Empty Rooms and Union Jacks

I’m sitting in an empty room. You’ve no idea how unusual that is. In my mother’s house, to sit in an empty room is just a miracle. Because she’s lived here for 65 years, the span of my lifetime, and seemingly never thrown away anything.

In my hand is a plastic bag that contains a stack of old correspondence, which has been sitting for eternity on a dusty shelf in the box room. I peer into it and immediately recognize the thin, blue aerogramme letters I used to send to my parents from Pune, back in the 1970s.

Long before email, I could, for a mere one rupee and sixty paise, communicate with mom and dad, several thousand kilometres away on the far side of the world and several light years away in understanding.

Curious, I open one of my letters, dated 1979, and begin to read: “I hereby give up trying to push Bhagwan down your throats…” Must have been the end of my missionary phase, when I finally realized my spiritual master wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea.

In this house, the past surrounds me. Old children’s games, old books, old furniture, photographs, magazines, newspaper clippings…. It all has to go. Before my mother comes back from the nursing home, the whole house has to be reorganized, which means tossing out huge quantities of stuff.

Betty, my 89 year-old mother, suffered a stroke about two months ago and is now in rehab, learning to use the left side of her body once more, after it became paralyzed. She’s doing well, but, if she’s going to live here, she requires a redesigned bedroom, living room and bathroom, with hand-holds, rails and stair-lifts everywhere.

Normally, I pass swiftly through the UK, en route from India to Europe, saying ‘hi’ to Betty for a couple of weeks, content in the knowledge that I’m not really part of this society. Who me? British? Nah. I’m a sannyasin, a citizen of the world, who, wherever he travels, stays within the magic bubbles created by Osho centers and communities.

Not this year. This year I’m trapped inside a reality show called Made-in-the-UK. My brother needs help getting this house sorted and I need to spend time with Betty every day in rehab, encouraging her to do the exercises that bring mobility back to her body.

That’s why I’m sitting in this empty room, reading an old aerogramme. That’s why I’m sifting through these relics from my family’s past and making daily trips to the town’s garbage recycling center. That’s why, at the end of my working day, I lean back into an armchair, put my feet up, chew on a microwave dinner, sip Newcastle Brown ale and watch British culture unfold on the TV screen before me:

BBC News at Six, Antiques Roadshow, Britain’s Got Talent, East Enders... plus a stream of historical documentaries: Celtic Britain, Viking Britain, Roman Britain, Tudor Britain, Victorian England…. The viewing public, it seems, is obsessed with this country’s past.

These past few days, however, everything has been different. One spectacular event has been ruling the networks, the channels and the ratings: the wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton. Every evening, a new focus: the history of royal weddings, the bridal gowns of past queens and princesses, wedding cakes down the ages, family trees and lineages, interviews with the happy couple, how they met, what they think….

For me, the timing is perfect. I’m stuck in Sussex, digging through my family’s past, looking at my British roots, at the very moment when media and monarchy orchestrate an event that enshrines this whole nation’s identity.

A royal wedding has everything. It’s a throwback to the days of Empire and global power. It’s a glittering spectacle of carriages, horses and coronets. It’s a religious ceremony, a national holiday and a romantic soap opera all rolled into one, with a good-looking young couple uniting in wedded bliss.

What has fascinated me, though, is not the event itself. It is the wave of public euphoria that arose out of nowhere and swept over this land, a tsunami of sentiment, swamping sceptics, republicans and other unbelievers.

A few weeks ago, opinion polls told us that nearly half the population wasn’t particularly interested in the wedding. But as the ‘happy day’ drew near, everything changed. It was like a national love fest, building up through steadily intensifying foreplay to a collective orgasm of ‘oooohs’ and ‘aaaahs’ that erupted from the crowd when the newlyweds kissed on the balcony of Buck House.

Watching all this, I can say that George Orwell got it wrong. Orwell, you may recall, was the British novelist who wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, depicting a nightmare world of total political control, in which citizens were kept subordinate to the state through pervasive mind control.

So impressive was Orwell’s chilling creation that some of the book’s central concepts entered our vocabulary, including Big Brother, doublethink, thought-crime and Newspeak.

But it’s not like that, George. It’s not as dark and oppressive as you imagined it would be, back in 1949, when you wrote your masterpiece. And yet, perhaps, reality is even scarier than fiction, because Big Brother was the ultimate jailer, whereas our Made-in-the-UK bondage is voluntary. We happily celebrate our confinement.

Of course, there are vested interests in Britain – politicians, priests, aristocrats, all the usual suspects – who seek to maintain the status quo and manipulate the masses to their own advantage, Big Brother style.

