Comfort – Com + Fort – to fight together / to strengthen together / to replenish together.
The word comfort comes from the late 13th century, meaning "to cheer up, console, soothe when in grief or trouble", from the Old French 'conforter', meaning "to solace; to help, strengthen," further from the Late Latin 'confortare', meaning "to strengthen, to replenish, to restock". The word's etymology shows the clear trend forming the thesis of this piece, i.e. the change in the meaning of 'comfort' through the changes in ages, empires, dictats, religions, literature, cinema, thought, sociality, and ideology, straight from Rome, as is the way today with online transactions, to home.
In the word's original sense, to comfort someone is to help someone prepare for war. Rather, to be more precise, it is to help someone stay prepared for war. The urgency of the war in the perceived meaning of the word cannot be emphasized enough, coming as it does from times before global governments, global trade, and global cooperation. The word ‘comfort’ comes from times when unelected gods Jupiter, Minerva, Poseidon, and Hades were the rulers of the world at large, rather than the unelected modern gods in the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. It comes from a time when war was the norm, not the aberration. It comes from a time when heads rolled frequently, almost casually, when the idea of the ruled masses having a say in government was revolutionary, and when the color purple was worth more than gold because of the relative difficulty in obtaining it.
To comfort someone is not to allay their fears or to solve their problems for them. To comfort means to fight, or at least prepare for / stay prepared for battle, along with someone. Literally, it is closer to the latter definition, i.e. to prepare someone else for their own battle, with the ‘preparer’ playing a minimal if any role in the preparee’s own battle. It is a truth well-known to lovers and students of life that the hardest battles to fight are always personal, private, intensely individual, i.e. within, with, and against ourselves. As a purely uninvolved agent, someone who comforts may play no role at all in the ensuing battle, but may watch on as an interested party, having primed the individual to fight their own battles. It is often in this way that the word ‘comfort’ peaks in terms of significance to the human mind, with spouses, teachers, and elders very often playing the important but unseen role of coaxing, willing, and driving their loved one to victory and glory in their own battles.
Krishna’s role in the Mahabharata war instantly comes to mind in this context to anyone even mildly familiar with the mythos of Hinduism.
Chapter 1: “I Am All Aquiver, My Tongue is Parched, Neither Can I Stand, Nor Can I Understand” – The Disillusionment of Arjuna
Parthasarathi (Charioteer of Parth, or Arjun) Krishna is one of the most popular depictions of Lord Krishna, with the divine king holding the reins of Pandava prince Arjuna’s chariot in his hands during the Mahabharata war, rather than a weapon. Arjuna’s reverential dependence upon Krishna, and his acknowledgment of Krishna’s importance even when unarmed, shows the comfort he intelligently draws from Krishna’s mere presence, a trait his quantitatively minded rival Duryodhana doesn’t share.
The Mahabharata constantly makes reference to the conflict between the qualitative mindedness of the Pandavas as well as many of the Kauravas’ reluctant allies such as Bhishma, Drona, and Kripa, and the quantitative mindset of the chief Kaurava, Duryodhana. The importance of quality over quantity is emphasized repeatedly through the book, not least in the episode when Arjuna initially chooses Krishna as his charioteer rather than choosing to integrate the mighty Yadava armies into the alliance of Pandava forces.
Before the Mahabharata war, Arjuna and Duryodhana come to Krishna’s palace, seeking to gain a valuable ally, with Krishna holding deep familial and political ties with both sides. However, repeating the motif from an earlier episode of the story – where the young Kuru prince Arjuna states that he saw “nothing but the parrot’s eye” when instructed by his guru to target the parrot’s eye – Arjuna has come to seek Krishna himself, while Duryodhana sees Krishna as merely a means to secure the acquisition of the formidable Yadav armies.
Thus sought head-on by the two rivals in the upcoming great war, Krishna, knowing who he’s dealing with, offers to split himself, so to speak, claiming that his ties to both sides compel him to not hurt either. Offered a choice between Krishna himself, unarmed, and the entirety of the might of the Yadavas except for Krishna himself, Arjuna goes for the one lion, while Duryodhana contents himself with millions of sheep.
Arjuna exhibits the extent of his devotion to Krishna even further during the dialog of the Bhagawadgeeta, prostrating himself before Krishna with the words,
शिष्यस्तेहं शाधि मां त्वां प्रपन्नं | (I am your disciple, deal with me as you will)
While Duryodhana sought comfort in “राज्यं भोगाः सुखानि च” (power, indulgences, and pleasures), it is Arjuna who thinks it madness to kill one’s own relatives. It is in this moment that Krishna most impressively justifies Arjuna’s faith in him, first calming him down from what could properly be considered a ‘panic attack’ in modern terms, and then explaining to Arjuna that while personal interpersonal bonds are crucial as a social being, true wisdom comes from doing what is the right thing at the time the question is asked, regardless of ties or affiliations.
