And the winner is Goddess Sri or Gauri ?

Sculpted panels at the rock cut temples at Ellora, Maharashra, portray the cosmic couple engrossed in a game of dice.

The popular folklore has it that Lord Shiva and Parvati once had a fling at the ‘throw of dice’ to entertain themselves.  And Shiva lost . An ecstatic Parvati just couldn’t believe it, she had beaten the lord himself. Thrilled to the core, she in her exuberance gave the gambler a ‘Midas touch’  boon - spend the Diwali night at the gaming table and keep amassing wealth throughout the year. From then on gambling on Diwali night became an adjunct of Diwali festivities. Along with the worship of wealth goddess Laxmi , the memory of Parvati’s success at the dice too is kept alive.

So, today beware the poker faced . If his luck holds many will leave the gaming table a diwala ( after all there is just the gap of a vowel between Diwali and Diwala ) . And both, divine sanction and divine indulgence, would back him up.

Hindu myths and traditions are replete with the high and mighty gambling away their wealth, kingdoms ,even their wives. However, the Hindu is an incorrigible prude. He never played strip poker. Stray gamblers did lose their underpants. Lord Shiva lost all including his loin cloth and had to walk away naked. Poor Drapadi was tormented with chirharan under public gaze because the Pandavas had staked her and lost at chauper. .

Me too in my callow, salad days kept my tryst with this tradition. After propitiating goddess Laxmi, we sat down to a longish ‘Teen Patti, or ‘flush’ card session that stretched well past midnight.   The poker faced like Le Chiffre in Casino Royale with expressions inscrutable whether the hands held three aces or dud cards always came up tops. But we played for low stakes for we had a little money and thus little to stake. We had no wives and none were interested in ‘defrocking’ the loser. The male genital held no charms for us.

The rules of the game decreed that a fixed amount or a percentage of the money on the board would be expropriated from the booty at the end of each round to defray expenses on food and drinks. We didn’t know then of the scriptural sanction for it. But there is . Kautilya in Arthashashtra enjoins upon the Superintendent to take 5 per cent of the stakes won by every winner fee chargeable for supplying water, accommodation and other services at the table.

But we never abided by the Katyayana’s diktat “ The keeper should give to the winner his money (out of his own pocket) and he should recover from the defeated gambler within three fortnights.’ It was strictly cash down, money at once. If you went broke ,you went out of the door.

Some may see irony in the fact that on a day the Hindu importunes goddess Sri for wealth, Shiva’s consort, Parvati ,points him to the gaming table. In the ‘throw of dice’ there is no win-win outcome, only a winner and a loser.

Dig deeper and the contradiction gets resolved. In Hindu cosmogony the creative process of ‘brahmand’ is a broad sweep, all comprehensive , all encompassing. Brahma (as per Vishnu Purana ) created the harmful or benign, gentle or cruel, full of dharma or adharma , truthful or false, devas or demons...simultaneously from the primordial flux. In the cosmic flow of time and space, the yugas, life and death, creation and destruction go apace. Contrast this with the Genesis where the knowledge of good and evil, the progression of births and deaths arise only from an indiscreet act of man, ‘the original sin’- Adam and Eve disobeying Jehovah and eating the fruit of the forbidden tree.

The process of acquiring wealth and dissipating it both must co-exist, that is the Hindu‘s conception of the natural order of things.

Who is afraid of ‘laxman-rekha’ ?

In the ‘history’ of Akhand Bharat the first death sentence for crossing the laxman rekha was pronounced on Shishupal, king of Chedi.

As the legend goes all the kings of aryabrata are seated in the glittering hall of the newly built rajmahal of Pandavas in Indraprastha. The highbrow gathering is green with envy at the glamour and splendour of the royal palace and the city constructed by none other than Viswakarma himself, the architect of devas. The occasion is solemn - coronation of Yudhishtra as king of half of Kuru dominions.

The Rajasuya yagna for consecrating a king is in progress . One among the assembled dignitaries must do the honours for agra pooja, an integral part of the Yagna. Pandavas consult the elders and choose Krishna. Shishupal explodes in uncontrollable rage and vehemently remonstrates. How can Krishna supersede the more qualified including Duryodhana and he when they are in attendance! Moreover , Krishna is not even a king. He incites the gathering and starts to abuse him . There is a flutter among the kings, a buzz in the crowd. Many start taking sides. The yagna proceedings come to an abrupt halt. Krishna ,however, is unruffled, a placid lake amidst the rippling cacophony and tempest of opprobrium.

