The Anarchy of A Smile

In case you haven't noticed it yet (or seen it too many times to notice it anymore), the title of this blog is The Anarchy of Thought, and there is even a small poll at the bottom of this page about what you think Anarchy is. It is time, perhaps, for me to explain what I mean by that somewhat ponderous term, and I shall start with a definition. I shall describe an Intellectual Anarchist (IA) as any person who, on the one hand, is fully aware that her views are socio-historically conditioned and, on the other, is able to put foward arguments to justify these views, and to defend them in the face of criticism from her detractors. Such a form of anarchy I call the Anarchy of Thought, and this anarchy is the base, the ground, or the substratum from which other forms of anarchy emerge, such as Economic Anarchy (EA), Social Anarchy (SA), and Political Anarchy (PA).

Moreover, it is possible to be IA and to adopt and live by one (or more) of these latter anarchies. For example, you can simultaneously be an IA and an EA : Vladimir Lenin, in my opinion, was one such person. Again, you can be both an IA and a SA : most radical feminists and cultural theorists fall into this category. And then, you can also choose to be an IA and a PA : Rousseau was arguably such a writer.

I leave you to think over precisely what type of an anarchist (or anti-anarchist!) you are. For the present, however, I shall point out the danger of a highly fashionable (and 'politically correct') mode of opposing the notions of Power, Authority, and Law, and confusing this opposition with 'anarchy'. Many people in our generation are suspicious of these notions which they routinely castigate as corrupt and negative entities to be dismissed to some quarantine camp. This is an excellent example of how human beings whose hearts are, as we say, in the right place can get carried away precisely by this 'language of the heart that the mind knows not of'. It is an undeniable truth that we have, in the name of Power and Authority, humiliated, oppressed, tortured, and degraded billions of individuals not only in distant lands but also in our own back-yards. However, the way to redress the balance now is not by rejecting all systems of Authority but by devising mechanisms through which Power can be exercised in more just ways.

Shall we reject the Power of the law through which gender discrimination, patriarchal injustices, and violence against women are prohibited? Shall we oppose the Authority of a constitution which declares various forms of racial, cultural, and ethnocentric supremacy to be illegal? Shall we repudiate the Laws of a country, written or unwritten, which seek to establish certain basic human rights for all? If we do not wish for any of these, Anarchy, whether Intellectual or its products Economic, Social and Political, must not be confounded with an unequivocal rejection of all Authority and Power as perfidious, debauched, nefarious, and elitist. To put it more pointedly : the fundamental question in such contexts should be not Whether Authority? but Whose Authority? (As an overgrown teenager You might still defiantly claim, 'I shall accept no Authority in this world but My own', but this reply proves my very point : there is someone Whose Authority You accept, namely Your own.)

How Natural/Cultured Are You?

The grapevine has it that there are no material or physical facts around any more; everything, including this sentence itself that you are reading right now, is entirely socially constructed. To put it more bluntly, everything is Nurture, and even your basic physical/biological Nature can be de/reconstructed through Nurture. This is one of the greatest debates of our generation : hundred years ago, it used to be Mind Versus (or, even, Over) Matter, and this has now become the one between Nurture Versus (or, Against) Nature.

Coming to the specific question of feminism, some theorists make a distinction between sex which refers to the corporeality of the human body ('Nature'), and gender which are the cultural conventions that establish, promote and legitimise the differences between masculinity and feminity ('Nurture'). For example, it is pointed out that the ways in which little boys and girls are brought up revolve around certain social rules or norms about behaviour ('boys are manly, girls are cry-babies'), dress-codes ('boys wear blue, girls wear pink'), and patterns of recreation ('boys play with guns, girls play at doll-houses'). That is, these are rules which have to do primarily with modes of Nurture and are not necessarily grounded in any Natural distinctions between men and women. So far, so good, and I agree whole-heartedly with feminists who 'take this line'.

There is a new group of feminists these days, however, who argue that Nurture can over-ride Nature in these matters such that sex is not anatomical/biological but is itself a socio-cultural construct, indeed a construct that is forcefully imposed on individuals. That is, there are no biological, material, or physical givens, these givens are themselves socially constructed. In reply to such views, four comments can be made.

Firstly, the very metaphor of Construction implies that there must be a material/biological base upon which this construction is raised; and to argue that this base itself is another construction is to set up an infinite regress. Secondly, we have become more aware than ever before of various patterns of trans-sexuality, but once again what these affirm is that there are certain real sexual boundaries that are being transgressed. If these margins were not real but entirely social constructions, what would be the point of trying to champion trans-sexuality? One would have to give up the prefix trans- and simply talk about one amorphous type of generic sexuality.

Thirdly, certain forms of domination of women do revolve around the issues of gender : for example, young women having to starve themselves to become slim enough for the modelling industry. However, gender-construction is not the final word about all such oppression for many women are oppressed precisely because of their sex, that is the biological make-up of their material bodies.

Fourthly, one can argue that the claim (that Nurture is All) is itself is a specific socio-historical construction. Let us say that a feminist who puts forward this view is writing in 2004 in suburban Chicago : one can then reply that given the social conditions of upper-class women in suburban Chicago, this view follows necessarily. The process does not stop there, for you can repeat the same analysis on me : given the fact that I am a male blogger in the pastoral surroundings of Cambridge University, I cannot but have this view given my socio-cultural environment. And now for You : either you agree with me or disagree with me, but in both cases given your socio-cultural conditions, you cannot but agree or disagree with me.