It is in this manner that Krishna becomes the epitome of comfort – the rock that you stand on, not the sword that you swing, and especially not the pleasures and indulgences that, at best, allow you to forget your sorrow for a short while. Krishna, the sole unarmed participant in the battle to decide everything, the one holding not a sword, not a mace, nor a bow, but the reigns, provides the most comfort to those around him.
Chapter 2: Boulders, Fishes, Lions, and Babies: What Camus, Hemingway, and Nietzsche Had to Say on Comfort
Choosing to keep fighting instead of giving up, as a first, basic, original choice upon which to base everything else in your life, is probably where modern culture differs most greatly from the time when ‘comfort’, ‘companion’, and many other such words were formed. The philosophy of the late 1800s and early 1900s bears out this philosophical shift, which, driven by the end of imperialism, the “death of god”, according to Nietzsche, and the rise of consumer-centric capitalism, was happening most urgently during this period.
Albert Camus, in his ardently explorative Myth of Sisyphus, compares the human condition to the punishment of Sisyphus, claiming that, given the nature of Sisyphus’s – and figuratively humanity’s – crime against the gods, man should find contentment in becoming aware of the seeming absurdity of day to day life and fighting with it nevertheless. Despite the futility of his toil and the inevitability of his punishment, Camus writes, Sisyphus can take comfort from his effort of lifting the boulder to the top every single time. This effort alone, Camus writes, should be enough to fill a man's heart. Fighting against the absurd is the fundamental choice that Camus's hero makes, rather than unsuccessfully trying to forget about its existence or ending one’s life due to being overwhelmed by it. It is in this way that Camus’s absurdist philosophy mirrors that of Friedrich Nietzsche, who spoke of the utility of seeing your life as an eternal recurrence, when he wasn't speaking of men who went beyond, lions who roared, and the truly eternal sunshine of the spotless minds of babies.
The Untamable La Mar and Santiago's Karmayoga
Ernest Hemingway’s classic The Old Man and the Sea, released in 1952, just as the modern Liberal era was getting started, can be considered as the great final rallying cry of Nietzsche and Camus’s philosophies. The Old Man and the Sea brings Camus and Nietzsche’s abstract reasoning, search for fundamental suppositions, and coherence between mythos and ethos into the cold, hard world of the Caribbean Sea, fishing lines, tornado seasons, tides, sunsets, and shark oil, as only Ernest Miller Hemingway could have.
It is simplicity itself to see Santiago, the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea, as an exemplar of Karmayoga – the path of enlightened action, just as it is easy to see the connection of the Bhagawadgeeta’s central philosophy with Camus’s Sisyphus and Nietzsche’s Ubermensch.
Santiago fishes because he is a fisherman. The apparent tautology in this statement is brought to a resolution with the understanding that Santiago is not fishing to survive, is not fishing as just one of many ways he could have made enough money to survive, but has chosen to look at fishing as a way of life, as a means to get far in terms of who he is, to get far in terms of becoming himself. It is the often-invisible 360-degree trip that Santiago has made around the profession of fishing, with the aid of his humility, loyalty, and discipline, that allows him to fish “because he is a fisherman”. In terms of the popular bell curve graph meme, Santiago lies on the extreme right end of the graph, having discarded his romantic notions about fishing as well as his frustration and annoyance with the day to day life of a fisherman, emerging on the other side as a clean, bright soul steeped in the terminology, behaviors, and habits, i.e. the profession, of a fisherman.
His profession has become his vocation, his raison d'etre, and thus his comfort, in the true, literal sense of the word. It is what he will fight for, i.e. what he will fight to be able to do. The anecdote about Santiago’s arm-wrestling bout with “the great negro from Cienfuegos” also bears out Santiago’s comfort in being who he is and doing what he does, as rather than winning a few more arm-wrestling games after his initial victory, and making more money out of it, he decides that his prowess at ‘the hand game’, as Hemingway calls it, could spell danger for his life as a fisherman, and stops playing it with the experiential knowledge that he could beat anyone at it if he really tried, but that he had no reason to do so.
Even though others see him in a new light after the match, and call him ‘el campion’, it makes no difference to him, just as it made no difference to him when he knew, after several hours of a brutal stalemate, that he was going to win this match because he had figured out his opponent’s way and his opponent had lost his self-belief after failing to down his hand. He simply perceives it as a fact of life, and not as any personal validation, since it is his life as a fisherman that gives him the most meaning, and thus the most comfort, not an isolated run of victories at ‘the hand game’.
