Jan 2018
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Beatnik in the East
I have been reading into the Beat Generation writers especially Ginsberg and Kerouac. I am fascinated by their leanings towards the Counter Culture movement, their passion to experiment with drugs and achieve liberation through altered states of consciousness, their echo for free libidinal revolution and their offers for nonviolence and peace. However what I can’t digest is their veering towards Eastern Religions and their morbid attraction for their rites and cults. The steering of their ships to Eastern mysticism is considered by me as their myopic fascination with the ecstasy of the East as Western foreign outsiders. Though I am living in the East, my mind has been brought up in the liberal Hellenic culture of the West. Language, Philosophy, Art and Culture of the West has deeply fascinated me and inspires my mind to innovate and create fictions, poetry and philosophy. I, being an Easterner live in a culture that’s highly conservative, orthodox and ritualistic. None of the devotees of Eastern Religions would feel to tempted to adopt, follow the patterns of life and living adopted by the Beatniks. My South Asian Experience with Eastern mysticism had been an infliction of wound on my being. Hinduism or Buddhism and its devotees in East do not follow it as the BEATNIKS did. Beatnik adoption of Hindu or Buddhist mysticism would be blasphemy for religious devotees of the East. Yes, I will try to live the ideal of Nietzsche’s Dionysian element of rhythm and ecstasy. The Philosophers of the West have inspired me to be a creative being and embrace a living of creative hedonism.