A friend and I were having a casual exchange regarding the Queen of England who passed away recently. There was much admiration for the way she carried herself over the years in her role. As queen, she was ceremony, symbol and institution all rolled into one, celebrated for the continuity she lent to the idea of Britain, and squarely reviled as the monarch with an imperialist’s legacy. Her personal life was a carefully managed piece of brand building, thanks to periodically dropped anecdotes and commentary from palace watchers and imaginative screenplays guided by ‘palace scholars’.

The chat turned to Prince Charles, the monarch in eternal waiting, his quirks and infidelities, his being dissed routinely and paying the price for straying from his given role, from behaviour befitting a prince. We were soon going back and forth about the inevitability of roles in a functioning society, and how, shorn of our roles, we are all similar in our needs, desires, frailties and follies, and shaped by control, shame, guilt and love. Very human.

Part 1

So, is life and living all about roles? Am I (to be) only a role?

What does it mean and what would it take to live life on one’s own terms? Considering the foregoing exchange, without too much thought, it seemed to me that such a life would call for inner anchorage, courage, and resilience.

Does the Hindu philosophical tradition have any pointers? Would living on one’s own terms be about the choices and process of living, or about destinations and outcomes? How does one read the laws of karma into role-taking / shaping? What of this gem, ‘Karmanye va adhikar aste…’? Is it all about duty and role performance without space for the ‘self’ (with all its seeking, needing, craving, aspiring…)?

It is very likely that each of us have our own take on these questions, based on what we have read, experienced and reflected on. What follows is where I am with these questions at this time, through this exchange with my friend.

Am I a role?

I am not just my role. To suggest that I am is to not be able to differentiate myself from the cloak I wear appropriate to a setting, or be unwilling to. In fact, I am more than my roles. Roles are the structures/constructs through which I engage and transact with the world as a social being. In my understanding, all roles entail expressing some aspects of oneself and restraining/inhibiting certain other parts. It is my constellation of identities that shape how I energise and play a role. This probably explains why the construct of a role widely held in society is enlivened in diverse ways. In other words, we lay our own angularities, capacities, idiosyncrasies and imaginations on socially shaped/mandated role expectations.

Unless All of Us Perform Our Respective Roles, Can Anyone Survive?

Roles in evolutionary terms are about containing chaos and anarchy and ‘taming the beast within’ for the ‘greater common good’. If everyone performed their roles as mandated, the world would be very orderly, stable and predictable. And very boring. In the absence of roles and structure, one gives expression to naked primal instincts—to survive, to protect, to dominate, ward off threats—and the threat of annihilation looms. Eternal vigilance is the price to pay.

The drama, the romance, the excitement, the racing heart and the heartache, change and continuity all arise in life because society doesn’t come anywhere close to the clockwork ideal of everyone playing their roles ‘by the book’. Fear and desire are strong drivers of engagement with life processes that create heaven and hell on this earth, and in our lives. They also inform ways in which we bring ourselves in our roles.

What Does ‘Living on My Own Terms’ Mean to Me?

Living on my own terms is not a negation of all roles, living in some primal, uninhibited, unmindful state or a state of counter-dependency and rejection of all expectations from my social setting. It also doesn’t mean standing apart, being an exile, a rebel, an isolate, or operating from the margins, turning away from society and its ways.

To me, it means making an active choice about what roles I will play, and how I seek to play a role. It may include aspects of socially approved behaviours. It means taking responsibility for the consequences of such role choices and be willing to deal with reaction, criticism, ridicule, contempt, others’ fears and consequent attempt at control. It means being clear what my boundaries are and drawing the line, while being willing to engage with an awareness of what I am negotiable about. It means allowing oneself room to manoeuvre, shape and reshape notions of role behaviours and boundaries. In this perspective, therefore, roles are not inviolable, non-negotiable or an oppression (or captivity); one can make peace with them and flourish.

It means treating desire and duty as a fine balancing act, where I exercise my agency to shape what I deem as duty and pursue what I deem desirable or aspirational.

Part 2

Do Our Religious Beliefs and Philosophy Influence Role Choices We Make? Does It Impact How We Approach Them?

By god!

It is tempting to get straight to ‘This is what our Hindu philosophy says.’ The truth is I am not competent. I am just a muddled pretender who has neither scholarship nor deep belief. Maybe I am like a blind man wearing glasses, thinking he sees all. Here is how I have understood what religion has been about:

I sometimes think the idea of a god emerged to deal with powerful unexplained and intangible forces at play—first as superstition. Fear is at the root of it. We created the gods and outsourced our protection to them.

