“anandame jeevita makarandam”

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”– that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
That’s all what one need to know even to be in ananda

GRK Murty
One summer evening, a song – “anandame jeevita makarandam” (bliss is the
nectar of life) wafted over from a distance. It was like the notes of bells, the
sounds of musical instruments, the ordinary noise of wind or rain on window
panels – all in gay abandon. Walking along with it was like an unquenched thirst
suddenly getting miraculously fulfilled.

As the time ticked, the fading song posed a question: “where to find ananda and
how to possess it?” Searching for ananda has been eternally haunting man. This
eternal search could have prompted Erich Fromm to say: “man is the only animal
for whom his own life is a problem which he has to solve”. And the greatest
hurdle that is coming in the way of finding a solution is the very thinking process
that we apply and the set of values that we have evolved to guide our reasoning.
Is it our over-emphasis on finding a single solution exclusive of all others that is
defeating our very purpose of pursuit of happiness and ananda?

As the world is increasingly moving towards industrialization, the Western

protagonists of capitalism perceived economic progress as the lynch pin of
happiness. It’s their belief that economic progress builds a fairer and better
ordered society. It is supposed to facilitate a sensible and decent living. But it has
not turned out to be so nor would it in the future. The capitalism-driven search
for ‘excellence’ and ‘efficiency’ in every walk of life has only divided the society
into ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ They have positioned the pursuit of ‘efficiency’ and
‘economic growth’ on a high pedestal that has resulted in pricing every work
either very highly or simply at zero. Is it not what echoes from what Thoreau once
said: the silent poor who built the pyramids to be the tombs of the Pharaohs were
fed on garlic, and it may be also that they were not decently buried themselves?
Does it mean that this difference between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ is the only
constant to remain eternally unchanged amidst Epicures’ eternal ‘change’?
This singular pursuit for economic excellence to the exclusion of all else, which
was the hallmark of laissez-faire capitalism could have made John Maynard
Keynes to lament: “There must be no mercy or protection for those who embark
their capital or their labour in the wrong direction. It is a method of bringing the
most successful profit-makers to the top by a ruthless struggle for survival, which
selects the most efficient. It does not count the cost of struggle, but looks only to
the benefits of the final result which are assumed to be lasting and permanent,
once it has been attained. The object of life being to crop the leaves off the
branches up to the greatest possible height, the likeliest way of achieving this end
is to leave the giraffes with the longest necks to starve out those whose necks are
shorter.”

Apart from these economic thoughts, there are wide-eyed poets who had
something else to romanticize on happiness. There is John Oldham, England’s
favorite satirist of 17th century, who wrote: “Music’s the cordial of a troubled
breast, / The softest remedy that grief can find / The gentle spell that charms our
care to rest / And calms the raffled passions of the mind.” “I feel physically
refreshed and strengthened by it”, said Coleridge about music. Even Goethe said
that music has made him unfold “like the fingers of a threatening fist which
straighten, amicable.” A. E. Housman had a different poem (that captures the
mood of industrial revolution well): “And malt does more than Milton can / To
justify God’s ways to man. / Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink / For fellows whom it
hurts to think.” There was that Saint-Composer, Sri Thyagaraja from South India
for whom the ‘economics of happiness’ squarely rested on his commune with God
through his kritis (compositions) – “Marugelara O! Raghava…” and such other 500
and odd compositions. A noted Telugu poet of 20th century sang his longing for –
someone who can: “love you for what you are / and to say ‘here I am’ to pop tear-
filled eyes for thee / that alone is wealth/ that alone is swarg.”

So, we had economists on the one hand who said “economic progress” leads to
happiness and on the other hand we had poets for whom right from ‘music’ to,
‘tear-filled’ eyes to relationships, to malt, is the source of happiness. These
conflicts relating to happiness made people to aver: “there is more to human
happiness than can be encompassed in terms of economic measures alone.” This
could not however last long for with the advancement in the tools for economic
studies, a new breed of economists engaged themselves in examining the
empirical determinants of happiness. Intriguingly, today there is a copious
literature on the ‘economics of happiness’.

David G. Blanchflower – of Dartmouth College, Hanover and Andrew J. Oswald of

Warwick University have taken it to further (bizarre?) heights by attempting to
estimate econometric happiness, factoring ‘sexual activity’ as an independent
variable. Here, they conceptualized ‘happiness’ relying on the definition given by
Veenhoven: “the degree to which an individual judges the overall quality of his or
her life as favorable”, while ignoring the psychologist’s understanding of
happiness in terms of ‘context-free happiness’ – well-being from life as a whole,
and ‘context-specific happiness’ – well-being associated with a single area of life.
Their conceptualization of ‘happiness’ indeed has the support of literature which
reveals that self-reported happiness is a mere reflection of four factors:
circumstances, aspirations, comparisons with others, and a person’s baseline
happiness or disposition outlook. Interestingly, much of the literature suggests
(ridicules?) that one “should think of people as getting utility from a comparison
of themselves with others.” They took off from this platform to construct an
econometric happiness equation with sexual activity as independent variable to
find out the links between money, sex, and happiness. The study revealed a
positive association between frequency of sexual activity and happiness. Indeed,
“it was statistically well determined, monotonic and large.”

That is the ever-mounting conflict between the happiness and its attainment! Let
us for a while look at it from an ancient Indian perspective: Nanda in Sanskrit
means “that which can reduce in quantity”. Ananda means that which cannot
reduce in quantity. Simply put, ananda mean bliss! Ananda is not joy, for it comes
without a reason. It just is or is not, while joy is something that we feel through
senses and hence we need to have an external object such as ‘sex’ in the case of
econometric happiness or ‘music’ or ‘relationship’ as in the case of poets. When,
one feels joy without these external objects/sensory inputs, it becomes bliss.
Ananda simply comes from within and thus is independent, unlike the ‘happiness’
in the econometric equation of David and Andrew. It otherwise means that very
living becomes a bliss when it is not attached to ‘externalities’. It is by stopping to
seek that one finds bliss, and if that is accepted and cultivated every other
economic good becomes irrelevant for being happy – for being in bliss.

This raises a new question: How is it that some retained that intrinsic capacity to
be happy, to be in bliss; while others lament about its absence? The answer
perhaps lies in the axiom: “a man is nothing but his mind; if that be out of order,
all’s amiss and if that be well, the rest is at ease.” Mind can be in order when
there is coherence in our thought process. Our knowledge of happiness and
ananda, as Paul Thagard observed elsewhere, is not like a house that sits on a
foundation of solid stones, but is more like a raft that floats on the sea while all
the pieces of the raft fit together and support each other. A belief cannot be
justified merely because it is indubitable, but because it coheres well with other
beliefs and support each other. As Rawls said, we must adjust our whole set of
beliefs, practices, and principles until we reach a coherent state called ‘reflective
equilibrium’.

Now the question is how to achieve it? We all know that from music to rainbow,
beautiful objects produce pleasure and happiness which means ‘beauty’ has a
large emotional component. But as many philosophers observed, it also has a
large component of ‘coherence’. “Beauty is the unity or coherence of the
imaginary object; ugliness its lack of unity, its incoherence”, said R.G.
Collingwood. The human mind, by configuring such coherence amongst its various
beliefs, values, and expectations can generate beautiful experiences, which
means happiness, which means ananda. For that matter the very knowledge of it,
as an Ancient Indian seer said, is ananda.

No wonder, in that configuration, you hum those undying lines, all in gay abandon
—andame anandam / anandame jeevitha makarandam (Beauty is bliss and bliss
is the elixir of life.
*****