Nausea

Pacing along a curvy hilly road, curvy enough to cudgel my entrails to vomit out my brunch, the bus takes 5 hours to reach Shimla. Those five hours of travel are unlike any other five hours of journey. Only those who have travelled often in these dilapidated buses across such topographies would proclaim– time is never secular. A second cannot be compared against another, a minute never moves as slow or fast as other sixty seconds, an hour can be as laborious as another day, a day can be more important than life in other times.

I am struggling with my stomach revolting against me. This realization brings me a little shame. An embarrassment slowly begins to takes control. My metropolitan existence sheds its false grandeur in the face of an uncomfortable bus ride. Is such a bus ride not meant to be a sense of adventure? Steep hills, bending roads, difficult terrain, rickety bus, congested seats, semi-civilized human forms – am I not supposed to get an orgasmic fit of rustic charm?

Alright, there it goes. It rushes up my internal biology and reveals its ugly colour and stench as it marches out of the window. The disembowelment helps me find some relief. Nausea slowly releases its hold. But no, not yet! Voices that until then had been faint emerge in a crescendo. Oh, I hear those semi-civilized rustic life forms – my metropolitan ‘self’ only half recognizes them as humans, for they do not possess the faculty of reason that Mr. Rene Descartes told me I have now by dint of my education. They speak of a certain Baba who was fasting against the government. The government had trampled down on a 100 thousand people who were fasting along with him in Delhi. They said, Baba had been hounded down by the police and he had to run for his life. The people were beaten mercilessly and many were in hospital. Their rancor against the government was palpable. How could a government beat a mass of people that it was supposed to protect? More disturbing to them however was how could the ‘Baba’, the saint who had cured them with his divine powers of yoga, be beaten by the government?

Nausea began to grip me again. Only this time the revolt was intellectual. Ah, here is the country, I thought, that remembers its ‘babas’ more than its ‘politicians’ (I remember to have read somewhere no one remembers Sri Aurobindo as a politician but everyone knows him as a saint). It is a travesty of modernity, a betrayal of unimaginable proportions. I heard this Baba sometime back on an LCD at a friend’s place in my University, and I remember how authoritatively all of us sitting there had proclaimed him as a traditional thug. ‘He was duping the people’, we were unanimous. ‘The people’ by the way we always ‘knew’ through our Marxist brains (and beards!) had a certain character, an essential feature that the granddaddy of communism - ‘proletariat’ he had named it - had revealed to us a century and a half ago. Religion was the opiate, and spirituality was its active cohort. The people…(okay, I have to investiture these ‘half civilized life forms’ as people for I need to have them as full forms in order to make my argument… to argue against a half-human is like shouting at a bull. Shouting you see is not making an argument. Only a human can make arguments. And I need to argue to exist. Descartes reframed – I argue therefore I am).

Sorry for the interruption, back to ‘the people’.

The people are blind to see that this Baba had a property worth 11000 million rupees gained through some 35 companies that enjoy tax breaks. One only has to hear him on TV to realize how illogical he can get. The other day, he squealed through his bearded frame ‘American dollar is priced so high because of the looted wealth from India. Let us get the money back and Rupee would be priced as high as dollar and dollar would be the new rupee.’ Dadabhai Naoroji would not take any claims , I am sure, if Baba were to reveal his inspiration was the text ‘The Poverty of India and the British rule.’ R.C. Dutt would for sure twist uncomfortably in his grave faced with the prospect of having preempted the Baba on this. Even dependency theorists would throw a fit at such a perversion of their own logic. The Baba by the way engages in novel economics only as a hobby. For a full time profession, he is a televangelist-cum-teleyogic. His daily doses of yoga come suffused with a polemic of rightist nationalism. The effect of the later cannot be documented, but for the former I can only remember my father jumping up and down in the verandah and breathing awkwardly (Baba calls it anulom-vilom) every morning. The powers of yoga are said to cure every disease, HIV AIDS exempted. To me, and to many of my like-minded friends, ridiculous is written all over it.

Nausea becomes more pronounced now. These people are still rattling about this Baba. Someone, a man from the third last seat of the bus, speaks of how his relative’s diabetes was cured. Another one, just ahead of him, explains how his friend got cured of a cancer. I am beginning to wonder why is that only relatives and friends narrate such incidents of divinity. Is divinity ordained in some conspiracy? There are no personal accounts, of how ‘I’ was healed. ‘The people’ never seem to understand the logic. Do they work on their own logic, some creed peculiar to them? Or are we in our intellectual existence living out in an alien world, a world where the agony of existence is more pronounced than how it is actually is?

Nevertheless, we reach a small town where the bus stops for a small break. I instantly jump out of the bus. I can barely tolerate the double whammy. On the road however there is procession of people in support of the baba. I instantly pick up today’s local newspaper from a vendor, so that – just so – I can hear, read, imagine of something else. May be a murder, a rape – anything that is good/evil enough to catch my attention – would take me away from this nausea. Sadly, nothing helps. The Bus driver honks. We are again on our way. Nausea persists.