In other words, to claim that Absolutely Everything is a social construction (including this statement itself) is to condemn oneself at once either to the vortex of an infinite regress or to the banality of repeating what is but trivially true. If you are a cultural determinist (CD) in this rigorous sense, you will have to claim that cultural norms determine or govern everything (including your belief in CD itself), so that there is no real world these norms apply to, operate in, or are about. There is a curious irony here : feminists are usually opposed to various forms of biological/genetic determinism, but these feminists seem to have replaced neurogenetic determinism ('Don't mention Nurture to me!') with another type of cultural determism ('Don't mention Nature to me!').

Finally, an example from a very different context to illuminate why statements such as 'Everything is interpretation' or 'Everything is political' ultimately undermine themselves. This comes from classical Vedantic thought, and revolves around some arguments put forward by Ramanuja (11th century) against the redoubtable Samkara (8th century) who had claimed that this empirical world is an illusion (maya) produced by a great Magician who is himself ultimately an illusion. To this claim, Ramanuja replies that if this great Magician himself is immersed in this illusion, we have the curious case of an unreal Magician who produces unreal objects in an unreal world for unreal observers (and also, of course, for unreal bloggers to report on this curious possibility to unreal blog-readers).

The Alleged Fogginess of Moral Judgement

There are two types of onslaughts, broadly speaking, on the notion of 'morality' that are currently all the rage. The first comes from some aspects of political theory which say that the relationship between nation-states revolves not around issues of morality but the question of national self-interest. That is, each country tries to procure the maximum amount of goods by paying the minimum levels of resources in return, so that all interactions in the international sphere are centred around the power wielded by heads of state or interest-groups and not the language of rights, obligations, or needs. Some time spent observing the world scenario, however, reveals that political leaders do not in fact behave as if morality plays no role in these matters : indeed, they routinely pass (quasi-)moral judgement on various categories of classes, blocs, and nations. Though they may try hard to stick to a 'neutral' vocabulary of exports and imports, balance of payment and the like, time and again their 'foreign affairs' departments claim to be standing on high moral ground and issue condemnations of other nation-states (the evil empire of Soviet Russia may be dead now, but there are more such evil empires around).

A somewhat different kind of a salvo is fired against morality by people who like to believe that it is all a question of what you wish to believe. To capture this attack with an expression, 'Anything can be moral if you think it is moral for you'. In other words, morality is not any more 'objective' than your personal liking for butterscotch ice-cream with rich, thick chocolate sauce on top of it. There is no sense, so runs the argument, in talking about moral statements as 'true' or 'false' : they are merely convenient summaries of your subjective wishes and desires. Once again, though, I am not quite sure that people who talk this away about the nature of moral judgement really mean what they are trying to say. Consider these five examples. (a) About 3,000 people were killed in America on September 11, 2001 and (b) this was followed by more killings and maimings of civilians in Afghanistan. (c) More than 6 million Jews were slaughtered during the Nazi Holocaust; (d) as a consequence of the formation of the state of Israel and Israel's America-aided war on the Palestinians, one third of the Palestinians in the occupied territories now live in refugee camps; and (e) this in turn has led to the rise of the intifada which is claiming Israeli lives. I have deliberately juxtaposed the views from the opposing sides of the same fence : the savagery of September 11 followed by brutalities in Afganistan, the barbarism of the Nazis leading to the state-terrorism of Israel and the violent reprisals of the Palestinians.

We are of course all going to 'take sides' in these matters, and it is indeed not easy to attempt the difficult task of 'truth and reconciliation' among people torn apart by the paroxysms of hatred. But that is precisely the point : whatever we may say in the cosy comfort of our living-rooms, we do take morality seriously, and we do realise how morality can be twisted into one's favour and used as a weapon to beat one's opponents. Once we start thinking carefully, we are urgently faced with the need to discuss issues of moral principles, moral judgements, and moral responsibilities. And these issues are not 'merely subjective' wishes of individuals, these are in fact as real as the deaths of people whose very lives depend on this reality.

The Buddha's Dying Wish

As dreams go, my dream last night was a somewhat curious one. I saw that I was inside a grove of pipala trees in the ancient town of Kapilavastu, and in front of me on a wicker bed was the frail emaciated body of the Venerable One, Gotama the Buddha. Gotama was dying; his earthly mission had been fulfilled, his messengers despatched to the furthest corners of the world, and sentient beings were now moving towards the final liberation.

One of his disciples Ananda of the Noble Smile came up to the Venerable One and said : 'Sire, if I may make so bold as to ask you this question, 'Have you ever felt any worry since the time you attained the bliss Nirvana'?' A wan smile crossed the Old Master's broken lips, and he beckoned to all his silent disciples to come closer to him.

