“Vermajee, we just celebrated Dussehra. So tell me honestly, did you celebrate Ram or burn Ravan?”
Vermajee looked at me over his glass and, as usual, refused to give me the satisfaction of a straight answer. “Depends,” he said. I know “depends” is the nuclear-weapon equivalent in a consultant’s vocabulary, especially when the consultant wants to sound wise without committing himself or buying time to think. But this time, he had raised a point and a question.
We have made Ram and Ravan into very convenient binaries. Ram is good, Ravan is bad; Ram represents virtue, Ravan represents arrogance; we celebrate Ram, and we ceremonially burn Ravan every year. It makes for a wonderful cultural metaphor and an even better visual spectacle, but life itself is rarely so neatly divided. None of us is Ram, and most of us know, at least privately, that we are not Ravan either. We spend our lives somewhere between the two, moving back and forth depending on circumstances, choices, temptations, fears, and sometimes simply the mood we woke up in.
“So should we hate the Ravan within us?” I asked, wanting to probe.
“Why hate him?” Vermajee replied. “Perhaps we should understand him first.”
I immediately sensed the conversation had moved into dangerous territory because Vermajee wore that particular expression that usually meant he was about to complicate what I thought was simple. This is the moment where the real Dussehra conversation began.
Ravan was hardly ignorant. He was learned, powerful, accomplished and, by most accounts, extraordinarily capable. His tragedy was not that he possessed no virtues; it was that his virtues could not restrain his ego. Perhaps that is what makes the metaphor so uncomfortable even today. The Ravan inside us rarely announces himself as evil. He arrives disguised as ambition, self-respect, entitlement, hurt, competitiveness, insecurity, or the perfectly reasonable belief that we are right and everybody else simply can’t understand us.
Osho once observed that life cannot be reduced to simple black-and-white categories. Uncountable shades of grey, contradictions, and possibilities lie between the extremes, and perhaps that is where most of us actually live. We want to believe that we are essentially good people, just as brands want to believe they are essentially good brands. Yet the real test often comes when being good becomes inconvenient, when nobody is watching, or when doing the right thing costs us something.
Advertising knows this contradiction rather well. A brand can speak passionately about purpose and still behave opportunistically; it can celebrate diversity in its communication while struggling with inclusion inside the organisation; it can talk about transparency and then quietly bury the inconvenient information in the fine print.
Consumers are hardly different. They demand authenticity from brands while carefully curating their own social-media realities, condemn vanity while checking who liked our post, and speak passionately about kindness until kindness becomes inconvenient.
“So what should we celebrate?” I asked Vermajee.
He took another sip and said, “That depends on where you are standing.”
I waited because I knew more was coming. “The Ram you celebrate today may not be the Ram you need tomorrow, and the Ravan you condemn today may be the part of yourself you need to confront tomorrow. Context changes the meaning, relevance and the emotion associated with them.”
Should we celebrate the Ram within us, or hate the Ravan within us? It is a wrong question because both are constantly present, competing, negotiating, and occasionally exchanging places. Life is a continuum, and we fluctuate on it; circumstances, power, fear, success, and failure change us.
Sometimes we can be Ram to one person and Ravan to another, without either necessarily being completely wrong about what they experienced. Which is why the answer, as Vermajee would inevitably say, is contextual. Perhaps Dussehra isn’t really asking us to choose permanently between Ram and Ravan, because none of us can be one or the other throughout our lives.
Perhaps Dussehra forces us to ask and recognise which one is dominant at the moment. Instead of merely burning Ravan every year, we should occasionally look at the ten heads and ask which one looks suspiciously familiar. After all, we may not be Ram, but knowing we can never be entirely free of Ravan might be the first step toward becoming a little more conscious of who we are.
Vermajee raised his glass. “To the human condition.”
Unfortunately, I was having this conversation with Vermajee as a senior citizen, not as a kid. I thought it over and then raised my glass. “To knowing which head is talking.” And perhaps that is enough for one Dussehra.
BLOG/073/2025/680/1235 Images generated using AI- ChatGPT.
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