The World And The Worlds

Down the centuries, rivers of ink and blood have been spilled over this question : do we human beings inhabit one world or many worlds? The standard answer, until even fifty years ago, was that we do live in one world, no matter how this 'world' was understood, but nowadays we are told to believe that there are as many worlds as there are human beings. As a matter of fact, there is something to be said for both types of responses.

To begin with, there remains a fundamental sense in which we humans do live in the same world : we have to deal with the existential facts of suffering and death; cope with hunger, thirst and disease; develop certain ways of responding to the bio-physical environment; struggle with the basic realities of our physiological constitution; try to make sense of our temporal experiences; establish modes of communicating with others around us and of transmitting our concepts to those who shall come after us. In all of these, the external world is just the way it is irrespective of what our beliefs about it may happen to be, so that if you cut off a person's left finger she will feel pain, no matter which time-zone she is living in. Moreover, everytime we send foreign aid to other countries; relocate and outsource our businesses to other parts of the globe; promote student-exchange programmes between different countries; find out our prospects in distant markets; try to learn different languages; assert that gender discrimination should be brought to an immediate end internationally; enforce certain conventions regarding war-time and peace-time practices on people of all nations; read novels and poetry in other languages; demand that other political regimes improve their human rights record; try to bring together heads of nations on common issues such as genocide and environmental pollution, we are claiming, implicitly or explicitly, that we human beings do live in One World.

Secondly, however, there is a bewildering range of views regarding what this world is really like, so that despite certain superficial similarities across cultures there lie deep subterannean divergences. For instance, on the one hand, we may say that both an American Marxist and a Thai Buddhist live in the same world in the sense that both of them undergo similar experiences of hunger and thirst; to give a blunt example, both will die within minutes if bitten by a poisonous snake. On the other hand, they do not quite live in the same world; the Marxist lives in that world whose temporal horizons are limited to this one life, whereas for the Buddhist the world includes several life-times in the past and several more in the future until final liberation is attained. Therefore, whereas the Marxist strives for a state of affairs in which a perfect classless society will be established on earth (this is what the Marxist's 'world' is), the Buddhist would ultimately reject such a society and strain towards a Nirvana (the 'true world') that is beyond space and time.

What Would Buddha Think?

There are certain varieties of New Age thought (especially in the West) which tell you something along these lines : 'Well, you know, what really matters is not what you believe but what you do.' There is another more wide-spread version of this statement which says that as long as you do whatever is accepted within some broadly agreed conventions, it does not matter what beliefs you may happen to hold. In one sense, such statements are, implicitly or explicitly, a full-scale assault on the ramparts of the Academy which, it is alleged, gives support to the activities of 'pure thought' and 'dispassionate rationality' which are not translated into action. How valid this accusation is, of course, a matter for another post; what I wish to examine here is the validity of the statement that it is only actions, which float freely from any mooring in beliefs, motives, desires, intentions, and inclinations, that count.

One of the simplest ways of challenging a specific view is to produce some counter-examples to it, and I shall provide three here.

(A) There are three men, John, Tom and David, each of who is asked this question, 'Have you ever been violent towards women?', and all of them unhesitatingly reply, 'No'. Since they have satisfied the condition that they behave in the appropriate (that is, non-violent) manner towards women, we might come to the conclusion that it does not matter why they behave in this way. But it does crucially matter that we also know the answer to this Why, and to appreciate this consider their three replies to this question.

John replies : 'I would not inflict harm on women because I believe that women too are individuals who are the bearers of certain rights and liberties guaranteed to all who are included within my nation, and more generally, within 'humanity', in whatever way you might define thi slippery term'. Tom says : 'I am an unrepentant misogynist. Far from actually harming a woman, I would not even go a few inches close to one. They are absolutely beneath my contempt'. Finally, David replies : 'Well, I don't think it is wrong to be violent towards women. But then you see there is the law, the police and all that nonsense, and I don't want to go to jail for that will disrupt my normal routine. So I choose to accept the social conventions of my country, and choose not to do what is forbidden by the law. But if I were to be living in a country where violence towards women is socially legitimised, I would surely not think twice before lashing out at a woman whenever it suited me.'

So in one specific context, say within the legal system of the UK where such violence is indeed illegal (but widespread nevertheless), the actual practices of John, Tom and David may not matter, but the divergences in their replies to the latter Why question can become of crucial significance in some cases. Say, for example, all three of them happen to be on a panel interviewing candidates for a job, among whom there are two women. Depending on their respective attitudes to this question, all three of them will have different views on whether these two women are capable to doing that job. Therefore, within that context, it is not enough to be able to determine how they have behaved towards the candidates (perhaps, all of them were outwardly polite and smiling), but it does really matter what they believe.

