The recent World Cup of football entertained 1.5 billion around the world, and people drew all sorts of lessons, but it confirmed to me once again the role of luck in human affairs. At crucial moments, it was not skill that separated winners from losers but chance, and part of the peculiar beauty of human excellence on the football field is, I expect, its vulnerability to things we cannot control. If it was skill alone Brazil should have won all the 14 World Cups, as the German coach confessed. Yet, I want to believe that human excellence and governance play a bigger role in our lives than blind luck. Something in me says that luck is something that we can earn, and it seems to favour the determined ones like Dhirubhai Ambani, who had the skill to know how to guide his luck even while waiting for it. EB White used to say that luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men. Even in football the success of the underdogs--Korea, Turkey and Senegalcame more from determination than fortune. In a wonderful book, The fragility of goodness: Luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy, Martha Nussbaum writes that we sometimes find ourselves, through no fault of our own, in situations where catastrophe, revulsion and remorse are inevitable. We cannot make ourselves entirely safe from bad luck but as rational persons we try to plan our lives to avoid it. One of the ways that we try to reduce the role of chance is through politics--by electing leaders who will deliver us peace, law and order, and good governance. A few months ago we were aghast when a truck killed the lovely Puja Mukerji near our home in Delhi. We knew her--she had recently acted in my play, 9 Jakhoo Hill. Some of her relatives consoled themselves, saying it was her karma, but I thought that it was a failure to enforce traffic rules. I am afraid to drive in Delhi because I fear that the driver next to me on the road may have got his licence by bribing someone. In the Mahabharata, Draupadi argues that one has to strive even if the fortuitous drift of events may nullify one's effort. She says that a farmer fulfils his duty when he has ploughed his field and sown the seeds. After that it depends on the rain. If the rain fails and the crop withers, the fault is not his--blame it on his karma. Today India's farmers, however, talk less about karma and more about irrigation. Enforcing traffic rules and providing rural infrastructure are some of the ways that a good state reduces the role of luck in our lives. Nonetheless, our lives remain contingent, and in attempting to cope with the unexplainable, I find the Indian notion of karma comforting and elegant although I do not subscribe to its metaphysics. Karma places moral responsibility squarely on the individual for his moral attitude and acts and makes fate an outcome of the individual's deepest longings. My favourite karma story is that of Gautami in the Mahabharata whose child is bitten by a snake and dies. A hunter catches it and wants to punish it, but the snake pleads innocence, saying that it acted under instructions of Death. Death claims that it was under orders from Time; and Time argues that it was not its fault because the child died as a result of it previous actions. At this moment Gautami realises that she too might be responsible for the tragedy for she had committed certain wrongs in her past. At that moment she becomes a moral agent. The sensible Vyasa, the author of the epic, seems to agree with Nussbaum that the peculiar beauty of human excellence is its vulnerability, but human beings have to be accountable for their lives. Hence, we can admire and praise the Brazilian striker, Ronaldo, even though we know that he is not entirely in charge.
Jul 15th 2002