How much can ONE person really do?

**This post was originally written as a personal reflection; a way for me to deal with a lot of similar yet conflicting thoughts I've had in the last months and weeks (and years, really). It doesn't explain much about what we've been doing lately, so I'm sorry if it's a bit out of context. Let me know what you think!**

We all talk about changing the world. You get a cause and you follow some philosophies and advice from an expert who has data and crunched numbers to back up her argument, and you make a vow to give up something(s) or add an extra routine to your life.

But there’s always the question of: how much am I, as one person amongst 400 million Americans or 7 billion people, really making change?

This is a dangerous question. It invites the philosophy of “well, if I don’t make that much of a positive impact by giving up all these things, how much harm do I actually do by not changing those parts of my life?” Enter social apathy.

Is it vanity?

Some inherent need to be someone who did something? Do we all just want to be a household name? Well, if that’s the case, you can apparently achieve that goal by releasing a sex tape or shooting an entire school-full. Those acts will get you to your goal in the short-term in such a way that failure is far less likely than if you aspired to be the next Gandhi (I am in India, after all), who had more setbacks (and very public ones, at that) in his daily life than more people would be “comfortable” with in several lifetimes.

Then there’s the question: where do my responsibilities ultimately lie?

As a young adult who still has yet to enter the “real world” in full force, what am I actually responsible for? Primarily, in my view, I am responsible for my future. That’s a big word, but it contains education, safety, social connections, and general well-being. That is a pretty short and (mostly) manageable list, leaving room and energy for non-personal responsibilities like “ending world hunger” or “the environment” to be added to the list.

Now, when I consider myself 15-20 years down the line, I’m generally the same person (personality, aspirations, values, etc.) except that list of responsibilities will be overwhelmingly longer. Suddenly, my responsibilities can’t just be contained in a box labeled: “my future”. There will be several boxes added to the chart, with labels like, “my family’s future”, “my financials”, and “my employees’/ clients’ (families’) futures”. Of course, just like the original “my future” box, each of these boxes contains another list of responsibilities within. With all these added responsibilities, it becomes harder to include all those non-personal responsibilities in.

So, I wonder, is it the length of the “responsibilities” list that determines one’s answer to the main question: “what can I, as one person, really do?”

If my 35-year-old self were limited in the amount of work she can do for the non-personal causes, then, wouldn’t the answer lie in limiting the number of personal responsibilities to make room for others? If my responsibility to my clients and/or employees lies in keeping my job or progressing in my career, and that motive stems from my financial responsibilities that bolster the future of my family, then wouldn’t the root of the problem be my family? In other words, would I have a greater capacity for considering my responsibilities to others if I chose to not have a family?

This idea makes me (and my parents too, I imagine) very sad.

Having a family, although it would take away some of my capacity to personally make the changes I want to see in the world, would also give me the opportunity to instill the desire to make and see those changes in another generation, who would, in turn, hopefully pass that desire on again. I like this idea, EXCEPT: what if no one ever breaks that cycle to actually take the leap(s) to make those changes happen? Also, if I don’t make the effort now to see that the majority of my peers also value these potential changes, they won’t pass them on to their children, who won’t see the need to implement the changes that future visionaries will attempt, and we’re stuck again.

Well, if we’re gonna be stuck anyway, what’s the point in me suffering now or making my hypothetical children suffer? There’s also always the notion that, if I focus on the now and my own personal responsibilities for a while, I’ll eventually accrue enough capital—financial and social means—to potentially implement those other-oriented responsibilities I hold so dear today. The danger in this, of course, is that, although the end goal is a solution, chances are, I’ll be part of the problem for a while as a means to that end goal.

Let’s say, for example, I decided on “the environment” as my end goal responsibility. I could change my entire lifestyle to be more environmentally friendly and work for an environmental NGO to slowly model and implement change. Or, I could make more money at a different job and save a lot of money by living on Ramen, all to eventually save enough money to buy up the Amazon and save it from deforestation or water pollution, but at the same time, all the plastic and Styrofoam packaging from my Ramen noodles would be floating in Garbage Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Ramen here, of course, is a stand-in for all my materialistic pleasures.

Then there’s another option that’s been laid out in front of us recently: I could devote myself to a life of meditation and detachment from worldly pleasures and pains to achieve liberation; moksha, or nirvana. While these ideas make sense to me cognitively, I can’t help but think of this philosophy as a cop-out. Sure, the task or responsibility of saving humanity from its own evils in one lifetime is futile. I mean, from the Christian perspective, even God couldn’t achieve this in the last 2000 years because,  people keep messing the job up. But, just because the job can’t be completely finished doesn’t mean we just give up and wait for our next karmic incarnation to take care of it or for the time cycles to give way to a better epoch.