Then he spoke to them, for one last time, and in a voice at once calm and resolute : 'Dear Bhikkus, I have but one worry left in this world of suffering, and this is the one that I shall become famous after I die.' All his disciples replied in one voice : 'But Venerable One, you are already famous; the four ends of the world resound with your name.' The Venerable One spoke again, his voice yet calmer this time : 'Dear Bhikkus of the Noble Path, do you not see what will happen to my message if I become famous after my death? There will be some people who will argue that I was really a great man, and some who will claim that I was but an impostor, and these two groups will quarrel with each other. They will be filled with anger and overcome by their violence, and anger and violence are forms of suffering. Consequently, instead of having removed their suffering in any way, I will have only increased it through my unwanted fame. So immersed will such people become in their arguments about who I was that they will forget that I had come into this world not to manifest my greatness but to remove their suffering. That is why, my dear Bhikkus, I wish to simply sink into oblivion the very moment of my death.'

Such was what I saw. When I woke up, I looked at the distant sky stretched for miles on end into the orange horizons. For a moment, I thought that it was sunset. And then I looked more closely at the birds : no, they were flying away from home, it was sunrise.

Deceptive Dictums

The dictums that are fashionable in a certain generation often encapsulate some of its central beliefs, hopes, fear and inner contradictions. Is it not, for example, a sign of our times that we so casually throw at one another the dictum 'Love is blind' whereas it is arguably the case that it is hatred which is truly blind? Here are two other dictums that have always intrigued me.

(a) 'There are higher things in life than money' : It is somewhat strange that you will not hear a poor person coming up to you with this dictum that allegedly has the claim of being 'high-minded', 'holy' and 'spiritual'. It is usually people who have had a lot of money, even too much of it, and have got tired of the razzmatazz around them who suddenly do a volte-face and declare that wealth, status and privileges have become as meaningless and valueless as dust to them. That is, though it is indeed true that money has only an instrumental value, you must first have enough of it to realise the truth of this instrumentality.

(b) 'Ignorance is bliss' : Always be suspicious of people who use this dictum; it is highly probable that the ignorance that they are referring to is one whose removal will put their own position or status in poor light. Instead ask : ignorance is bliss for whom? Often the ignorance in question is a feigned ignorance such as the one of multinational corporations which set up chemical plants in distant countries, or of politicians and economists (who are in any case politicians in disguise) who formulate various kinds of international policies.

A Question of Trust



Most intelligence organisations in the world have a counter-intelligence wing which tries to find out if their own members are handing out secrets across the fence. But one might claim that there should also be a counter-counter-intelligence to keep a tab on the people in the counter-intelligence. Some might yet feel that it is arbitrary to stop at this point, and that one should have a counter-counter-counter-intelligence, and this process could go on ad infinitum. Nevertheless, most intelligence organisations are satisfied with simply having a counter-intelligence wing. This is not to say that they know that the people in the counter-intelligence are not leaking out secrets across the borders, but that they have sufficient reason to trust them not to do so. In other words, what really counts here is not 'knowledge' but 'reasonable trust' (RT).

This can easily be extended to many other areas of our social existence. Here is one example : do you really know that your parents are who they tell you that they are, namely, your parents? At most, you have come to develop (for various reasons) a RT in them, and on its basis you believe that they are not deceiving you or lying to you. And the same goes for an infinite variety of 'facts' around you. Speaking for myself, I have never been to Mongolia, but I have a RT in cartographers, politicians and travellers around the world on the basis of which I believe that they are not involved in a gigantic conspiracy to delude me into thinking that a zone of land called Mongolia exists when it actually does not. Another example is neo-Darwinism which I accept (though I might dispute some of its alleged implications) in spite of the fact that I have never even observed the helical structure of the DNA under a microscope, not to mention not having taken an extended course in evolutionary biology. So if a person who does not accept neo-Darwinism were to confront me on the matter of the evolutionary history of the world, I would not, strictly speaking, have at my disposal the adequate tools to engage in a detailed discussion on this matter. I could only tell her that I have a RT in evolutionary biologists which leads me to affirm some of the tenets of current neo-Darwinism. (The debate would then, of course, shift to the question of why I have this RT. That is, it is now the question of what precisely counts as 'reasonable' in the expression 'reasonable trust'.)

So if you accept what cosmologists say about the first three minutes of the universe without being able to solve differential equations, what economists write about removing world hunger without understanding what inflation rates are, what politicians claim about new modes of legislation while believing that they are not 'transparent' enough, what the doctors offer as a diagnosis of your diseased liver without understanding anything of medicine, what journalists report on a civil war in a distant country without having any straightforward means to verify these reports, what your friend says he did yesterday evening when he was in Milan while you have no acquaintance there, what your astrophysicist describes about the nature of 'dark matter' while you have never taken even an elementary course in astrophysics, you should remember that in all these activities you are aspiring towards knowledge, but this knowledge is based on the presupposition of mutual trust.

If you decide that you shall count as knowledge only something that you can empirically verify for yourself, you may have to burn down whole libraries not only of sociology, political theory and medicine, but also of number theory, quantum cosmology and marine biology. This trust, of course, is not an absolutely static 'foundation' of the enquiry : it is constantly evolving so that sometimes we lose trust, at other times we regain it, and yet at other times, it grow from strength to strength.

Why 'You' Do Not Exist

I realise that I have made very few explicitly theological comments on this blog so far though I am, to be technically precise, a student in the Faculty of Divinity, an older term for 'theology'. So here is something theological to start with, a few reflections on that most intriguing and breath-taking of Hindu philosophies, Advaita Vedanta (AV). I am not, of course, going to launch into a full-scale exposition of AV here (there are plenty of websites around that do an excellent job at this); rather, I wish to bring out a certain aspect of its challenge to some of our contemporary ('western') beliefs about the 'reality' of the empirical world.

