By — Shyamal Sinha
“In spite of my old age, my face is quite handsome,” says the Dalai Lama in a video message published on his eighty-sixth birthday in 2021. Those deep-belly laughs that follow this statement, characteristic of the Dalai Lama and known to warm up the hearts of those in his presence in the moment, are meant to make light of what he says, but only seemingly. The unmistakable glow on his face that lights up every YouTube Live public address and, I imagine, closed-door meeting he does – the brilliant, youthful energy that propels his impassioned hand gestures as he speaks of matters close to his heart – which I have been fortunate enough to witness and experience in person too – are truly miracles to behold. Mick Brown, author of, among others, The Dance of 17 Lives: The Incredible True Story of Tibet’s 17th Karmapa, for which he interviewed His Holiness in a personal audience, shares this awe with me: “It’s very difficult to tell with the Dalai Lama, isn’t it, how old he is. He’s not wrinkled, he has such vitality.” Victor Chen, a close friend of His Holiness, relates an episode when doctors, upon close medical examination of His Holiness in 2004, came to the conclusion that he is “a sixty-seven-year-old man with the heart of a twenty-year-old”.
What His Holiness says about his “handsome face” then is in fact steeped in the truth, because here’s the most powerful argument in favour of compassion and the smartest answer to “Why”? – It keeps us young. This also remains true for Kailash Satyarthi, who, although much younger than His Holiness, belies his age completely in his energy, demeanour, and spirit.
From among the feelings of the last two years that we can all concur upon, can’t we, is a deep-seated weariness of having aged irrevocably. This isn’t the regular ticking time – weeks turning into years, hair inevitably turning grey. The scale of the illnesses, deaths, loss, suffering and grief, the tests of patience and well-being that we’ve all been enduring ceaselessly since 2020 has affected an almost surreal ageing. A colleague of mine, an editor at the country’s only news platform run by women from rural marginalized communities, frames it well during one check-in we did in 2021: “Bade buzurg waale feeling hai na, kuch is tarah, zindagi ke mushkil palon aur pehluon se guzarna.” (It’s what we’ve heard the elders say, enduring the difficult moments and aspects of life and time.) Indeed, it’s as if we’ve lived a lot, enough, regardless of our actual ages. And while beating the clock has always been the fabled elixir for the human race – think innumerable hacks and rituals and products and businesses selling us immortality or youth – we haven’t really been looking in the right place to start with. Or rather, we’ve only just started looking, with only the last decade seeing serious investment in this field in the West. Yet another secret in the process of being unearthed.
This secret does not lie in procedures and lotions, atop treadmills or under bench presses and surgeons’ knives; it lives inside us. This is why, when I interview Jinpa, I learn how he is between prepping for his keynote speaker duties at annual conventions for doctors and portfolio managers in investment banking. It is no wonder that two of the most moneyed or, you could, say thriving businesses globally – healthcare on the cusp of evolution over the next decade and finance, a traditional giant – are now becoming spaces that are recognizing the need for incorporating compassionate viewpoints in their work. This is because the added benefits of practising compassion vis-à-vis the fabled elixir we’re all after, are finally coming to the forefront. A three-month meditation programme that includes compassion training – part of The Shamatha Project, an ongoing multiyear research project at the Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis, led by neuroscientist Dr Clifford Saron – reveals fascinating effects on the participants’ telomerase, an enzyme that repairs our telomeres, the DNA sequences at the tail ends of our chromosomes, the length of which directly relates to lifespans.
That the science of slowing down ageing and countering inflammation aligns with the qualities inherent in compassion makes it an anti-ageing formula that no corporate can bottle up! The research and data breathe through lived examples. And Kailash Satyarthi, who also seems ageless, incidentally, is our go-to for a plethora of those. He shares a volunteering story, which is actually a story wrapped up in many a story, illuminating the youthful energy that channelling compassion can bring.
He speaks about the pioneering Bal Mitra Mandal project that the Kailash Satyarthi Foundation has been running in several Indian states since 2007, which envisions an ideal society as “child-led, child-centric”. He tells me about Sanjay Colony in Delhi near the Embassy area – which was chosen due to its abiding concerns and law-enforcement issues, including heavy drug usage among teenagers and girls being harassed – “generally considered an unsafe area”, he adds, and continues, “we tried the child-friendly society model, in which the local children lead. We started sending volunteers with the advice not to go there and start distributing chocolates, but to accept chocolates if they’re offered to them.” He grins as he adds the side note on the demographic he has in mind: “a bunch of privileged children from the area, expats, corporates, Indian and American.”
What started as volunteering turned into a hyper-local intervention: “Slowly the children, their mothers, the young girls, started opening up, coming out and finding solutions. This became such a strong group of people working together, and we could actually witness and feel the compassion of those teenagers increasing… Plus, their parents were also impacted – unka bhi compassion badha (their compassion grew as well). One lady friend of mine from here, she lives in Chanakyapuri, I have seen her change so much through this experience. She’s much less into the Dilli wala dikhawa (superficial Delhi elite) lifestyle. She came so close to reality that she let that go; she became friends with the children and their parents; she brought in her friends – doctors and theatre practitioners – for street theatre activities. She spoke to someone in Shalimar Paints because the children decided to make the colony bright and colourful – “to have the walls painted with children’s dreams”. And sure enough, the change translated: “Child sexual abuse dropped, drug usage dropped and police violence became zero.” Kailash Satyarthi’s sense of joy in relating this is palpable as he concludes, “Compassion was the core driver in this. This is what compassion can do, and only compassion can do this.”
The youthful, indeed youth-inducing energy inherent to compassion – it makes you want to be useful, thereby giving purpose, and through that, making actively favourable imprints in your DNA – works both internally and externally. The “handsome face” that the Dalai Lama alludes to is a manifestation of the internal state of mind after all. In another light moment on the subject, His Holiness shares on his website blog how he was told at Heathrow airport during a layover that he doesn’t look a day above sixty – he was eighty-one at the time – and was asked for “his secret”. After chortling that it’s not meant for sharing since it is “his secret”, he simply credited it to his “peace of mind”. Compassion, it turns out, is also good for how it works on the mind in this context.
