Flipside of Bonhomie

Dictionary meaning of bonhomie is - good-natured easy friendliness. This kind of attitude and behaviour can, at least to some extent, be also expressed by a little more technical term - altruism having the dictionary meaning - feelings and behaviour that show a desire to help other people and a lack of selfishness.

As it can be seen from above,
two words differ regarding one quality or aspect so to say - that is lack of selfishness.

Bonhomie is kind of a ritualistic display of Altruism. If the ritual is given too much weightage, the purpose of Altruism proper is defeated - it becomes a pathology of paranoia of being dissented by the people around. One must realise that there's no escape from dissent as long as everyone is seeing exactly the same thing. In the present state of affairs this is only an utopia - totally unrealistic thing to expect to happen.

The profile in this blog describes me as an altruist. Leaving out such difficult concept like "lack of selfishness" for the time being, I would take bonhomie as a less academic word for the type of attitude and behaviour associated with altruism. I would stress on it as I used to and still, do display a lot of signs of bonhomie.

But what was there behind all these things? Firstly - it could be a codependent behaviour. The person, due to his lack of competency and poor knowledge of life skills, may be too afraid of leaving the cozy comfort zone; and hence just indulge the weak as far as possible and thus subsist just by doing anything whatsoever.

Secondly, of course, it may be due to the sense of security it does give when one sees all happy faces around oneself - everyone wants to feel secure.
Thirdly, as is the case with me, a person can be born just like that - full of empathy, very sympathetic as well. The scene of a sad face in front of myself have always moved me a lot - even made me tearful, feeling kind of a very deep urge to do whatever can be done to eradicate the cause of pain that might be bothering, or even torturing the person or people around me. In this context one thing I must state about me: when I ventured to introspect to have a real good look at this particular aspect of my personality so as to find out what really make me feel the way I just said, I came to know about a deep and kind of strong belief of mine, which in a way contributed to my acts of bonhomie or altruism, so to say; I did always reared and cherished the idea that all the "sane" people around me, as we mean us in plain common everyday language, must be having the same idea about what is "good" for everyone - here "good" is meant to be "desirable" - to put it in the most general sense. It somehow, primarily, meant to me that everyone might be feeling like me about seeing others being in distress. I held this idea for a very large part of my life - which amounts to the fact that I took others for altruists like myself.

I would, kind of, love to identify myself with that sort of things - but curiously enough things have kept changing - right in front of my eyes, my conscious mind, this epitaph of this cherished idea of mine came down to ground - shattered, I would say. Slowly and surely the world established itself to be an entity entirely different than what I so dearly loved it to be like.

The world around, as it revealed itself before me gradually, is largely, far from altruistic; it is mostly a throng of selfish creatures. They are insensitive towards others, often entirely devoid of empathy. They are growing all the more cocky every day - may be each moment of every day - like the curious shoddy modern day yankees depicted in hollywood film "Logan Lucky". It is becoming more and more only a gathering of neurotic or psychotic sensationalists.

Some people other than me might have also been aware of this dire fact of these days - which says why there is at least some discussion about the need for empathy.

but anyway, my kind of bonhomie is more or less of a relic now. Perhaps it would have always been considered as an useless idea by the most of the people, earlier as well.

I, these days call myself, in unison with the legitimate experts in the relevant field, a pathological altruist - who has caused more harm to oneself rather than the good that might have been done to the ecology and environment around oneself.

An altruist tries to make others happy - and that kind of a person (of course sane in the usual sense) is able to see what ails others and tries eradicate, or at least mitigate the cause of such things. But this, for sure, needs cooperation from those in the recipients' end. But, in hindsight, and surely these days, I can very certainly say that these others are wallowing in the mire of anosognosia so deep that they cannot be helped - by no means.

But the effort takes its toll upon the protagonist. Thus the spiralling insanity and frenzied sensationalism around me has almost made a neurotic of my own self. It burns me out. The pile of dreg becomes all the more heavier every day - impeding even the slightest budge on my part.