Think of a bomb lying down somewhere in your wine-cellar. Strictly speaking, this bomb does not exist as a bomb until the moment it explodes; till then, it is just a conglomeration of wires, combustible material and minute gadgets. Therefore, one might say, somewhat paradoxically, that a bomb attains its 'true existence' in that split-second when it destroys itself. Consequently, at that very moment when you think that you have grasped the 'real' bomb, it has already disappeared leaving behind no sign or mark of itself. This does not mean, however, that the bomb moves to a state of perfect annihilation into absolute nothingness. What has happened is that the bomb, in the moment of explosion, have given up (I feel tempted to say 'renounced') its previous empirical characteristics (nama-rupa). Earlier we could specify a certain bit of painted matter as being seven inches long, five inches wide, and three inches thick, and refer to this bit with the (English) word 'bomb'; now, however, it has dissolved into the fathomless sea of energy where 'it' cannot be pointed to with any such descriptions. (By the way, for those of you who may not be poetically inclined, I am not simply throwing poetic metaphors at you here : this is a 'scientific' metaphor allowed by the equivalence of mass and energy in terms of E=mc(squared). The bomb cannot be utterly annihilated, but it can be transformed into an equivalent amount of energy.)

The central claim of Advaita Vedanta (AV) is that the relation between 'you' and the ultimate reality (we shall call this Brahman) is of a similar nature. AV does not deny that at one level (called the vyavaharika level) you really exist : of course, it is 'you' who is reading these words of 'mine', 'you' who was trying to solve Fermat's Last Theorem this morning, 'you' who was playing badminton with 'your' three friends in the evening, 'you' who has just finished a long phone conversation with 'your' sister, and 'you' who is now trying to get 'your' head round these paradoxical statements that 'I' am pouring out onto this screen. AV, however, also says that this 'you' is very much like the bomb in the earlier example : 'you' exist, but not in the truest sense. To attain the highest form of existence, 'you' must realise that 'you' do not exist, and this realisation will come to 'you' only after a long period of meditation on scriptural texts, and a life of moral austerity and purification, usually lived under a teacher (guru).

At that moment of in-sight when 'you' realise that at the highest level of reality (called the paramarthika level) 'you' and 'I' are just an illusion (maya), 'you' shall just BE, and like the bomb that dissolves into the sea of energy leaving no trace of its specificities behind, 'you' shall flow into the supreme reality of Brahman which IS. In this Brahman, there is neither 'subject' nor 'object', neither 'time' nor 'eternity', neither 'speech' nor 'silence'; this Brahman IS, indeed, completely beyond all dualities, polarties, fragmentations, delusions, and oppositions which characterise our finite existence in the cycle of incessant rebirths (samsara).

Now hold on a minute. Yes, I can see your hand going up at the back, and you ask me that impeccably 'scientific' question : Where is your proof that the opposition between 'subject' and 'object' is dissolved in the moment of liberative insight?

To this question, I first point out that I am not an Advaitin myself (which is why I am using the words I and myself without the quotes in this sentence), at least not in the full-fledged sense of a person who has had the realisation that the I is an illusion. Nevertheless, this is how I shall speak on the behalf of an Advaitin.

Advaitin : 'Yes, 'I' appreciate 'your' demand for proof regarding this matter. However, it depends on what precisely 'you' mean by proof here. The insight that 'we' speak of in AV is something that can only be realised after a long period of training and meditative introspection. Therefore, if 'you' want proof, 'you' must come and live with 'us' and like 'us', and 'you' shall hopefully have the proof for 'yourself''.

Scientist : 'But that is not how we do things in science. Science is all about Do-It-Yourself. I do not accept anything in science unless and until I have first verified it for myself.'

Advaitin : 'What kind of a scientist are 'you'?'

Scientist : 'I am a biochemist, and I analyse the structure of protein molecules.'

Advaitin : 'Now, have 'you' verified for 'yourself' Einstein's theory of general relativity?'

Scientist : 'No.'

Advaitin : 'Have 'you' verified for 'yourself' the Josephson effect in superconductivity?'

Scientist : 'No.'

Advaitin : 'Have 'you' verified for 'yourself' Kepler's laws of planetary motion?'

Scientist : 'No.'

Advaitin : 'Have 'you' verified for 'yourself' Planck's law of black-body radiation?'

Scientist : 'No.'

Advaitin : 'Have 'you' verified for 'yourself' Faraday's law of induction?'

Scientist : 'No.'

Advaitin : 'Have 'you' verified for 'yourself' the Nash embedding theorem for Euclidean spaces?'

Scientist : 'No.'

Advaitin : 'Have 'you' verified for 'yourself' Godel's incompleteness theorem?'

Scientist : 'No.'

Advaitin : 'Okay then, if 'you' have not verified any of these, what gives 'you' the confidence that these scientists/mathematicians were actually correct? Just a little while ago, 'I' heard you saying that 'you' do not accept something unless 'you' have verified it for 'yourself'?'

Scientist : 'Well, I sort of trust the scientific community.'

Advaitin : 'But, then, the same applies to 'me'. 'You' trust 'your' scientific community, and 'I' trust 'my' own community which is centred around the Upanisads. If 'you' were to come and live with 'me' for five years, 'you' would see that the things that 'I' am speaking of, no matter how arcane they may seem to 'you' today, indeed point towards the highest reality.'