(B) Any social system that is based on brute demands for submission to some sort of a higher authority may be able to enforce on human beings modes of behaviour that are always within the established norms, but it will remain doubtful to what extent they wish to uphold that system. Consider, for example, the collapse of Communism in various parts of Europe (which is not to say that this is the reason, but one of the important reasons for this fall). Therefore, it is not sufficient to know what Czechs, Romanians, Ukrainians, and Muscovites do without finding out at the same time what they believe in, and trying to establish whether or not their actions are external manifestations of these inner beliefs and inclinations.

(C) An opposite example comes from the contemporary West, where a diluted form of atheism has become acceptable as the authoritarian norm. To confess that one is religious is tantamount to social suicide : 'What! You have become religious! Oh my gosh, whatever happened to you? You were normal until last night's party? Was it something in your vodka? I tell you what, you need to go out more often.' Therefore, the reason why some choose to call themselves atheists is not so much because they have seriously sat down with pen and paper and pondered over the relevant issues, but simply because they do not want to 'lose face' before their friends, spouses, colleagues, and peers (and the same applies to the latter who are pressurised by the dynamics of hidden and subtle social forces to exclude certain topics from 'polite conversation'). Therefore, once again we have people who are behaving in just the right way (that is, by acquiring the skill of religion-bashing which is necessary for climbing the 'intellectual' ladder), but the more fundamental question remains this Why : Why do they behave this way? Is it because they have carefully reflected on these matters in the process of mutual discussions with people of various religious/agnostic/atheist persuasions, or is it simply because of their emotional need for social acceptance by like-minded people around them?

Note, however, that I am not trying to settle the debate over 'God and atheism' by making these sociological observations, that is an entirely different debate which must be conducted at several levels, psychological, emotional, moral, and epistemological. My concern here is simply to show why it is never enough to know that people are behaving in the 'right' way without asking them why they are behaving that way. Just as many Russian Orthodox folk started behaving as atheists during Stalin's time not because they had become Marxists overnight but simply because they did not want to be sent to freezing concentration camps in Siberia, it is very much possible that many people who outwardly live as atheists have been pressurised to turn towards atheism because they are scared of social exclusion which is as nightmarish as a concentration camp for them. This becomes all the more clear when one considers the fact that in our private lives, far away from the discomforting public gaze, we are virtually deluged by stream after stream of New Age thought, transcendental meditation, yogic practices, astrology, Zen, horoscopes, wicca, relaxation therapy, aromatherapy, and crystal gazing.

A final note about Buddhism itself, especially concerning the manner in which it has been received in the West. Some Western Buddhists will give you the following litany : 'Islam, Judaism and Christianity require you to believe in things for which there is no evidence. In Buddhism, however, you are free to investigate and examine every precept and teaching, and find out for yourself whether these are true or false'. To this, two replies. Firstly, I shall here allow the former accusation to stand; to rebut it will carry me too far afield. Secondly, however, even a week spent in studying through Buddhist metaphysics will make you realise that things are not quite as simple as that. One of the foundational principles of Buddhist thought is the law of karma and rebirth, and if it were really that easy to verify the truth or falsity of this law, I guess everyone would have become a Buddhist by now. The fact that many people, even after having grappled with the complexities of Buddhism for a sufficiently long period of time, remain unsure about whether or not to accept this law as a 'description of reality' should cast at least some doubt on the claim that Buddhism is a Do-It-Yourself philosophy wide-open to all amateurs. In short, then, even in Buddhism it is not enough to know what to do unless you also know why you are doing so.

The Vulnerability of Science




Deconstruction is very much in the air these days, so much so that you should not be surprised if in another three years someone comes up to you and asks you,'By the way, have you had your cat/wife/boss deconstructed?' At the rate at which we have turned to deconstruct one another, one wonders what will be left to dismantle very soon. Until we reach that time, however, there are still a few more things left for us to deconstruct, and here is something for you as you sip your weekend coffee.

I am always intrigued by this social phenomenon. There are several Indian expats in the West (mainly in the US) who are mostly software engineers and IT consultants, and have received a very high level of 'scientific' or technological education. Now we all know that one aspect of such education is that it trains you to become 'cool, dispassionate and neutral' observers of whatever it is that you are trying to see. How is it the case, then, that so many of these expats support a political party back at home which propagates, among other things, the bizzare conspiracy theory that the Hindu majority is under a threat from the Muslim minority?