Many a big people in history has been found to have changed their attitude like a complete upending at some point of time in their lives. Their sympathetic point of view towards human life in general changed completely to make them an antagonist - not an anti-hero even. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar is a very prominent example from Bengal. At times, Swami Vivekananda ruefully regretted that he did not have people strong enough as his comrades who could take forward the movement he so forcefully started. The list is certainly quite long - there have been people in Indian mythology like Krishna, who is considered an incarnation of God who was the mastermind behind the extinction of the lousy hedonists of his clan who used to do nothing much but loafing around and quarreling among themselves.

The other countries and civilizations can provide us with the names of antagonists like that. Diogenes is one of the foremost of the league who despised the banal ways of everyday life of his time with everything. Nietzsche can be another very prominent name in the list and a very formidable one. His unfavorable attitude towards the escapist common mass of all time has been reflected in his writings time and again. His magnum opus - Thus Spake Zarathustra is kind of embodiment of that idea. Achilles of Troy was such a character from the old Greek literature.

There are evidences of polemic among the alpha personalities in different periods of history; but we are not talking about such things here. We are talking about the tenderness of these lionhearts, who once volunteered to take side of the weak and meeks of this world with a vision that it could certainly be made understood to the herd under consideration that each and everyone is good enough to take care of their own self and play his or her role in the society so as to make this world a better place. But eventually it all turned into a game of parasitic exploitation of the big hearted poor fellows who, ironically can take a lot of screwing up. The odious cankers malignantly spread the phenomena of their wretched existence all over the healthy parts of the ecology of the world like plague until it all crumble down to ruin, due to want of strength provided by the supports which had been extended by the magnanimous ones until before that point of time - when these superstructures get fatigued to the end of their strength, being sapped on by depraved sucker worms.

This miserable world does not deserve bonhomie - it deserves people like Diogenes. Nietzsche, in quite a his work, especially in "Will to Power" has expressed his high regard for such people like Diogenes. His Zarathustra is kind of embodiment of the spirit I intend to point to here. Zarathustra, in one place says - "there they laugh: they do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these ears" ... a mix of dejection and disappointment.

Apparently, bonhomie has never really paid - it has consistently failed to create an effect permanent enough to mitigate the problems of life which keep nagging almost everyone in some way or another. It has failed to teach people how to approach these problems on their own - so that when it takes longer than expected for the aid to arrive, they can maintain the quality of life, that they can stand steadily without a prop, when the adversity is not that big that it threatens to turn the world upside down. Thus it is not really useful for the purpose of making the world a better place.

It rather drains the protagonist empty of his energies and hampers the innate qualities of him. It almost always is awry. So it is not really going to do any harm to anyone, be it the giver or the recipient, if one acts a bit warily, at least a little, while expressing bonhomie.

We better propagate the word that everyone should try their best so as to give their best all by themselves and let others live their own lives.

So let us be wary.

Everyone is under the grip of insecurity all the time and hence engaged heart and soul in finding a secure position in life. As long as one is not stable in life he cannot do anything towards development of one's own self. Thus insecurity is hindering everyone from taking him or herself to the next level. One cannot be made to feel secure from outside - security must come from inside. Thus, as it is practically just the opposite, my bonhomie is not helping anybody - it is rather having its toll upon me - draining me like anything.

The obtuse and asinine informativeness of the common logomaniacs around are incessantly damaging the pristine tranquility in the people around them who still might be having that bliss and those numbskulls are totally unaware of the damage they are inflicting and its extent as well. That is the manifestation of their anosognosia.

I have a constant feeling of being infringed into my space by others. My idea of "me" and "my space" must be having the most important role behind this feeling. Others do react the same way - but their actions are only instinctive, they are unaware or can be at most vaguely aware of what lies beneath. That is their anosognosia.

That is the root cause of the ailments looming large over humanity - anosognosia - manifestation of lack of self awareness. This cannot be done away with by bonhomie only. In fact bonhomie, in the long run worsens situation. Hence it must be combined with little or big nudges as and when required to help the herd open their eyes to what are they after.

Logorrhea - a malady looking to become imposing in our contemporary Indian society

Logorrhea in a mild way, has become an almost ubiquitously prevalent aspect of (human) behaviour in contemporary Indian society. Mild way, as, if observed carefully, most of the people would be seen to be feeling it compulsively necessary to try to make their own point listened to by everyone around, not bothering the least of whether it is bothering the others; while the symptom of logorrhea often includes the aspect of talking to oneself and in its mild and temporary form it takes shape as it is described above.

