Everyday Ayurveda by Dr Bhaswati Bhattacharya
When a person wants to highlight instinctive and often violent behavior in modern western urban culture, s/he will often state that someone behaved “like an animal.” Anyone with a pet may ponder carefully and know that most animals big or small will not act violently unless provoked or taken away from the safety of their natural environment. Even when acting violently, there is a sense of harmony and justice in the movements of an animal when protecting itself or its loved ones, gathering food, or building a home.
In fact, animals are great teachers to us about living in peace within an ecosystem. Once adapted to domesticated homes and secure of their food and shelter, animals resume their nature of participating in the environment, guarding, playing, engaging and protecting the energies in their sphere. Their minds detect relationships and maximize efforts to harmonize with natural space and the present moment.
Modern society elevates humans from this “animal behavior” by reminding us of greater purpose beyond a hierarchy of body-based needs of survival. We are reminded to engage in higher thinking and evolution of the mind. This has been utilized to guide vulnerable minds cleverly and gradually toward values that promote us to climb the ladder of wealth. Concrete items mean more than abstract energies.
We are taught to feel poor unless we have the latest toy or status symbol. We feel challenged in situations where we cannot live on the comfort levels to which we have become entitled. Our poverty is encapsulated into bombs, hurled at others as though we are victims who deserve retaliation against the richer, more comfortable, less discomforted. We are taught that the values of the well-settled white prominent figures are superior (think supremacy) and should be idealized as the American way, preserved without regard to the environment of the country around all of us who do not live on Park Avenue, Indian Creek Island Road, Lake Shore Drive, Bourbon Street, Rodeo Drive, or Nimes Road. Only their slice of American society matters. So, we idealize the wealthy, and yet we resent them. We climb so that we can enter the stratosphere of the people we hate, so we remain ever-poor.
Many of those who are wealthy quietly govern our society. Their choices serve to install decision-makers who create wealth, not demand public service when appointed as a public servant. The choices of those who vote for personal wealth do not serve the ecosystem. So we are slapped with the thought that our choices must then serve to protect ourselves – we should abandon the damaged ecosystem and the common good and vote for those who govern for One and not for Many.
Once we are convinced that we are poor, our mental poverty drives our bad choices. We can no longer see clearly to understand that many of those who are wealthy quietly govern our society. They secretly serve to propagate the lack of harmony because strife fills their pockets with money. Through their choices of sequestering their own wealth, they betray the system that was created for a society not for a handful of billionaires. Their choices serve to install decision-makers that create wealth, not demand public service when appointed as a public servant. The choices of those who vote for personal wealth do not serve the ecosystem. So we are slapped with the thought that our choices must then serve to protect ourselves – we should abandon the damaged ecosystem and the common good and vote for those who govern for One and not for Many.
We begin to normalize the values among men that are non-humanitarian, not for the common good, and those that demonstrate how taking care of oneself and one’s family is the best priority.
Thus, the wealthy are prepared to vote for the one who will preserve their wealth; taking care of others to harmonize society does not matter. The downtrodden are prepared to vote for the one who will lift them up with the only jobs they can do; seeing a larger vision to rebalance the ecosystem of our evolving society does not matter. Many slices of Indian America are prepared to vote for the one who will glorify their sense of feeling important, after leaving a nation that was raped of its importance as an ancient culture. Doctors and engineers, professors and businessmen vote for the wealth preserver, not for the leader who dares to heal the society.
Bharat’s great-grandchildren, the South Asian Americans of today, either immigrants, FOBs, ABCDEFGs, H1Bs, aunties, desis — or however we identify ourselves as people in America living with videsi heritage — are waking up. Our ancestors may have been slaves to the imperialist white supremacy or the British or the Muslim tyranny misrecorded in today’s history books, and our elders of the past century may have deep poverty consciousness, money issues and obsession with demonstrations of wealth. These former slaves tell us to remain under the radar, lest we be beaten, shot or targeted. This mentality tells us our choice does not matter. We are encouraged to make choices with a herd mentality that protects only our South Asian communities. We might defer to our elders or defer to our profession’s choice.
What we choose in two weeks is not for ourselves. We choose for a society that has normalized non-human values. We must choose whether to rehumanize America by electing people who do not normalize selfishness while sitting in seats of public service.
But what we must know is that we have normalized violence and instinctive protection behaviors that animals take on when they are threatened. We have discarded the human values of gifting, trading and volunteering. We have normalized people who shoot animals and shoot humans because they value their own life more than others. We have normalized hoarding, hunting, and wasting more than we need. We have normalized the same greed, envy, lust, pride and wrath that fueled wars in Europe just decades ago, and we are headed for the same challenges of a deeply divided continent.
True wealth is in the mind. It tells us to choose to understand the America we have today, and make a choice that will unharness us from the games people play. We can topple the safety nets that only catch the rich. We can harmonize the country to align with the values of today’s multi-cultural, multi-faceted America. We can choose to remove figureheads that vote for their own gain and not the gain of the People. We cannot each move ahead until we ALL move ahead.
What we choose in two weeks is not for ourselves. We choose for a society that has normalized non-human values. We must choose whether to rehumanize America by electing people who do not normalize selfishness while sitting in seats of public service. By voting, we add to the total number of votes of the population. In this way, each vote is a whisper in the choice for DEMOcracy. How will you choose?
Dr. Bhaswati Bhattacharya
The South Asian Times Columnist Dr. Bhaswati Bhattacharya is a Fulbright Specialist 2018‐2022 in Public Health and Clinical Asst Professor of Medicine, Weill Cornell Medical College, New York. She studied at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard during her MPH studies. Her bestselling book Everyday Ayurveda is published by Penguin Random House. www.drbhaswati.com
