What do we learn from Bhasmaksha ?
Myth-loving readers are well aware of mythical tells from India these days — thanks to popular mythologists. Many of celebrity scientists are convinced about “truth” behind “ancient” mythical stories forgetting metaphorical aspects, forgetting the fact that those ancient stories were developed as a result of ancient people’s quest resulting from their observation of the world, forgetting that myth, being subjective truth cannot be absolute worldview. Some of them are trying to conceptualize stories developed in ancient times. And this 21st century phenomenon makes me remember one story read in Bengali Ramayan.
We all know there are different regional versions of Ramayan. The most popular Bengali Ramayan was written by Krittibas Ojha, a resident of Fuliya (current Nadia district of West Bengal) in first half of 15th century. This version tells a story of a Rakshas named Bhasmaksha, who also called Bhasmalochan in some other versions. Bhasmaksha, being driven by the desire to gain absolute power like most of the Rakshasas, began practicing penance (Tapasya). A thousand years of his hard penance satisfied Brahma enough to appear before him offering a boon. The Rakshas first wanted immortality. Brahma denied saying that his immortality would destroy creations. The next thing the Rakshas asked for was a pair of fiery eyes that would burn anything he would look at into ashes. Brahma granted that suggesting him to cover his eyes. The happy Rakshas wanted to test the effectiveness of the boon looking at his armed force at first. All burnt into ashes instantly. The pleased Rakshas came back to Lanka, his abode covering his eyes this time. But soon, his wife and children left him to save themselves from his devastating power. Covering his eyes he locked himself inside a dark room in his palace. After many other Rakshas heroes died in his battle against Ram, Raban send this Dhumraksha to destroy Ram. He arrived in the battlefield in a chariot covered by leather, his eyes covered to ensure not to burn everything before him. Ram came to know about the power of his eyes from Bibhishan on his arrival. He set an appropriate weapon to counter this. The Rakshas, confident of his destructive power came straight towards Ram not looking at anyone else and removed the leather cover from his eyes. What he saw was the image of own face, reflected on a large mirror Ram had placed between himself and the Rakshas. As he looked at the mirror, reflection of his own eyes set him ablaze. The powerful Rakshas was burnt into ashes within moments.
The story tells us, power attained by hook and crook, power attained to destroy the creation is bound to be perished. Power of the almighty is immeasurable and that takes charge every time when one empowered by technology tries to challenge it. What the Rakshas’s extreme austerity helped him to gain, was some limited technological knowledge that made him confident — and overconfidence leads us to the route to destruction.
Technological giants do not comprehend stories. If they did, they did not become gigantic power dreaming of measuring, controlling and managing the entire world. At some point of time, when humans had limited technological knowledge, they only tried to save themselves from natural disasters applying that knowledge. As technological knowledge began expanding, the tribe acquiring advanced technological knowledge began controlling less technically advanced tribes. The concept of slavery found new meaning with the invention of guns which replaced physical strength by mechanical one (Ancient China discovered gun power but used to make fireworks instead of weapons using that!). Our ancient tribes with limited technological knowledge did not create stories with a target of promoting some technological marvel, but gun carrying humans started creating stories to glorify technology. Industrial revolution fueled this trend. Human’s effort to control disease too found an ally in technology. The power of advanced technology was established in every corner of the world, spreading across all aspects of human life. Who would enjoy the world’s best luxury using the technological marvels led to war between similarly tech-developed tribes twice in a gap of fifty years. On the other hand, most of humans failed to notice that while fighting among themselves for the ownership of resources, tribes unintentionally exchanged stories among themselves. When the tech-powerful tribes used knowledge of technology, the less-tech powerful started countering them with their stories — of an ancient world having higher spiritual value than technological knowledge. Vivekananda reached America with his interpretation of ancient Indian stories as his weapon.
Technologically powerful tribes in post-WWII world found a new dimension of technology to reign over the world in the concept of BINARIES. It took decades of penance of new generation scientists of various knowledge areas to give binaries a presentable shape. Humans have tenacity to work for what they want to ACHIEVE. Finally with a huge monetary and intellectual investment from all neo-giants of the Information technology sector equipped with artificial intelligence, binaries became acceptable as solver of all human problems.
Information Technology helps new-age manufacturers produce goods faster with minimum human effort at minimum cost. It helps reaching goods at everyone’s disposal (provided buyer has money to purchase the goods). It helps extending human life’s tenure on earth provided the patient has money to pay for healthcare. It also comes to rescue insecure politicians to practice control over the population whose opinion counts. And all these tasks need understanding of human mind — user’s opinion. As Information technology starts being projected as solution to all human problems, the masterminds promoting it need winning human minds and faith by understanding them fast. Mind-reading using Information technology became big challenge while human minds are too diverse to read. And here emerged the requirement of segmenting human minds and desire. An entire population of a target area became subject to segmentation. How would we segment them? Geography, race, gender, selection pattern, nothing seemed adequate to solve issues all of manufacturing, trading and political achievers face. 21st century information technology preacher found ally in ancient stories, myths and fables, which not only promise help in classifying human mind, but also manipulate it to some extent. Ancient myths, which were developed as a result of human observation and used to spread knowledge, became more focused. The demarcation between History, the concept from technologically advanced world and Myth, the concept of less technologically advanced world begins blurring. Raban’s Puspak Rath begins being considered as historical fact as that pleases certain segment of tech-users. Also the frequent change of physical genders of mythical characters becomes fact or truth to another segment of people. Advancement of medical research with the aid of IT, ensuring creation of life anywhere without male-female contact lights the lamp of new dream in another segment of tech-users. Creating Humans of selected quality in a pot instead of female womb, a man with elephant or pig’s head or talking horses become a matter of time and further research in the imagination of modern scientist brains. Extending human life (read selected “Brains”) till infinity is another possibility IT aided medical science offers. Scientific ethics is trying to block the possibility of creating human-animal hybrid or planting human brain on imperishable robot till date, but we don’t know how long that ethics will work if it pleases another segment of tech-users. Laws start changing focusing on human pleasure imagined by ancient story tellers — IT would make all our stories possible in near future.
And this is where the less-advanced, less-technology user human mind becomes skeptical. Yes 21st century technological advancements with support of giant information technology specialists have a potential to make all of our mythological imaginations a reality. And we already see the impact in human habits. All of our modern writing community are using keyboards instead of pen and paper; touch technology is replacing human touch; we don’t need to communicate with humans for simple pleasures of life and most important, reading or listening habit, that was once considered to be necessary to expand one’s knowledge is drastically changing. Literary creations exploring human minds, their relation with nature is being replaced by mythological fantasy with promising development potential as reader’s choice. Parents who make babies physically due to lack of access to advanced non-sexual technology started replacing their way of showing human affection by handing touch-phones to single kids growing in technologically advanced sky-scrappers. Natural laws are being discussed in nature-free environment. Segmenting humans and manipulating their choice become reality — thanks to big data; control which was not possible using previous standardization is now possible by segmentation.
Fundamental difference between ancient nature-worshiper and new-generation technology worshiper lies in later ’s attempt of replacing nature with advancement of IT. Today we tell stories with an intention to realize everything which were previously only imaginations. And skeptical reader is forced to write a few lines using the screen and keyboard.
Liliput’s words never reach Brobdingnagian ears. Writing a Medium article doesn’t make sense in a world ruled by IT giants. Less-technically equipped writer still writes with a belief that almighty Ram would help reducing the impact of Rakshas force of Information Technology someday.
Shubhamastu!
Reference: Many printed books by many authors and two recent articles:
