War of Lanka (Ram Chandra #4)

by Amish Tripathi

And ashok can also mean ‘to not feel grief’. Some are cursed by fate to experience misery that becomes the foundation of their very being. They are inured to the vicissitudes of life. Nothing can hurt them any more, for they have already been hurt beyond endurance. Fresh drops of grief cause no ripples in their ocean of anguish.

Tacticians focus on tomorrow, intent on winning the immediate battle. Strategists obsess about the day after tomorrow. They must win the war.

Some people say that focus requires a mind with a fearsome intellect. They are wrong. What it needs most, in fact, is a calmly breathing heart. For a fearsome intellect without the curb of a calm heart is like an unguided missile. It can blow up and destroy anyone, even itself.

Innocence and truthfulness were so rare among adults. Life had a way of torturing those characteristics out of people, leaving resentment or cynicism in their place. Some adults gave their bitterness another word – maturity. A gracious word to hide their selfishness and cowardice.

Desire, Emotions and Intelligence. They arrange themselves in a hierarchy, with Desire at the bottom and Intelligence at the top. Desire and Emotions can be allowed to drive decisions at times. But Desire must never be allowed to override Emotions in decision-making. And Emotions must never overpower Intelligence. When we allow our behaviour and decisions to be primarily driven by Intelligence, then we have the opportunity to live wisely.

‘that grief and suffering can serve as engines that move life forward. Happiness is overrated. Hatred, of course, is destructive.’

‘Great does not mean good, Sita. Great only means the person makes a real impact on the world. Ordinary people do not impact the world, they are only impacted by it. Now, with great people, the impact can be good or bad. But know this: Happy people can never be great.’

‘Happiness is like a drug. The ultimate drug. It makes you accept life as it is. Just inject the drug into your mind, be blissed out and don’t achieve anything, don’t change anything. Just be a joyful idiot.’

‘But grief, on the other hand, drives you insane. You are not satisfied with anything. Anything. How do you banish that grief from your life? How? By changing the world, or so you think … For no matter how much you change the world, you will not find happiness. Why? Because the only way to be happy is by being drugged; by managing your own mind, rather than changing the world. That is why the only people who bring about change are the ones who are not happy, the ones who are grief-stricken.’

‘Think of the sun,’ said Raavan. ‘It is, after all, a gigantic, radioactive ball of fire. No life is possible close to it. And within it is only death. But a mere eight minutes of light-speed away is Mother Earth, teeming with life made possible by the sun. The sun is like a grievously hurting man, burning himself up with his suffering. But his suffering makes life possible some distance away. That is greatness.’

It is said that the fate of truly great people is to suffer, but they confuse correlation with causality. It is actually the other way around. Because they suffer, they become great.’

But war can only take away an injustice. It cannot create justice. War can only take away Evil. It cannot create Good. To create Justice and Good, you need peace. And to win peace, you need a leader who will stay the course, no matter what comes along – grief, suffering – to sway him from his path.’

They are ruthless monsters. And without me to restrain them, they can cause chaos. They are barbarians who will burn alive unarmed people, even children, just to collect some loot, as they did in Mumbadevi. Thugs who will rape any non-Lankan woman who falls into their hands. Butchers who will carry out public beheadings because they enjoy the spectacle. Fiends who will sell people into slavery, even though dharma bans it, because it’s profitable. Terrific killers with oodles of courage, no doubt. But without the restraint of dharma.

‘May you have the greatest blessing of all: May you be of service to our motherland, India.’

‘The little girl is outmatched,’ said Ram. ‘She may be brave, but somewhere in the back of her mind she would know that she doesn’t stand a chance. Had she been confronting a beast of this size and ferocity who was genuinely ruthless and cruel, she would have been trampled to death in moments. There is no way she cannot know that. The emotion with which she is standing, fearless and strong, means that she knows the truth … Not just knows, she has absolute faith in the truth: that the bull will not harm her. That the bull is reined in by dharma. The bull will not do any wrong. To my mind, the beast is the Bull of Dharma.’

‘One dream …’ said Sursa softly, ‘was to win your love … Another, to die in your arms … And the third … to see you cry when I die …’

‘Mother India has been abundantly blessed with rivers. More than any other land. Egypt is called the Gift of the Nile River System. Mesopotamia exists because of the Tigris–Euphrates river system. They are lucky lands since they have a large river system. That’s what makes civilisation possible. Some really, really fortunate lands have two, or maybe even three large river systems. Our Mother India has seven!’ Shatrughan began to name the great river systems, counting them off on his fingertips. ‘The Indus river system, the Saraswati river system, the Ganga–Brahmaputra river system, the Narmada river system, the Mahanadi river system, the Godavari–Krishna river system, the Kaveri river system. And then there are many smaller ones, like the Tapti and Penna, which we don’t even count among the seven, but they each carry as much water as the Euphrates River! Even the Mahanadi, which is the smallest of the seven major river systems, often carries as much water as the Nile River!’

‘Yes … I either surprise or disappoint. I never seem to meet expectations!’

Sometimes the hero and the leader can fuse in the same individual. But often this does not happen. A hero does not need followers, a leader cannot be imagined without those he leads. A hero sacrifices himself, while a leader may not succumb to this magnificent impulse. A hero must be courageous, a leader does what must be done, even risk being perceived as cowardly sometimes. A hero inspires the storytellers, a leader lives on in the hearts of his followers. A hero is concerned with what the gods will think of him, a leader is concerned with protecting and nurturing his people and his land. A hero will not leave the moral high ground, even if it hurts his people, while a leader will step down from the moral high ground if need be, and even sacrifice his own soul for the good of the people he leads. A hero will fight the enemy against insurmountable odds and embrace death with a flourish. A leader will respond calmly and deny the enemy a key strategic advantage in a battle.

Ants have been on earth for nearly one hundred million years, well before human beings made their appearance. They were around when dinosaurs walked the earth, and survived whatever it was that destroyed those massive beasts. And then their population exploded a few million years later. The ant population is large, some estimates placing it in many thousands of trillions. They constitute between fifteen to twenty per cent of the terrestrial animal biomass; more than all humans and mammals combined!

practically, the entire driver ant colonies are female; the males live for only a week and they either die or are killed after procreation.

‘Maybe love is an illusion, maybe it isn’t. But even so, there is no reason we should not enjoy it while we feel it. Illusion or not. Only those who have not suffered the dreary desert of grief will deny the ethereal, even if temporary, comfort of love.’

Sometimes, not offering battle is the best way to win that battle.’

‘Mritaih praapyah svargo yadiha kathayati etad anritam. Paraksho na svargo bahugunamihaiva phalati.’

They say that only the dead are allowed to reach heaven. But that is false. True heaven is not beyond us in this life. It is right here on earth. With the one you love.

‘Not by you. Impressed with love, actually. It can make even someone like you a lover of poetry!’

‘She is the morning to my night. She is the destination to my travels. She is the rain to my cloud. Whatever be the questions of my life, she is the answer.’

Good soldiers win wars. But so do good engineers.

Abandoned and lonely male elephants, just like abandoned and lonely men, can make for efficient killers.

‘Janani Janmabhumishcha Swargaadapi Gariyasi.’ Mother and Motherland are superior to heaven.

Grief is the ultimate reality of the universe.’

‘but only from the prism of the universe. From a different prism, that of human beings, grief is merely love that is aching to be expressed. Grief is dammed up love. It arises when love is blocked, like the waters of a dam. Grief is made of feelings that have nowhere to go; because the one you ache to express your love to, is gone …’

Schopenhauer. “Wealth is like sea water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become,”