bottom feeders, will see numerical decline.
The electoral nip in the air hints at a winter of discontent around the corner. Cowering ministers and grovelling parliamentarians are discreetly rummaging in the messy closets of their careers for misplaced spines. Unimaginable walk-backs of draconian laws means there is blood in the water. Too many debacles. Too many scandals. Too little contrition. Icons suddenly seem scowlingly vulnerable. Fate, as always, has the last laugh. The solution to all setbacks is found in the handbook of Stoic philosophy—Amor fati, meaning a “love of your fate.”
Fate has a mathematical beauty of symmetry, being the arbiter of fame and flameouts. Fight as you will, fate doesn’t offer cash back. Amor fati is about wholeheartedly accepting your lot in life, the good and bad, imperfections and uncertainties as fundamental touchstones of your kismet. There is stuff happening in the world you can do squat about: drowning cities, Sebi’s dodgy ethics, the Election Commission’s date dynamics, raving rat racers in Noida media studios, and, of course, Rahul Gandhi Redux.
Amor fati invites you to embrace your destiny, to make sense of it, and even give it a hug. Horatio did it on the bridge. AR Rahman did it at the Oscars. Narendra Modi did it in the Rashtrapati Bhavan forecourt. Rahul Gandhi did it by taking a walk. Accepting fate is an ageless, profound Hindu practice. But to love it, even if it is a pickle? You got to hand it to the Stoics, a bunch of cheerless Greek blokes in 300 BC, led by Zeno of Citium; ‘Fate is sticking it to you? Just lie back and accept it, if you can’t enjoy it,’ they say. Big bad warriors won’t like Zeno. Their Big Carrot Energy (apologies to Bugs Bunny) changes history by defying fate. But power on steroids also goes down for similar reasons. Maybe the Stoics had a plan.
The plan probably is this. Stoics who follow the Amor fati trope convert troubles into ‘stuff-to-be-solved,’ rather than sweating the big stuff. Equanimity, that angel of clarity is a pop-up on karma’s screen which types in all caps: CHILL BRO, THIS AIN’T OVER UNTIL IT’S OVER. Amor fati has stood Rahul in good stead both during his Pappu Blue Period and the current Tee Rex time. Chirpy NDA allies laugh their way to their vote banks, pockets stuffed with dole. Even a loser like Prashant Kishor is promising Muslim voters a sweet deal if they plump for his what’s-its-name party; but they are Amor fati connoisseurs, having partaken of the biryani of socio-electoral gobbledygook since 1950.
Challenges are as inevitable as measles, and can get you down. Folks dissed PM Modi for referring to himself in the third person. Researchers in psychology have found that a third-person perspective dials down the temperature of negative emotions. Maybe Modi could reinvent in the first person a grander vision of a larger destiny for himself and the country, which hasn’t given him the protein he hoped for. Accept, adapt and act. Don’t just love yourself. Love your fate. And fate will love you back. And if Amor fati ka guarantee bombs? Sue me.
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com