Here is my own deconstruction of this phenomenon; I am sure you will have some of your own. I believe that there are two primary reasons why these technology-savvy students accept such fanciful ideas. Firstly, they extrapolate the two-valued logic that operates within the scientific domain into the trans-scientific world which is governed by a multi-valued logic. That is, scientists are accustomed to making and working with statements such as, 'Either X is positive or it is negative', 'Either Y is an electron or it is not', and 'Either Z is an endothermic reaction or it is not'. Unfortunately, the social world does not necessarily fall into such neat categories (even when we try to squeeze it into them) so that A and its apparent opposite B may not, in fact, contradict each other in this precise manner.

It is, therefore, the mistaken application of a dual logic that can lead people from a scientific background astray into thinking that if the minority (X) gains, the majority (Y) has to lose. The nature of socio-political existence, however, is infinitely more complex than such simplistic generalisations lead us to believe : it may so happen that Y stands to gain if and only if X makes some gains at the same time, or that the gains of X and Y are synchronised, or that unless X makes some substantial gains, Y will not be able to make any significant headway in any direction.

The second reason is this. Students from a scientific background can suffer from a unique kind of emotional vulnerability which is that of being unable to live with uncertainty and of demanding that everything be laid down in unequivocal terms. What they often do not realise is that they begin to develop the need for a form of security which they enjoy by asking only those questions which can be precisely answered in mathematically exact language, and by denouncing all other questions as 'irrational' and 'sentimental'. Therefore, though it is true that at the formal level the scientific enterprise is based on a healthy skepticism, it is quite rare for students of science to be actually skeptical of their own assumptions. In short, many scientists are usually not the 'open-minded' voyagers on the sea of human knowledge that some Romantics have made them out to be. Indeed, it would seem that some students can become so 'close-minded' that they are only too willing to jump at any conspiracy theory that comes tumbling their way.

The reason why these conspiracy theories is so attractive to them is that they answer to a very deep emotional need : that of being able to see the world in unequivocal 'scientific' terms through the lens of a dual logic which would state that We are in the mess that we are today because of Them. Not only does this overlook the fact that quite often in the past and in the present members of Them have lived as members of Us and vice versa, but also that our house was in civil warfare and disorder long, long, long before we ever heard of Them, or They heard of Us.

Why Scientists Have To Be Faithful

I suppose most scientists would be horrified by my claim that the scientific enterprise itself is solidly based on certain principles of faith. This is largely because the word 'faith' has come to mean 'belief in something for which there is no evidence'. Though I myself do not think that this is a good definition of the term 'faith', I shall nevertheless use this very definition and show why scientists themselves not only do, but also must, operate with a faith of precisely this nature.

(A) The Uniformity of Nature : At the heart of the scientific business is the presupposition that goes by the name of 'uniformity of nature', which states that the future will be like the past. So regularly do we use this presumption while going about the job of 'doing' science that we easily overlook the fact that this is precisely a sort of 'faith', for it is hard to think of what could possibly count as hard evidence for it. This presumption of the uniformity of nature is rather an axiomatic foundation for science, and being so it cannot be 'proved' in a non-circular manner, that is, without assuming the truth of what we are supposed to prove. You may very well want to believe that the world tomorrow will be very much the same as the world described by physics today, but this belief is, strictly speaking, not a mathematical conclusion but an article of 'faith'.

(B) The Universality of Description : Most scientific laws are said to be timelessly true, but strictly speaking this is a presumption and not the outcome of a rigorous proof. For example, why do we assume that the law of gravitation will hold good in all the distant galaxies in the universe though nobody has ever been to those galaxies and empirically 'verified' the law of gravitation there? Similarly, think of the law of conservation of momentum : one can only presume that this law is universally valid in all times and all places. The statement that scientific laws are universally/timelessly valid is therefore not an empirical datum but an article of 'faith', since there is no hard evidence for this presumption.

(C) The Comprehensibility of Nature : This is another fundamental presupposition that guides scientific activity which is that the natural world is indeed comprehensible to us. In fact, we have absorbed this presumption so deeply into ourselves that it is often hard for us to see it for what it is --- a presumption, nothing more, nothing less. To see why this is so, consider what happens when we are unable to explain what caused a certain event X. We could have simply said, 'Oh, well, X just happened', and left the matter at that, but we do not do so and instead go on trying to find out what caused it. To do this, however, we must operate with the background presumption that such causes can indeed be unearthed by the powers of the human mind. Once again the existence (or the non-existence) of these powers cannot be 'proved' in a rigorous manner by appealing to 'evidence'; it is a 'faith' in the potency (or incompetence) of rationality, a 'faith' that some people may or may not have.

