My Ph.D. Thesis : Two Summaries

Most newspapers have two types of crosswords, one called direct and the other cryptic. As I work on the final draft of my Ph.D. thesis, perhaps I should give my readers two summaries, one direct and the other cryptic, of what 'it is about'.

Direct Summary :

My thesis is about the nature of our temporal experiences, the fact that we are temporal beings who are influenced as much by the (rewritable) past as by the (projected) future. This might sound counter-intuitive, especially if you happen to follow rigorously the dictum, 'Live for today, and don't think about your past or about your future'. As a matter of fact, however, the past is never past, it is still flowing past us, our past actions, experiences, inclinations, and dispositions live with us even if in a subterranean manner; and our present expectations of the future cast a long backward-shadow on what we are doing right now. We human beings, therefore, live at the unstable and shifting point of intersection between the effects of the disappeared past and the anticipations of the incoming future.

Cryptic Summary :

In the year 2030, the Ironist will go back to a remote village in the upper regions of Assam, India, where his family had been landowners for countless generations during the time of the British Empire. The last time he was there was in 1990 when his old grandfather had died, and as he walks down the dusty red road in 2030, he will suddenly remember all the sights, the sounds, and the smells that he has lived with since then. He will recall how the huge black house was overcrowded with grieving men and women; how the crisp air in the golden paddy fields glistening in the autumn sun was alive with the screams of his cousins playing hide-and-seek all over the sprawling estate; how the elders rebuked them for their utter lack of taste; and how the starving villagers came to pay their last respects to their honourable landowner, who seemed larger in death than in life.

And then he will relive how every morning he used to walk down the narrow misty road to the river with some of his cousins and would stare intensely at the cold swirling waters. He will also reminisce how a young cousin, barely six years old, had asked him where her grandfather had gone to, and how he had, at the age of sweet sixteen, assured her that God was lovingly holding grandfather in His right hand, and how that guarantee had brought a stream of tears from her beautiful little brown eyes.

But in 2030, none of them would be there. He will not have been in touch with his cousins for almost half a century, many of his uncles and aunts would either be dead or waiting for a merciful death, and nobody in the village would recognise him. He will walk round and round the ancestral mansion in the ghostly moonlight, and think of all the people there who had vanished dreaming of the distant skies. He will hear vacant echoes of the songs that some wandering minstrels had sung in 1990 at his grandfather's funeral, will see wraiths of his ancestors floating around the rooftop, and will smell again the burning wood of his grandfather's pyre.

He will walk down the river as he used to do long ago, and will meet an old white-haired woman at the bank, who will tell him that the river has changed course five times since 1990, and that he must now walk further upstream to find it. He will ask her if she will walk that distance with him, but she will remind him that she belongs to his unredeemed past and is forbidden by time to undertake the journey with him.

So he will walk along and arrive at a fork in the red road, and when he will want to take the road he has never taken earlier, he will see an old man sitting under a brown banyan tree who will tell him that the road is forever closed to him. So he shall turn back and start walking to the house when he will meet his beaming grand-niece who will come up to him with a brown book of his forgotten poems. She will turn the brittle yellow pages, apparently at random, until she will reach this one :

I too had once tasted the fervent sky

And let her pallid wealth

Sink into my tired bones

And now that with me

You too have grown an eternity old

I wish to go back to our past

And paint the anguished face

Of your unblemished youth.

His grand-niece will ask him, 'Is this you someone you had known once?', and he will lie to her, 'No, my dear, it is not anybody I knew. In fact, this poem is just for you.'

And she will go away, with a gentle smile on her young rose-red lips, and will fade away into the morning mists. He will trudge back to the river, knowing that the time has come for him to disappear too, to disappear into the cold night to meet his ancestors who have always been waiting to reconcile him to his past.

As a student of philosophy, it is one of my joys to occasionally stumble over in the course of my explorations into philosophers and theologians from the past certain statements which remind me how deeply aware some of the Mediaevals were of our inability to grasp or express what lies at the boundaries of speech or language. St Augustine, for example, at the end of his book De Civitas Dei, a book that took him around twelve years to finish, simply writes : 'If my readers think that in this book I have said too much about God or too little about God, I beg for their forgiveness. But if they think that I have said just the right amount, I ask them to join me in praising God.' Some seven hundred years later, a famous disciple of his, St Aquinas, another prolific writer whose texts run into twenty-two volumes in one French edition, said a few days before he died : 'Everything that I have written in my life so far now seems like a piece of straw to me.'

