Uttam Prakash
“Even filth can feel like paradise to the bound.”
(Inspired by a verse in the Shrimad Bhagavatam 1.9.8, where a hog refuses heaven for the comfort of its mud.)
Across the world today, nations face a quieter danger than war or collapse: Comfort. The comfort of routine corruption, fading outrage, and calling decay the new normal. Institutions weaken more through habit, than rebellion or likes. People stop expecting better. Governments learn to live with less.
Indian thought has long warned of this. Our oldest stories spoke of moral fatigue long before modern politics found a name for it. One such parable, retold from the Srimad Bhagavatam, still feels uncomfortably close to our times.
Somewhere at the foot of the Himalayas, in a quiet village, lived a Brahmin.
In those days, villages still moved with the rhythm of the earth. Fields were green and generous, water clear enough to sip directly. People rose with the sun, worked with their hands, and ended their days under open stars, waking fresh after sound sleep. Life had few needs, and even less greed.
The Brahmin’s modest cottage stood by a rivulet shaded by jamun, amaltas, and bamboo. He began each day with prayer, drew water with his own hands, read through the quiet afternoons, and spent his evenings listening to villagers who came to him with their troubles. He spoke little, smiled often, and carried a calm that made others feel safe.
Word spread. People walked miles to meet him, to ask about their children, their harvests, their tangled lives. Over time they began to believe he could read the past and glimpse the future as clearly as a reflection. They came with fear and left with peace. To many, he was no longer just a learned man but someone touched by the divine, a guide whose words steadied their lives.
One evening, after meeting a long line of visitors, a mischievous thought crossed his mind.
If he could see the fate of others, why not his own?
He smiled at the idea, tried to let it go, but curiosity would not leave him.
One such morning, when the hills were still half-asleep and the sky opened in shades of blue and amber, he sat cross-legged, closed his eyes, and went into deep meditation.
He saw himself at life’s end, face serene on a spotless white pillow, his sons around him, his little granddaughter holding his hand. A dazzling blue light, like an ocean wave, surged toward him, circled his feet, and wrapped him in a bliss he had never known.
Then, in an instant, the light collapsed into stench. The air grew heavy and foul. He looked down and saw a body covered in coarse hair. Children shouted and threw stones. He was a pig, snout-deep in garbage.
Shocked to see himself born as a pig, his meditation broke with a heave of nausea. Days passed before he understood. Once, long ago, he had corrected a wandering saint in public for mispronouncing a Sanskrit verse and smiled with quiet pride as others laughed. It seemed like a small thing, said and forgotten. But karma remembers what we ignore. That careless insult had ripened into this future.
He thought of remorse and redemption but found only one way out. If he could die soon after birth, perhaps the curse would end quickly.
He called his sons and, gathering courage, told them his fate.
“When I die, and am reborn as a piglet, release me at once,” he said softly, his voice carrying a quiet plea. “Do not let me breathe even a moment of that wretched life.”
They promised. He even gave them the exact time and place so no moment would be lost.
The Brahmin died on the appointed day. His sons, caught in the long Hindu rituals of mourning – the chants, the fire, the visitors, forgot their promise. Only on the thirteenth day, when the rituals ended, did they realize, with a stab of guilt, that their father was still trapped in the fate he had feared.
With remorse pressing hard, they rushed to the place their father had described. There, in the muck, they found a litter of piglets. One of them looked up, muddy snout glistening, eyes bright, tail wagging. They knew it was him.
Tears filled their eyes as they moved to free him from the filth and despair. But the piglet ran, squealing, until they finally cornered him. One son raised his sword.
Then the piglet stood on its hind legs, lifted its front legs like folded hands, and pleaded,
“Stop, my sons. Spare me. Believe me, I am enjoying this breeze. I am happy.”
The sword froze. The breeze moved over the heap of garbage. The story ends there.
But some stories end only to echo.
Perhaps the real fall of a man or a nation is not when it slips into the muck, but when it begins to enjoy it.
At first, we complain. Then we adjust. Then we stop noticing.
When corruption becomes routine, when injustice feels familiar, when poisoned air becomes part of the skyline – that is how decline begins and ends. Not with revolt, but with comfort.
The Brahmin begged to be freed before he got used to the filth. The piglet begged even more to stay. Between those two voices, civilizations too must choose: to reform or to rot, to act or to adapt.
The story is not about follies, but about accommodation – the quiet moral fatigue that lets decay pass for normal. Democracies across continents are learning the same truth the Brahmin once saw too late: the danger is not in collapse, but in learning to live with it.
History’s gravestone is etched with four words “we got used to it”.
(The author is a public servant based in Kochi, India. He writes on governance, reforms, and human behavior, drawing from public service experiences across India and Afghanistan.)
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