Masala Chai For The Soul: FREE READ | Love thy Enemies—and May their Tribe Increase
Love thy Enemies—and May their Tribe Increase
Enemies can’t betray you; they won’t disappoint you and they don’t bore the pants off you. Yet they hardly ever get good press. Every morning, there are a million posts going around the web, wishing the time of the day, dripping with the syrupy virtues of friendship, love, bonding and other stuff so cringeworthy that it would make characters in an Ekta Kapoor serial seem stoic.
Events like Friendship Day (the first Sunday of August) trigger such a sugary tsunami, that if the internet was borderline diabetic, you could bet it would have lapsed into a coma. But look at things through the cold prism of reason, and you will see a world suffering from the debilitating effects of an animosity deficit. The inconvenient truth is that the human species needs enemies as much as, if not more than, it needs friends.
Let’s suppose we want to know the truth about ourselves. We certainly can’t depend on our friends for it. Most of us rate that if we are not already rich and famous, it’s solely because the world is slow to recognize and reward our special kind of talent. Your chums—well-meaning but undiscerning—tend to go along with these assessments, and counting on them to give you an objective opinion about yourself is as unlikely as expecting Katappa to backstab Baahubali. So if you want the facts without the fluff, it’s best to consult your nearest enemy.
An enemy at the gate is also useful as a cohesive force. At its core, humanity is essentially a motley, uneasy bunch of leftists, rightists, humanists, centrists, extremists, atheists, fundamentalists and all manner of ‘ists’, including the odd nudist, á la Ranveer Singh. Left to ourselves, we will scheme and squabble, bicker and backstab at the slightest opportunity. History shows that nothing prevents society from splintering along pre-existing fault lines as effectively as a figure or an issue we can all hate in unison.
As long as the British were strutting around their colonies, we knew where to lay the blame for everything that was going wrong. After Independence, those niggling little things we could not stand about each other (earlier subsumed under the greater dislike for the British yoke) spluttered to the surface. The results are what you see in the papers every day. Indians with long memories will remember that in the early 1960s, the anti-Hindi agitation had assumed ominous undertones with strident talk of Tamil Nadu seceding from the nation.
Just when things were looking as if they would go out of hand, a foe helpfully showed up at our borders, viz., China (like leopards, the Chinese don’t change their spots). When they overran our frontier posts, the flamboyant M.G. Ramachandran announced the withdrawal of the agitation, saying he did not want to pave the way for the enemy, and chipped in with a handsome donation to the Armed Forces fund.
The tide turned, and although the issue kept cropping up at predictable intervals, it could never muster the same vintage virulence. The Chinese have reason to be miffed that we did not thank them enough for helping our country sort out its internal problems. Enlightened souls, holy men and philosophers, of course, have a different take on the subject. They are all for cosying up to your enemies, and either getting them to see things from your point of view or adjusting your own perspective to suit theirs. Against the weight of their combined counsel, I would pit Ronda Rousey. Her CV does not describe her as a philosopher of any standing, but she is the former bantamweight champion of mixed martial arts (so you disagree at your peril). And she has said: ‘Fighting is good for society’s health.’ If you believe Ronda is more brawn than brain, let’s push farther back in history and go higher up the intellectual scale. Hazlitt, the eighteenth-century essayist weighed in with: ‘Love turns, with little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.’ Better still, just rerun an old Hollywood epic. In William Wyler’s Ben-Hur, you will hear the Roman Consul Quintus Arrius whipping the hero in the ship’s galley, and then telling him: ‘Hate keeps a man alive.’
Look back at your life. It’s generally the enemy who brings out the best in us. Our adrenaline that wonder juice that turns the average into the excellent—is opponent-dependent. In the office, a sworn rival in the next cabin can do wonders for our efficiency—more effective than a roomful of friends shouting encouragement. They sharpen our responses and prompt us to go the extra mile.
After all, we don’t want to let the dastard next door get promoted before us, do we? At the social level too, enemies perform a useful function: they keep the conversation crackling. Try this at your next gettogether.
Set the ball rolling with a savoury character sketch of the target—the upstart staying upstairs, your club president, his overweening secretary…anyone will do (provided, of course, they are not among those present). Serving up an enemy for the evening is like announcing that the bar is open. Suddenly, the atmosphere perks up and everyone readies for a good time. Friends will contribute their own perspectives about so-and-so and some will add rib-tickling sidelights. Before you know it, a lacklustre assembly turns into a rollicking, high-decibel event.
If our B-schools really knew what’s good for their students in later life, they would begin teaching ‘Enemy Management’. And the first lesson will be on how to pick the right enemy.
You need to be careful—more careful, in fact, than when picking friends. At the global level, America has long been a popular enemy—as universal a staple as daal chawal. You could lay the blame for virtually everything on America, whether for internal strife (US-funded), for our troubles with Pakistan (instigated by US arms manufacturers) or for our cultural decadence (too obvious to need explanation). But the Americans now have serious competition. There’s Russia under the unsmiling Mr Putin, and China under the seemingly congenitally constipated Xi Jinping. There are also religious fundamentalists who are racing up the charts and rapidly emerging as everyone’s favourite foe. Other standard options in India include netas of all stripes, the media, a certain anchor, the builder lobby, the drug mafia and the ‘other’ community… The menu is long and you should certainly find a flavour you like.
The fact is our minds are so wired and hearts so structured that we need to hate, almost as much as we need to love. If we don’t find a suitable enemy, we will, God forbid, begin to hate our friends.
So thank your stars for your enemies.
‘Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.’
—John F. Kennedy
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