Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream by Deepak Chopra, Sanjiv Chopra Read Free Book Online Page A

between Hindus and Muslims that began in 1947 with the overnight partition of India and Pakistan had led to a vast murderous purge that claimed even Mahatma Gandhi to an assassin’s bullet.
    My father tried to lose the black sedan, but after a few minutes the tense situation had become a full-blown car chase. Our pursuers tried to run us into a ditch. My father gunned the engine to put some distance between us and them, but after a moment the black sedan caught up. It pulled alongside close enough that we could see three fierce men inside. But I don’t remember being frightened. In fact, Sanjiv and I were thrilled.
    A word about bandits and their peculiar status in India. Any attempt to make daily life orderly seems to fail there. If you send your best dress shirt to the dry cleaner’s and there is a spot on one sleeve, they may helpfully cut both sleeves off (as happened to an outraged American friend a few years ago). Or they might use kerosene instead of dry-cleaning fluid, a smell that never quite goes away. You learn to put tape over the postage when you mail a letter, to discourage postal workers from stealing the stamps and discarding your letter. In a third-class hotel a family may tire of waiting for their dinner dishes to be taken away—presuming that a large family has been sleeping in one room in the same bed—so why not store the dirty crockery in a dresser drawer? The next guest may be a bit surprised to discover them there when he opens the drawer (this happened to another visiting friend), but not all that much. Behind the apparent chaos, every social distinction is known down to the finest detail.
    The hidden order that rules India is a way to preserve everyday life. There are dividing lines everywhere. People are silently aware of caste, even now, decades after it became illegal to discriminate on the basis of caste. A person’s name instantly reveals where he was born and usually the dharma, or family occupation, he follows. By the timeyou have heard a stranger’s name, caught his accent, and assessed his dialect and vocabulary, perhaps a minute has passed, but in that minute was revealed a condensed autobiography—and with it a tightly bound package of prejudices. Modernism threw people together who never wanted to breathe the same air. They had to sit together in tight railway coaches, and no country packs its populace onto railways like India. The strict old rules, such as the one requiring a Brahmin from the priest caste to go home and bathe if the shadow of an untouchable crossed his path, were no longer practical. Was it really viable, under British rule, for a person born into an upper caste to throw out all the food in the house and clean it from top to bottom after a foreigner came to call?
    India’s messy dance between chaos and order is crystallized in the dacoit. Between the early Thirties and mid-Fifties, a notorious bandit named Man Singh far outdid any legendary American gangster like John Dillinger. In his whole career Dillinger was credited with robbing two dozen banks and four police stations, in the course of which he actually killed only one person, a policeman. Man Singh committed more than eleven hundred armed robberies and killed 185 people, not counting numerous kidnappings for ransom and shootouts with the law—he killed thirty-two policemen.
    Singh was born in the Chambal Valley in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, in terrain crisscrossed with deep winding ravines and scrub forest—perfect hiding places. Singh occupied a secure social standing where he lived; he was never turned in despite the sizable reward on his head. He was a provider. His gang consisted of his extended family, more than a dozen brothers and nephews, and when he spoke in public, in brazen defiance of his outlaw status, Singh was humble and respectful. After he was gunned down in 1955 by Gurkha soldiers as he sat under a banyan tree with his son, a temple was erected in his honor. Dacoits worship at