His comfort is earned, not granted. His comfort, in the true sense of the word, is with him throughout the struggle, is acted out throughout the struggle. In fact, the harder the sea tries to keep him down, the deeper the marlin goes, the faster he swims, the more he lashes out at the painful claw that Santiago has sunk into him, the more Santiago draws on his true comfort – his own pride at his own self-identity, formed by his intense, immense knowledge of the ways of fishing. I am talking, of course, about behavioral knowledge built around the real-life end goal of making the catch, not theoretical knowledge built around the real-life goal of selling the catch for a good price. Despite the thirst, and hunger, and the fishing ropes scraping his skin and cramping his limbs, and the impossibility of restorative sleep, this stoic hero's belief lies not in what is around him, but in who he is at his core. He is a fisherman and he must do all these things to remain a fisherman, which is to say, to remain who he is, which is his one true comfort.
Camus’s Sisyphus makes an unmissable appearance right at the start of The Old Man and the Sea, in the fact that Santiago has gone eighty-four days without making a catch, others are worried about him, and yet others are even beginning to laugh and titter behind his back. But none of this makes any difference to Santiago, who thinks of things he should have done, but then remembers and acts out the need to act with what is available right now, right here. It is not in the profitable selling of his catch that Santiago finds comfort, but rather in the struggle to make the catch in the first place, a sentiment excellently borne out by the last part of the book. It is this self-created cocoon of comfort that allows him to weather the eighty-four days, his subsequent catch of the marlin, and its eventual devouring by the sharks, with equanimity.
Suicide is the Only Real Philosophical Problem
Hemingway's own life is the perfect, pithy definition of the original sense of the word 'comfort'. He hunted lions, he summited peaks, he served in America's medical corps in the first world war, he reported on the Spanish civil war, and later wrote the memorable For Whom the Bell Tolls upon the basis of his time there. Nobody had forced him to do any of these things. It was his own inner drive, his own inner monologue, his own way of looking at the world, that was making him do all of it. This, to Hemingway, was the most comfortable life possible.
A very similar sentiment can be seen among mountaineers, whose iconic response to why they climb mountains - "because they're there" – echoes Hemingway’s own life with perfect clarity. For these people, climbing a mountain is relaxing, is 'comfortable', in the sense that climbing a mountain rejuvenates these people, it renews their strength to fight against the absurd, the necessary, the unavoidable. It is more painful for these people to lie on the bed doing nothing than to climb a mountain, just as it was more painful for Hemingway to do nothing than to do something, and more painful for Santiago to make a mistake in the craft of fishing than the knowledge that he had gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. It is not getting the catch that makes a difference to Santiago, but being a good fisherman.
Born into a heritage of suicidality, Hemingway's eventual killing of himself, which is often used as a stick to beat him with, had many reasons even apart from the fact that he suffered from a hereditary condition that affected mental and physical health, and that his father, his brother, and his sister all killed themselves, too. He had been "treated" for "mental conditions" with more than 10 rounds of ECT, leaving him without full brain function, which he considered essential to his entire purpose, his vocation in life.
In a way, his suicide, precipitated by the irreversible degradation in his quality of life as he saw fit, illustrated his willingness to settle for nothing but his own idea of his own comfort – it was only when his life became irreparably worse than he could bear that he chose his 'comfort' in the most drastic way imaginable. This is best seen, as far as this piece is concerned, in juxtaposition to Camus’s timeless words, "Suicide is the only real philosophical problem". Providing the other, action-oriented half to Albert Camus’s dry, analytical, philosophical statement, and finishing his sentence like true soulmates should, Friedrich Nietzsche, who was born half a century before either Hemingway or Camus, said “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”.
Carrying One's Own Cross: How Nietzsche Despaired in the Destruction of Church and God
Nietzsche’s use of the ubermensch concept stems directly from his disapproval of the wholesale break-up of the institution of God, recognising with immense clarity that the concept of God was the basic comfort of mankind, and eradicating the same would require the creation of an alternative source of comfort, an alternative source of the desire to keep fighting the good battle. Nietzsche was not rejoicing in the death of God, as he himself proclaimed it, but was in fact exhibiting his deep concern at the breakdown of the idea and philosophical institution of God, which he knew to be the bedrock of the very idea of civilization.
It becomes much easier to understand and act out Nietzsche’s philosophy once this distinction is made, and once this reference point is established. When lamenting the death of god, he was not lamenting the death of blind tradition, repressive heritage, and the dangerous insulation that comes with a too sharply cut social identity, but the death of hope, of charity, and of beauty. When proclaiming the death of god, he was not celebrating, but rather worrying about whether, why, and how people would take flight when there was no more a heaven to look up to, and what would stop people from descending into hell now that it was brought alongside heaven and earth without discrimination.
