Understanding Yudhishtira through his Shadow

Mahabharata: the game of dice

How could Yudhishtira have done what he did? How could noble King Dharmaputra have gambled away his kingdom, his brothers, his wife? Was it really Yudhishtira playing that fateful game of dice? Or, was it Yudhishtira’s Shadow?

The Shadow is a Jungian archetype. Having a Shadow is the inevitable consequence of having a Self. When the Self stands up in the light it naturally and inevitably casts a shadow, a distorted image of itself, that contains the less acknowledged, less developed, more vulnerable aspects of the personality.

I like to think Yudhishtira’s Shadow had taken over, uninvited, when the dice didn’t roll for him during that game. Yudhishtira still was a very young man then. He hadn’t yet found or tamed his Shadow. Yudhishtira finally harnessed his Shadow when he went into exile and became Kanka, teaching King Virata to play dice, thus finding the equilibrium needed to be a great king.

Shadow-puppet of King Yudhishtira

How did Rama, the other great king of Indian mythology, find and harness his Shadow? Did he find and harness his Shadow?

Every Self has a Shadow. But Rama’s Shadow is invisible, we don't know anything about it. Rama is flawless. He was born the perfect man, the maryada purushottam. He didn’t have to struggle to grow into the role, which, paradoxically, makes me less comfortable with Rama; like there is a Shadow out there that might emerge at a crucial moment and do something spectacularly daft.

Shadow wars, or the tragedy of Monty vs Monty

Monty Panesar celebrates with his England team mates

Whatever happened to Monty?

For years he was international cricket’s quietest, sweetest, most diffident player. He has lived through highs and lows: bowling England to glorious victories, being dropped by his county. The fans loved him, and mocked him. Through all those years, he had nothing but polite, respectful words for everybody, including the opposition. He responded to everything life threw his way with hard work, piety, discipline and “putting the ball in the right areas”.

And now? He is getting thrown out of nightclubs for misbehaving, and getting arrested for pissing on bouncers. Where did this other Monty come from?

My take is that the other Monty was always there, the other Monty is Monty's Shadow. 

The Shadow is a Jungian archetype. Having a Shadow is the inevitable consequence of having a Self. When the Self stands up in the light it naturally and inevitably casts a shadow, a distorted image of itself, that contains the less acknowledged, less developed, more vulnerable aspects of the personality.

Everybody has a Shadow. The real question is not whether Monty had a Shadow, but what Monty did with his Shadow. Like a lot of people-like-us, Monty suppressed his Shadow. He hid it away. He let his Shadow eat his disappointment, his shame, his humiliation, his anger, and came out to play with his game face on, radiating earnestness, belief, team-ship and optimism.

It worked, up to a point. Monty did play test cricket for England. But he remained a curiously mechanical, one-dimensional player. As Shane Warne acutely observed, “Monty hasn’t played thirty-three tests, he has played one test thirty-three times”. Monty was never creative. He was too distant from his Shadow.

Psychologists Barry Michels and Phil Stutz run a cult-practice in Hollywood, helping directors, screen-writers, agents and actors harness their Shadows. They see the Shadow as the key to creativity, in art, and in everything else. I heard about them from this New Yorker article:

As the liaison to the unconscious, Michels says, the Shadow is the source of all creativity and agility in life, business, and art, which he calls “flow.”

Barry Michels' Shadow

...Michels asks his patients to relate to the Shadow as something real, which can be coaxed from the cobwebbed lair of the unconscious into the physical world. The process, as he describes it, is spooky, a kind of daylight séance in which he plays the role of guide. 

In “The Tools,” Michels tells the story of “Jennifer,” a model who lobbies to get her child into a fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year kindergarten but is too ashamed of her self-described “trailer trash” origins to talk to the other mothers, whom she views as “a superior race of Range-Rover-driving goddesses.” The secret to her crippling sense of inferiority lies with her Shadow, which she must accept and integrate into her public self. “I asked her to close her eyes,” Michels writes. He goes on:

“Go back to the parents’ meeting where you froze up; re-create all those shaky feelings you had.” She nodded. “Now, push the feelings out in front of you and give them a face and body. This figure is the embodiment of everything you feel insecure about.” I paused. “When you’re ready, tell me what you see.”

There was a long silence. Jennifer flinched suddenly, then blinked her eyes open. “Ugh,” she said grimacing. “I saw this 13 or 14 years old girl, overweight, unwashed. Her face was pasty and covered with zits . . . a complete loser.”

Jennifer had just seen her shadow.

In a similar sort of way, I think we’ve just seen Monty’s Shadow. Monty’s Shadow wants to make it with chicks at the nightclub. The Shadow wants to give it back to bullying bouncers. Monty doesn’t know how to, but his Shadow really wants to.