By allowing the Advaitin to have the last word on this matter, I am not trying to trivialise some disputed issues in the philosophy of science over whether or not science is taking us towards or away from 'reality'. The point here is simply that scientists cannot (for reasons of time, space, resources and energy) go around verifying each and every theorem, proposition, law, conjecture, or hypothesis that is put forward by other people : a basic trust in one another's judgment therefore plays a vital role in the scientific world. What my Advaitin is arguing is that just as scientists operate with a basic trust in some foundational texts (of Newton, Einstein, and Darwin) so too does 'he' (and, yes, this time it is a 'he', most Advaitins have been men, empirically speaking) carry out 'his' meditative reflections with a similar trust in 'his' basic texts which are the Upanisads.

The mutual discussion, consequently, should not be obscured by saying that scientists are 'rational' and that Advaitins are 'irrational', for the fundamental issue in this context is this : Why should we trust scientists more than Advaitins, or vice versa?

That is a juicy bone I shall leave you to gnaw on (believe me, we really are more canine than we think we are).

The Importance Of Being Gothic (And Remaining Scientific)

An Old Master said, towards the middle of the last century, that even after science has answered all possible questions, the most fundamental ones remain even unasked. I start with this statement in order to higlight my view that it is possible to agree with this Master without at the same time giving up this core belief that we cannot repudiate the knowledge that we have gained from the basic sciences such as physics and evolutionary biology. That is, whereas I believe on the one hand, for reasons I shall not discuss in this post, that the nature of reality is close to what quantum mechanicists and neo-Darwinists tell us it is, I also believe, on the other hand, that the oft-made claim that 'science is the only road to reality' is at best a tautological statement that redefines 'reality' in terms of 'what science tells us today in the year 2005'.

Thus I affirm both that (a) science is a valuable practice that is in the process of telling us with greater and greater cumulative accuracy what the world is like, and (b) that because of the methodological limits that the scientific enterprise is based on, some elemental questions concerning human existence necessarily have to be left outside the scientific domain. The essential difference between me and some scientists will therefore lie over the range of questions that I have placed under category (b). They might like to claim that these questions (such as 'Who am I?', 'Why should we go on living?', 'What is my life about?','What is suffering?', and 'What should we hope for?') can be redefined, rephrased or reformulated in such a manner that they now come under category (a), such that these questions become 'Which collection of atoms/genes am I?, 'Why should these genes/atoms go on surviving?', 'What are these atoms/genes about?','What is the mutation of a gene/oscillation of a wave-pattern?', and 'Where are these atoms/genes headed towards?'. I shall not go into this matter in greater detail here, except for noting that while I do not rule out the possibility that I am mistaken, I am not yet convinced that this redefinition will make the former questions disappear into nothingness.

While we physicists, biologists, and philosophers of science continue to debate over whether or not questions in (b) can be 'reduced' to questions in (a), here is one of my gothic stories to illuminate the point that I am trying to make. (The point, to recall, is that one can have both (a) and (b)). I shall define a gothic story as an example of a style of fiction that tries to bring out what is fundamentally mysterious about our existence. And by 'mysterious' I mean not the lack of adequate information or of access to an appropriate data-base system, nor simply a weekend indulgence in story-telling or a nostalgic yearning for happier days, but our inability to express in and through human speech those questions that lie at the limit of understanding. Therefore, when I talk about The Importance of Being Gothic in this sense, I am thinking not just of Buffy the Vampire-Slayer, of Dracula's Daughter, of the weird girl next-door, of a nutty professor, or of Urban Gothic rock bands, but of all human beings, and especially of them who are seeking to express that reality from which our fragile words turn back.

It was on a December morning that I took that fateful turn at the fork when coming back from the market-square. It had been many years of my life in the university town of Cambridge, but I had never gone along that brown road before. That was the great road untaken, and I had been warned by many people against going that way. Some had said that nothing lay at the end of it, some had said it would take me to a place with horrible secrets, and others had said I would never really come back from it. When I think about them today, I realise that only those in the third group were correct : I have never quite come back from what I saw, heard, discovered and felt that evening at the end of that road.

As I walked along, I suddenly realised that I was walking along the banks of the river Cam. The sun was setting in the distance, setting the sky on fire with its brilliant orange rays. Some of them came shooting through the damp air, made their way through the leafless branches and fell on the cold shimmering waters. After a while, I realised that I was completely alone on that desolate bank, and that there was not a soul anywhere near me for miles around. I looked towards my left, and through the lifting mists I saw a graveyard on the other bank of the river. I was perplexed for despite being an avid frequenter of graveyards I had never known of the existence of one in that part of the countryside. And then I suddenly saw her. She was sitting at the other end of a small brown boat that was moored to the bank, and was looking towards the sky dripping with red. I was standing speechless, staring at her long white flowing dress when she turned towards me with a faint smile on her famished lips. I looked at her eyes, and I felt that someone had distilled the entire suffering of the world and poured it into a pair of human eyes. She threw out her left hand, and beckoned to me to come into her boat.