Nietzsche, Camus, and Hemingway teach us that once the decision to live life is made, consciously and in full awareness, the domino effect stemming from that decision might just carry the individual through their entire life; that once the reason to live one’s life is found, the vicissitudes of day to day life do not seem to have any effect on the enjoyment and delectation of said life; that once one’s true comfort is found, no invasion, no intrusion, no interference can push this consciously lived life off its rails.
Chapter 3: We the People: The Difference Between Habituation and Comfort
"Hesitating to act because the whole vision might not be achieved, or because others do not yet share it, is an attitude that only hinders progress." - Mahatma Gandhi
Swades - We the People, the 2004 commercial flop from Ashutosh Gowarikar, remains one of the best movies of all time in Indian cinema, one of the best projects Gowarikar ever completed, and, in the context of this piece, one of the best discussions on the idea of 'comfort' one will ever see.
Rooted in Gandhian conscious collectivism, Swades opens with Mohan Bhargav, an NRI scientist working for NASA, feeling the first pangs of discomfort in his luxurious, high-scale, high-achieving life, because he misses his mother figure, Kaveri amma, who raised him as a young child in India and made him who he is today. As the song ‘Yeh jo des hain tera’ makes explicit later, it is an unnamed, unnameable longing that is pulling him closer to the place of his ‘belonging’, to a land and a people where he is not only welcome, but missed achingly.
Through Mohan's lens, we see the habitual lethargy and disunity of Charanpur, a small village framed as a microcosm of India itself, as the place where Rama once walked, and where Rama's footprints can still be seen. Charanpur is not strong, it is not rich, it is not powerful, but the biggest problem with it, according to Mohan, is not the presence of the material hardships but the absolute absence of unity, which blocks any and all paths towards material progress.
Mohan sees himself as an outsider, as a man straddling two cultures, until he witnesses the very human plight of Haridas, the weaver who wasn't allowed to change his profession, and thus association with the related caste, even just to feed his own family. Shaken to his very core by this injustice, Mohan becomes restless, trying to properly understand and align new realizations into capable, productive motivation. But he finally sees himself as an Indian at heart, on the basis of his own honest confession to himself of his own concern for this people, for his people. Unlike others in Charanpur, though, he sees the problems of India as something to work to eradicate, not something to get used to or sweep under the rug. It is this restlessness, this anxiety, this angst, that feeds his later actions in the movie.
Having grown tired and frustrated with the villagers' apathy, Mohan eventually confronts them in two key scenes set on the day and night of the Hindu festival of Dussehra, the day when the good, symbolized as Rama, defeats evil, symbolized as Ravana.
He accosts them for having gotten used to the absence of electric power and other material hardships, for putting all their energy into justifying their present situation rather than into improving it, for having lost their ability or desire to fight, for sinking into apathy, ignorance, and an unspoken collective agreement to pervert the meaning of 'comfort' to justify their inability to fix their situation. Mohan Bhargav, an outsider in the literal sense if not the spiritual sense, sees that they are not really comfortable with what and who they are, but merely used to it.
Knowledge of the difference between what we are merely used to, and what we are actually comfortable with, is often what sparks revolutions and brings about lasting change. It can be difficult to separate the habitual and the usual from the comfortable, and it is not until a party realizes that the thing they are used to is not what they are comfortable with, that they can truly move out of it. This is seen on all levels and in all modes of human interaction, from the inner dialog of individuals to the politics of entire nation-states, from couples and families to multinational corporations, from sports teams to art groups, and from religion to science. To acknowledge the biting, ever-present niggle hinting that what you have is not what you want can be difficult, but once this first step is completed, the rest usually falls into place on its own. Taking that first step is what defines a hero, in the original, psychologically exploratory sense of the word.
Often, due to the immense difficulty of admitting to oneself that what one has is not what one wants, it takes an outsider to show us it. Whether we are prepared for the positive change or steeped irrevocably in apathy and self-pity is revealed in our response to the outsider pointing this out to us.
This is exactly what plays out in the second half of Swades, precipitated by Mohan’s constructive solution of building a small hydroelectric plant to satisfy Charanpur’s own power needs – born out of his anger and frustration at the self-indulgence, arrogant ignorance, and self-pity of Charanpur – being embraced, not antagonized, by the villagers. The village head, mukhiya, who has always seen Mohan sympathetically, symbolizes the political, material willpower necessary to bring about lasting change, while ‘Dadaji’, the old Gandhian teacher who has been trying in vain for years, possibly decades, to bring back the spirit of what made India independent, into a now-independent India, symbolizes the spiritual spine that every long-lasting, auspicious revolution demands and requires. Together, the village head and the old teacher enable Mohan’s efforts to make the village self-sufficient in terms of electric power, eliminating at a stroke the power cuts that have restrained and divided the village for years.