(D) The Value of the Enterprise : There is yet a fourth fundamental presupposition that regulates scientific enquiry, and it is this proposition X : It is a valuable thing to practise science. It hardly needs to be pointed out in this age of ecologists, feminists, animal rights activists, post-colonial critics, cultural theorists, and peace fighters, that science has become a deeply contested territory. It is claimed that far from being 'value-neutral' science actually reflects the interests of multi-national private corporations which fund university departments to carry out research into those areas that can lead to the former's financial profit. So, for example, no industry would fund a department of quantum cosmology or string theory (there is no commercial profit to be gained out of these), while there is no dearth of industrial funding for departments of genetic engineering, on both sides of the Atlantic. In some of its forms, therefore, science itself has become just one more market commodity such that it is industrial concerns which now direct what areas are worthy of scientific attention, research, and exploration. Therefore, if we still wish to carry on with science despite these shocking exposes (which are based, incidentally, on quite hard evidence), we must have a sort of 'faith' in X, the 'faith' that will give us the courage to believe that in spite of all its associated and unintended dangers, science does remain a valuable pursuit of enquiry into the nature of reality. This, to repeat, is a presumption that some will accept, and others will reject.

The Academic Roulette!

This is how one internet dictionary defines the term Russian Roulette : A stunt in which one spins the cylinder of a revolver loaded with only one bullet, aims the muzzle at one's head, and pulls the trigger. If you happen to be even vaguely associated with academic life, you might wish to participate some day in what I shall call here the Academic Roulette.

There are six players in this deadly war of wits, the Academic Roulette, each of them standing for some -ism or the other, and these can range from Buddhism to feminism to liberalism to ecologism to atheism to Marxism. Let us say that one of these players is a Marxist, but none of the other five are aware of her political beliefs, theories, and affiliations. We could say that all six academics are behind the Veil of Ignorance : nobody knows what the world-view of the person sitting next to her is. Now this Marxist is made to drink a cup of poison, and is given exactly 60 minutes to convince the other five that she is, in fact, a thoroughbred capitalist. If the other five believe that she has provided a reasonable vindication of capitalist theory and practice (irrespective of what they think she really is), she will be allowed to drink an antidote to the poison at the sixtieth minute : otherwise, she dies.

And the same goes for the rest. The Buddhist academic will have to convince the other five academics that she is, in fact, a Muslim; the atheist that she is a Greek Orthodox Christian; the feminist that she is a victim of domestic violence; the American libertarian that she is a follower of Chairman Mao Zedong; and, finally, the ecologist that she is a defender of Globalisation.

(I have added the bit about the poison only to 'spice up' this Roulette business. On a different note, however, I believe that it is extremely important for all human beings, whether or not they are inside the academy, to acquire the skills, intellectual, social and political, to become able to play this Academic Roulette. This is because quite often it is only by trying to present another person's view in her own words, trying to see her world through her own eyes, and trying to walk her mile in her own skin, that we may come a bit closer to understanding what she is really trying to say. This is not to say that we shall actually succeed in this endeavour, but that we may nevertheless wish to make the attempt.)

What Is So Funny?

There is a TV show called Charmed where three sisters Phoebe, Piper and Prue realise that they are witches after unearthing a big tome of magic spells of various sorts. They are periodically attacked by warlocks and all other meanies (in the form of ordinary humans), and they have to make use of their supernatural powers to defeat them and protect the innocent. Now is that supposed to be funny or what? I personally thought it was funny, but hold on. When watching an episode of this show a few years ago, I began to ponder over a question that often strikes me : 'Where does one draw the line, so to speak, between what is funny and what is not?'

There are at least two categories of people who would not find Charmed funny at all. The first are those who will point out that Charmed is simply perpetuating the 'Mediaeval' belief that there is something 'witchy' about women. Why is it three sisters and not three brothers who are being portrayed in this TV series? And to this it can replied that this is because the producers knew that they could tap into the 'collective unconscious' of their viewers who would more readily make an association between 'witchcraft' and 'feminity' than between 'witchcraft' and 'masculinity'. 'Feminity' has often been connected with the 'dark and demonaic' aspects of the human mind (which is far more gendered than we usually realise), and by casting three women as witches for the new age, the projection of women as the exotic and the repressed Other is being given a subtle legitimisation. America has a notorious reputation, it will further be pointed out, of witch-hunting (the Salem witch trials et al.), and one should therefore get rid of this cliched association once and for all. To the second category belong various kinds of people whom I shall here, for the sake of brevity, simply label as the 'scientists'. America, they shall argue, stands for the light of Civilisation, Modernity, Freedom and Progress, and we cannot allow these three witches to become role-models for our teenage girls over the country. They are taking America back into the past by three hundred years, and have also become the unofficial spokeswomen for people dabbling in wicca, vodoo, necromancy, neo-paganism, sorcery and all others sorts of unspeakable heresies against Rationality.