A Suitable Girl

I received a rather apocalyptic email from my aunt yesterday, asking me if she should ‘look for a girl’ (hang on! her words, not mine) for me, now that I am approaching my 30 year old mark (does that mean I am nearing a one-third life crisis?) and time is running out for everyone. I have been sitting at this computer for fifteen minutes now thinking of what to write as a simple, short, jargon-free, and precise reply to someone who has not yet been tainted by the wiles of the Academy. So I am going through the following list of reasons why the answer to that question can only be a ‘no’, and I find myself rejecting them one by one.

(1) The Gay Reply : Since I am feeling rather light-hearted after going through all this heavy thinking, perhaps I should start on a gay note. I could tell her that the reason why ‘looking for a girl for me’ is out of the question is because, to put it bluntly, I am gay.
Objection!!! : Most Indians do not know what the word ‘homosexuality’ denotes, and, even if they do, they would never imagine that someone in their own closet is gay. As it is, my aunt already thinks that I am quite ‘abnormal’; now I do not wish to cause her any further pain by making her believe that I am ‘unnatural’ as well. No, my aunt is not mature enough for this reply.

(2) The Asinine Reply : There was, in the Mediaeval Ages, a clever man called Jean Buridan who is alleged to have come up with the following story. If you put an ass in between one pile of hay and one bucket of water, the ass will not be able to make up its mind as to whether to go for the hay or the water; and, consequently, the ass will simply stand there motionless. I could reply to my aunt that I face a similar dilemma concerning the dialectics of Globalization and/or Localization. That is, if she looks for a non-Indian girl (although how she would do this beats me), I will stand condemned by the environmentalists of buying into Globalisation; but if it is an Indian girl that she is after, I shall be accused by my fellow Academicians at Cambridge of allowing myself to be swayed by the parochial winds of Localization. So I shall plead to my aunt that she should understand my Buridanesque dilemma.

Objection!!! : I shall have to speak to my aunt for at least two hours on the telephone to explain to her what Globalization and/or Localization are about. Not that I mind doing this, but I know what her response will be : ‘You know what? That is all very fine according to the theory. But you get practical now! Come down to earth for heaven's sake!’

(3) The Feminist Reply : I can tell my aunt that it so happens that I inhabit a privileged part of the world where, for better or for worse, I am surrounded on all sides by a most curious species of females who are called the Feminists. If they were ever to know that I have consented to my aunt’s ‘looking for a girl’, they would drag me at once to Cambridge University’s Committee For Gender Equality, and, needless to say, I would be skinned alive by it.

Objection!!! : Well, very much the same problem with this reply as well. I shall have to spend three hours this time discussing the various strands of Feminist thought with her, starting from Sappho to Hypatia to Heloise to de Beauvoir to Reuther. And neither she nor I will be any wiser at the end of the heroic effort on the part of a man to explain Feminism to a woman : ‘Ok, ok, I got all that. But what is your point?’, is what she shall remark.

Perhaps, then, I should try a different tack instead, and simply allow her to go along with the whole shebang by sending her the following matrimonial (patrimonial?).

ID : Ironist_Lovable
I am 29, going on 30, residing in Cambridge, UK.

My Basics :
Age : 29
Marital Status : Never married (though there just might be more to this than meets the eye; as a famous philosopher once said, rather ominously, everything depends on how you define a word)
Children : No (not biological ones at any rate, and none forthcoming either, though nobody is responsible for one’s intellectual children)
Height : 5’11” (so that I do not need to stand on the shoulder of giants)
Complexion : Extremely Fair to Extremely Wheatish
Body Type : Discursive to Recursive
Special Cases : Everything about me is a special case; really, you have to meet me to believe this, and even this timely warning will not quite prepare you for the shock

My Religious and Social Background :
Religion : Trust me, you don’t want to know what my ‘religion’ is
Caste : Downwardly-mobile Brahmin (the downward slide started with my grandfather who married my grandmother’s sister)
Mother Tongue : Bengali (this is because as I once wrote in my autobiography : 'A man is not born as, but becomes, a Bengali')
Family Values : No family, hence no values

My Cultural Background :
Country of Birth : India
Grew up in : Assam, India
Personal values : I value the person, isn’t that valuable enough?
Can speak : Bengali, English, and Assamese