In one of many, many excellent directorial touches in this movie, which make the movie worth rewatching not just once but several times, Kaveri amma even says to Mohan, “He who would not help himself cannot be helped even by God”. This is theoretically the ‘prevailing belief’ in this part of the world, but the village still hasn't produced a hero, one who would break through the shackles of mentality holding them back. In another directorial wink at the audiences, when Mohan meets the village panchayat for the first time, one of the council members, a rather mysterious character within the story named "Narayan ji", responds to Mohan’s namaskar with the popular Indian saying, “Raam tumhari raksha kare”, meaning "May Rama protect you", an almost inconspicuous line that sets up the whole of the rest of the movie, and a sentiment whose meaning is turned inside out by Mohan Bhargav in his refusal to idly sit by hoping for the arrival of Rama, and instead pursuing Him in a tangible, rational, empirical manner. While the villagers only see Rama in the idol, Mohan sees Rama in blood and sweat and toil, anger, rage and fury, peace, benefaction, and charity, togetherness, unity, and belonging, and accomplishment, success, and achievement.
Mohan Bhargav, theoretically an outsider, seemingly an outsider, brings the knowledge beyond the shackles to the place of his roots. He fights with them, and for them, and this makes them trust him. It is not that they don’t want the good things, but that they are genuinely stymied by the situation around them, possibly even by the very basic absence of the knowledge of the process of power generation, which Mohan brings with him from ‘the outside’, where he has explored but his people haven’t. It only takes one properly rolling stone to create an avalanche, and Mohan plays exactly that role – he doesn’t just criticize the villagers idly, nor does he try to fix their problems for them – he fights their battles with them, leading them when necessary, and by doing so makes them believe once again in the possibility of something better, the possibility of improvement.
This is acknowledged in the Diwali scene, when the farmer panch, who has always been the most openly antagonistic toward Mohan, heartily appreciates and thanks Mohan for his contribution to not just the material well-being, but the psychological well-being of the society of Charanpur, showing that the reason why he was antagonistic to Mohan earlier was not that he didn’t want the good things, but that he didn’t believe in their possibility, a sentiment echoed by the potters whom Mohan meets in his school recruitment drive, and who see the idea that their own children could, through education, one day play a fighting role in the wider world as an unattainable dream until the persistence of Mohan, Nivaran Dayal, and Melaram convinces them. It is their unfortunately mutual absence of belief in progress and improvement that makes the individuals that make up the society of Charanpur turn to casteism instead, which enables some form of order and some form of shared identity in the society and culture that they nevertheless care for, rather than the nihilistic psychological chaos of the absence of hope. The scene right after the Diwali scene brings this sentiment to a pathos-rich consummation, with Dadaji declaring his comfort at the fact that with Mohan now here to guide the village, and with one more sensible head to guide India herself, he can now peacefully breathe his last.
Negativity, more than anything else, is a feeling of loss of agency. To maintain one's agency, which goes all the way from the intrapersonal to the universal, is to maintain positivity. Mohan Bhargav comforts the villagers of Charanpur by abstaining from negativity, even in response to almost open hostility on occasion, and maintaining his positivity, to the point of frustration, anger, and a possibly-risky confrontation, a knowing nod to the Gandhian origins of the thesis of the movie.
Comforting someone is not to keep them wrapped up in a state of mental and physical numbness. It is not to keep them inside because the outside is dangerous. It is to prep them for battle, fighting alongside them if necessary. It is to prep them for the inevitable outside, because however bad the outside can get, nothing is worse than never going there.
Chapter 4: The Comfort of the Creative and the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Camus, in the Myth of Sisyphus, says - whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference. What matters is whether life is worth living or not.
This opinion – certainly the first half of it – echoes almost verbatim that of another literary giant, a great and terrible bloodhound, who knew what poisonous plants grew in which part of England and could identify what area of London you’d been in by the mudstains on your trousers, but lacked even the desire to get to know that the sun is the center of the solar system, a "fact" that every child is forced to learn by rote, because all that matters to him is the game that he has chosen for himself. It is only when the "game is on" that this master hunter awakens to the world surrounding him. This of course is particularly true of this individual, whose biography includes the note that he was an intravenous consumer of cocaine, meaning that the surface perception of the world around him was to him a matter of profound unimportance and literally something to "wake up to" only if the right case, the right scent came along.
I am talking, of course, about Sherlock Holmes.