One could see here just a hint of the old debate between the Populists and the Elitists : the Elitists claim to be standing on high moral ground (the freedom of women and the progress of rationality in the above two examples), and the Populists reply that they can see nothing wrong in experimenting with newer forms of 'being cool'. I tend to agree with the Populists on this matter, keeping in mind the caveats of the Elitists. I would 'read' the TV series Charmed as a kind of sophisticated satire of the traditional association of women with witchcraft. That is, though this may not have been the intention of the TV producers themselves, one could argue that the viewers should see this series as 'funny' not in the sense that women are witches, but in the sense that so many people can be so easily tricked into believing that they just might be so, deep under their fair skin. In a sense, therefore, both the Elitists and the Populists are right, but not in quite the ways in which they themselves view the problem. The Elitists are right in pointing out how old stereotypes are readily propagated by the media, but they often fail to see the satirical power that the media, with a little bit of reflection, can come to possess, develop, and put to excellent use.

In short, Charmed can be viewed as a truly subversive TV series providing a critical perspective on the notion that women are more prone to witchcraft than men. Now the plot thickens, shall we say in the spirit of Charmed, when we bring in the big R word into this debate : Religion. Even with Charmed, I would not be suprised if many Christians, Muslims and Jews did not find the portrayal of three human beings playing the fool with 'evil' forces funny at all. However, when it comes to the 'retelling' or 'recontextualisation' of religious stories in the media, passions can easily run much higher. Take the case of the well-known Monty Python movie The Life of Brian. In truth, it is a satire that makes fun of certain types of believers of Christianity, and not of Jesus of Nazareth himself. It is about a man called Brian who is mistaken for the promised Messiah, and is subjected to different kinds of abuses by religious and political groups. However, the object of satire (like the 'object of desire') is always difficult to pin down so that the act of lampooning specific believers can always be 'read' as a parody of the founder of that religion.

Consider, for example, a movie called The Life of Ahmed which will be about a man called Ahmed who was contemporaneous with the Prophet Muhammad. And let us say that this film will show how Ahmed was mistaken for the Prophet himself, and was harassed in different ways by the Arabs of his time. In one sense, it is a pretty 'tame' movie (by Hollywood standards), and yet I suppose that there are very few film-directors in the 'west' today who would be so bold as to actually make and screen this movie. Not only will it raise unprecedented furore, it can easily topple series of governments in its wake. And the same would hold incidentally for a movie called The Life of Zeenat about a Muslim woman who was somehow mistaken for Lord Krishna, irrespective of where this movie is made, in India, in the UK or in the US.

And this time, let us move into the big P : Politics. Such examples are not too hard to find, but I shall mention just one from the South Asian context. I take it that nobody, as of today, would dream of writing a satire on the Partition of 1947, a tragic Exodus when millions lost their lives. And rightly so, for there really is nothing, as we say, funny about it. But consider this. In the year 2090, when more or less everyone will have forgotten (and also stopped caring) what the bloody mess was about, a dare-devil script-writer for Bollywood comes up with this spoof : the departing British want to rub in their point that without the English administration, the natives will descend into anarchy and cut one another's throats; so they instigate the Partition and have a laugh at the expense of the natives as they are moving away on their ships from Bombay to Southampton.

In short, 'what is funny' and 'what is not funny' are two categories the dividing line between which is constantly shifting. It would have been unthinkable to write a book called The Life of Brian in the Victorian England of 1871 (at most, the book would have been published anonymously), and yet today it is considered quite a mild and harmless one. I am suggesting that the same might hold for The Life of Ahmed and The Life of Zeenat in another fifty years. Moreover, a person's perception of what is funny will also depend on what one might call her Fun-Threshold (FT); this FT varies from person to person, and for the same person from one context to another. For example, if you, a non-Indian, are in the company of some Indian friends, you might listen to jokes about Indians, and enjoy a high level of FT in that situation; when, on the other hand, you are with non-Indians, you would normally maintain a low level of FT regarding such jokes unless you want to get into some sort of trouble, legal or otherwise. (And the same holds for the Irish, the Poles, the Blacks, the Italians, the Germans, and so on.)