My Education and Career :
Education : Ph.D.
Occupation : Still trying to find one
Annual income : Negotiable
My Star Sign : Aquarius

Hobbies, Interests and More :
My Hobbies : Music; Indian and Western classical, Indian and Western folk
My Interests : Listening to music, reading books, talking to ducks, playing the fool with dogs, listening to the whispers in people’s unspoken words, and seeing the shades of sadness in the smiles of the sleeping sky
My Favourite Music : Beethoven’s symphony no 6, Schubert's symphony no 9, and 14th - 18th century Bengali folk music
My Favourite Read : ‘Crime and Punishment’, Fyodor Dostoivsky; 'The Home and the World', Rabindranath Tagore
My Favourite Movies : (Bengali) Gonoshotru, (Hindi) Sholay, (Spanish) Profundo Carmesi, (Italian) Ladri di biciclette, (English) The Kiss of the Spider Woman, and (French) Le Dernier Metro
My Sports : Mental acrobatics, (occasionally) badminton, and morning walks to meet the ducks
My Favourite Cuisine : Bread and butter, and cornflakes with five spoons of sugar
My Preferred Dress Style : Usually in the usual black (or green) coat

My Personality :

I don’t quite know where to start. I mean I have never done this before, this writing about myself, and I am feeling so nervous right now. Okay, okay, *gasp*, let me begin by saying that basically I am a nice, decent, and fun-loving guy. You know what I mean? I am studying for a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, and if this does not sound like fun to you, well, what can I say? People with whom I have been associated usually tell others (if not me, sadly) that I am an easy-going and a no-hassles person who takes all things as they come.

Partner Expectations :

Now coming to my partner, she should be home-loving, children-loving, dog-loving, caring-loving, and loving-loving, someone who shares my idea of what fun is and someone I can chill out with. She should be a convent-educated and a very outgoing woman who wishes to live life to the full (with me, of course). Actually, you know, she should be, how do I put it, she should be very independent-minded and that kind of thing, but she should also be down-to-earthed, grounded, rocked, planted, and rooted in our Indian family values which are so precious. She should be, shall I say, a woman of substance and she shall not be disappointed to find a substantial man in me. She should seek a long, happy, and contented family life surrounded by children and grand-children in which she will wake up every morning and discover that she loves me just that one bit more everytime I say her name or everytime I walk into the room.

Now, then, that is the stuff that I have written. But I am still thinking whether or not to send this matrimonial (patrimonial?) to my aunt …

Martin Luther On Foolishness

Martin Luther (the German Protestant, not the Black American leader) was quite an interesting figure in the history of the Church. He started his life as a monk, but later 'protested' against Rome, and got married to an ex-nun, Catherine.

No wonder then that this rhyme (in German) is often attributed to him :

He who does not know Wine, Women and Song

Remains a fool his whole life long.

What I am curious about though is what Luther would have written if he had been a woman.

She who does not know X, Y, and Z

Remains a fool her whole life long.

What would X,Y and Z stand for in this case?

The Quotable St Augustine

For around three years now, I have been 'doing' (if that is the word) a Ph.D. on two people, one called St Augustine (North Africa, 5th century AD) and the other called Ramanuja (South India, 11th century AD). As for the former, he has some pretty grim things to say about the 'human condition'; but the patient reader of St Augustine will be rewarded by the little gems that are liberally strewn through his volumes. Three of these gems are :

(A) Adam did not love Eve because she was beautiful. It was because Adam loved Eve that Eve felt that she had become beautiful. (Or is that 'sexist'? Hmm...)

(B) The only measure of love is to love without measure.

(C) I wish that my books will be read by someone who is not only a kind reader but also a frank critic.

My 'Religious' Development

I have now spent almost seven years in the University of Cambridge, a locale which is (allegedly) post-industrial, post-Christian, post-liberal, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and post-modern. Whenever I am asked within its environs the most portentous question as to whether 'I am religious', I usually reply that I am agnostic, and this for two reasons. Firstly, because, as it will become clear in the course of this post, there is a certain sense in which I really am agnostic, though my agnosticism is best captured in the prayer, 'Lord, I believe, help Thou my unbelief.' Secondly, however, I find myself today at the constantly moving point of intersection between four great traditions, Roman Catholicism, Vedantic Hinduism and its various offshoots, Western Marxism and its different transpositions, and atheistic French existentialism; and it is consequently immensely difficult to summarise my 'religion' with a definite word, label, turn of phrase, or term. What follows is a sort of Progress Report which will trace my religious 'development' from my early childhood to the present day, that is, April 24, 2005. (I place the word 'development' in italics; this is because some of my readers, both atheistic and religious, will feel that I have regressed rather than developed.)

