A volte-face that mattered

A sinuous road culminates at the apex of the hillock. It is said that a great emperor once stood on top of it and looked down at the meandering river Daya that had turned crimson with blood. The sight is purported to have transformed the man. A testimony to that legend lies at the base of the hillock etched in stone (in the ancient Pali script).

Two millenniums and two centuries later, the idyllic river still flows albeit belying the morbid sight it once witnessed. A herd of buffaloes lie prostrate on its bank, basking in the sun that beats hard on the anvil of Utkal. The benign calm of the place is eerily deafening, like the introduction of Death in The Seventh Seal. The warm air flowing over the expanse of the region rushes through the nostril, fills the lungs and forces a gasp out of the bystander; As if to say that perusing such a sight only befits a lion-hearted monarch and not a lesser mortal. The land, whose allurement once caused the war (that cost a "million" lives) now gives life in the form of lush green farming fields, as if in an act of penance.


On fulfilling this tryst with history the traveler now walks down the circutous path to where the rock edict lies, at the foot of the hillock. A monolithic elephant (left in its semi-sculpted state) stands sentinel, guarding the edict for two thousand years. Time shows in the eroded tusks and the tired eyes. A dozen rules on morality and benevolence are etched in the stone below. It is the closest to the proverbial "writing on the wall" that I have witnessed in my life. This is not Belshazzar's court; Neither were the inscriptions written by the hand of god. And it wasn't certainly deciphered by Daniel. That these could be the rules charted by the same man who caused the Daya to turn scarlet is beyond the comprehension of a lesser man.


There have been ruthless conquerors like Alexander, Chengis Khan and Julius Caesar. And there have been supreme givers like Mahavira and Buddha. But perhaps none who transitioned from a ruthless ruler to a supreme giver in one lifetime, like Asoka!

As I mull over, I realize how difficult it must have been to change oneself, so late in life, and after much "success". The depth of self introspection required to realize ones own flaws (amidst the "glory" of this success) and the subsequent determination to be able to alter oneself for the better, is unfathomable. Asoka could have left his legacy at Kalinga. History would have remembered him as a great emperor still, like Alexander, Akbar, Caesar and others. Shahrukh would have still made the movie despite being deprived of the melodramatic ending. True, there would have been no Dharmashoka, but the rest of history would have remained unaltered.

Like Asoka, perhaps most humans with even a semi-fertile brain hear the "guilty" verdict often in the courtroom of our head. A student hears it when he cheats in class, the teacher when he answers incorrectly to camouflage his ignorance, the policeman as he accepts a bribe, and a politician as he reads a hollow speech. A "foreign-returned" condescending soul hears it when he complains of filth in his motherland. A writer when he sells plagiarized work, an auctioneer when he sells a fake, et al. I hear it for all the morally incorrect things that I do and the duties that I shirk off as "not mine". To hear that verdict in our little heads is not so much a rare human faculty as is the ability thereafter to walk the path of redemption.

The Asokan edicts evince a complete understanding of the magnitude of the emperor's own guilt (which in his case arose from the taking of innumerable lives) and a subsequent effort to redeem himself. They mostly evince the man's disgust of his own gory "success". Asoka's is a perpetual example to all present day corporate honchos and political heads (as well as to the rest of us with moral/social responsibilities) that standing at the apex does not absolve one of an immoral path traversed to reach there. There is glory not in ensconcing oneself on the mound of dead, but in the ability to accept ones guilt and do a volte-face in pursuit of being a better human.