Nature was untamed and it caused havoc but also offered its bounty, unasked. Nature worship was to please the gods and keep away dangers. It was also a way of thanksgiving, with a request thrown in for continued generosity.

Subsequently, religion came about, in addition, as an instrument for social control through the promise of a heavenly afterlife in return for a regulated existence (role adherence) in this one. In our context, duty, eschewing desire, and renunciation have been held as ideals. They have for long tempered our dreams, dampened our expression, and prepared us for a role-bound existence, which is no more than a roster of duties.

Roles and the Karma Discourse

In the action space where role taking and performance propels the world, the ‘law of karma’ is often invoked to nudge people towards the good and the virtuous; payback is expected to be beneficial for good conduct (largely socially normed). Implicit is the threat that bad days will be upon us for doing what is socially unacceptable. Variants of this come up in expressions such as ‘As you sow, so you shall reap’, ‘What goes around, comes around’, in the extension of Newton’s Third Law to human affairs, ‘to every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’, and in the more contemporary warning to law breakers, that no matter how high and mighty, ‘they cannot escape the long arm of the law’.

The redeeming aspect in this perspective is that how I choose to live my life is not just influenced by past karma but it in turn shapes the karmic scorecard. The roles I choose to play and how I choose to play them could tilt it in ways I deem favourable. I guess we are talking karma aggregates rather than a one-to-one correspondence between action and payback.

I know ‘past life regression’ practitioners who explain our present life in terms of the credit or dues accruing from our previous lives, which pretty much takes away some of our autonomy and choice-making. In this perspective, the Master Scorekeeper and Playmaker keeps tally and rolls the dice; it is a grand self-deception to think ‘I choose, I create, I engage, I shape, … ‘. Instead, I am a mere puppet living a grand delusion of choice and creation. Some may find this liberating and a convenient principle allowing them to take no real responsibility for oneself. Others may see this as very sobering, even deflating. It is so much more a relief to depersonalise/de-karmalise and speak more broadly of forces beyond our control that we are subject to. This at least allows for a self with agency, purpose and meaning.  And choice. And role shaping.

Moving on, ‘Karmanye va adhikar aste…’ from the Bhagawad Gita is often quoted, and roughly translated means, ‘You have the right to work only but never to its fruits. Let not the fruits of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.’ These lines have been conveniently interpreted by many who seek to avoid responsibility, goal directedness, or accountability for results. It is the credo of the saintly, devoted and duty-bound who seek to serve and underplay their own stakes for moral reasons, as if bringing in the self is pollution or a corruption of a role/mission.

I find the verse a powerful instigator of action and a useful caution.

It is not a negation of needs or desires.  It is not a call to renunciation. It has nothing to do with selfishness. It is a reminder that one is merely human and not omnipotent to control all the forces that shape outcomes. To me is about honouring desire, aspiration and ambition by acting on it. It is a call to action. It invites fullest attention to my effort—that which I can deploy and regulate. It is also sound advice to one who is not too far gone as an egotist—too full and certain of one’s own prowess (‘I make the weather’, Groundhog Day)—and is able to glimpse limitations, and the twin illusions of one’s control and exclusive contribution to outcomes.

Years ago, something that I heard S N Goenka say in a Vipassana discourse made immense sense: karma is not some distant logbook that will visit upon us on a future date. Instead, its work is now. The payback is immediate—when you know that you have done something wrong, shame, guilt, regret, anger and self-loathing gnaw away at the vitals straight away. You lose sleep. Worse may follow, but maybe we erred in thinking of karma in dramatic, gross, concrete terms when its work is quiet, subtle and out of plain sight. Goenka was of course talking about the Buddha’s eight-fold path to right living as the backdrop.

Prince or pauper, you make the bed you sleep on, one made of thorns or of roses. If you make it all about yourself, you turn extractive and diminish your context; if you make it all about your context, you turn a martyr and seed guilt. Perhaps we need to play roles in ways that enliven us and nourish our context. Indeed, such an idea of role taking was first introduced as ‘dharmic’ by an old friend and teacher, Raghu Ananthanarayanan.

Living life on one’s own terms is not a negation of one’s context but choosing one’s ways to shape it—for better or worse.

Friends, present and past colleagues, and EUM practitioners are bound to recognize the engagement with the EUM framework’s Universe of Roles and Boundaries (URB) in the main, to the Universe of Strength and Desire (USD) to a lesser extent, and Universe of Purpose and Achievement (UPA) in this piece. The EUM framework, authored by Ashok Malhotra, was a precious aid in thinking through this piece. In the spirit of the EUM, I am hoping there will be other perspectives that will get shared.