Stutz and Michels’ therapy is about discovering the Shadow, acknowledging it, giving it the respect you long for, and integrating the Shadow with the Self. From that viewpoint, it may not have been a bad thing for Monty’s Shadow to start finding expression. It might have helped him find his mojo, find creativity, re-kindle his career. After all, Monty isn’t much older now than Greame Swann was when he made his test debut (also a second coming).

Tragically, Monty’s Shadow seems to have taken control uninvited, at a moment when Monty’s Self was vulnerable, after having been dropped for the fourth test of the Ashes.

A night out with the lads would have been unremarkable for Swanny, Bressy, Broady or KP. It probably means the end of the road for Monty. I don’t think the cricket media have grasped this thought yet, they’re still taking the piss. But I’m finding it hard to imagine the England establishment forgiving Monty his trespasses. I wish he had had a more dignified farewell. I don’t think he will play another international.

But before Monty goes away, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on Monty’s golden moments: his first test wicket, Sachin Tendulkar in Nagpur 2005, the beauty he bowled Younis Khan with at Old Trafford in 2009, his match winning performance in Bombay in 2012. And this amazing one-handed diving catch, which I haven’t seen before, which is the most watched You tube video featuring Monty.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Starring Johar Tsarnaev

Johar Tsarnaev on the Rolling Stone cover

I spent last weekend wallowing in this Rolling Stone cover story about Johar Tsarnaev, about what a kind, charming, thoughtful, smart, sensitive, popular, wholesome kid Johar was, about how the creeping shadows of political and familial dysfunction haunt his tender mind, and turn him into an Islamist murderer. It’s a great story. It should be made into a movie.

Actually, big part of Johar’s story has already been made into a movie: The Reluctant Fundamentalist, directed by Mira Nair, based on the book by Mohsin Hamid. Reading Johar’s story helped me realise why I disliked The Reluctant Fundamentalist so much.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s protagonist, Changez Khan, is a lot like Johar. Changez too is a kind, charming, thoughtful, smart, sensitive, popular and wholesome kid. Like Johar, Changez arrives in America, assimilates successfully, falls out of love with post 9/11 America, and drifts towards terrorism. The story is well told, that drift towards terrorism feels natural, inevitable, the consequence of integrity.

However, that is where it stops. Changez’s story stops tantalisingly short of where the radicalised Islamist man-child commits murder in the name of God. Mohsin Hamid invites us to sympathise with Changez’s drift towards fundamentalism, he doesn’t show us the consequences of that drift.

Rolling Stone invites us to sympathise with Johar’s drift towards fundamentalism, to understand how his sensitivity and intelligence contributed to his alienation. But in Johar’s case, we already know the consequences. Before reading about Johar, we already know what he did for the sake of his half-baked political ideas. We know Johar murdered eight year old Martin Richards, who was cheering finishers at the Boston Marathon.

The mainstream media, the popular imagination, finds it hard to deal with the fact that a sweet kid can do evil, and therefore be evil. Evil-doers are objectified: we don’t do evil, they do. The narrative is about how a nice kid who was one of us inexplicably transformed into one of them, a monster. A lot of America interpreted the Rolling Stone cover as glamourising a monster, making a rock star of a terrorist, making evil cool. That isn’t how I read it.

To me, the Rolling Stone cover story makes obvious that evil-doers are not monsters, they’re perfectly ordinary people. Often, they're very nice people. They look like Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man, or these happy laughing Nazi officers playing with an accordion at Auschwitz, or like Johar Tsarnaev, hamming it up with his buddies before his high school prom. This doesn’t make them any less evil. But it does make them a lot more scary.

Johar (red tie) before his high school prom

Riz Ahmed as Changez Khan

Aamir Khan as the Ice Candy Man

Nazi officers at Auschwitz

Nazi officers at Auschwitz

Jack Reacher, the twenty first century cowboy

Jack Reacher, the movie, starts with a gripping premise:

Normal people are living their everyday lives on a crisp sunny morning in an American city, when a shot rings out. A nicely dressed lady crumples to the ground, dead. Another shot rings out, another random person is dead. People start running in all directions, trying to escape from the shooter they can't see. The firing continues. Three more shots ring out. Three more people die.

The city is shocked. The authorities must solve this case, do something, show that they are in charge. The police try. But the ordinary police are clearly not up the the task. This special case requires a special kind of policeman...enter Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher...ta tan ta taaan.

Ultimately Jack Reacher does solve the case. On the way he saves damsels in distress, bashes up baddies, nails cruel Russian gangsters, and exposes corruption in high places. It's good in-flight entertainment, though I won't remember it a year from now.

