Re-engineering the ‘karma’ theory
Lord Krishna’s final advice to Arjuna was: “Thus I have explained to you knowledge still more confidential. Deliberate on this fully, and then do what you wish to do.” The choice—and the responsibility—remains yours. If you act with knowledge, detachment, and surrender, you break free from karma’s bondage. This is the liberating message of the Gita. Even Gurbani says: ‘Jeha beeje so lunai, karma sand-ra khet’, which means, as you sow, so shall you reap, in the field called ‘action’. According to the ‘Karma’ theory, the individual soul is held responsible for its actions. Those were the times when men could be considered as individuals and held responsible for an act, but we are living in post-modern times. Contemporary man stands splintered as an individual. He is a divided personality, and diverse forces are responsible for his actions. His archetype is found in Hamlet, who is most relevant to our times as well. [To be or not to be]
The Radical Ethics: Associated Responsibility
The core idea of “Associated Responsibility” (or collective guilt), which figures in Canto III of my latest epic ‘Revelations’, pushes us beyond individual ‘karma’ to interrogate intergenerational and institutional complicity: parents, teachers, and even the broader academic ecosystem that “nurtured” corruption.
It is, in fact, an attempt to re-engineer the ‘Karma’ philosophy from a post-modernist standpoint. Poetus, a character in the epic drama, acts as a Socratic provocateur, forcing God to confront an uncomfortable expansion of accountability. He pleads that all the stakeholders in a criminal act should be summoned and suitably punished.
The case relates to Sinnaraux, a Vice-Chancellor who is caught selling degrees. It was the first case of its kind in which the theory of ‘karma’ was subjected to a wider operational interpretation. As a result, his dead parents are summoned from Purgatory. His teachers are also dragged into the court, some dead and some alive. They are publicly shamed. The VC is sent back with a sinister punishment. All his degrees are forfeited. His face is to be blackened, and he is to stay on the campus of his university for 7 years as a living example of a moral crime. The divine establishment feels aghast to see how the moral architecture of a university, a microcosm of civilization, crumbles not from one man’s ‘karma’, but from a web of neglect: the parents who prioritized status over character, the teachers who taught skills without ethics, and the collective silence that normalised the rot. Thus, ‘Revelations’ shifts karma theory’s focus from the individual to Associated Responsibility, which is “ecosystem-centric”, and indicts the society that glorifies greed. Italian philosopher Mauro Montacchiesi describes Associated Responsibility as radical ethics and “a philosophical innovation of remarkable depth.” He believes that Anand “redefines ethical causality as relational,” in view of the fact that “the idea that moral accountability operates well outside the bounds of the individual to encompass formative structures such as society, education, and family highlights a fully articulated distancing from classical doctrines of ‘karma’.”
Author of 200 books, Dr. Anand is President of the International Academy of Ethics, a polymath and a vital architect of 21st century ethical literature. Email: [email protected].
