The Fragile Absolute

If the Transparent Ironist were asked to summarise his life so far, he would reply with a somewhat cryptic phrase : the infinite passion for the Fragile Absolute.

It was his habit of reading books, one that he developed during his school years, that first set him on the track towards searching for an Absolute that time cannot touch, that age cannot wither, and that impermanence cannot corrupt. He spent the greater part of those formative years sitting at his table, quietly bent over his books for sometimes as long as fourteen hours a day, devouring one after the other not only his school text-books but also Chaucer, Shakespeare, Marvell, Marlowe, Keats, Milton, Shelley, Byron, Dryden, Herbert, Pope, Dickens, Yeats, the Brontes, Dickinson, and Eliot. He diligently ploughed his way through the history of the Greeks, the architecture of the Romans, the great civilisation of the Middle Ages, the flowering of the Renaissance, the rise of Western capitalism, and the freedom struggles of the Indians.

It is perhaps because of this childhood regime that he went through that he feels somewhat baffled when he comes across people within the Academy who do not share his fanatical passion for Absolute knowledge, and who see their practice of book-reading as some kind of an onerous 'duty' that they have to (mechanically?) perform (to pass their exams?) and not, like him, as synonymous with the very process of staying alive. For him, books are to a student in the Academy what water is to a fish, the air is to a bird, or honey is to a bee; and he sometimes wonders why everyone in the Academy does not live in accordance with such a passionate (and neurotic?) 'fundamentalism'. He feels equally puzzled, moreover, when he reads about people who pick up one sub-sub-sub-speciality within one field and stick on to it for twenty years of their lives as if nothing existed outside that localised context of their enquiry. Perhaps he does not know whether he would prefer a 'depth' in one particular discipline or a 'breadth' that would encompass all possible disciplines : thankfully, however, as a student of philosophy, he does not need to make an Either/Or choice in this matter for philosophy is a 'subject' that allows him to make the (foolhardy?) attempt to develop both at the same time. For in philosophy the term 'knowledge' truly comes into its own : it no longer means, as it may do so in some disciplines, an accumulation of information, but refers to an unquenchable thirst for finding out the unbreakable connection between the way things really are and the way one ought to live in this world.

And yet, in spite of his infinite passion for Absolute knowledge (where 'knowledge' is understood in the sense defined in the previous sentence), he knows that this search for the Absolute stands under the sign of a fragility that radically infects all human endeavour. In the course of the ongoing journey towards this Absolute, the Ironist continues to be aware of the finitude of his life which is like a mist that can disappear in a moment of bright sunlight, and of the bitter truth that he shall never, in fact, be able to reach this Absolute and hold It in his hands. At best, he can only come asymptotically close to it, and no matter how desperately he tries to grasp at It, It will continue to slip away from him.

Thus his hankering is expressed within a temporal context where he continues to experience infinite longings, a deep-seated dissatisfaction with the impermanence of everything that is mortal, a radical protest against the inevitability of his impending death, a profound awareness of his inability to respond to a love that arrives gratuitously at his door-step, an unbearable torment at his failure to find that which time cannot dissolve, a hidden guilt over his past that remains unredeemed, and yet, in spite of all these, an unfathomable hope that his search will be one that will not be in vain. Thus, it is the Absoluteness of knowledge that he yearns for, and this despite his realisation that he must resign himself to be content with, at best, a fragile and temporally limited version of it.

Talking Postmodernism To A Duck

Ducks have played a very important role in my intellectual development during the last four years. Those who do not know me 'outside' this blog might well exclaim : 'Excuse me? What was that again?'

Well, then, for around three years or so, I used to walk early in the mornings to the banks of the river Cam (from which the mediaeval (yes, I prefer the Queen's English spelling, not that I am a Royalist though, mind you) university-town of Cam-bridge gets its name) where I used to talk to the bleary-eyed caffeine-deprived morning ducks, some of them brownish, others blackish.

Ok, ok, time for one more question : 'Excuse me? Are you a wacko or something? Don't you have human beings around you to talk to? I mean, ducks? Are you serious? How depressing! They teach you anything so far, huh? Honey, trust me, the next time you are feeling a bit low, just come over to my place. Did you get that?'

(Hmm, I seem to be getting better at playing the Devil's Advocate on myself. No? But what if I were really the Devil Her(?)self? Would I then have to play God's Advocate?)

Ok, let me drag myself out of this perfidious monologuing with myself, and answer that question about duck-talking : 'No, dear, I do have humans around me to discuss my views with. But you see, talking to ducks is a rare kind of a challenge, one of trying to explain your beliefs to creatures with whom you do not share your sort of linguistic capacities.'

'But this whole thing sucks. I mean, here are these ducks, these poor dumb little thingies, and there you are, Mr Philosopher, sermonising to them about the profundities of human existence. Have you never heard of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French wise guy?'

'Yes?'

'Well, he (sort of) married this illiterate girl who had not the faintest clue to what philosophy was about, and this because Rousseau was scared of talking to women who might prove to be superior to him in intellectual prowess. Are you not doing a similar thing with the ducks? Why can't you hunt down some Ph.D. students who have done the relevant literature reviews?'

