The inconsistency of Vivekananda as a role model

In many Bengali families, Swami Vivekananda is presented as a role model to very young children, especially boys. This is done through various tales, anecdotes, and his teachings. And, there is no dearth of material to do this. There are picture books, titled “Chotoder Vivekananda” [Vivekananda for youngsters] highlighting his own childhood days; his spiritual awakening through his contact with Ramakrishna Paramhansa; his travels across the country; his voyage to the United States; his legendary speech starting with “Sisters and Brothers of America”; and so on. Then there are portraits, paintings, posters, and statues. There is actually quite an extensive “industry” surrounding the need of parents to present Vivekananda as a role model, something which they themselves learnt from their own parents.

And, it is my very personal opinion that there is something seriously inconsistent with this practice. In what follows, I will try to explain why I think so.

Vivekananda’s life is truly special that has numerous inspirational hallmarks. But for the purpose of this discussion, I shall focus on the following three key ones:
– Detachment from material possessions
– Detachment from family life
– Detachment from blind faith, and adherence to reason and logic

When parents present Vivekananda as a role model, they highlight these hallmarks of his life as something to emulate. And that’s where I feel there is an inherent problem. Let us take them up one by one.

Detachment from material possessions

When children are very young, parents give them the example of how Vivekananda did not care about material possessions, with the implicit or explicit advice that it is not right to hanker after material possessions, rather they should try to thirst for knowledge and such other faculties which will help them grow up to be good children (especially good boys). This profound lesson serves a great general purpose either through explicit invocation or, better yet, through the cultivation of a culture that curbs the tendency of a child against showing an immoderate desire for new/expensive clothes or toys. It is a testament to the impressionability of young children that quite a few of them do indeed imbibe this spirit of moderation.

The problem with this way of raising a child is that the parents cannot remain consistent with their teachings by the time the child goes into high school, and even more so when he is about to go into college. For no sooner the child reaches that stage, the parents start “preparing” their kids for various entrance examinations for engineering and medicine. And to what end? The primary motivation of sending their children into engineering and medicine is, almost without exception, a chance at a better life, a better material life than what they were able to give to their children. Unspoken hopes and promises of a better, bigger house, perhaps a car, a comfortable bank balance, and all the other material trappings of a life, that is unashamedly, glaringly inconsistent with the profound teachings of detachment towards material possessions that had been taught to the child, by way of Vivekananda’s life.

It is as if someone plants a rose plant seed, lovingly waters it, but as soon as it starts budding, suddenly starts expecting the plant to bear mangoes.

While there is invariably a feeling of discordance, the minds of most youngsters are adaptable enough that they adjust to these new expectations without too much trouble. Of course, the more superficial the profundity of their earlier teachings had been, the easier it is for them to make this transition towards this immediate necessity of starting their preparations. However, curiously and ironically, the transition is enormously helped by the fact that while the underlying motivation and impetus undergoes a complete reversal (from the ideals of detachment to material possessions), the day-to-day functional implementation of this new motivation and impetus is still learning and studying (for the entrance exams), which is perfectly concordant with what these youngsters had been encouraged to do anyways from early childhood (thirst for knowledge and all that!).

So far so good. However, …

… the bigger problem and the main inconsistency arises later. When these children are all grown up (let’s say after completing their engineering degrees), get a job, and start earning, they find themselves not just woefully incapable in matters of personal finance but having to contend with a hard-to-overcome mental inertia to even learn the basics of financial matters. Thanks to the two-decade-long grooming they have received in cultivating a detachment from material things. This discordance becomes all the more acute when such a person (our erstwhile child) has to start his own family. Which is exactly what we come to next.

Detachment from family

Like all ascetics, Swami Vivekananda left his family to be a sanyasi. What made his case truly spectacular was that he did that despite his background. It does not take too much sacrifice to become an ascetic if one comes from extremely modest means. But Vivekananda was from a well-to-do family; he was well-educated, and (this is my personal note!) if his photographs are anything to go by he was a well-built, young man with fine gentlemanly features – something that would have made him the darling of Calcutta high society had he chosen so. But he sacrificed all that.