Wouldn’t I, at the end of my life, feel worse about not having done (almost) everything in my ability to improve the world I was brought into than not having attained liberation? The way I see it, if I perform my duty or dharma to improve the world in this lifetime, then, when I die, even if I am reborn in the Hindu/Jain cycle, I’ll have accumulated good karma (or so I’d like to think), so if my soul decides to attempt moksha, it’ll be in a better position to do so at that point.

Honestly, for coming from a collectivist culture, this whole liberation thing seems pretty selfish to me, but I guess you could say the reverse for modern/Western Christianity. Is that the point then, to reverse the effects or tendencies of one’s culture? If I am inclined to think of myself as part of a group, and act and think according to the needs and desires of that group, should I use spirituality to focus on the independent self? Inversely, are the group-focused missions of Western(ized) religions intended to counteract our cultures’ individualist propensities? What happens when an individualist-cultured person practices an “individualist” religion/spirituality, and vice-versa?

Clearly, some (few) people have been able to use the detachment ideals of these “Eastern” religions for positive social change. In a way, this makes sense, going back to my original responsibilities predicament: if I am able to detach myself from that huge long list of responsibilities that my 40-year-old self is bound to, might I then have the time and responsibilities-capacity to worry about the rest of the world again?

Well, from my current perspective, I know I couldn’t live with a self that didn’t aspire to improve the world—however that might happen, so I guess I start with that affirmation and go from there.

There are so many questions here that have no answers. I am happy to explore all the possible explanations and ruminations which are provided to me through all the philosophies and religions of the world, but the only time I might know the answers to the “what can I do?” question is when I look back on my decisions from today with 20/20 hindsight-vision. Just know, future me, that I’m trying my damnedest, albeit blindly!

**Appropriately, as I finished this reflection, the song “You Might Die Trying” by Dave Matthews Band came on shuffle. I've never really listened to the song before, and the first verse is particularly relevant:

“To change the world / Starts with one step /

However small / the first step is hardest of all /

Once you get your gait / you’ll be walkin’ tall /

You said you’d never dare / ‘Cuz you might die tryin”

Thoughts on: Social Effects of Spiritualism in India

There are parts of India that are exactly what I expected and there are other parts that still surprise me. As a whole, I love India more and more every day, and this growing love is a result of the amazing beauty of the scenery, the hospitality and good-naturedness of the people, the peaceful manner in which people go about their everyday lives, the amazing food, and the spirituality emanating from almost everything here.

Especially after I had the opportunity to hear the Dalai Lama speak this summer, I anticipated India to be a very spiritual and religiously pluralistic place. It is true that India is extremely spiritual—Hinduism, we’ve been reminded time and time again, is a way of life, not a religion—and while that spirituality is oftentimes inspirational, I have also found it self-destructive. By “self-destructive” I do not mean that an individual’s spirituality leads to that one person’s destruction, but rather the nature of all of India’s spirituality. Her obsession with spirituality has, in many cases, contributed to social dissolution and disregard among Indians. So, in my use of the term “self-destructive”, India as a nation is the self to which I refer.

To explain what I mean, I’ll need to back up a little further.

When we’ve been told, “Hinduism is a way of life, not a religion”, it’s always accompanied by another statement: “Hinduism [the word] was created by the West to distinguish their own [Judeo-Christian] religious practices from those of the native Indians”. What these two statements mean in the day-to-day life of an Indian is this: nearly every native Indian is a hindu, regardless of religious belief (Indian Christians are often referred to as “church-going hindus”), because the word literally just means “Indian”; and Hinduism—as the religious or spiritual practices of native Indians—is practiced differently from person to person. This makes it a bit difficult to study Hinduism as one subject: the best one can do is explain the historical development and common rituals of Hindus today.

Fun Fact: Contrary to popular thought, Hinduism is actually, at its core, a monotheistic belief with an overall GOD or “oneness” called Brahma. The “little” gods (there are over 330,000) you’ve no doubt heard of (Krishna, Durga, etc) function similarly to Catholic saints: specific regions, villages, and professions have patron gods. Just like the saints and the Holy Trinity can seem polytheistic to people of other religions, many people have misunderstood Hinduism to be polytheistic. Qualification: there may be Hindus who do practice and believe in polytheism, but that is not the case among the majority, as I have come to understand it.

Aaand back to the main discussion of spirituality in India...