However, note that FT is not to be confused with what is called 'sense of humour' (SH). A person could have a very low FT in one respect and a very good SH in another respect. Here is one example. A Russian Marxist will not tolerate anybody making a mockery of 'the law of historical materialism', and has in this sense a very low FT (and the same goes for an American and her 'liberalism', an Indian and her 'Shining India' motto, and an academic and her PhD thesis). In another sense, however, he could have an excellent SH, and regularly joke about some of the ills of life under Marxism (and the same holds for the American liberalist, the Indian nationalist, and the university academic).

Whom Are We Tolerating?

One of the most slippery aspects of contemporary socio-political existence in several parts of Europe and Asia today is what I shall call the phenomenon of Comparative Martyrdom in which a group or tradition tries to present itself as having undergone greater persecution in the past than the groups or traditions around it. This raises a host of interesting debates centred around whom we are 'tolerating' (not to mention the perennial question of precisely what toleration is). There have been two major responses to this question : the classical European reply is that the locus of toleration is the Individual, whereas the contemporary consensus seems to be that it is rather the Community.

According to the older reply, it must always be the Individual who is to be tolerated, for it is the individual's liberty which is a higher value than anything else. This response is associated with the rise of European science, one important aspect of which was what has come to be known as the 'spirit of free enquiry', a spirit that can blow only in an environment where the Individual is allowed to think, write, speak and investigate whatever she wishes to. However, even proponents of this view recognised certain limitations; for example, that the right to Speech does not give one the licence to indulge in hate-speech against certain groups of people, that the right to Enquiry must be exercised within a context where other people too will discuss whether stem-cell research is to be allowed, and so on.

The more popular response, however, is that it is whole communities that are the true loci of toleration. That is, it argues that it is not enough to tolerate mere individuals, for in some societies the Individual is but a conceptual abstraction and virtually non-existent. Therefore, to give an example, if a Hindu immigrant in Britain in the 1970s wishes to learn something about her Hindu cultural origins, the government can be said to be truly tolerant only if it sets up local institutions where such education can be socially imparted to interested people. Or again, to be truly tolerant towards the Blacks, it will not do, so runs the argument, merely to treat individual Black people as the bearers of civil rights; the government must also establish departments of Black History in colleges and universities so that entire Black communities can better appreciate their (forgotten and repressed) pasts.

I believe, however, that both these approaches, as they stand, are well-meant but potentially misguided, for the question of the genuine locality of toleration cannot be answered in this Either/Or manner. The approach that we take towards such issues cannot be based on such sweeping dichotomies but must rather be sensitive to the socio-historical specificities of each case. Consider this example, drawn from the Indian Muslim context.

An Indian Muslim woman makes a claim for divorce : should the government 'tolerate' her as a member of the Muslim community or as an Individual who is the bearer of certain liberties which non-Muslim Indians possess? Much can be said for both options. On the one hand, the government cannot be said to tolerate the Muslim community unless it allows it to formulate its own socio-religious communitarian laws; on the other hand, if such laws prevent a Muslim from enjoying such rights which are allowed to non-Muslims, and if this Muslim woman wishes to exercise these rights, the Muslim must also be tolerated as an Individual. Consequently, which option is actually taken is a matter cannot be settled by adopting an approach of Either-The Community Or-The Individual.

The reason for this becomes clearer when we note that the so-called Individual in this context is herself immersed in her own community, this time, the community that is bound together by the rights that are granted by the Indian Constitution. Therefore, instead of viewing it as a battle between the (non-Muslim Indian) Individual and the (Muslim) Community, we should rather see it as one between (the Indian Constitution) Communitarian (the ICC) and (the Indian Constitution and the Muslim tradition) Communitarian (the ICMC). In many cases, there will be no clashes between the ICC and the ICMC : both types of communitarians, for example, agree that it is wrong to murder, cheat, swindle, or rob other citizens of the country. The trouble starts over certain fault-line issues such as abortion, marriage and divorce, property rights, and the liberty of women.

Over abortion, for example, the ICC response is quite clear : consult an expert on the Indian constitution, and if she says that the right to have an abortion does not clash with any of its schedules, ICC women can exercise this right straightaway. Coming to the ICMC reply, however, there is an additional factor, that of scriptural authority, so that even if the Indian Constitution (which she otherwise follows) allows abortion, she might come to the conclusion that abortion is an immoral practice.

