Word: fate
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Question of Will. India under Lai Bahadur Shastri remains hung up on its dipolar destiny: karma and dharma. According to Hindu philosophy, two major injunctions dictate a man's way of life. Karma is predestined fate, the godly consequence that dictates the caste and society into which the Hindu is born as punishment or reward for the way he behaved in his previous incarnation. Dharma is the grace-or righteousness-that accrues to a man who accepts his karma-ordained condition. Over the centuries, karma has come to mean passive acceptance of hunger, disease, poverty and humiliation...
...that men are willing to die for, beyond self-interest, tends more or less obscurely to justify that fate by giving it a foundation in dignity: Christianity for the slave, the nation for the citizen, Communism for the worker...
...broods a character in André Malraux's Man's Fate, undoubtedly reflecting the author's own vision in the 1920s when he spent two years in Canton as propaganda commissar for the Kuomintang, which was then an alliance that included the Communists. Last week, for the first time in 40 years, Malraux was back in China as guest of the Red leaders who achieved the revolution Malraux worked for as a young man. Too individualistic ever to join the party, Malraux's own disillusion with Communism came with the Nazi-Soviet pact...
That was a letdown, but Massamba-Debat had other cheery news for his armed fanatics. Eighteen commandos had been taken prisoner, he announced, and their fate would be placed in the hands of the people. "If the people say we should burn them alive, then we shall burn them alive. If the people say they should be buried alive, then we will bury them alive. And if the people say hang them, then we will hang them...
...endlessly treated to clinical accounts, some written by his long-suffering wife June, of Levant in one or another sanitarium, of his bouts with drug addiction or liquor. From all this, Levant comes out as a man who might have been but just missed, who wallows in that unhappy fate by parading as an object of derision. The effect is painful, like a Levant joke: "Ralph Edwards had wanted me to be on his program This Is Your Life, but he couldn't find one friend...