The age of kaali
// March 13th, 2005 // All
If the radiance of a thousand suns
were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the spendour of the mighty one ..
I am become death
the destroyer of worlds
Gita / Robert Oppenheimer, Alamogordo 1945
William Dalrymple in the Age of Kaali.
I loved this book, if only for the introduction-where Dalrymple ever so skillfully tied in the book’s threads [its a collection of essays authored in India and Pakistan] with the perception that the world is currently in the kaali yug [lit. the black age], the age indentified as the epoch of decriptitude and decadence amongst the four ages that make up the hindu cycle of creation and destruction.
Its a facinating idea, and indeed like the book as a whole makes you think hard about the world and age we live in.
I’ve long wondered why almost without exception, it is a commonly aired belief that things seem to progress for the worse-especially with regards to our humanism and morality. and this is not just a new-fangled post-modernist thought, infact, its something you come commonly come across in earlier literature, say the writings of Amir Khusrau, and i am sure even before him.
Is it really that we are perpetually locked in a secular decline of our values-or is it perhaps because on a personal level pain and suffering are slowly erased and most memories remain of times when we were happy.
perhaps, but this seems like too inelegant, too brutish to seem right..
Its slightly unnerving that many religions seem to consider our times as the ones directly preceeding the destruction of our world. But then, the cynics argue that religion has always used fear to further its cause. As I am sure the british humanist association would agree- I recently attended a Darwin day seminar (chaired by no less than Richard Dawkins himself) and it was slightly amusing to see for the first time (atleast for me) the non-religious wanting to act as [rather patronising] sheperds for the poor confused beliviers, led astray by religion.
Generally you only hear people in saffron lungis or puggrees foaming at the mouth while rabble rousing with talk such as this…
Kali Yug has two phases: In the first, humans – having lost the knowledge of the two higher selves – had knowledge of the ‘breath body’ apart from the physical self. During the second phase even this knowledge has deserted mankind, leaving us only with the awareness of the gross physical body. This explains why we are now more preoccupied with our physical self than anything else.
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