One of the reason behind this symptom may be traumatic injury in frontal lobe. One of the possible causes behind such trauma is the pressure caused by increased population and especially population density. Increased population density may affect our social psychology in a couple of ways - one is by creating lack of personal space giving rise to anxiety, due to a sense of insufficiency of available resources. Under such circumstances one might put one's efforts to secure one's share of resources by way of exercising influence on others - a means of which might be an urge to articulate one's own views with the target of reinforcing one's own
image as an important person who is able to sway the course of affairs by dint of being able to provide with solutions to problems - apparent or not so apparent to others.

Another explanation is a little more subtle - like not so apparent as said above. Here, lack of personal space may lead to a severe boredom for those who are thoughtful, reflective by nature. Not being able to be with one's own self for enough time may lead to sustained frustration in those persons amounting to trauma. Another thing which often comes along with such boredom is the fear of being heckled by the people by which the affected person is surrounded with all the time. This heckling surely occurs often with the thinker, the odd man out, who tends not to be gregarious as he needs space, both physical and mental, for leading the normal life of his or her way.

There is not much talk in this line so far in any kind of media or platform, neither is there any research in the academia in Indian context.

DSM IV does not yet recognise the phenomena described above as logorrhea proper. In the western societies, the problem of diminishing social space is not yet present - which does not yet make the situations mentioned above as imposing problems as it is with us, the Indians.

The point which is to be noted here is the increase in the trend of the mannerism of talkativeness along any arbitrary cross-section of the population in any part of India and its proportionate correlation with increasing population and population density all over the Indian land.

Many of the catastrophic and fatal incidents which have been taking place involving atrocities inflicted upon one person or group of people by adversaries may be traced down to an inception concerning such individual or group communications or urge to communicate certain ideas not caring for those who are supposed to be there at the receiving end. Logorrhea has as a very important aspect of itself, this tendency to overlook or not being conscious at all about the effect the compulsive way of communication might have upon the people who are supposed to be in the receiving end.

It is high time we start looking into it before the magnitude of the problem becomes unmanageably large.

Our idea of education is still its being only a tool to make ourselves able to grab an opportunity to become a cog in the machinery which mechanically produces consumable resources using natural resources so that some people will buy the produce and live in a bare ritualistic way. Consumption is looked upon an essential ritual, manners of which must not be questioned. Our education, in all its parts, remains tacit about raising questions, it rather mostly discourage such action and behaviour. That way we are way far from our counterparts around the world. We are often heard to be crying at the top of our voice boasting to be the largest democracy in the world. But the idea of democracy is not encouraged to be percolated down to the basic units of society - the families, the one to one relationship between two persons - like spouses or parents and child or children.

Our ideas of education still belong to the Victorian era as described in the novel "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens.

As long as we are not prepared to come out of that dingy hole as a whole national population we will not be able to look at such fundamental issues with the discussion of which this piece was started and which are of real national concern, which can make us go in a tailspin as an entire demographic lot for the reasons already mentioned, we will not be able to make any headway towards real national progress. A machine may be upgraded with all the new technologies - but it does not progress. The people who use the machine may make progress by using the upgraded machines in judicious manner.

We have to be aware of our position and make choice for ourselves - keep being machines - used or misused in the hands of others or stop living as machines and cogs and be a conscious and consciously productive part of the gestalt of a nation. We have to step back, pause, collect ourselves, thinkand act consciously. In the process, at first, we must get rid of our attachment to ritualistic manners of thinking, making ourselves free of useless, ineffectual inhibitions and be aware of the underlying fears which make use act the way we do. Logorrhea, the phenomena with which the discussion started, is a manifestation of such a fear of which we remain unconscious. We must befriend reality preferably on a real time basis which is spirituality. This is not the theological religion we all often seem to be bothering about so much. It is about being conscious at every moment about our own selves and our relationship with the ecology we are part of from where our education can start in an effective way.