Until around six years ago, the formidable question of 'God's existence' never bothered me; what did intensely trouble me (as it continues to do today) is the pervasiveness of suffering in this world. When I was in Class I, my grandfather met with a sudden death; and though I was never quite close to him, I was deeply affected by the consequent suffering that my mother and my aunts went through. As I moved into classes II and III, I slowly found myself being haunted by a strange sense that things around me were not as solid or as durable as they seemed to me, and when in Class IV I read about Gautama Buddha's struggles with the question of suffering and how to move beyond it, this uncanny feeling that the world lacks an inner solidity began to grow deeper in me. I began to bury myself more and more into books, wishing to find respite from this sombre feeling of impermanence that Buddhism injected into me like a doctor's medicine. Sometime in Class VIII, a Brother in my Roman Catholic school gave me a small book, 'Lives of Catholic Saints', where for the first time I read about a man who would change my life forever, St Francis of Assissi. There I read about how St Francis took the the text in the New Testament, 'If you wish to be perfect, go and sell everything and follow Me', in the most literal sense, and sold absolutely everything that he possessed and went out, leaving home and family, to serve the poor. What struck me powerfully at that time was St Francis' childlike 'fundamentalism', the utter sincerity and purity of heart with which he accepted these words and lived in accordance with them, and also the fact that there were millions of Franciscans all over the world who were living according to the Rule of St Francis, with no bank accounts for themselves, no 'private property', no wealth, no land, no privileges, and no personal possessions.

Around this time, my mother died a sudden death too, and the sense of impermanence returned to haunt me; and I began to realise even more deeply than before how radically contingent our human existence is and how profoundly fragile human goodness is. At the same time, the words that had once moved St Francis so dramatically began to take a deeper root in me, and I began to ask myself why I could not follow in his footsteps too. Nevertheless, I temporarily pushed these questions into the background, and began to study for a degree in Physics. Looking back, I realise that it was an extremely useful education, for Physics made me aware for the first time of the importance of searching for the truth, and of wanting to know what was true and what was false. Consequently, I began to seriously ask the question, 'Does God exist?', and read more and more books on this topic, an exploration that gradually introduced me to the somewhat disparate worlds of Hinduism, Marxism and French Existentialism. Slowly, I began to feel torn apart by, on the one hand, my desire to seek the truth and my wish, on the other hand, to 'give up the world' and follow St Francis straightaway. I began to ask myself more and more questions of this sort : What if following St Francis is not the truth? If the God of St Francis does not exist and turns out to be a figment of my imagination, should I still go ahead and follow him? What, then, is the truth? But why do I even 'need' the truth before selling everything that I have and serving the poor? Is not serving the poor itself all the truth that I shall ever need to know? How then shall I know what the truth is? Is Marxism the truth? Should I then become a Marxist? But are these meaningful questions at all? What if 'truth' is simply a linguistic illusion, and I am miserably wasting my time asking such questions? How then should I live my life, which direction should I take, and what should I hope for?

To cut a long story short, I moved away from physics towards philosophy/theology when I realised that the contradiction within me was becoming too powerful. Not that I thought that philosophy was some sort of a royal road to solving my dilemmas; I knew even then that philosophy is more an adventure in knowing what the right questions are than in finding ready-made solutions to these. In the course of my seven years of a Cambridge education, I have been seeking to develop a 'religious' framework and attempting the painful task of seeking some amount of coherence in the (sometimes drastically opposed) world-views which I have trained myself to inhabit.

What does my 'religion' look like? Here is a summary, if alarming, description : It is a 'religion' that emanates from the great Franciscan judgement, 'If you wish to be perfect, go and sell everything and follow Me', flows outwards picking up the rich tributaries of Vedantic Hinduism, Marxism and Existentialism, tributaries which do not quite merge into the mainstream but retain in some sense their distinctive identities. I am aware, of course, that this 'religion' will not go down with well with the 'orthodox' members of any of these above groups : Roman Catholics will (possibly) condemn me of heresy, Hindus (probably) of fraternizing with an institution that has sent out countless numbers of much-hated missionaries to India, Marxists (possibly) of pandering to 'religious' hopes, and Existentialists (probably) of being inauthentic. Let me therefore add some more detail to this broad picture.