I slowly walked down the slippery bank and crawled into her boat. She uttered not a word, but gently picked up the oars and began to row into the middle of the river. I was now able to see her from a closer distance, but I could not say whether she was young or old. There was something very young about her face, and yet I felt that her eyes were the most ancient that I had ever seen on any human face. Soon we reached the other bank of the river; she gracefully slid out of the boat, her long dress trailing behind her, and I followed her like a puppet, mesmerised by the sights and the sounds of this brave new world that had suddenly been revealed to me.

She walked on, and I followed her, as a moth that approaches its sure annihilation in the waiting fire. Old branches crackled under my feet which I felt had become as heavy as lead, so painful were my attempts to keep on moving on that rocky earth. Finally, she stopped at a gravestone, knelt down before it, and began to remove the thick layers of dust on it. Then she stopped midway, and began to sob vehemently. I felt the ground beneath me shake with the violence of her misery, and when I looked at the sky I felt that its redness had turned a shade deeper. I went up to her and sat down beside her. Just for a moment, she glanced at me, and I was filled with horror: she was weeping tears and tears of blood, pure, sparkling, thick, and red blood. They streamed down her white cheeks in two great streams, down her throat and her white dress and onto the brown soil.

At that moment, I heard thunder, and all of a sudden torrents of icy-cold rain began to fall on me. I instinctively jumped up and ran towards the green trees, where I remained sheltered for a long time, I don't know how long, perhaps an hour, perhaps two. When the rain finally stopped, I came out and started walking towards the gravestone. I now began to wipe away the thick mud on the gravestone frantically. And then a shiver ran through my entire body. On the gravestone was my name, followed by the words : 'Who died on February 11, 1776'. But that could not be possible! That was the date of my birth! Did I die on the very day that I was born into this world?

I looked all around me, but there was nobody in that solitary moment, not even the lady who had brought this unexpected misery upon me. At that moment, something made me look at the ground near my feet, and I saw a most amazing sight. At the spot where the lady's tears of blood had fallen earlier there were now three beautiful red lilies. I plucked them up from the ground, and as I did so a sudden agony ran through my body as if someone had thrust a thousand arrows of fire through my heart. The agony subsided as soon as it had attacked me, and I hurriedly made my way towards the boat with the lilies. Soon I was back on the other bank of the river, and I began to walk down the road that I had come along.

Very soon, however, I realised that something was amiss. The trees looked different, yes, they looked much older. After a long time, I finally managed to make my way into what I thought was the market-square, and even that had changed dramatically in the period that I had been away. Nothing looked familiar to me, and the ways in which the womenfolk were dressed struck me as definitely odd. I went into one of the shops and asked the owner what year it was. The lady at the counter curled up her nose and said : '1997. Why would you ask such a question?'

And that is how my new life in Cambridge started. I had to brush up a lot on my English, get used to wearing new types of clothes, start shopping at supermarkets, and learn how to handle cellphones, cars and computers. Yes, I do miss my old friends at times, I miss having a laugh with them, those lost friends with whom I used to talk about conquering the world, and exploring distant continents.

People who live around me now think that I am an artifact from some cultural museum, they invite newspaper journalists to interview me and bring TV camera crews so that I can smile onto their blank screens. They send in their psychoanalysts to find out precisely what category my madness should be placed under, their rationalists to expose my deceit to the public, and their temple-goers to tell them what message from the divine I bear for them. And they gather around me and ask me, 'So who are you?They say you are that many years old. Isn't that awesome?'. And when I reply that I do not know who I am, that I died on the same day that I was born into this world many centuries ago, and that they should ask themselves this very question before putting it to me, they turn away from me, and castigate me as a bad influence on the young students of Cambridge. How ironic that is, how could I be of any influence to anyone when I cannot even answer the question, 'Who am I?'

What used to intrigue me for a long time, however, were the three lilies that I brought back with me : they are still fresh today in the vase near my window. I was thinking about them one evening when I was walking along the Backs of the river Cam just behind Trinity College when I saw a young woman sitting at one of the benches. I went up to her and struck up a conversation with her in the course of which I happened to mention to her the three lilies.

'Ah', she said, 'A man could never understand such a mystery. So intricate and yet so simple it is that it would break his heart under its weight. You know what those three lilies stand for? For the three forms of human suffering, one that is real, one that is unreal, and one that lies sleeping in the heart of the darkness. And you know why those red lilies never die? Because in this world only those three forms of suffering are eternal, just as the desire to escape from them is eternal'.

Then she got up from the bench, walked towards the river where a small boat was moored to the bank. She effortlessly slid into it, and began to row away from me into the mists. I just sat there at my brown bench, mesmerised as I had been one day, long, long, long ago.

So, then, what have we got out of this random excursion into Gothiana? Have I answered any of 'life's great questions' for you through my story? Obviously not, but then it is not the purpose of a Gothic story to answer such questions, its purpose is rather to express the author's conviction that these questions are as real, as fundamental, and as live as any other 'scientific' question, and that these Gothic questions have a notorious reputation of coming in through the back door even after some of contents of the living room have been dusted, polished and emptied through the front door.

