Page 48 - NAMAH-Jan-2023

Namah Vol. 30, Issue 4, 15th January 2022

a spirit-free zone. new form. In Aurobindonian terms, this
facilitated the workings of the mentalised
However, the disappearance of friendship vital — the Asura. The Asura is the Devil
in a cyber age could be the culmination in his intellectual make-up and eulogises
of a phenomenon that started long back. perversion. In the post-modern world where
Michel Foucault traced the beginning of all restraints, psychological and social, proved
the disappearance of the institution of counter-productive, perversion rapidly reached
friendship to the sixteenth and seventeenth new heights.
centuries that paralleled the consideration of
homosexuality as a socio-political-medical Pornography became a multi-million-dollar
issue. It was a bit strange that friendship industry and in public life sex was divorced
which was an open-ended relationship of from love and romance. With the advent
obligations and value-sharing was equated of cyberspace that engulfed the globe, the
with something that appeared as an apparent Asura extended his domain to shatter the
violation of social and biological norms. basis of trust and sincerity without
Foucault seemed to study both phenomena which true friendship cannot sustain
as belonging to the same system of bio-power itself but paradoxically, virtual friendships
that prescribes normative social rules (1). can emerge. It is in this background
that friendship in private as well as in
A shift in the base of bio-power could also public life began to lose its appeal and
signal a shift in the style of friendship. In cohesiveness.
the linking of an aesthetic based individual
friendship to an ethical based social narrative A consciousness perspective of friendship
that approves or disapproves types of friend-
ship (like gay relationships), the political A consciousness perspective would not find it
element becomes another determinant of strange to view the gradual decadence of the
friendship. Things get complicated because institution of friendship. Firstly, most human
political power can facilitate certain types relations occur in the surface personality or
of friendship and as a corollary identify outer being and are modulated by the vital that
enemies as if enmity per se was programmed is the plane of life-energy and which holds our
in friendship. desires, passions, lusts, emotional reactions and
dynamism. Secondly, the outer being revolves
Everyone would not agree to such sweeping around the ego and consequently friendship
generalisations. I recall old-timers, who have succumbs to the demands, turbulences,
passed away, describing that all social values preferences and idiosyncrasies of the vital. Very
started having a sea-change during the few friendships can be deep and enduring at
Second World War. This was not surprising this surface being. Even the common belief
as induction of millions of citizens in warfare that adolescence fosters true friendship may
resulted in a massive reversal of ethical codes be over-rated.
of conduct. When the Great War ended, the
reversal of ethical codes extended to social Blos, one of the early researchers in depth
life. The Devil would now incarnate in a psychology of adolescence, felt that

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