But as I see it, that’s just a by-product. The ruling elite has no power. It’s us. We want to be ruled. We want to belong. We hunger for national identity. We can think of nothing better than to puff out our chests with pride and wave the Union Jack as the Royal House of Windsor stages another spectacle.

Winning gold medals at the Olympics boosts the national ego. So does lifting an international soccer trophy. So does a booming economy. But nothing does it better than a royal wedding. Not only are we impressed by it, so is the world. An international audience of no less than two billion people in 180 countries watched the ceremony.

Personally, I enjoyed the whole thing – the build up, the happy crowds waving Union Jacks, the commentators going gaga – and it certainly helps that Wills and Kate seem to be genuinely nice people.

Yet, at the same time, I find the whole thing bizarre. Because, after all, what does monarchy symbolize? Collectively, it seems, we make an agreement to pick out a family of ordinary human beings and raise them above us, thereby putting ourselves below them. Having done that, we cheer like crazy because we have transformed ourselves into “humble and obedient servants” – the correct way to address British Royalty.

Having made ourselves inferior, we then long for recognition from those we deem superior. The ultimate accolade, which everyone in this country seems to crave, is to be ‘knighted’ by the reigning monarch.

Nobody seems immune. Even rebellious, anti-establishment icons like Mick Jagger eventually succumb. The sneering, gyrating sex symbol that made parents tremble with fear as their teenage daughters danced to the music of the Rolling Stones – let’s spend the night together – is now to be addressed as ‘Sir Mick.’

Why do we play this strange game?

The purpose, of course, is to subordinate the individual to the group. To make ‘we’ more important than ‘I’. To replace personal dignity with national pride. Bowing down to the crown means bowing down to the state.

The underlying paradigm seems to be: “I may be insignificant, but I belong to the greatest nation on earth… and I’ll beat the crap out of anyone who says different.”

One of Orwell’s central themes in Nineteen Eighty-Four is that the state requires an enemy to create national unity, and, of course, this country has had its share. Even today, in football contests, the public desperately want England to beat the Germans, so it’s a kinda ironic that our revered Royal Family is of German ancestry.

Queen Victoria of the House of Hanover married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, so they both belonged to German Royal families. It wasn’t until 1917 that their grandson, King George V, hastily changed his name from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor in response to anti-German feelings during World War One.

All of this seems a long way from my mother’s empty room and an aerogramme from Pune. But for me, it all weaves together. Unexpectedly, through my mother’s illness, I’ve been forced to look deeply into my past. Every shelf of clutter that I sort through reminds me of my upbringing in this country. Every TV program exposes the collective attitudes that surround me.

I hope that, with each room that I empty, a similar process goes on inside my head, and it’s intriguing to see what still affects me. For example, on the eve of the wedding, I noticed that to throw away a couple of old flags – Union Jacks from past Royal occasions – made me feel guilty, like some kind of traitor. I made sure nobody at the recycling center saw me do it.

But, at the same time, as the house gets cleared, I’m feeling lighter. I breathe easier. The dust of the past is also clearing.

In this day and age, it’s not possible to live on this planet without some kind of state-sanctioned social identity, complete with birth certificate, ID and passport, and Made-in-the-UK is as convenient as any – more useful, in fact, than most.

The art, as I see it, is not to fight it but relax with it. For example, I enjoy sitting around with the builders and electricians who work with me, drinking tea and talking about – what else? – last night’s football:

“That was never a red card situation… Real Madrid played like a bunch of babies… Mourinho stopped smiling in the second half, didn’t he?… I can’t see United beating Barca though…”

George Orwell, by the way, concludes his epic novel with a grim and prophetic insight into the helplessness of the individual against the state:

“They can’t get inside you,” she had said. But they could get inside you. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

I beg to differ, George. They can get inside you, sure, but each of us has the power to get them out again. Emptiness, I find, is an effective medicine against any effort to control my mind. No doublespeak or Newspeak can penetrate there.

And while the software programs implanted in my brain through education and upbringing still get tweaked, they’re not strong enough to hold me. When the house is ready and my mother safely back in her little kingdom, my Made-in-the-UK reality show will come to an end.

I will move on. For I am a stranger in a strange land. I don’t belong here, or anywhere. I may look like a citizen, but actually I’m a tourist. Just passing through….

Text by Subhuti for Osho News

Subhuti is a writer and a journalist. He has worked as a political reporter in the British Houses of Parliament and created ‘The Rajneesh Times’ newspaper in Oregon. He has also written several musicals and plays, and is currently working as a ghost writer. He has been a sannyasin for 34 years. He is also author of My Dance with a Madman, a chronicle of his life in India with Osho. www.anandsubhuti.com