Why Women Just Don't Get It

I had this weird dream last night. I was somewhere in the middle of the desert, possibly in Arizona (but don't you go quizzing me on geography now, I plead American), and this man came up to me and asked me if I would work at his casino for the night. He explained to me that there had been a sudden crackdown on British immigrants, and with Queen George becoming more and more insane every day (but don't ask me who She was, that is history and I am, as you know, American) there was little hope that any more of Her maverick pilgrims would come to that God-forsaken place of his. Well, you guessed it right, I said Aye to his offer. Coming to think of it now that I feel slightly more awake I don't really know why I said 'yes'; perhaps it was his awesome New England accent, or perhaps just his disarming smile like the one that my pet Guru in Orange county throws my way every now and then. So I went underground with him on an elevator, and saw myself in a place glittering with all possible sorts of lights. At the far end of the room I saw a blue-suited woman standing up on a high platform and making an impassioned speech : 'Friends, Americans, and countrywomen, lend me your reason. This new country here, under the earth, is a place of freedom, opportunity, liberty and equality. Everyone can become here just what they want to, if only they will try. As we used to say in the olden, and more colored (erm, I mean colorful) days, if you cannot lower the bar, just jump over it.'

And this talk about crossing a bar led to the following unbarred altercation between the lady (L) and some men wearing brown hats (BH).

BH : If we all jump across the bar, where is our social security? Who shall put the food into the rice bowl, Madame?

L : Silence! It is I who make the puns around here! The only security you are ever going to enjoy is that of your own privacy. I don't care if you land on an oil-field in the bush or on a mine-field in the desert, so long as you just jump. And just so that you know, I am the rice bowl of the world. Ahem.

BH : Amen!

Ah well, that was that. I mean there was much more to it than that, arrrghhhhhh, but believe me, you just don't want to know. Anyways, after some time, more and more people started streaming into the casino. My job was to hand out counters to the customers, and I was sitting at a purple desk near a huge green table. Towards midnight, a old man and his young wife, reeking of perfume, trotted up to the table. The man bought several thousand dollars worth of counters. Just as he was about to leave, he turned back towards me and asked : 'By the way, do you happen to know who won the Superbowl last night?'

I was quite shocked for I had absolutely no idea what the term 'Superbowl' referred to. I did remember the reference to a rice bowl by the lady earlier, but thought it was not a good idea to start that all over again. So I simply put on my best Alabama smile (again, don't quiz me on geography, thank you very much) and said : 'Excuse me, what is the Superbowl about? Something that supermen in spacesuit-like dresses do?'

There was a moment of deafening silence that echoed and reechoed down the hall. After what seemed like an eternity to me, the man's wife glared at me, and noisily stamped her right heel on the floor : 'See Robert! That's why a woman shall never become the President of this country! No sense of geography, no sense of history, and no sense of tradition. In fact, no sense at all. Utter nonsense. O captain, my captain, you should have been living at this hour!'

I woke up just as the bells were ringing on Capitol Hill. Beside me was my lovely dog waiting for me with the morning edition of The Transparent Ironist between its brown teeth. Later in the day, I did a www.google.com search for 'Superbowl'. It was then that I realised why I had managed to irritate his wife so much. Yes, I was close, indeed too close for her comfort : the Superbowl is literally a game played inside a bowl by supermen wearing spacesuits.

The Death of Reality

If you spend even a week studying through some of the foundational texts of Western civilisation starting from Plato to Galileo to Mill to Russell to contemporary post-modernists, you will perhaps be struck by the observation that many of the intellectual changes that have transformed the cultural landscape of Europe over the last six hundred years revolve around a curious irony. On the one hand, we are routinely asked to believe that human beings are not anthropo-centric anymore, and that thanks to Copernicus and Company we do not believe anymore that the world has to be just what we say it is. We are reminded time and again by astrophysicists in particular that we are but specks of dust or blobs of slime on a tiny top whirling through vast expanses of space and time. On the other hand, many people in our generation claim that there is nothing more to reality than what we put into it, and it would seem that they have resurrected a form of anthropo-centrism which they otherwise claim to be vigorously opposed to. Indeed, they have arrived at a profoundly anti-Copernican conclusion : the whole world revolves around me, the 'I' who invents my own values and my own beliefs, and this is an anthropo-centrism that nobody would have dreamt of proposing even in the heyday of Ptolemian cosmology.

I shall call these people the New Idol-Worshippers (NIW); people who believe that their mental inventions need not be rooted in reality, and develop a relationship of infatuation with them that borders on worshipping them. The basic problem with these inventions or constructs is this : even if these constructs are the collections of what are believed to be the highest and the noblest ideals of humanity, they remain mere products of the NIW's subjective fantasies and there are no good reasons why others should accept them as well. This is because these constructs are not grounded in reality but are a network of inter-connected words, such that, according to the NIW, this network IS the world.

In short, the NIWs proclaim that there is no extra-linguistic reality, there is no world out there beyond these words that we speak. There is, of course, more than a grain of truth in this claim : our ability to convey to one another what we believe the world is really like is often severely constrained by the limitations and the ambivalences of the written and the spoken word. This, however, does not warrant the conclusion that it is impossible to think or to communicate without language. One can think of, for example, the fascinating levels of intimacy that lovers of dogs and cats can develop with their pets without the use of any (human) language or (human) discursive or cognitive processes. Coming to the intra-species domain of human beings, we usually operate with the presupposition that we mutually inhabit a bio-physical reality that is not being created by the speaker in the process of speaking, but exists even before (and after) she began to speak the first word. If you believe that every person makes up the world out of absolute nothingness for herself, this would imply that we can never 'latch' our words onto something solid and external, and given this complete lack of fit why would you even take the trouble of trying to read Dostoivsky in Dutch translation, Proust in Portuguese, or Tagore in Tamil?