No one would call Holmes' life "comfortable" in the conventional sense, with an inconstant schedule, sometimes infrequent access to food and drink, and the constant risk of being attacked by one of Professor Moriarty's lower-level operatives and murdered into oblivion. But Sherlock has chosen this life for himself, because it is the only life that makes sense to him, the only life that is comfortable to him. He could've been a highly successful actor, as criminals and lawkeepers alike remark in the OG books, and he would have been sure to turn a successful hand at any of the million trades available to an eligible nineteenth century British middle class man of his talents and sheer brain power. Mycroft, his older brother, was sure to have suggested a suitable position in government, protecting his brother’s life at a stroke from both the criminal underbelly of the country and the anonymity and disrespect that comes with the absence of official credentials.
But Sherlock persists in his quixotic ways, meagre means, and rented apartment, steadily talking to a skull in the absence of a companion and whiling away the empty hours with temperamental bouts on the violin and recreational cocaine injections.
This streak is also seen in the characters of Howard Roark and his own role model, Henry Cameron, in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, with all of Roark, Cameron, and Sherlock Holmes refusing to accept anything other than the life they want, as their meaning of "comfort". It would've been less comfortable for Howard Roark to design phony, ostentatious buildings for Guy Francon than to starve due to a lack of patrons, for instance, just as it would have been less comfortable for Holmes to draw a considerable salary as an essential government employee and live in material comfort, the only sense of the word that has persisted in modern times, than to depend on unpredictable criminal cases for making a living. The meaning of the word "comfort", for people like these, is entirely psychological, mental, never material. It is fulfilment of their mental projects, goals, and targets that makes these people truly comfortable, not soft cushions and spa treatments.
They are willing to stake their entire reputations upon not just the outcome of their creative work, which requires that they be allowed to do things their own way, but sustained excellence, which, while appearing to be spectacularly ‘uncomfortable’ in the conventional sense of the word, remains the pulsating, dynamic core of their comfort. Like Santiago, the fisherman from Old Man and the Sea, Sherlock Holmes, Howard Roark, and Henry Cameron do what they do as not just a means of livelihood, but as a way of life, as an organic extension of who they are at the core. Hemingway, writing the following sentence about Santiago, might as well have been writing it about Sherlock, Poirot, Roark, Cameron, Taggert, or Rearden:
“The thousand times that he had proved it meant nothing. Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.”
Chapter 5: आराम: कल्पवृक्षाणाम् विराम: सकलापदाम् - Rama as Comfort Personified
The word Rama, coming close on the heels of the root sound ‘रं’, literally means ‘comfort’, ‘enjoyment’, even ‘entertainment’, in a certain sense. The Vishnusahasranaam calls Vishnu रामो विरामो विरजो in one of its many verses, highlighting the importance of the linguistic root of ‘Rama’ in the majesty and glory of the root deity Vishnu himself. Other words such as लोकाभिराम also highlight the role of Rama as something that destresses, relaxes, and comforts.
रं, the root of Rama, is found in both beauty and violence, in both love and war, in the Sanskrit language, as seen in the words - रमणीय, रममाण, रती, on one side and रण, रोष, and क्रोध on the other. The letter is also seen in रज, राग, and रंग, which denote sensuality and the differentiable and combinatorial nature of perception, an aspect of awareness / consciousness possibly functioning as the brush that picks up from both sides and applies them equally on the canvas of consciousness. Rather interestingly, the letter is also seen to be closely associated with blood, in words like रक्त and रुधिर, and tears, as in रुदन and क्रंदन, making for a powerful association of ideas that not just do go with each other, but perhaps should.
Linguistically, this hints at the idea that comfort comes from not just one, not even both, but a combination of war and love, violence and beauty, joy and sorrow, sensitivity and intolerance, and that राम is the path to रं, the psycholinguistic root of all the severely important aspects and functions of the human body listed above, and more. राम is what leads us to रं.
It is for this reason that the best friends and spouses are often those that infuriate and becalm you in equal measure. Those that attract you and anger you in equal measure.
These are our "comfort zones", where we can truly be ourselves, able to express both sides of our personality. These are our partners not just in peace, but in war - or in crime, as the wayward juvenile insist on saying. This is why fighting with your spouse can, has, and should be elevated to an art form where excellence, not victory, is the goal.
Rama as the Comfort of Culture
The ideological, philosophical, and religious repercussions of the literary character of Rama encompass the entire length and breadth of the human experience, from the intrapersonal to the globally social. In purely mathematical terms, Rama can be termed as the vector quality that pushes the otherwise scalar quantities of the world into grouping, socialization, and culture. Like a vector graphic design, which is based on ratios and proportionality rather than absolute metrics, the symbolism of Rama can be applied equally well at any scale of the human experience, unlike a Raster graphic design, which comes with its own fitting and hence cannot be expanded or shrunk to suit the wearer.
