Nietzsche’s Camel (Short-Essay)

Friedrich Nietzsche in his easily-put-down-able “Thus spoke Zarathustra” compares the ordinary crowd to a camel. The camel carries irrational wisdom and a load of stupidity without any rebellious reaction.

The morality, then, questions none of the belief systems, or grandeur but loose ideas, and undigested education on its back without any humble questions at all.

And the camel has values of religion and the words of priests, scriptures, and dead gods on the tongue. Of course, for Nietzsche, it soon ends when the camel metamorphosizes into a lion, a being that can rebel and unburden the weights of the past for the sake of love and freedom and to full fill the quest of Superman.

But in the practical world, the metamorphosis rarely happens. Consider our education which puts “the wit and wisdom of legends” in our minds with rote memorization and mark sheets always chains us to stand on the “shoulders of giants”, to use a Newtonian phrase. The Socrates in our mind never comes out to raise the school uniformed hand in classrooms.

We at least expect a dialogue-debate-discussion in university but the dumping of the Himalayan syllabus down the throats of students doesn’t give us a chance.

and the parenting, often a helicopter parenting, too thrills when the child is a camel, in our case, literally by carrying loads of school bags filled with classics(class-notes) that a child never opens.

The orchestrated labs never have lions in them nor a child( Nietzsche’s ultimate state of mind) that can curiously play with the chemicals.

obviously, camels continue old traditions. We were that camels who burned women alive in the name of “Sati”, deny entry to temples if found to be menstruating, and practice female genital mutilation.

The elephant in the room here is the bag of karma that dictates every atom in India. This camel-ness, for a lack of a better word, keeps India in the past and not in the future of space travel or quantum fields.

Here, Lionisation, again for a lack of a better word, doesn’t mean aping the west as we have been doing for quite a while now or making science a new religion or creating “materialistic philosophies” but taking independent paths, putting aside the “matrix” of the rut and consider letting in new winds into the hearts and minds.

Perhaps, Mahatma Gandhi puts it right this time—

“ I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.”

Thus spoke “I”.