Now, when parents, modern-day parents that is, present Vivekananda as a role model to their children, his abnegation of family life is very much an integral part of the tales told. In many families, his virtues, his character is extolled, and justifiably so. These stories and the attendant virtues of renunciation are particularly impressed upon pre-adolescent boys with the hope of cultivating a culture that will foster their growth into good, virtuous, pubescent boys who shall stay away from “evil” temptations, devote their mind to studies, and in general – most importantly – stay away from girls. Basically, the refrain from these parents is: Respect women (one of the most important of Vivekananda’s own teachings), but stay away from girls. Plus if it can be so arranged that the boys can be sent to an all-boys school, then that would be the epitome of perfection.

How much “purity” and virtue is actually fostered is a different matter altogether. But such a sanitized, controlled upbringing does do one thing for sure: it creates a handicap in these boys to talk with and generally interact with girls with any semblance of normalcy. The result most often is that while their natural, age-appropriate thirst for female companionship rages on, they remain frustratingly cloistered within their safe, all-boys cliques, with nothing but the veneer of virtue as the unspoken, agreed-upon excuse holding them together.

All this holds, of course, only up to higher secondary school and if, perchance, the promises made to parents had been particular potent perhaps even through college. But as with the previous detachment to material things, the parents’ teachings can no longer remain consistent the moment their “child” (now a man), starts earning. For then, the crescendo to get married starts rising immediately.

It is not as if these young men are unprepared for such an eventuality, nor it may be said that they do not actually look forward with a deliciously guilty anticipation to this rising crescendo. Yet the fact remains that thanks to their upbringing they are woefully ill-equipped to interact with a girl, much less a woman with any degree of maturity and genuine understanding – an ability that is a most basic necessity for a reasonably successful married life.

Furthermore, it has to be understood that getting married does not just involve setting up one’s own family and the challenge thereof of living and building a life with a woman, it also entails dealing with new relations, interacting with a whole motley of new and strange characters often at variance with the culture and ethos of the boy’s upbringing and family (The challenges faced by a girl are much, much more but here I am primarily focussing on the boy’s challenges based on his upbringing.) And, all this is again highly inconsistent with those idealism of detachment from family life that were implicitly impressed upon the young boy, by way of Vivekananda’s life.

It is as if you have discouraged a child from dipping his even toe into the swimming pool, but then one day seeing that the child has grown up (all the while on dry land), suddenly decide that he is strong enough and you throw him into the deep end of the pool.

Detachment from blind faith, and adherence to reason and logic

The previous two detachments: first from material possessions and then from family life, at least had the saving grace that in the young child, the parents tried to inculcate such feelings. However, when it comes to detachment from blind faith, the inconsistency starts from the childhood itself.

On the one hand, the parents extol the overall virtues of Vivekananda, and even relate to their children stories and anecdotes from his life highlighting his faculties of reasoning and logic. Most striking among these stories, is the way he approached his spiritual guru Ramakrishna Paramhansa with questions and doubts. That doubt-ridden path to his eventual spiritual awakening is not just an important part of his life’s story but is in a sense a defining and distinguishing identity.

But, on the other hand, the same parents – at least many of them – conveniently do not impress upon their children the potency of such a doubt-ridden inner world to arrive at certain truths, the potency of reason and logic. Rather, they continue to peddle through other teachings (not based on Vivekananda) dogmatic belief, and even expect their children to accept unquestioningly such teachings.

All this of course is quite inconsistent if these parents wish their children to take up Vivekananda as their role model.

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I think parents should stop presenting Vivekananda as a role model. It only contributes to confusing children as they grow up, and creating a life-long discordance in them.

Vivekananda is an ideal. To emulate him – in the truest sense – would entail inordinate sacrifice, and a deviation from mainstream life which rarely any parent would want from their children.

There is absolutely nothing wrong for parents to want their children to grow up and get great, high-paying jobs, buy big houses, new cars, build a bank balance, and be interested in general in setting up a life that is material-ly comfortable. Just as there is absolutely nothing wrong for parents to want their boys to get married and go forth in building a family. Just don’t foist any pretences of detachment and fill the heads of the children with any idealism that cannot be maintained later in life.

Don’t ask your children to become like Vivekananda, and then expect in later life to become everything that Vivekananda was not.