Sa Ham- I am She (2024 series): The Tipping Point

The Creation of Durga (Watercolour on Paper @Met Museum)

(This year, by the grace of the Goddess, I bring in a third edition of the Sa Ham-I am She series. Each edition was influenced by the theoretical lens I was donning at that particular period. Sa Ham 2012 edition was touched by my many travels across India. Sa Ham 2017 edition was shaped by the neurolinguistics of how we perceive the world. This 2024 edition marks the emergence of ecological consciousness-- an awareness of relational interdependencies for life making life) 

It is believed that the autumn worship of the Goddess is akalbodhan, an untimely awakening. That the timely worship of the Goddess is in Spring (Basanti puja).

The myths are many. As per one mythological story, Sri Ram sought the Goddess Durga’s blessing before going to war with Ravana and invoked her on the 6^th day of the Devi Paksha, also known as Shashti. Another story speaks of the Goddess emerging from the energies of the many gods to defeat Mahishasura.

Ravana had a boon that he couldn’t be killed unless the Goddess gave permission. Mahishasura had a boon that he couldn’t be killed by any man or a god.

The stories are not simply that Rama worshipped the Goddess and she readily blessed him. Nor that the Gods created a Goddess, and she vanquished Mahishasura.

Instead, the process is slow, stirring, changing till that tipping point when everything changes.

I hear this term “tipping point” being used often these days and it delights me that there is an awareness of non-linear processes at play for something to emerge.

This essay is interested in the processes that lead to the tipping point.

Tipping point is different from problem solving. In the later, a problem is noticed, and a solution to rectify the problem is imagined. This is the narrow boundary lens analysis.

When our perceptions become spacious, instead of directly fixing a problem, we turn our attention to the conditions that keep a symptom as it is. And add in new conditions that may stir the pot in new ways.

In the myth, Rama has to offer 108 blue lotuses in his worship. He manages to find only 107 blue lotus and after floundering for a while, decides to offer his eye (said to look like blue lotus). As he takes an arrow to pluck the eye, the Goddess is said to have appeared. What is conveyed in Rama’s method of praying is the deep earnestness in seeking the blessing of the Goddess and the willingness to do something different. This, in turn, was influenced by the conditions—his wife Sita’s abduction by Ravana, Ravana refusing to negotiate, and the necessity of war.

In the Mahishasuramardini myth, the Goddess is created because the Gods have tried to defeat Mahishasura and failed. The usual ways of responding to the Asura fails while he grew in power. It is only then the Gods, on the advice of Vishnu, combined their powers to invoke a female form of their energies – Goddess Durga of ten arms.

This is a very different way to approach world issues. For example, hunger is an issue. Hunger cannot be fixed by simply providing food. Hunger can be seasonal hunger due to lack of jobs, or because of sudden medical bills or rent increase. Hunger could be because one doesn’t have access to kitchen. It could be because of malnutrition and sometimes because companies nudge people towards sodas and chips. Sometimes it is inherited bad dietary pattern. Sometimes it is eating what is not appropriate for the season or not eating diversely.

One can go on and on about the dynamics of hunger in our world. The point is simple fixes cannot tackle the problem. Instead, it is helpful to widen our perception and notice conditions. The structure of modern business, structure of influencing rhetoric, inequality and hierarchy in distribution, access and quality, lasting effects of colonisation and rapid industrialisation and so on.

To combine and invoke the Goddess requires we understand entangled nature of these conditions and the patterns that keep them as is.

What instead happens is we keep trying piecemeal solutions to fix the problem using the same patterns that have held the symptoms in place. Charitable pursuits on the side and corporate CSR while reading the many marketing books that tell you how to influence your potential customers and how to become rich quickly. In the meantime, not just hunger but many other issues show up in some form or the other.

Our world is becoming hungry at multiple levels.

It is like if the Gods were relentlessly fighting Mahishasura because they cannot believe they, in their current forms, are not suitable for the task.

Our world with its numerous problems is stuck on what Gregory Bateson called the “runaway.” A state when the computer hangs and a process loops infinitely. You can no longer provide new inputs unless you log out or have already set exit commands.

But we can’t “log out” of our worlds. Nor can we user input in the same old way.

The invitation is an untimely invocation of some other form not yet known.

(You may want to read Nora Bateson’s poem Hallway of Hallways as a companion piece)