What I found interesting though, was how despite the cheesy plot and predictable characters, Jack Reacher was so unlike a Bollywood movie. A Bollywood hero will typically step into the story, bash up a couple of baddies, and quickly tell the audience his back story: all about his kith and kin, about his struggles in his younger days, about how he became who is his.

Jack Reacher, however, has no back story. He walks into the movie, does his thing, and rides away into the sunset. We know nothing about his loving mother, his noble father, or the evil uncle who stole his khandaani haveli (family property). We don't see him bullied in high-school or picked on by a sadistic teacher, being rejected by his childhood sweetheart, or losing his best buddy in battle. We don't know what shaped him. He doesn't have a context, his people. He stands alone.

Does that make Jack Reacher quintessentially American? Tempting thought, but I don't think so. Superman and Batman are classical Bollywood characters, with their rich back stories about planet Krypton, and the misfortunes of the Wayne dynasty.

Maybe Jack Reacher is what the Western has become. The city is now the wild west, and clean-cut Tom Cruise is the new-look cowboy.

We drive on the left, so why do we walk on the right?

In England, we drive on the left. So it would be natural to walk on the left, right? Wrong! 

This sign, instructing pedestrians to walk on the right, was photographed in the Green Park tube station, in Central London.

In the Green Park tube station

Why? Because of the high concentration of American tourists in Central London? Maybe...but it might just be random. 

I'm conditioned to think that things are the way they are for a reason. It is much harder to accept that most things are the way they are for no especially good reason. It just is what it is. Get with the programme, baby, go with the flow.

Pedestrian tunnel, Green Park tube station

The Boston Marathon bombings - terrorism, Islamophobia, or something even scarier?

Bomb at the Boston Marathon

A couple of twisted young men kill innocent people at the Boston marathon, and it’s called terrorism. Other twisted young men kill innocent people - at a Batman movie premier in Aurora, Colorado, or at a political rally in Tuscon, Arizona, or at a primary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut - and there is no mention of terrorism.

What’s the difference? The Boston murderers were Muslims of Chechen origin, the other murderers were “regular” Americans. It’s easy to believe the different coverage is down to xenophobia or Islamo-phobia, and I don’t doubt there is plenty of that going on.

But there may be something deeper going on as well, which is about the way the brain processes information, something that is much harder to correct than xenophobia.

Apparently, new information coming to the brain is not absorbed directly. The brain makes sense of new information by referencing it to old or familiar information. Familiar information becomes a benchmark or a norm. New information is compared and contrasted to this familiar norm. Distinctive features of the new information are made sense of, are explained, by the attributes in which they most obviously differ from the norm. 

For instance, in the corporate world I inhabit, the "norm" is that powerful people are white men. So when a woman exhibits a particular behaviour, say domineering or bullying behaviour, the mind finds an explanation for that behaviour, in her gender. The mind thinks "She's being domineering because she is a woman. Maybe she is over-compensating, trying to get ahead in a man's world." Equally, when a woman is self effacing, the mind thinks "She's being self-effacing because she is a woman, she is the product of generations of gender stereo-typing." The same behaviour observed in a white male might be explained by his biography or personality, but not by his gender.

Critically, this habit of the mind is involuntary. Research shows that it affects passionate liberals as much as bigots, even when the passionate liberals are fully aware of this unreasonable pattern of thought. 

The same mental mechanism looks for an explanation for what happened, a cause, in the bombers' Chechen background - "they did what they did because of what happened in Chechnya". That is less stupid than jumping to the conclusion that the bombings were a part of an Islamist terrorist plot. That doesn't make it true. 

The reality is that it is almost impossible to know why what happened happened.  The mind doesn't accept this vacuum, it fills it up with a plausible story. "Islamist plot", "right wing bigotry", "misunderstood immigrants", whatever - any story will do. The stories don't have to be true. They just need to protect us from accepting that God plays dice with the universe.

God's dice

Why Bollywood does beautiful forevers

Bollywood India

For the same reason that Sweden does crime fiction.

Camilla Lackberg

Sweden's best selling crime writer, Camilla Lackberg, explained to The Independent why a country as sedate as Sweden has spawned such a crop of world-beating crime writers. Her thesis is it's because Sweden is so safe. "Crime stories are our version of sitting round a camp fire and telling tales. We enjoy being scared under safe circumstances. That's why there's no tradition of crime writing in countries that have wars."

Basically, fiction provides the ingredient missing in real life.

Which is precisely why Bollywood is syrupy sweet. India still is poor. Life in India still is tough. Fiction needs to provide the sweetness that is so elusive in real life.

Another India