What disappoints me

I have a characteristic naivete of  faithful expectation from the people I usually spent time throughout the day, deeply ingrained within me, that they are capable of seeing what I see as very apparent, in almost every context. This may be due to the fact that I talk in terms of everyday affairs taking place in our immediately close environment. I take it for granted that as everything is open in front of everyone's eyes, they must be seeing it without missing the details which are rather obvious to me. There is also the fact that I see that I have developed myself to be quite a fine talker having the faculty of delineating things with kind of vibrant lucidity. The psychological insight I have developed in course of my thorough reading in diverse fields, which amounts to quite a thorough interdisciplinary study of the various issues concerning raw human life as far as its fundamental issues are concerned, helps me often get an idea of the predilections of person or persons  I am talking to, and hence almost always can channelise the discussions towards a very meaningful brainstorming sessions on the fundamental issues of human life. But the one crucial drawback of my aptitude I have mentioned above often, if not almost always leads things to kind of disappointing outcome - and of course it comes out to be disappointing for me !! If I have my deeply ingrained naivete, others have their idiosyncrasies, very deep rooted cognitive biases, inhibitions, unrealistic fears, insecurities etc. which, in most cases prevent us i.e. me and others from reaching to some kind concurrent point of view, upon which we agree unequivocally. I, admittedly, almost invariably, miss out one single point - that is others do not really see why I see; while others often miss out plethora of the nuances of a certain scenario or a topic on which we would be having the conversation, that I can appreciate. So there always remains a hiatus, an abyss between me and the world. Often people do not have a very pliant mind, often they are rigid about their attitude towards a certain scenario or state of affairs. Blinkered and short term thinking habits are ubiquitous. And there is the great shortcoming of any social system - heuristics and trends. These aspects of the problem of communication remain strewn around like lump impedances which disrupt the flow of ideas and information as well - leading to broken and failed communication. I fail to remember that me and others often are not in the same vantage point - this fact is there as well.

All the above, almost all the time,  amounts to the same great disappointment for me - finally I fail to reach others; efforts do not pay. My energy remits all the same - but output remains unsatisfactory. I always have the test of failure left for my own self. Must be, at times others also feel like me. But the noumenon remains the same.

The matter of greater concern is the fact that this leads all the way down the vicious cycle - it reinforces the differences between me and the world in every occasion of such failure. It spirals down the abyss and the abyss becomes larger. Disappointment and pessimism keeps looming large over me.

And finally that is what disappoints me.

Project Life

May be this day will later be recalled as a turning point in my life; I have a strain of realisation that so far I have been too much in the idea that I would some time be able to bring a big change in the way of life of the human species, especially mental aspects of life and the basic intellectual ways, and that too would happen very much in my lifetime. My inspirations were the intellectual legends like Goutama Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mohammed and the contemporaries like Rabindranath Tagore. I am a big fan of Jiddu Krishnamurti - I have always felt him to be very near and close to me though he passed away even before I came to know his name.

I used to look at this idea as a very important project of mine and would act and work accordingly as meticulously and thoroughly as possible. The idea was very compelling. It used to be my passion and turned to an obsession. It seems so far I have lived for this idea.

A strange confidence, almost audacious in nature would drive me to make it a point whenever I talked to anybody and whoever it might be, that we are only just a little short of being absolutely efficient and perfect as clockwork and the gap can be very easily bridged if we are just a little more aware to the present moment all the time and be a little open and sensitive to whatever is going on around us; and that is achievable by everyone if we are a wee bit more conscious about our actions - that is we are conscious about our will and we are really exercising  that conscious will.

Now, I am about to be on the wrong side of fifty within a year or so. I have long been striving for this grand cause, to see the success of this project of mine - to create a revolution of human consciousness, if not worldwide, at least around myself, concerning my people - for decades together. It has not happened yet.

But my energy is on the wane and so far I have not been able to create any serious ripple that might be helpful towards success of the project.

Under such circumstances I couldn't help take a break and reflect upon the activities and events involving myself and others. It came back to me that I am actually trying to change or eliminate some reality which does not need me as a prop to be there and it actually does not bother the least about my existence or my likes and dislikes or fancies.

