The Mogul Who Loved His Son More Than Him

Often we blame the industrial age and the cyber age for the ills in the social fabric and the values that we now have. While at the same time acknowledging the wonders and astonishing changes these revolutions have brought forth. Though our social behaviour  have a general disposition warranted by evolution, I believe that, culture along with the shackles of religion have an important hand in determining and controlling human behaviour, determining values and systems. Our feelings too!

The subject of Love was touched upon quite manifestly in the blog ‘B-Log’. Reactions have poured in plenty. This post intends to nudge upon the matter and not just love as was discussed then, but on a more micro level.

I have had ( in retrospect) the amusing  experiences of attending a couple of discourses ostensibly called ”Yoga sessions” and “Inner engineering course”, organised by two gentlemen in ocher robes. I was intoxicated very much during those few days I was at those sessions ,that, when I left the venue I felt wonderfully inebriated and I was virtually walking levitated. A few days after, when reality of life knocked me with its characteristic knock out hook,my behaviour and attitude went back to my old self. I used to say and acknowledged by C that,the immediate aftermath were the days I seldom nagged C or picked up a fight with her. I was floating in blissful spiritual hallucination. Here there was nothing to do with religion or faith.In fact the change for the brief few days was noticeable in me and C. I must categorically discourage any notion that we went to those two ‘vacations’ for transforming ourselves or to seek divine interventions in our affairs. We were cajoled by a couple of acquaintances and thence we undertook the fact finding missions.

So that tells a lot about the impact that  spiritual, religious and occult discourses that are dispensed at the many “divine abodes” and prayer congregations that have mushroomed all over, especially in that stretch of the national Highway from Trichur to Aluva.

If these centres of divine ordinance and dispensations were of any impact, society would have usurped what we are told that heaven is like. Love, compassion, understanding, unselfishness and the few other virtues would have eclipsed the many other vices that are corroding the fabric. There would not have been necessity for “old age homes” – a refuge where we banish people when they turn feeble, sick and old. There may not have been the real life picture of an old infirm mother in her nineties confined into the corner of a cow shed by her own sons and daughters. There may not have been avarice, greed and insensitivity, even amongst siblings and children of the same womb.

A fascinating anachronism has to be mentioned here, however trifle it may be to some. A respected elderly gentleman passed away a few months back. He is survived by his three children. The last many years of his life was spent with his youngest child. His children are all well educated and in respectable positions in life. It was after a couple of months after his passing away, that his youngest child noticed his bank balance of a few lakhs of Rupees. Instead of cornering the small fortune to her, which would not have surfaced anyway as nobody else had an idea of that, she divided the money into six equals and deposited into six accounts in the credit of the late gentleman’s six grand children and sent the deposit receipts to them. “A watershed in stupidity in the present day”!

No divine ordaining was required for the act I mentioned. It was ingrained in the gene. While learning history in the middle school, most of us may have been told about the unrequited love of the Mogul invader Babur for his son who was ailing and sinking .It is said that he spent an whole night by the sick son’s bed and prayed to his God .He pleaded and beseeched his god to relieve his child from the suffering and appropriate his life instead. The wish was granted, so the legend notes! This act of the Prussian monarch was espoused as selfless, laudable and heavenly. In simple terms a father bartering his life if that would save his child.

If a parent is told about his or her child’s illness, accident or misfortune there may not be parents who would not overcome everything in their way to be near the child. They may invoke all gods and offer themselves in every which way, if that can provide reprieve to the child. We call it selflessness; we call it love in pristine form. We may enact a “Babur”. By the same token how would Man react if it is the parents’ life that is on the block? Will Man, without batting an eyelid exercise the same love for his/her father or mother?

It may not be untruth to say that Man may not and that may be because Man see little of him in the parent, but see himself in his biological creation.

And we call it love- selfless!