It is extremely important not to misjudge the issue here : it is not over what is called 'open-mindedness'. Some ICCs often give the impression that ICMCs are narrow-minded because they accept an authority higher than themselves, that is, of the Qu'ran. This is an extremely myopic reaction, for ICCs themselves accept a greater authority, this time, of the Indian Constitution which they did not personally write, which they probably have never even cared to read through, which they do not usually question, and whose schedules they ('blindly') accept most of the time. Therefore, the vital question instead is this : Whose authority shall we accept? The ICC reply is that the Indian Constitution is the sole authority that we can accept, whereas the ICMC response is that the Indian Constitution applies only to temporal affairs and cannot be the final judge over questions connected with the individual's relation to the transcendent.

Here I have been talking specifically about the (Indian Constitution and the Muslim tradition) Communitarian, but the point can be easily extended to the (Indian Constitution and the Christian tradition) Communitarian (the ICCC), and even the (Indian Constitution and the Hindu tradition) Communitarian (the ICHC). For example, the ICHC may believe that even if euthanasia and inter-caste marriage are allowed by the Indian constitution, her specific tradition is opposed to these practices, so that this time we have a clash between the ICC and the ICHC. To make things even messier, let us think of someone who is an anti-ICC over some specific issue such as that of gay marriage. This time, the anti-ICC proponent of gay marriage will clash not only with the ICCs but also with most ICMCs, most ICCCs, and most ICHCs.

It is for reasons such as these that in societies with people from various ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds, it is not possible to settle in an a priori manner the precise domain of toleration. Sometimes it will be the Individual (for example, when a young girl refuses to marry the person whom her parents have chosen for her), sometimes it will be the Community (for examples, in cases involving anti-Semitism and 'Islamophobia'), and sometimes it will remain a hotly disputed issue over who is to be tolerated (and this is currently the situation over euthanasia, abortion and gay marriages).

Whatever Happened to/in the Past?

One of the greatest discoveries of the last century was that the past can be invented, so much so that we now have a multiplicity of pasts. Nor is this a turn of phrase that I have coined for my own purposes here, for it is arguably the case that sometime until the nineteenth century most people used to believe that they have inherited The Past, whatever this might be, the European Past, the Chinese Past, the Religious Past, the Colonial Past, the American Past, the Scientific Past, the White Past, or the Asian Past. Now, on the other hand, we are deluged by a variety of pasts, and more and more of them are being invented and re-invented every day.

One could even say that the Pasts are up for grabs, so that one can simultaneously belong to more than one Past. As an Indian living in the UK and studying 'philosophy of religion' at a British University, for example, I live at the interstices of as many as four Pasts : the Asian Past, the Colonial Past, the Scientific Past and the Religious Past; and each of these Pasts is being reexamined, reconceptualised, and recontextualised every passing year. One can think of my own Past therefore as a gigantic river in spate into which these four historical tributaries have merged, and yet merged without losing their distinctive identities.

There is, of course, a certain sense in which being told that you are the inheritors of The Past gives you a sense of 'security' : you know where you have come from, where you are today, and which way/s you are moving along. This is why History can be such a powerful tool for guiding people into the next generation : it can tell you that the Past was logically inevitable, and that the Future will follow as its logical consequence. Certain forms of 'determinism' (whether scientific or religious) take it yet further : that we do not really matter, for it has been decided which road we shall take at every fork even before we arrived onto the scene.

Most socio-political debates, however, emerge from this illusion that we have been handed down The Past in an indiluted form, and that it is our bounden duty to do or die for this One Past. I shall here take two examples from the (pan-)Indian context to show why we must strive to get ourselves rid of this illusion, and the sooner the better.

The first concerns the 'sovereignty' of a state called Assam (think of Assam tea) in the north-eastern part of India. There are some people in Assam today who believe, to put it precisely, that 'Assam was never a part of India' and there are many others who claim that 'Assam has always been a part of India'. As a matter of fact, people in neither group seem to have read their histories carefully, and consequently have made the category mistake of thinking that there was a real entity called 'India' before 1947, which is the year when the British left 'India'. The truth of the matter is that there was no geo-political unit called 'India' before Independence, and the India that we see on our maps today is largely a product of the schemes of the wily Sardar Patel. Therefore, the fundamental question is not over The Past : 'India' did not exist before 1947, and to ask the question, 'Did Assam belong to India before 1947?', is as ridiculous as asking this one, 'Was Julius Caesar angry when his computer crashed?' Instead, the basal question here is over a possible present : should Assam remain in the Indian Union today?, and this question must be answered only after taking into account the multiple Pasts that have made the Assamese people what they are today.