Rama is the ideal comfort, the ideal one to have next to you in times of war as well as peace, to the extent that even those who actually fought with him – not just those who came after – revered him as divine. He shows through his actions that he is not just a comfort for those who ally with him, but a comfort for all who follow the good path – or, as the philosophy behind the mythology puts it, a comfort for all the three worlds of the animistic Hindu faith. The word "लोक" deserves its own entry in this series, and it may get one someday, but suffice it to say for now that the word "लोक", which means both “that which is seen / perceived” and “those who perceive”, represents a tangible, perceptible blurring of the line between "world" and "worldview" in the Hindu faith.
To say that Rama is a comfort to all three worlds, is to say that Rama is a comfort whether you are in psychological heaven, psychological middle ground, or psychological hell, a comfort in all worldviews.
Not only Rama’s historical person, but the name Rama itself has been consecrated into Hinduism as an everpresent, ever-available, ever-capable source of support and grounding in times of trouble. Since there are other characters fully or partially named ‘Rama’ before the canonical birth of the Rama of the Ramayan, Rama’s naming had to be either an insanely lucky coincidence or a stunningly clever post-hoc revision to bring the character in line with what he ended up meaning to the people of his land, from the perspective of a people that saw words and letters as being directly connected to the gods, to the divine. It can be argued in this context that the historical or literary character of Rama, in the context of Hindu tradition, represents a ‘just-right’ balancing of the two sides of human personality, with his name representing a ‘just-right’ balance of the two ways the root letter रं can take psycholinguistically, the two ways it can twist in meaning.
Chanting Rama’s name and meditating upon his form is said to be one of the best paths to mukti or moksha in Hindu philosophy, and also remains a popular everyday method to allay worries, concerns, or fears among religious Hindus. The everpresent Indian greeting of “Ram Ram” takes on much greater significance in this context, transforming from a religious statement to identify others like us, into a panhumanistic sentiment of the shared hope of mutual prospering that defines culture and civilization. Rama is the highest good that all cultures are built around. Rama is remembered when meeting new people as well as when waving goodbye to the dearly departed, in happiness and in pain, by oneself and with others, when eating and when starving, further revealing the nature of the literary character of Rama as a panhuman, even pan-universal force of good.
In this way, Rama becomes the comfort of not just his own contemporaries, his own family, his own loved ones, but an entire civilization, an entire timeline, and lineage, spanning several thousands of years and the entirety of the immense Indian Subcontinent.
Chapter 6: The Materialistic Vestiges of “Comfort” and the Dying Tradition of Getting on With It
The materialistic meaning of “comfort” is all that has remained with the shift in time from a spirit-based, honor-glory-virtue-based, animistic society, to a strictly materialistic one. Seen from the lens of materialism, from the lens of right-here-right-now thinking, physical pleasures, indulgences, and titillations are the only thing that can prepare one for the battle of our times, where relaxing is associated with softness, good taste is associated with sweetness, the battles are hardly ever literal, but metaphorical, and watching helplessly as Sisyphus’s boulder rolls back, rather than straining to push it uphill again, has become the cultural norm.
This leaves "comfort" to occupy the same psycholinguistic space as rest and relaxation, which has no inherent objective of preparing the subject for battle. It leaves "comfort" to mean the same as numbness, the same as sleep, the same as rest, the same as relaxation. Humanity, in the historical perspective, has never been more "comfortable" than in present times, and yet this has come with an equally unprecedented spike in the rates of psychological disorders like anxiety, depression, BPD, etc. Whence, then, this contradiction?
Batatyachi Chaal, and the Pursuit of Happiness
P. L. Deshpande's Batatyachi Chaal, the great entertainer’s magnum opus in my own humble opinion, laments the passing of such a time, when people prioritised the wars of surviving and thriving above physical comfort, often going without what we would even forget to call "basic amenities" because we are so used to them. The people were rock hard, and thus organically together, and were engaged furiously – each in their own way – in the nevertheless common pursuit of happiness, one of many human rights that the US constitution was prescient, often first, in recognising as such.
The inclusion of this right in the US constitution, just like the wit of Pu La Deshpande in penning his passionate portrayal of life in Mumbai in the first half of the twentieth century, shows the ability of the respective writers to stay in their present moment, present times, without losing the link to what has been, or to what will be. It is in the losing of the link to present times that insanity is truly found, and it is in the losing of the link to what was and what will be that wisdom is truly lost.
Perhaps this is the meaning of the often-ignored "continuum" in the term 'spacetime continuum', but to the mind, a memory is the same as being in that place, in that time. If a place ignites a spark of memory, it is because association with the place is the same as association with the time spent there. It is layers upon layers of such memories, associations, that "build" comfort, within societies, homes, people, and places, and all the institutions thereof. It is such layering, when it is well done, that creates true comfort, indicating as it does an alignment of what you are with what is.
