The Hindu : Karnataka News : Sins, lively and deadly

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Sep 11, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka

Sins, lively and deadly

The shift to the city from a mofussil area helps broaden one’s mind

Moving from the mofussil to a metropolis like Bangalore undoubtedly enables a provincial to improve and broaden her or his mind. While one is always aware of the deficiencies in one’s education and training, one also has the opportunities to improve oneself by scratching the rich lodes of knowledge and wisdom that are available just for the picking in the metropolitan centres. This is especially so in matters of cultural enrichment, more so, in matters of enrichment of one’s material and spiritual culture.

Consider, for instance, the two oracles, rather more slickly packaged and categorical in their opinions and verdicts than the oracles of old, which magisterially dispense their prescriptive wisdom week after week. On matters political, as in the current controversies about the nuclear agreement with the U.S., the prescription is for an even keel, following the golden path of the middle way, abjuring the fanaticism of the Right and the antediluvian dogmas of the Left, though these never seem to consider the perils of the pitfall in the middle. Rather more revealing are the cultural prescriptions available free every month in supplements glossier than the main product, but only in the metropolitan centres. Before coming to this city, I used to glance through the main product at the friendly newsagent in the neighbourhood, buying an odd copy when the cover promised something interesting, most of the times being let down. However, being now idle and lonely for most of the time, I have begun to study them, especially the supplements, most assiduously.

The benefits of such application and industry have been most gratifying. For instance, one had always believed that envy was the most despicable of the seven deadly sins of the texts.

Unlike its six other companions which may more accurately be described as lively sins, and without at least three of them, lust, pride and sloth, “poetry might never have been born,” in the words of a fictional poet, envy diminished and degraded both the subject and object of that emotion.

However, one has now learnt, courtesy the education that one has received on such interesting and useful subjects as self-indulgence (‘Indulgence makes one feel good’), the golden rules of ‘attitude’ and tantrums of the affluent (‘pity the rich’), not to speak of ‘aspirational realisation,’ that envy is an emotion to be cherished and flaunted and celebrated in style.

But it is not all just style; one also is educated on matters of substance. One learns, for instance, about cosmic copulation (‘the hottest craze since the Kama Sutra’), yoga deluxe (‘Nude yoga for men of all sexual orientations’), exhortations to ‘break the metaphor, embrace the darkness’ and other even more arcane subjects. With the emphasis always on the growing ‘disposable incomes’ which has not helped the tens of thousands of farmers who continue to kill themselves, there are also more practical guides to help one to buy, at prices that are clearly viewed as affordable by the peddlers though beyond the dreams of avarice (covetousness, as the text puts it) of ordinary mortals, yachts and jets and other modest necessities like the sexiest watches of the season, one of which, The Eternalist, costs a mere Rs. 6.5 crore, with the names and address of local dealers supplied. Indeed, an 80-page supplement recently dealt exclusively with luxury watches, whose market presently estimated to be Rs. 200 crore, one is gloatingly informed, is growing at 25 per cent annually.

M.S. Prabhakara

kamaroopi@gmail.com