Philosophical debates remain about the concept and nature of reality. But as long as we live, in bare existential sense, what we all do when we eat, sleep wake up and the like, is just taking part in a reality, which is larger than each of us and, at least apparently, almost same for all of us and is independent of any particular being like me or someone else. I can, theoretically, at most make some changes in some parts of this reality which concerns me, but that calls for a unique situation of concurrency of more than one factors some of which are actually quite well beyond my control. A very glaring example of which is the dispositions of people around me. I cannot change that at my will as long as it does not change from its centre or centres, which is the inner world of other people which I cannot reach physically. So at least for some cases I need to align myself with reality so as to save myself from getting bruised and in extreme cases ceasing to exist - keep in mind we are talking about the day to day existence in which we do things so that we can fall asleep when we feel like and wake up again.

I am quite able to do the way I  persuade others to act and actually that has been my way of life. I have developed that keen sense along with my conviction to my view of the way to a better social existence, which have even gained me a special status among the people around me: family and people at work. I can sense their honesty when they tell me that I am not like others and what I say is very much an ideal thing. Some show me kind of reverence in one to one situations in a very plain manner. But all theses things have so far made me ask myself and at times others also: so what? What about you? What are you going to do then? There would either be no answer than silence or there would be kind of lame and faulty explanation of why such things are impractical to go for. Quite often I have had kind of run-in with my family and other people regarding this matter; I could not absorb the fact that people shirk their part in making life good. In the process I have become known as a brusqe polemic character without following. I am looked after as something out of the world, kind of moron. One thing has become very certain out of all these - I am not going to have any success in my project, however hard I work, simply because I do not know yet how to transgress reality.

But it is having its toll on me. All my waking moments I keep firing all cylinders towards my object - but like a mirage it remains where it has been so far. This realisation gave me a feeling of being in a desert all alone. I felt like giving up the futile efforts.

This leads me to draw a couple of inferences from the proceedings: first - I, as a mind, kind of, do not belong to this time and ofcourse not to the place where I happen to be. This makes me an alien to the life of my place, as a stream of events - just a little disturbance which this system of human species somehow manages to keep at bay, and hence need not bother about or feel any need to change its ways due to my efforts - though these efforts cost me a lot of mental energy and life force and drains me a lot.

And secondly, lately I have been draining fast. I feel burnt out with frustration mounting up in a big way; it is eating me. It is an ignominious feeling which tends to tell me that I am done - in every manner. I cannot even being able to sit a few minutes still - my brain is on overdrive. It prattles all the time - and through incessant imaginary conversations tries to establish some fundamental standards basing on which life can be made as just as possible and as healthy as possible.

There is no only single way of the business of life. Things keep happening. As Alan Watts put it in one of his talks, everyone is playing. The rules are flexible. Compulsion arises out of perspective, not being in a good vantage point. If we are too discontented for the reason of being able to see less we become anxious and in turn jittery. A close look towards life in general seems to give an idea that we expect to get rid of this anxiety which we apprehend to come up every next moment; our activities are all in some way or other directed to reach that state where we can overcome this anxiety.

The most important single parameter that can be monitored for understanding the healthiness of the mental aspects of one's life is one's being in conscious touch with one's own will and dispositions. Conscious will has its cognitive role towards managing dispositions. And conscious will always go for one single thing - that is the stability of being in the meniscus, which spares one's mind of stress. I have long been missing this feeling of stability - as if I have been doing like a cliffhanger for eternity. It occurred to me that I have been longing for an end to the anxiety created by the hiatus between the progress in my dream project and reality. This brought within me an urge for immediate reclamation of whatever of life I have within me. I want back the small palpable satisfactions that I may have by exercising the skills I have. I am actually a polymath. I can be creative in widely variable ways - through languages, through lines i.e. drwaing and painting, abstract thoughts pertaining to the philosophical realms, exploring the labyrinth of minds along with psychology. I can entertain myself anytime with chess, I am not all too bad in vocal music, I can successfully try my hands is sculptures - there are enormous possibilities to live life to its full. A superbly eclectic mind such as mine cannot remain restrained in any groove. My spherically divergent aptitudes keep me revving.

The overdrive at times get the better of me - I start living in the edge: may be even off the edge. But then, the Me within me comes back like phoenix time and again. So far no abyss has been enough for me - I am never totally engulfed by anything, not even deterred from getting along with living for too long, as long as the body which is required to be designated as a living being, in the colloquial sense, does not fail the whole entity called me.

