"When the Elite Feel Entitled"

 

When a person brands himself as an intellectual giant of society, compulsively ridicules and confuses the same society, the foolish and ignorant masses will take it as long as it's entertaining. Once the confetti is out and the curtains close, the masses will make sure to make a 'Wise Man' out of the intellectually entitled. And the 'Wise Man' will readily apologize.

When the elite act like entitled monsters, the foolish and ignorant masses they have been entertaining will show the entitled who the real multifaceted monster is.

I consider the moving feet of God, Sri Adi Shankaracharya, to be the greatest of all intellects to have walked on this planet. Shankara, even after becoming the great acharya that he is, had the humility to bow down to a village drunkard when he (Shankara) felt that he had something to learn even from a stinking drunkard. That is one of the reasons we call him: Aalayam, Karunaalyam.

Human society is always in awe of a humble wise person. The people, the masses, will put you on a high pedestal of their society and celebrate your intellect as their own. They will make you an intellectual elite since you have given expression to their thoughts and feelings. It’s that feeling you get while reading a book or watching a movie or a sport. You usually feel like you yourself could have written that book, shot the movie, or played that amazing straight drive. I feel like that even today when I watch cricket archives of my hero, The Great Wall of India, Rahul Dravid, batting. Humility is the essence or the rasa. When humility is combined with intellect, it makes a pleasant condition and atmosphere for wisdom to manifest.

When a person grows in stature, when a person stands apart as a visionary, the person becomes an entity of adulation. When the society churns out its elite, it's expected of the elite to be the shining light of wisdom in society. If animalistic instincts take over the better senses of the elite and start vibing entitlement... that's it; in the dharmic lore, it's articulated as ‘Vinaasha Khaale Vipiritha Bhuddi’... Karma will have its way, the intellect a person uses to climb the social ladder will collapse, and the same intellect will turn against the person.

From time immemorial, human society has always celebrated the strife and success of other fellow humans. We naturally tend to acknowledge human excellence and competence. In a functioning society, any quantifiable human strife, like in the fields of sports, sciences, and economics, the essence of human achievement is easily measured, recognized, honoured, and acknowledgments are usually credited to individuals when it’s due. Arts, on the other hand, are not so easily quantifiable. Arts cannot be produced en masse. We may consider arts to be the biggest set, and the rest of all the other fields are subsets of the arts. That is the reason we find artists in every field of study. In Hindu culture, arts are considered to be a means to enlightenment or realizing the highest of human possibilities. An actor who plays Sri Rama or Krishna on stage or screen is expected by society to behave in a certain way and take a certain righteous stand even off stage. Great artists like Dr. Rajkumar or N. T. Rama Rao have a transcendental effect on the masses, even long after their physical demise. People have worshipped their beloved gods in the images of these artists. When people cry out “Anna Mathe Hutti Ba”, it’s the audience's intimate hope to be easily transcendentalized. And every true artist desires that intimate relationship with their audience.