That is, it is only in a very limited sense that we construct our own reality, and this is the sense that our perspectives on the world are moulded by several factors such as our genetic heritage and our socio-cultural upbringing. These factors themselves, however, are not produced by us, by our minds, by our words, or by our language : they existed even before we arrived on the scene. Therefore, there is a reality that exists independently of our mental conceptions though we are unable to articulate or capture the nature of this reality precisely and completely through our language.

Contrary to what the NIWs believe, language, then, is not an idol to be worshipped; it is a tool to be used with fear and trembling, for it can both disclose to us the several dimensions of reality or lead us further away from it.

Why I Am A Fundamentalist

There is no dearth of books, essays, articles, and meditations that go by the generic title 'Why I am not a X' where X could be anything from a Hindu to a Christian to a Marxist to a liberal to a Muslim to an ecologist to a footballer's-wife to a cellphone-user to a blogger. There seems, however, to be a relative scarcity of similar reflections under the label 'Why I am a X'. The X that would fill in for me the blank in that statement would be the following type of a fundamentalist claim : The central purpose of school, college, and university education is to eradicate from the human heart all possible traces of Nationalism, and to the extent that I am passionately, even fanatically if you like, committed to this belief, I am a self-styled fundamentalist.

The reason for this fundamentalist expression of mine can be stated quite precisely. I believe that what we refer to, in social and political theory, as the 'nation-state' is nothing but a delusive fiction that exists nowhere but in the pure (that is, formally empty) subjectivity of the human mind. What we call 'India' or 'Bangladesh' or 'Ukraine' or 'Germany' or 'Ethiopia' is nothing more than a pattern of whimsical zig-zag lines that we (or, more accurately, those who practise High Diplomacy) draw with pen and pencil on a sheet of paper. Therefore, I would re-define 'Nationalism' exhaustively and absolutely in functional terms as the possession of a piece of paper that identifies you in thoroughly arbitrary terms as an inhabitant of a certain piece of land; speaking for myself, therefore, I am 'Indian' only in the sense that I have an Indian passport, nothing more, nothing less. My functionalist understanding of Nationalism is integrally connected with my fanatical belief that what is glorified as 'love of the Motherland' or 'love for one's homesoil' is a reactionary, antiquated, prehistoric, patriarchal, and barbaric emotion, and that the complete extirpation of all possible elements of this love is one of the foremost aims of what is known as education.

Looking back at my early childhood, I can see that the seeds of this fundamentalism were always latent in me, and, in particular, I remember how at the age of ten these words of Marcus Aurelius had a powerful impact on me : I am a citizen of the world, and let nobody call me a Roman. Much later, when I began to read more and more of and about European thought, I realised that my disdainful stance towards 'nationalism' could easily be misunderstood as a wholehearted acceptance of 'all things Western'. However, one aspect of my fundamentalist attitude is that I make a very rigorous separation between the 'nation-state' and 'socio-cultural matrices', so that when I say that the only thing 'Indian' about me is my passport (which, again, is nothing but a few pieces of ordinary paper), I am referring in such contexts to the former and not to the latter. It is not the richness, the ambiguities, the complexities, and the inner tensions of the linguistic, cultural, and anthropological diversity that I reject, but the notion that a fictitious entity called 'India' must be carved up by imposing arbitrary lines onto sheets of paper (sometimes even over mountains and seas which are uninhabited anyway); that an elaborately hierarchical apparatus of government machinery must be set up to 'brainwash' children into believing that it is their highest destiny to do or die at all costs for this (fabricated) reality; that prodigious amounts of resources, natural and human, must be diverted into paying armed forces whose sole purpose of existence is the maintenance of these illusory lines; that tremendous emphasis must be laid on spreading the vicious belief that some human beings become at once more worthy of your love, compassion, and generosity simply by having the label 'Indian' stuck onto their shirt-collars like a dog-tag; and that staggering levels of untruth must be propagated to perpetuate the myth that nothing good, wholesome or valuable has ever existed outside those constricted boundaries.

In short, one vital feature of my fundamentalism is that all nation-states (irrespective of what they are, 'India', 'Nepal', 'Italy', 'Japan', 'USA', 'Canada', 'China', 'Algeria', 'Bolivia' or 'Malaysia') are simply fictitious and phantom bodies that exist nowhere but in the government-aided hallucinatory fantasies of pencil-happy cartographers. Just as we have some reductionists in our midst who make the generic claim that 'X is nothing but Y, where Y can be your genes, your culture, atoms, electrons, or energy' I too would claim in a parallel manner that 'Nationalism is nothing but the mass illusion that a certain set of non-existent lines exists'. I am nevertheless willing to concede that it may be impossible for us belligerent human beings to live in peace unless we have the emotional security of our little maps. However, I would see this as a source not of mutual pride but of collective shame : it is a sign and a most potent reminder of our fallen existence that we are so willing to deceive ourselves into believing that lines which exist not on the real soil but on government-printed paper are powerful enough to divide ourselves in our shared humanity.

Finally, I cannot but recall the words of a 12th century theologian called Hugh of St Victor who writing within the horizons of a Mediaeval Catholicism which believed that this world is but a temporary stopping-place said : 'The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every country is as his native land is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world has become a foreign land.'