The Schizophrenia of Moral Systems

First published in Word Worth: World magazine of ideas and arts, September 2006, Vol 6, No.10

The Schizophrenia of Moral Systems

A question that a Swiss friend recently set before me is what got me thinking on this issue of schizophrenia of moral systems, including the one I was raised in. As someone who grew up in India I find it extremely distressing that an estimated fifty million women have already been intentionally targeted and weeded out from India’s population. This is India’s silent genocide… My response thus far has been one of outrage directed largely towards what I regarded as a ruthless and self-obsessed patriarchy. But the query that my Swiss friend put to me, for the first time made me wonder about the internal thought processes of this patriarchy. What my friend wanted to know was how Indians reconciled this genocide with the basic Hindu concept of karma? Would this not amount to an accumulation of bad karma for the nation? Read the full essay here.