Like most words in this series, the meaning of the word ‘comfort’ bifurcates into a process-oriented, action-oriented meaning, which includes the effects of the dimension of time, and which has been lost in the drive towards materialism, and a static, unyielding, “objective” meaning, which has removed the effects of time from the meaning of the word, taking with it the very human awareness of the antecedents and descendants of the present moment, and the very human ability to work magic between the two poles of what was and what will be.
The right to the pursuit of happiness in the US constitution encapsulates the former meaning, wisely recognizing as it does the Sisyphean nature of the central desire of the human spirit, while the materialistic modern interpretation of the word is recognizable instantly by the insistence of its adherents on the absence of effort, absence of sacrifice, absence of dedication and consistency, and of the continuity between the right and the wrong, the good and the bad, the then and the now, not knowing that forgetting this continuity is to forget who we are.
समाजपुरुष, and the Role of First-Person Association In Belonging
The final chapter in PuLa's Batatyachi Chaal, "एक चिंतन" (A Ponderance), talks of people who were constantly fighting life head-on, were constantly preparing to fight life head-on, without getting caught up in material discomforts, economic hardships, and socio-political disturbances. In the constantly shifting, murky world of the first half of the 20th century, the "चाळ" (a type of housing complex popular in Maharashtra, and a word so enveloped within the layers of the region’s culture that I literally couldn't come up with a translation for it) remained a polar constant, carrying on with its exuberant, larger than life routine and its understated, deflated rent prices, undeterred by minor inconveniences such as mosquitoes, fleas, rats, and the million other pests brought along by the tropical weather of Mumbai, influenza, malaria, TB, dysentery, and several other such contagious and deadly diseases, a couple of world wars, bringing along with them rationing and an even shorter lease on the already contracted way of life in the lower middle class, as well as the rise of the final properly organized push for India's independence. Yet the building's occupants remained strong, and passionate, and devoted to their personal as well as communal pursuits, which kept the entire building running, and as one.
The building’s lament is not with the hardships and troubles, but with the dimming of the life-affirming spirit that kept it not only running and functional, but prosperous and thriving even through the hard times. The 'chaal' doesn't tremble at the fear of being torn down as derelict - it has always been okay with that - rather, it trembles at the tragic reality that the children and grandchildren of these people, having grown up without their environment creating fundamental, inevitable hardships, should now seek to find the flaws of life in their place of origin, mirroring Mohan Bhargav’s initial approach to India and Charanpur, which Kaveri amma corrects by pointing out his habit of referring to Indians in the second person rather than in the first person.
Haunted by such absence of first-person association with it among its own occupants, बटाट्याची चाळ now finds itself a lone voice, a sorry, pathetic Hamlet trying to avenge not a biological father but a cultural father, a sentiment expressed excellently in the Sanskrit word समाजपुरुष, which means something on the lines of "the way a society is organized". It is a capable समाजपुरुष that comforts, in theory, the समाज or society based on it, while a weak समाजपुरुष corrupts and weakens society by leaving it without comfort, i.e. spineless, in times of need. It is the loss of such a stronger, more resilient, more densely packed, older spine of society that this last chapter in the book laments and recalls.
It remains one of the best literary descriptions of what is often nebulously termed as the "generation gap" without proper understanding of what the ‘generation’ or ‘gap’ in that phrase refer to. The word ‘comfort’, of course, remains central to that conversation.
What is “comfortable” is what allows us to fight the world on our terms. What is “comfortable” is what keeps us fighting, what aids us in fighting for a long time and with sustained vigor. It is not what allows us to forget the world in a torn fortress of loneliness, relaxation, and numb ignorance. As a species, humanity has not prospered on the back of inaction, indulgence, and indifference. It was awareness of the continuity of the present with the future, including both the good and the bad in it, that drove humanity out of ignorance and into the light. It is, in the literal sense, inhuman to futilely try to give up this awareness, to reject and suppress it because present pleasures cannot be refused and metaphorical battles can always be postponed. It is the ability to fight, to work, and to stay on track that drives everything about humanity that can reasonably be termed ‘good’, while the ability to fight together, to work together, and to prepare for the next battle together, is what brings people truly closest, invoking as it does a primal covenant imprinted into the soul of humanity even before our first memory. It is wise to stay aligned with this covenant, which, in a very real sense, gives humanity its own meaning.
सर्वांना अक्षय्य तृतीयेच्या अनंत अनंत शुभेच्छा! भांडते रहा, मांडते रहा! वाढते रहा, खेळते रहा!
© Tanmay Viraj Tikekar
30/04/2025
tikekar.tanmay@gmail.com
