Durga's Secret: Everyone Lives on the Edge in Fear

by Devdutt Pattanaik

Typically cultures use rules and laws (niti) and traditional codes of conduct (riti) to stifle freedom for the larger good. But this can destroy creativity and innovation and even introspection. It can amplify our sense of entrapment. So it is important to retain the wildness of nature, which offers the promise of freedom.

Ultimately, for culture to happen, domestication has to be voluntary, born of love, not the desire to control.

Human imagination enables us to judge nature and rejects its ways. We reject the way of the jungle, which favours only the fit. We create society where rules ensure even the unfit can survive. By doing so we create victims, villains and heroes. The rules are supposed to save those victimised by nature (the unfit). Those who uphold the law are heroes and those who break it are the villains.