On the deadlock situation in the government hospitals of West Bengal

These days life in West Bengal is a fiasco. Many people, most of whom take pride in their political bent of mind are blathering at the top of their voice about many things, many of which are only remotely relevant to a way to sustained end of all these things, which every sane person must be wishing for.

Things which are not uttered even by mistake are the contents of the pandora's box. The rural part of West Bengal need to brought back to life immediately. But that needs some sacrifice, a taboo word, to the political leaders and all sorts of businessesmen alike. The common rural people are mere lesser beings who are gaga about all such complexities. They have been made habituated to the life of freeloaders as far as their contribution towards civil improvement of society is concerned.

There is no ideology of service these days - it is extinct. We even do no longer bank on any kind of ideology whatsoever, we fall for contracts by means of which everyone is trying to secure all kinds of mutual transactions to the extent possible: thus everyone is a businessman. Moreover, thsese contracts of business are focused on the defense mechanism against the mutual mistrust of the contracting parties. Under such situations, where there is no trust, one party is, in any case, bound to feel defeated. This discourages everyone to start new projects of real honest effort to eradicate the difficulty in rural life and make life there civilized enough that people living there get a minimum level of social satisfaction. That causes the continued exodus of very high rate towards the cities. This is creating a jeopardizingly unequal distribution of population over the whole state.

This being a border state there is infiltration which is being cashed by the political parties in the form of various schemes. But the border states of West Bengal are no less a threat to the social order in here. Egregious conduct as far as civility is concerned, is a very common characteristic of this cross section of the population of West Bengal. They are the harbingers of boorishness in the society in here. These two factors play equally important roles in the degradation of the quality of life in the cities of West Bengal, most importantly of Kolkata.

There are amenities in the cities: but proper use of them calls for a restriction on the population and their civic sense. The age old Victorian system of education entirely fails to develop the human aspects of the population throughout a large part of India - West Bengal is no exception. This education system mostly creates contraptions which somehow fit into the production system only in a mechanical sense. It has nothing to do about developing ethical and aesthetic senses of the students taking part in this educational system. The products of system hardly bothers to care for the real meaning of quality of life. They are mostly all to busy to bring it to others' notice in a loud and officious manner that they are there, somehow alive!!

On top of that, the rural population of West Bengal hardly goes through any education mechanism in the modern sense of the term. Their education has remained almost in a primitive stage. That is the cause of the total lack of sense of responsibility of the rural population of West Bengal towards improvement of the quality of their own life.

The entire picture is thus bleak. Obviously enough, all the parties are outrageously oblivious about what is at stake. No one sees hardly a few hours ahead and all are way too much engrossed about why things have not been done, as if grabbing the collar of those who played truant is going to revert it all: the fail to acknowledge that this is once again playing truant - evading once own part to contribute in the process of improvement. We keep sliding down the sinkhole in a sure manner and unobstructed.

Politicking is trying to find out a short cut to improvement of quality of life, but actually there is no such shortcut. Neither is it going to help saying: it is easier said than done and pass the buck on others. It is either done or not done and each human being as an individual must do his or her bit of hardship to improve the quality of life. Only sincerity towards living can improve our life

Fact vs Truth

Facts always have directly tangible effect on the experiencer : it can be observed and felt physically - while that may not always be the case with truth. Under given situations,  truth has to be "realised" by way of reasoning with the help of the premise of tangible facts commonly experienced by all the people. But that cannot be directly experienced by all. As an example we can say that the visual of a moon in the eveing sky is a fact,  whereas its being there above the earth is a truth - as this phenomena cannot be experienced in a direct way, by being there on the moon, by each and every one of us. So to arrive at a truth we have to give space, a leeway to our beliefs, with caution or awareness on our part to see that this belief does not contradict any of the established truths which are already commonly accepted - like we believe the experience of the astronauts.

The moment there is such a contradiction we should reevaluate the truth as well as the new experience which is contradicting the already established truth to see if there is any flaw in the new experience, or the premise basing on which we earlier arrived at the earlier accepted truth.