Worldly Dangal

In the movie Dangal, a young aspiring wrestler chooses to wrestle in a weight category heavier than her own. Seemingly a foolish decision, this puts her on a path to discovering wrestling techniques, leading her to win a championship medal.

In the material world, most people struggle through their working lives with the objective of reaching a stage where they have accumulated enough resources to retire peacefully. In the spiritual field, the most accomplished seekers are considered those who renounce the world and seek self-realisation far from the struggles of real life. Both worldly struggler and spiritual renouncer could be making wrong choices.

The worldly struggler may be choosing the wrong objective of a peaceful work-free retirement. Peacefulness is nothing but a stable, continuous mental state of equanimity. It has nothing to do with accumulation of resources. Due to this wrong choice of objectives, the worldly struggler fails to use laboratory-like conditions of the real world to pursue a better state of equanimity. If she builds equanimity skill through worldly struggles, she will discover retirement bliss throughout the journey, not just at the end.


The spiritual renouncer saint is perhaps missing the entire point: the Self-realisation she seeks is also based on the achievement of a state of sthitaprajna, equanimity, and that this skill, too, can be best sharpened within this worldly journey, not outside of it.