Vedanta - Peculiar be Praised
ISHAN CHAUDHURI
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“The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities, and his right to these peculiarities.“Religion rarely extols the virtues of individualism head-on.At best, like companies where teamwork is of essence, some faiths value the individual but as an extension of something `greater'. Placing him or her as one of the chief ingredients that form a grouping -whether it's family, organisation, society or even humanity -is how individualism is celebrated in a world that is dazzled by the collective.
But the author of Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, whose `peculiar' line this piece begins with, holds the individual, eve ry individual, at the core of life itself. And Grossman does so with out opting to place the indi vidual in any larger conte xt. His worship of the individual stems, ironically , from the society he was reacting against in 1930s Soviet Union: the collective, or the `soviet'.
`Soviet' may have become a defunct and discredited word, but here in liberal democratic 2015, we continue to hold the collective in its various comforting and benign forms above the individual. Forgetting, perhaps, that it is the `peculiarities' of the individual more than the `generalities' of any grouping that make life special.
Which doesn't take away the necessity of being part of a larger entity . “No man,“ as John Donne put it, “is an island, entire of itself.“ But that has been easier to remember, in a world in which persons are part of data, a family , a grouping. To know the value of the individual, however, overwhelms every other experience.
But the author of Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman, whose `peculiar' line this piece begins with, holds the individual, eve ry individual, at the core of life itself. And Grossman does so with out opting to place the indi vidual in any larger conte xt. His worship of the individual stems, ironically , from the society he was reacting against in 1930s Soviet Union: the collective, or the `soviet'.
`Soviet' may have become a defunct and discredited word, but here in liberal democratic 2015, we continue to hold the collective in its various comforting and benign forms above the individual. Forgetting, perhaps, that it is the `peculiarities' of the individual more than the `generalities' of any grouping that make life special.
Which doesn't take away the necessity of being part of a larger entity . “No man,“ as John Donne put it, “is an island, entire of itself.“ But that has been easier to remember, in a world in which persons are part of data, a family , a grouping. To know the value of the individual, however, overwhelms every other experience.
