Me, The Jokerman: Enthusiasms, Rants & Obsessions by Khushwant Singh

Author:Khushwant Singh [Singh, Khushwant]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mobilism
ISBN: 9789384067779
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Published: 2016-07-31T18:30:00+00:00

MONOPOLIZING GURUS

Shourie points out that the Westernized elite tend to dismiss Gandhi as a faddist and as a traditionalist without realizing that ‘like a true revolutionary who looked into the people’s psyche’, he beat the orthodox Hindus and Jains at their most vulnerable points. Although he had no pretensions to scholarship, what he had read ‘convinced him that the texts, though useful, could never be elevated to being [the] final arbiter’. He rejected both the literal interpretations and the authority of the gurus who often claimed monopoly over sacred knowledge. He used to say that the texts suffered from a process of ‘double distillation’ because they came to us through a human prophet ‘and then passed through a second distillation by commentators’. He stated, ‘Categorically, I would reject all scriptural authority if it is in conflict with sober reason or the dictates of the heart. Authority sustains and ennobles the weak when it is the handiwork of reason, but it degrades them when it supplants reason sanctified by the still, small voice within...blind worship of authority is a sign of weakness of mind...’ Shourie goes on to contrast the attributes of Sankara and Gandhi. Where Sankara is preoccupied with the scriptures, Gandhi is preoccupied with life and ‘the actual struggles that the masses must wage. Here is the difference between scholastic disputation and life, between exegetical polemics and real struggles.’

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