Discovering my SENSE of SELF

Why Modi’s Swatchh Bharat Abhiyan will not succeed? Because we Indians do not consider our public spaces as our own. Like a natural, normal human being, we only care about what we consider our own, and our ‘sense of self’ does not include regions outside the boundaries of our homes. You talk about public spaces, we Indians have lost our touch with our own siblings. We no longer consider our brother’s family as ours; we are living in nuclear age, an age where our nieces are no longer equal to our daughters. Forget extended families, some of us do not even consider our parents as our own. But yes, we are super possessed with our own ‘Selves’, we care a lot about our houses, we want them to have latest designs and marbled floors, we want our kids to pursue high quality education and we want to shop all latest stuff for our families. So we are normal, we are normal for people and objects that come within the sphere of our ‘Self’.

Any movement of national importance shall not succeed unless people include it in their ‘Sense of Self’. We Indians are individually smart to work for our own ‘Sense of Self’, but are collectively dumb to work for something that fall outside the sphere of our concern. Our ‘Sense of Self’ has changed dramatically in past couple of decades. Earlier, during Independence struggle, we used to think our nation as our own, and were willing to give up our lives for it. Gradually our sphere of ‘Self’ started shrinking, excluding our nation, societies, communities and families one by one. Today, we only care about our immediate nuclear family and live for its well-being.

How has this happened to us and what can we do now to heal the situation? When I reflect on it, the only answer I come across is ‘meditation’. I believe that we have lost touch with ‘other’ human beings because we have lost touch with ourselves. We have lost spiritual touch as a society. We have lost ourselves so much into sense objects that we now live primarily to fulfill our desires of owning royal mansion, luxurious car and latest gadgets. 

Meditation, I believe, can heal our connections and can help us to move beyond physical and emotional wants to intellectual and spiritual pursuits. It can certainly help us to connect with people on human level without getting lost in our selfish interests. Unless we feel connected with all of us, unless we consider our country as our home, there is no hope for any movement that requires us to act outside our sphere of ‘Self’. 

Therefore, the prescription is to meditate for an hour at least once a day, and we can certainly switch off our TVs in the evening to find time for the same.