The Siddhartha Syndrome

One of the most well-known stories about Gautam Buddha involves how as Prince Siddhartha, he encountered disease, old age and death all in one night and decided to call it quits and become a sanyasi.  In normal daily life, no one makes such a life-changing decision just because he saw someone sick or old or dead.   Then why did he do so?  Or is it a very simplistic story-fication of some complex transformation that happened within Prince Siddhartha?

The answer lies in the way he was brought up. His father King Suddhodhana’s idea of bringing up his son as a confirmed royal was to protect him from becoming of aware of anything adverse that will let him question the fundamentals of life. King Suddhodhana was convinced that he was doing the right thing because he loved his son.

If only King Suddhodhana’s did what most other kings did with their sons – send your children to a gurukul in the midst of a forest with no servants and no privilege during their formative years – the world would have probably never had a Gautam Buddha.

Today, when I look around the upper middle class Indian families (including mine – however we love to continue to call ourselves middle-class families), I see a strong Siddhartha syndrome taking roots in the minds of parents and therefore the children.

Today, most urban families have one or at the most two children. Which means, even if you are low income earning person, you devoted all your time and resources to that one child.  The picture gets rosier if both parents work, (which seems to be the spreading trend). The only child and at best the two children never have to want anything.  They are never allowed to face any difficulty or make do with what is available or even share.

Today, for the first time in most middle-income families, it is possible to raise individuals – not siblings. Every person in the family can have a separate life and we can afford it.

This is the basic way of life in the first world. There is no need to compete because everyone has everything.

The problem in India, however, is the wide disparity in growth, development and opportunities. While within families we have been able to avoid competition and sharing, when our children move out in the society for the first time, they demonstrate what I call the Siddhartha syndrome.

I see my own children refusing to use a public toilet or eat in any wayside dhabha if it doesn’t look sparkling clean. If they take one sip of “regular” water, they fall sick with diarrhoea. If they are asked to compete with a million other children for those few government seats, they don’t understand why it is to be done at all.

I know of neighbours whose children refused to take admission in a college because it had no garden or clean exteriors.  They would rather have their parents pay huge fees to a private university with all these amenities than a run-down government college.

This, I call the Siddhartha Syndrome.  It is fast taking roots in upper  middle classes in India.  I doubt if these modern-day Siddhartha’s will attain enlightenment the way the original Siddhartha did.

Just a housewife

There are more housewives than women who do professional work. It’s a societal truth in India.  Does that mean they do nothing?  It would seem so if you went by the answers you typically get when you ask the question “What do you do” to any woman.

If the said woman does a professional job, she would say she is an airhostess, or a teacher or a nurse or whatever it is that she does. She wouldn’t make a special mention that she runs a family, just like a married man would. No married man ever claims running his family as a special or full-time job.

If the questioned woman is a “housewife”, you will notice a sudden lowering of the decibel and a few moments of silence after she claims that as her “occupation”. It is almost as if she carries a crucifix of not really doing anything.  It is even more stark when she or her husband says she is “just a housewife”.

It occurs to me that this schism is mainly due to the shift in our cultural values of a “being” culture to a more Protestant “doing” culture. You are only what you do; not what you are.

Now, one or two of the multiple layers of meaning deriving from “what you are” is the spoiler. Specifically, “what you are” points to privileges and advantages that someone gets from being born in a privileged or well-endowed family, a merit not in the least a result of your own labors.

As our population grew, those without the “what you are” advantages had to come up with the “what you do” attitude to earn what they did not inherit.

Historically, the Hindu culture has never fostered hard work, it has fostered work for pleasure or need.  This was due to the high contentment element inbuilt in our close family ties and general prosperity in the society.

Our culture impressed upon the importance of “being yourself” rather than as a doer of something”. The logic behind that is that what you do “being yourself” will be of much superior quality and lead to greater satisfaction than “doing for doing sake”.

Being a housewife is a classic case of “being yourself” when motherhood was considered the ultimate purpose for the life of every woman. In order to become a mother, she had to become a wife which in turn meant becoming an integral member of the husband’s family.   Everywhere she just had to become, just be – achieve her natural purpose.  So there was nothing defined, no specific  job description or role definition.  Everyone understood what it was and each one lived it to the extent she could.

Our deeds came from our “being” whoever we were; whereas the western Protestant value is that being derives from your “doing”.  Do we derive our identity from our deeds or our deeds from our identity?  Did the egg come first or the chicken?  Till we answer that question, housewives will continue to be “just” that.