Ever wondered why January is special? Well, god Janus is the reason. He has two faces: one to look backwards as well. Don’t we have a rear-view mirror in our cars? Why do we need to see what is behind us in order to be safe in going forward? Why is Alzheimer’s such a sad thing? Isn’t it because it wipes out the past. And with that, one’s identity too?

Today we think it is best to disburden ourselves of the treasures of the past. We are sprinting on the fast track of linear progress, where it is foolish to look back. It doesn’t matter that this outlook undermines gratitude, cuts individuals from their roots and degrades the elderly into wrinkled items of redundancy. Perhaps we should consider, “May be it’s a good idea to keep in touch with the treasures of the past as well?”

Most of us overlook the fact that the past holds the roots of the present. To see this for what it is, consider the law of nature that whatever exists in time will turn, over time, into its opposite. What’s new becomes old, day becomes night, the strong becomes weak, and so on. If this is true, it stands to logic that the fine-print of the present is best read also in the light of the past.

Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, once said that human species was born as a child prodigy. We were at our best in the days of our infancy; for, after all, it was in the period of its infancy that our species produced the immortal classics in diverse areas of knowledge and creativity. All of western philosophy, said Alfred North Whitehead with a touch of waggish exaggeration, is no more than a footnote to Plato.

If indeed it is true that the passage of time distorts ideas and institutions, it stands to logic that we understand best what they have come to be when we also remember what they were meant to be. This is obvious in the case, say, of words. It would be rather humbling for our jargon-mouthing economists to know that the word meant, “setting (people) free”! How can we judge agendas and advocacies, systems and structures, objectively and justly, if we don’t know what they were envisaged to be?

Any connection, do you think, between polis, politics and police? All of them derive their roots from the duty to promote a sane, courteous and law-abiding culture in the city? Hard to believe, isn’t it, that ‘politeness’ was deemed the hallmark of the police? ‘Politics’ was the art of living together in harmony in the polis (city) so as to express the best potential embedded in collective life. Legislation, or law-making, was predicated on building a noble society. The foremost responsibility of a law-maker was to be a role-model to the rest of the society!

The word ‘candidate’ belongs to the same root as ‘candid.’ Candidness was the essential virtue in a candidate in Rome. It is doubtful if our politicians, who clad themselves in white khadi, know that this practise is of Roman origin. Candidates in ancient Rome wore sparkling white togas while canvassing for votes; claiming purity as their foremost eligibility! Citizens knew that politics had to be clean for good governance to be real.

The Athenian society was clear that citizens should be nurtured as morally healthy individuals for them to be sane citizens. Hence the importance that they -Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Anaxagoras, and so on laid on education. Education was predicated on the need to train citizens in the practice of ‘virtue.’ Virtue was not a matter of knowing right and wrong, but of being trained to do what is right.

Virtue becomes real only through virtuous actions.
The Greeks knew that virtue was a habit. This becomes clear, when we recall that ‘ethics’ is derived from ‘ethos,’ which means ‘habit.’ Habit is formed through repeated actions, as in training. No habit is natural. What is natural, like our instinct to eat, does not have to be formed. A baby’s instinct to eat is natural, and is fully developed at birth. The one thing that education today fails to address is the need to promote healthy intellectual and ethical habits. Lifelong learning, for example, will work only if it is formed into a habit. So also, public hygiene, courteous behaviour, commitment to justice, integrity at work, and so on.

Of course, habits are being promoted or formed today too. But they are not healthy habits. When road rage explodes, we are flummoxed as to how such things could happen. We refuse to see the connection between this and the public display of intemperance and the growing faith in violence as our problem-solving strategy. From cradle to saddle, temperance stands discounted. Hate and intemperance are the current metaphors for individual and collective virility.

We pay lip-service to Swami Vivekananda; but when it comes to culture, it is Sigmund Freud that we follow. Vivekananda is grist to mills of oratory; Freud is for day-to-day life. Swamiji’s exposition of the sublimation of instincts, in order to convert sexual energy into spiritual energy, and vice versa, stands in no chance against Freud’s impulse release, which assumes that individuals are mere bio-chemical pressure cookers with genitals as safety-valves.

We market yoga, but ignore its holistic philosophy of all-round harmony and tolerance. Yoga is about wholeness. Oneness, not fragmentation, has to be its outcome. Yoga is as much about the health of the whole person as it is about physical fitness. It is mendacious to presume the contrary. Ironically, even in commercializing the treasures of the past, we seem beset by spiritual and cultural Alzheimer’s. As an educator I welcome a re-appropriation of our classic heritage; not as a propagandist gimmick, but as a sincere effort to regain our ruptured wholeness as a people, whose horizon, as Max Mueller aptly said, was illumined by spiritual wisdom in many respects, as it did nowhere elsewhere in the world.