What Did A World Famous
Psychologist Say After His Visit To India?
Last week I phoned
my friends around the world and talked about the COVID19 crisis. They are professionals
in my field who I have known for years. We often share our joys and sorrows over
the transitions we go through.
This time I found a
difference. Many of them talked about feeling acutely lonely and alienated. They
shared how being locked up inside homes, the alienation has overtaken them and brought
them to a stage of questioning many assumptions. One of them broke down saying
he and his wife might separate due to the stress of the lockdown. They were a
little surprised that I wasn’t so perturbed and asked me why? I told them I wish
I knew. “Maybe it is yet to come,” I said to make them feel better. We talked
about the times we have spent together in the past, when they came to India,
about our families and last but not the least the COVID19 virus.
As I sat back,
something said by my teacher came to my mind. George Kohlrieser is an
internationally known expert on human attachment process. Author of the book ‘Hostage
at the Table’ he had visited India and stayed here travelling the length and
breadth of our country. He was my mentor, guided my research and coached me in
grief work. An astute observer of human nature, I wondered what impressions he had
of India when he left.
“Rajat,” he said,
after a moment of silence when I asked him a few months later, “I have many
impressions of your country, but there is one I would like to tell you. Throughout
my journey I didn’t hear a baby cry in India. Even if I heard one crying, I
found someone quickly came and picked him up. When I was returning back home,
my plane had halted at Amsterdam airport and I heard a baby cry. His mother was
buying something nearby. No one bothered or came to calm or comfort him. People
passed by as if nothing happened.”
And then he said,
“This may be one of the biggest strengths of you people. In crisis, in times of
darkness this is the spirit you can invoke to come out stronger.”
Finishing his words,
he said, “This incident taught me how alienated and detached some people have become.
Your country still retains a value that the world can learn from.” His words
ring true every time I hear a baby cry. Having grown up in a way where I never
thought of this, an expert like him made me aware of what I perhaps would have
never known.
But my article is
not a comparison between cultures. I only shared it to describe the alienation
of modern man from himself and how we can heal that path. If not done today, long
after the trauma of COVID19 is gone, the alienation of man would remain, forcing
us to listen to the message that my professor reminded me of.
The word
‘alienation’ comes from a Latin word that means the condition of being an
outsider to oneself. When and where did some of us become outsiders to ourselves?
He also said that alienation lies at the root of many an illness.
Otto Rank, the
psychiatrist, once said, “Loneliness is a part of self definition for the
modern man.” He said loneliness is an issue we will have to face each time we
cut ourselves off from our roots. He felt that faced with the most violent time
in history and technology that has the power to take over our lives, the day is
not far off when we will have to face an alienation that would force us to
define ourselves taking us back to our roots.
Three decades ago,
a conference was organized to reflect over the issue ‘if man has really progressed
and if so, how much’. Fifty Nobel Laurates were given this question to reflect and
find an answer over three days. Some of the brightest minds of our time, at the
end of the conference got together and asserted that man has progressed, but
little and true progress will only come when he learns to integrate science with
art and spirituality. They also said that the enemy of man is his alienation from
his own self and he will find healing in the wisdom of the ancients, especially
the east.
Today, when more
and more people are living as single members in a household as compared to any
other time in history, this message could not be more true. In Sweden 62% households
have only one member. In USA, nearly a third of people live as single persons.
This is spreading across the world and perhaps becoming the biggest enemy of
man.
Alienation has
become the biggest enemy of our civilization. The present COVID19 crisis has
the potential to take it to its limit, a point of no return. It is an
existential dilemma from which there is no escape.
Many years ago, in
Tihar jail, when a new jail was set up, the traditional bonding system in the prisons
called ‘phatta’ was disrupted with group of prisoners being shifted to
different jails. The morbidity amongst those separated reached an all time high
and when the original groups were restored, the illnesses were dramatically
brought down.
On the day of
Janta curfew as I came out to ‘clap’, I noticed something that I had never seen
before. All around me, in the apartment balconies, people looked at each other,
smiling, creating music with whatever they had found. Have we ever done that
before? I tried to remember. Then I noticed something else. Everyone was trying
to synchronize his music with the other, elders and children alike. Do we do
that in times of crisis?
In 1994, I was in Bergamo,
Italy, presently in the middle of COVID19 crisis. A group of townspeople had assembled
in the main square and brought all metallic junk pieces dating back to fifty
years. They beat them together creating a music late in the night protesting
against the war by beating anything they could find. Somebody told me they are
all musicians from the town who have kept the musical instruments at home. When
I met one of the band members and asked why they did it, he replied this was a
music from the soul that no musical instrument could bring out. He explained
when the town had almost become a ghost town after the second world war, the
townspeople had found hope once again by beating every metal piece they could
find.
Today, the epidemic
is forcing us, the digital man, to confront and ask us the same question. We may
be the last generation who remains as the bridge between the old and the modern
that separates the two periods and we may be the only one to bridge this
alienation. The digitalization has become a disconnect, a loss to be filled up.
The bubble the modern man built around himself has burst, this time by a virus.
The COVID19 virus
comes to us at a time in history unlike any other time. The Indian in us stands
alienated and needs an awakening to heal itself. We are finding a new
definition and meaning in ‘vasudaiva kutumbakam’, the cornerstone of our identity.
We need that definition today but based on a collective unity amongst ourselves,
more than any other time in history. It will decide where our civilization will
go.
The call by our Prime
Minster to light a lamp on the night of 5th April is perhaps to re-awaken
and ignite that bond, that connects and binds us together. We must re-awaken
that as people, as a nation, to feel whole again. Keeping that in mind, my
family and I will go and light a lamp as an ordinary Indian. I want to connect
with every Indian in those nine minutes. And I know I am not alone when I say
so.
Rajat Mitra
Psychologist,
Speaker and Author of ‘The Infidel Next Door’
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