The second concerns a similar set of issues related to the support that certain political parties in India receive from ex-pat Indians in Europe and the US. Some of these ex-pats seem to harbour certain kinds of conspiracy theories about how the 'West' has been exploiting India since time immemorial. Once again, a fictitious entity called 'India' is invented (not to mention the other one, the 'West'), whereas as I have pointed out in the earlier example there was no such reality before 1947. Whether or not people who live in the zone that we call 'India' today ever regarded themselves as being members of one socio-cultural unit in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries is something that must first be demonstrated, and not assumed to be true at the start of an argument. Therefore, instead of allowing oneself to be deceived that we Indians have been granted the immaculate gift of The Past, we should analyse this very past, and a careful scrutiny will reveal that there have been many streams which have flowed into this Past. Indeed, it will then become clear that some of these streams were 'Western' in origin but have now become so inextricably a part of our own Indian past that they cannot be isolated any longer as such.

Therefore, let us return once again to the past, and when we have drilled our way through it, we may hopefully emerge into a possible future. And when that future, now seemingly distant, becomes our present and is later cast into the past, it shall be time again to repeat this process all over again.

Analyse, This

You are today a young person of 24 : an aspiring writer, novelist, poet, thinker, academic, journalist, musician, blogger, painter, composer, dramatist, or politician. You struggle hard to establish your voice, opinion, style or view in this world, and you often feel amazed that the others around you have actually managed to make it into the newspapers in spite of being so pathetic, ridiculous, untalented, mundane, frigid, tame, pedestrian, platitudinous, insipid, vapid, cliched, thoughtless, deplorable, drab, and uninspired. You strive vigorously to expose the shallowness and the utter inanity of your competitors, with the hope that the world out there too will see through them and come around to your point of view. You dearly hope that your rivals will somehow just disappear from the face of the earth, leaving it a much better, cleaner, healthier, and safer place for everyone else to live in.

Now analyse this. Tomorrow you are an old person of 74 nodding by the fire, turning the dusty pages of your youthful masterpiece. Nobody reads through that masterpiece anymore, except perhaps for a few quotes from it in some anthology that students are compelled to memorise for their final-year exams. The generation around you has not even the faintest clue of what those great debates were about, and it has now moved on to find better and more interesting things to do. You have become a moth-eaten museum icon from an age of some forgotten quarrels that nobody remembers, nobody except the odd PhD student who makes an appointment with you one evening to ask you some questions for her thesis. And then you see your old competitors dying off, one by one. But this time, strangely enough, you do not want them to go away; you want to hold on to them, and their passing away becomes a reminder of your own approaching death.

And then at 74, you begin to wish that you had apprehended all of this at 24. You might then have lived happier, learnt and heard a few more things, and not have had the realisation that all flesh is grass strike you like a sudden thunderbolt in your dying years. You might then have pondered just a moment more on why an Old Master had once said that philosophy is but the art of learning how to die.

I wanted to say just one word. But I have already used more than one in trying to do so. Perhaps that is impossible. Or perhaps just the conspiracy of language.

The Parable of the Fishermen

Once upon a time, there used to live a group of fishermen by the river Veritas. They used nets which had come down to them from the days of their grandparents, and their grandparents in turn had learnt the skills of making fishing nets from their own grandparents. These fishermen had in their town their own netmakers who made nets in just the same way that they had been taught by their forefathers. These nets were sewn out of thick and strong ropes, and were made in such a manner that each hole in them was 2 inch by 2 inch. With these, they caught various kinds of fish, some of which they ate and others they sold in the market every evening. There also lived in their community a very curious breed of people who had devoted their entire lives to cataloguing, tabulating, and systematising the various types of fish that had been caught from that river. The tables that they had built up were, they claimed, exhaustive, and these were taught to children in the schools, who grew up learning about the different kinds of fish that could be found in the river Veritas. Soon this formula became a part of household wisdom : a fish is any creature that lives in the river, and whose maximum length and maximum width are both 2 inches.

One morning, these fishermen had a strange visitor who claimed that he had come to their town from a village across the hills called Transcendence. He had on his back a huge bag, the contents of which he displayed to the stupified villagers. There fell out all kinds of things which looked very much like the fish that they had been catching with their own nets, except that these smooth slippery shiny things were all wider and longer than 2 inch by 2 inch. The village council sat for an emergency meeting to discuss a number of issues. First, should these new things be given the name 'fish' or were they just some variant or mutant of the species 'fish'? Second, why had they never been able to catch these bigger 'things' with their own nets?

The visitor from Transcendence had been asked to come along to the meeting. When it was over, he rose slowly and spoke, 'Sirs, may I suggest something? What if you asked your netmakers to make some new nets whose holes are 4 inch by 4 inch, and tried fishing in the river Veritas with these nets? Perhaps, then, you might see that these strange 'things' are fish after all, and that they exist in your very own river.'