As I mentioned, I have found Indians’ omnipresent spirituality to be inspiring in many ways. I have relished in the peace—internal and external—I feel after a session of yogic asanas (what I’ve naively called “yoga” up until now), and I am consistently reminded through the kindness and positive attitudes of the Indians I meet that my spirituality should be a lifestyle, and not isolated to a few moments once or twice a week.  I don’t need to go to seminary or devote myself to a hermetic monastic life or regularly read a certain book to live a life in accordance with my spiritual and moral ideals. Although I’ve believed this for a long time, it’s been nice to get all this reassurance. For now, I am challenging myself to incorporate more moments of stillness into my everyday life.

Added bonus: according to our Yoga lecturer (who has her doctorate in the field), research shows that regularly including meditation-like practices into your life improves all areas of health: physical, mental, and spiritual. Look it up if you don’t believe me!

So, in a very important sense, the Indian spirituality is very beneficial. In other ways, I am disturbed by the ease with which it enables social degradation. Of course, one of the main topics we have breached in India is the caste system. At the beginning of our time in India, we were ensured by a professor and students at Rizvi Law College in Mumbai that the caste system is no longer relevant in modern India, with the occasional exception of marriages. However, the longer we spend in India, and the more time we spend in areas less “modern” than urban Mumbai, the more clear it becomes that the caste system is not only relevant, but still very strong throughout India.

As foreigners, it is difficult for us to perceive the small acts that make up this unique form of prejudice. In tea shops, one man is given a glass cup, while his companion of darker skin and more modest upbringing is provided with a plastic cup. To us, it looks as though the shop has just run out of glass cups, but the actual reason he’s been given a plastic cup is for his uncleanliness or untouchability to be more easily erased by simply throwing his cup away, rather than washing it.

Caste, we have been assured, is not inherently nor originally Hindu, but has been incorporated into the religious hierarchy over several centuries. Originally, caste was simply a division of labor: priests and those concerned with religious matters; soldiers and those concerned with security; merchants and those concerned with cultural and economic trade; servants; and those delegated to the dirtier jobs of society (sanitation, etc). Over time, caste became immobile and unchangeable, and religious significance was incorporated into the whole hierarchy. While Hinduism did not create caste, it is maintained in Indian society through cultural Hinduism, which, as I explained before, permeates all of India, regardless of religious affirmation. Sadly, some Indian churches have become infamous for their use of caste. Not all churches, thankfully—in fact, it almost seems like the caste system is a pre-packaged sermon for many ministers: just plug in “untouchables” for “lepers”, etc. 

One of the ways caste is continued is through the Hindu concepts of karma and dharma. The aim of the Hindu life is to reach moksha or liberation from the cycle of rebirth, which all souls are victim to until this liberation is attained. Karma is the explanation for one’s current state—if you completed your dharma (karmic duty) well in your past life, you are rewarded with good status in this life. In this philosophy, to help an individual of untouchability or outcaste status is to interfere with their karma, so it is better to let them suffer. Many Indians today recognize the harmful social effects of this philosophy and are working to improve humanitarian efforts in India, but they have a long battle to fight against such a culturally entrenched concept.

***This has been a very abridged explanation of some of the current effects of caste, but I hope it at least clarifies a few things—and brings up many more questions***

Another implication of spiritualism in India is the question of religious pluralism and secularism. Hinduism is praised as a religion of tolerance. Because it is so undefined and dynamic, there is much room for personalization of Hindu faith or spiritualism. There is a lot we can learn from the tradition of tolerance in India, but with certain precautions.

Is the tolerance or expansion of Hinduism the same thing as religious plurality? I’ve learned that Indians often separate themselves in religious-based communities, meaning that, while Christians, Muslims, and Hindus may all live within the confines of a certain region, those groups are segregated in their own communities, which often serves to increase polarization. Is co-existing (with sporadic clashes) really pluralism?

India suffers from intolerant and violent acts from extremist groups, just like every other religious community. In recent years, there have been several cases of inter-religious violence and terrorism in India. While the motivations of these events cannot be generalized to the entire population, stereotypes do pop up, making the work of ecumenical and interfaith centers all that more critical. Check out the ECC—Ecumenical Christian Centre of Bangalore (where we’re staying) and the Quo Vadis Interfaith Dialogue Center of Tiruvannamalai.

Obviously, these “faults” in Indian society are easier to observe as a cultural outsider, but these observations and subsequent reflections on India have led me to consider the social implications of our Western Judeo-Christian-based world and my role in it. India is nothing if not thought-provoking.

I have few short internet connections, which is why this post is so long (and photo-less). What else would you like to hear about my time in India? My daily life here? Food? A few funny “cultural experience” stories? Political/economic issues in India? Indians’ perspectives on globalization? An Egypt-India comparison? A photo-post? Give me suggestions!