The problem again is that you cannot stop one from desiring a utopian world because one’s mind is not all about pain and despair. One desires, hopes and lives even amidst multiple adversities. There is one more thing which a taxi driver, a young man of late forties, did one day. Since my vehicle was sent for servicing, I hired a cab to go to Patan. The street paced up with agitation.
Everyone seemingly were in extreme rush, many wanted to go past the driver by loud honking of their horns. He let them go and they smilingly went past him. One would overtake him and slow his car to talk on his mobile, the other will laugh in his hamlet. A motorcyclist whizzed past us, and then he too lowered the gear to respond to a mobile call while riding in front us.
Some were in real hurry. Many pretended that they needed velocity, and some wanted to go ahead of everyone. “Why do you always allow others to go ahead?” He did not look at me and replied, “If you observe my speeding neighbors, you will find that they are still around me. That gray car has been around me from Putli Sadak; that Honda biggie is three feet ahead of me for 20 minutes, the micro bus is running alongside mine from Singhadurbar. They all are rushing ahead but around my calm wheel.”
“I always try to think and act and say ‘me first’ and whenever I tried to act first, I damaged my cab or rubbed and hit someone else’s. I do not want to go first if I harm the other.” An extraordinary driver of patience with so much of wisdom! You do not meet such peoples for years, and when you meet them, your grave philosophical readings manifest themselves in the middle of complexity of streets and markets.
I recently offered a course on South Asian resilience and read a group of Indian philosophers. Vivekananda is always dear to me as one of the finest of modern minds, and since I read him for multiple academic purposes, I sometimes critique his writings. The cab driver made things easy for me by a simple and yet incomprehensible wisdom.
“You have to put yourself last and others before you. The senses say ‘myself first.’ Ethics say ‘I must hold myself last.’”
“You have to put yourself last and others before you. The senses say ‘myself first’. Ethics say ‘I must hold myself last’.” In a talk delivered in London, Vivekananda writes in “The Necessity of Religion.” You may giggle on such a sluggish ideology, I may show my disgust! Pah! But the Swami writes: “Thus, all codes of ethics are based upon this renunciation; destruction not construction, of the individual on the material plane.”
This is a pervasive attitude: Not to hold yourself last. The driver told me in wonderful Nepali: “Just a little bit if possible, here and there, at times, working in the offices and buying vegetables, working for the nation and queuing for food, even if the life is fast.” “Even when the world is so very fast, with so much of movement?” I asked. “Speed is meaningless if I do not slow down,” this is what he exactly told me without looking at me. “We all will crash on moral grounds.”
“Who are you?” I asked. “What?” He looked sideways.
The problem with me at times is that I stagger to comprehend philosophy when I hear them on humble occasions. We honk that we are not supposed to philosophize things when we are in the midst of daily complexities. Philosophy is a matter of distant wisdom. We dispute on how to appropriate wisdom of the saints, and in the meantime a cab driver takes you a ride by holding the wheel and talking wonders of life. When Vivekananda appeared and when the driver spoke are the matters of paradox of distance; the problem is to decide where the river ends and the sand begins.
The best thing with me now is not to know who said what. I do not care whether they were the words of Swami Vivekananda or the cab driver. I do not want to know the details of wisdom. I would not want to know who opens the pages of the book and who holds the wheel!
There is a little grocery shop, an unimpressive corner just before you turn to Jhamsikhel in Patan. He lives nearby. He told me that he stands near the corner shop, buys a cigarette and stands back further into a shade and looks at the rushing life around him. And then everything slows down in front of him as he continues looking, and after sometime, everything stops moving around him. I was sacred a bit when he looked at me with calmness of mind.
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