Not Bheema, his hackle is raised. How dare Shishupal vilify his illustrious, godly cousin , he must be taught a lesson. He rushes menacingly towards Shishupal. However, Bhishma pitamah stops him midway and tells the assembled kings of  Krishna’s ‘vachan’ - he will not harm Shishupal till he commits one hundred crimes against him . But Shishupal is on an unswerving  trajectory. He, heedlessly, persists in his unrelenting vituperative tirade and in the process crosses 100 sins. 

Krishna with wry resignation observes Shishupal crossing the  laxman rekha, and releases the sudarshan chakra. Shishupal gets shorter by six inches from the top. Oops ! That’s what happens when one doesn’t abide by laxman rekhas.  

Humans grow up negotiating a baffling maze of laxman rekhas, red lines, no-no(s), no-go(s), ‘don’t you dare(s) !’ ‘that’s the limit !’.......This is haram, that is non-kosher, this is taboo that a must do, beef is grief....! How desperately an adolescent yearns to be an adult , just to draw up rather than heed laxman rekhas . Sadly, that isn’t the way life unveils . More nuanced, more subtle ,and more grating on the nerves , red lines sprout that shackle body and spirit. Nevertheless societal well being rests on the scaffolding of such proscriptions. If Shishupal had stopped at the 100th sin, he would have lived to fight another day.

Of more relevance to modern contexts is the liberal import underlying the obviously punitive carapace in the gatha , namely, Shishupal being allowed to commit 100 sins by divine dispensation. Today we jump at the gun and shoot at the first instance. Society is in jitters, is in deep angst, having immensely shrank distances to laxman rekhas . The country of immigrants wants no more ; the cradle of Islamic civilisation, the middle-east, has reached the tipping point of Shia-Sunni tolerance and stews in a boiling cauldron of internecine strife ;  liberal capitalism is deemed to have run its course ,anti-globalisation noises, Brexit are symptoms of it ; the country that gave the Islamic world its first whiff of modern liberalism , Turkey, slides incessantly into authoritarianism; a country that advertises ‘one nation two systems’ is hell bent on eliminating the only other system where it exists, Hong Kong ; India an avowed secular nation is in the grips of identity politics, having reached the end of the tether of  ‘minority appeasement’.

Everywhere it seems  the laxman rekha is much less than 100 sins away. 

Dharma is the best

There’s a chemistry of thought running through these childlike propositions 

Plus    and  Plus =    Plus 

Minus and  Minus = Minus 

Plus    and Minus =  Plus or Minus, depending on which is bigger 

Hydrogen gas and Oxygen = water 

The end product is either one of the combining elements (Plus or Minus) or something new that embeds the elements but not the properties of either .

Now this one .

Male  and Female = child

The child is a new life but endowed with some elements of physique and nature from either or both parents. (the Baap par gaya hai, Maa par gaya hai truism) 

Thus laws of the material world and the laws of living beings differ. Material laws are static, imperishable and predictable. There is an abiding sense of certainty and finality in the inanimate world. Do laws for humans carry the same feel of definiteness ? For lower forms of life , yes, for they are governed by matsya nyaya, the law of the jungle that makes survival of the fittest the enduring supreme truth. However, laws for the highest form of life and its salvation can’t be the same. 

Different religions, spiritual leaders and seers have sought to divine these laws but only come up with dissimilar prescriptions for righteous conduct, many in sharp conflict with each other. But there is a common substratum of rules of conduct running through each system of theological thought. We can name it revealed truth, universal ethics, morality or whatever ,but the Hindu conception of Dharma, to my mind ,comes closest to embracing the whole common area. 

Dharma includes all that is rightful conduct but also much more. It is flexible and a practical path to human salvation. Dharma would make it rightful for a starving rishi ,Viswakarma, to steal dog meat from a chandala when faced with a choice of death or theft . Preserving the divine gift of life overwhelms all ethics in this case. So must Duryodhana be killed by landing unethical blows, but die he must for his vanity has been the cause of mahabharat. So the manner of his slaying is inconsequential and his elimination a dharmic necessity.

The current strife between peoples of different religious denominations espousing the supremacy of their particular faiths seems so futile, unwarranted . Between religion defined sins and virtues and the universal ethics of rights and wrongs lies the dharmic course. Dharma meanders between the two boundaries, electing the action from within their bounds that which is most appropriate to a given situation, a given moment and a given place. It is the spiritual path to salvation- individual-centric and incorporating the best of religion and ethics. According supremacy to universal normatic rules of conduct rather than faith dictates will surely make the world a better and healthier place for its inhabitants .