Silence With The Storm Chap 1 (standard:non fiction, 5861 words) [1/2] show all parts
Author: Rattan Mann	Updated: Oct 05 2003	Views/Reads: 3928/2736	Part vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
An Autobiography

SILENCE WITH THE STORM 

RATTAN MANN 

DEDICATION 

To Ravindra, who is still too young and innocent to understand fully the
hypocrisy of those wise teachers and great lovers of peace, 
non-violence, and yoga who murder the soul to preserve a worthless 
body, and to mamma and Bimla who understand them too well, more than is 
necessary. 

CHAPTER 1 

Like every man I was born of woman, and like every child I cried the
moment I came into the world. Indian philosophers say that this is 
man's first outcry of sorrow and protest against the world's cruelities 
and injustices, but whatever the philosophical explanation of the 
birth-trauma, my cries must have been a great relief to my mother. 

" It is a boy " my grand-mother is supposed to have said, and my mother
was overjoyed because those were times and places where boys were more 
important than girls, men more important than women, positions more 
important than men, and connections more important than positions, or 
at least more useful - those were times of slavery, those were places 
of poverty. 

Thousands of years before I existed, the course of my life was already
predetermined, not by the predictable motions of the heavenly bodies, 
the stars and the planets, but by the unpredictable caprices of the 
human mind. The Alphas of the Universe, the Brahmins of India, have 
taken upon their shoulders the irresponsible responsibility of 
determining, from birth to death, the fate of every individual upon 
this earth. From zero to twenty-five years, I was to remain chaste, 
avoid women, wine, and meat, and devote my life - or waste my time, 
depending on the point of view taken - to learning by rote, without 
understanding, it goes without saying, the mantras and the slokas of 
the Vedas and the Upanishads, until even the universal truths contained 
in those holy scriptures was crushed beneath the heavy schedule of the 
ever-busy lips. At twenty-five a woman was suddenly to be produced 
before me by the magic of my parents, and till fifty I was to dedicate 
my energies, both physical and psychological, though in reality mostly 
sexual, to dragging into this sorrowful world a few more of my kith and 
kin, the Betas of the Universe, the Kshatriyas, the warriors, the 
professional killers of their fellow-men. From fifty to seventy-five 
years I was to remain a figure-head of my family, at the end of which 
term I must renounce, voluntarily of course, the earthly pleasures and 
vices and call myself a hermit and saint, because to call myself a 
homeless beggar, thrown out by thoughtless sons and greedy and 
quarrel-some daughters-in-laws, no longer willing to burden themselves 
with the care of an old and worthless man, would be too crude and 
unaesthetic a description of reality. In the jungle, I the hermit was 
allowed but one occupation, for the lack of any other choice of course, 
though would-be saints, fixed to the coming world, are not duty-bound 
to agree, and that was prayer and penance to pave my path to Nirvana, 
which would finally be achieved at the ripe old age of hundred, and 
last forever and ever, unless some megalomaniac God, scared of human 
will, chose to throw me back, with heavenly justification of course, to 
repeat the sorrowful cycle of human existence once more. 

Something else was also predetermined for me: I must hate, on purely
logical a priori grounds, without ever asking why, the Deltas of 
Mankind, the Sudras of India. Loathe them, detest them, despise them, 
shun them, scorn them, trample them, turn my back when I saw them, and 
close my ears when I heard them coming. I was also forbidden to ask one 
question: How a man feels when he lives in the gutter and dies in the 
gutter, sleeps in the gutter and wakes up in the gutter, weeps in the 
gutter and laughs in the gutter. This was not a human problem, but only 
a problem of the Deltas, who with God's help, could take care of it 
themselves, and a privilaged Beta like me was highly discouraged to 
ponder over such useless issues. 

So was I taught, so did I beleive. Under oath, and upon my honour I
declare that no electric shocks were given to me, nor was I tortured 
into this belief. I beleived it on my own free will, and quite proudly 


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