First, why do I not sell everything that I possess and go out to serve the poor? The answer to this question is direct, raw, frank, and brutal : It is because I cannot overcome my seemingly insatiable thirst to read more and more books, to know the truth about who we are and what we here for. But precisely for this reason, I am acutely aware at certain times how heavily the great judgement of the New Testament hangs over me like a dark cloud on my horizon, reminding me that I have failed to follow St Francis, that I am wasting my time over unanswerable questions while billions of the poor are starving to death in some part of the world. I am under no illusions that compared to the single medical prescription of a doctor to a woman in deep pain, the loving touch of a hospital nurse to a recuperating patient, or the uncomplaining hardwork of a social worker for the poor in the villages, my Ph.D. thesis is as worthless as a heap of dust for it shall remove no pain, it shall reduce nobody's hunger and it shall alleviate suffering in no way at all. The foundational belief of the Franciscan Order, which is that one's love of God must have immediate and vital implications for all dimensions of human existence, social, economic, 'intellectual', cultural, political and 'spiritual', is the most enduring contribution of this Order to humanity.

In what sense does Vedantic Hinduism live in me? It is through its message of Advaita or non-duality, which I interpret to mean that even in the midst of our cultural, religious, and linguistic differences, quite often irreducible, the possibilities of mutual understanding are not completely cut-off. This is not, incidentally, to be confused with the glib message that 'we are all the same after all', for there is a fundamental sense in which we are not the same : there are some who will wake up tomorrow morning to have no bread and butter on their plates whereas some of us will get to eat caviar and drink Evian.

And this brings me to Marxist theory. The most fashionable way to attack Marxism these days is to point out that it led to Stalinism, thereby implying that there is a sort of logically necessary inevitability that propels a post-capitalist society towards the horrific excesses of a Josef Stalin. I remain unconvinced, however, that Marxism can be written off in this flippant manner, and I believe that the humanitarian vision of the early Marx pained by the gross injustices of an industrialised economy, will hang as a perennial sign of contradiction over all of us. In their passionate concern for and involvement with social justice, St Francis and Karl Marx, for all their fundamental divergences over the 'nature of reality', can come together as comrade-in-arms, even if their ultimate ends are radically different.

And finally Existentialism, especially that of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. So far I have been talking about the inter-personal or social dimension of human existence; however, one must not forget that it is quite often the Individual who speaks out against various forms of totalitarian oppression, that it is the Individual who reminds those who are cosily sheltered within the comfort-zones of Religion, Family, Society and other forms of totalities that there are still people at the margins whose lives are driven by chronic pain, suffering and agony.

Ultimately, then, this is my 'religion' : a 'religion' that seeks to know what the truth is about our human existence that is lived within the horizon of its joys, its hopes, its smiles, its reconciliations, its redemptions, its rainbows, its loves, its glories, its beauties, its charms, its wonders, its creativities, its darknesses, its horrors, its pains, its alienations, its enslavements, its agonies, its tragedies, and its instabilities. It is a religion that is driven (among other things) by this fundamental impulse : Human beings by nature wish to know the Truth of how to end their Suffering.

My 'religion' is not one that I would 'preach' or 'recommend' to anyone, for there is a certain sense in which it is much better to be either a militant atheist who thinks that atheism is a self-evident truth or a devoutly religious person who is never wracked by doubt. For these people, there is the sense that they have finally reached some sort of a safe haven while for me there is only the perpetuity of mobility, the instability of doubt, the anxiety of having missed the truth, and the constancy of a flowing-outwards. Consequently, I do not know where I shall find myself ten years from today : perhaps I shall become a militant atheist, a casual agnostic, a bemused onlooker, a devout Catholic, a pious Muslim, or a more deeply-rooted Hindu. I can only say that the 'religious' journey so far has been at once tormenting and deeply fulfilling, and I can only hope that the future holds out the same for me.

In conclusion, I find myself coming back to what my illustrious predecessor at Trinity College, that redoubtable atheist Bertrand Russell, once wrote :

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of [hu]mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair ... Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.