'Because duck-talking is not about accumulating bits and pieces of information, for which I would rather go to www.wikipedia.org; nor is it about demonstrating your rhetorical powers to passive listeners, for which I would rather supervise some first-year undergraduates. It is a challenge to express your ideas so clearly and transparently that you can, for half an hour at least, be emboldened to believe that even a duck will be able to 'understand' it.'

'Hmm. Well, I am not convinced.'

'Why not join me now? I am walking down to the river in a few minutes?'

'Really?'

'Be my guest.'

The Transparent Ironist (TI) : Dear duck, I shall talk to you today about postmodernism. Ever heard that term?

The Duck (D) gets very excited, apparently postmodernism is in the air : Quack, quack, quack.

TI : I shall start by noting that there are, broadly speaking, two versions of postmodernism, one I shall call Weak postmodernism (WP) and the other Strong postmodernism (SP). Let me start off with WP.

D : Quack!

TI : Very well, my friend, let's get off to a quacking start with WP. Suppose I want to ask the question, 'What is the best way of living in this world?', how shall I go about answering this question? Firstly, I shall have to think of my familial background, then my childhood experiences, the various books I have read, and also the different human beings whom I have interacted with in my life. All of these will have varying degrees of significant influence on my response to that question. Consequently, the answer that I give to that question cannot be 'objective' in the sense of being stated as a 'view from nowhere' that will be 'universally' applicable for all human beings. Are you with me so far?

D : Quack, quack, quack!

TI : So far, things are somewhat obvious : most of us know that we are 'conditioned' to think and believe in certain things by the ways in which we are brought up. What WP says is that human beings belonging to different cultures, communities, faiths, or traditions come to develop their distinctive views of The Way Things Are in accordance with their environmental influences, linguistic idiosyncrasies, and localised contexts. Therefore, we should resist the attempt made by any group to project its view of the world as the 'global perspective', for there is no Archimedean point, no God's-eye-view vouchsafed to us mortals, no way of getting 'behind' our environments to see how 'correct' our views are.

The duck buries its head into its chest, goes into the water, stays there for a while, comes out of it, flutters its wings and cries : Quack!

TI : So, then, let us move onto SP which moves one step ahead of WP and claims that we are completely incarcerated within our local environments and cultures which act as water-tight compartments sealing us off from initiating or fostering any genuine communication with people in other environments around us. Not only is it the case that what one culture holds to be true is different from what a second culture does, but the very notions of 'truth' and 'reality' change from the former to the latter. Consequently, according to SP, a quantum physicist from Oxford, England, cannot go to a tribe in the lower Niger and pronounce that the beliefs and the practices of the local witch-doctor there have no purchase on 'reality', since the term 'reality' cannot be directly translated without remainder from the first context to the second.

The D tries to fly into the air, hovers over my head for a few seconds, and then dashes down the ground.

TI : Now, needless to say, both WP and SP have been, in turn, celebrated and criticised by people from different cultural, academic, and social backgrounds. Scientists in particular are edgy about both these forms and, rightly so, since the acceptance of SP will ring the death-knell of the scientific enterprise with its (potentially) universalisable truth-claims. Many social anthropologists too, however, have been suspicious of some versions of SP and argue, with a lot of detailed evidence, that human beings are not, in fact, as hermetically sealed within their parochial contexts as the proponents of SP seem to claim.

D : Quack, quack, quack!

TI : Now both WP and SP have far-reaching political implications, one of which is that we human beings should not step on the toes of one another since we all belong to our own particularised contexts where we should be allowed to flourish without any intervention or interference. Hence the recent craze for acquainting oneself with 'politically correct' modes of speech so that we allow one another their 'space'. Do you know, dear duck, what the implications of WP and SP are for you?

D : Quack?

TI : Well, it means that one species of animals on this planet, namely, human beings, do not have the right to violate the privacy and the autonomy of another species, namely, you ducks. Therefore, if human beings were to accept WP and/or SP rigorously, it would mean that you shall never end up as Peking Duck on someone's dinner plate.

The duck is thrilled to hear this piece of free legal advice, and flies out to inform its buddies of the Good News : Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack!

My Experiments With Gender

I sometimes wonder what it would be like if I could, even for five minutes, think, feel, and act as a woman. Precisely in what ways would I 'see', perceive, or experience the world differently? Would the sky, the flowers and the trees, the birds and the dogs, the people on the streets, the milkman in the morning, the young lady at the ticket-counter, the old bus-driver in a white beard, my male cousins and my close friends, my uncles and my aunts, would they all look or 'feel' the same way as they do to me right now? And here I don't mean what I think or feel the way a woman thinks or feels is (I can, of course, build up an imaginative 'mental picture' for this) but the 'lived or felt experience' of the way a woman thinks and feels from the 'inside'. My male friends, for example : if I were to beome a woman for the next five minutes, would I then see them as stupid, idiotic, moronic, dumb, likeable, attractive, desirable, warm, compassionate, kind, cool, funny, snazzy, cheerful, or what?

Till such a miracle gender-switch becomes possible (perhaps through a Star-Trek style Experience Machine that you can plug onto), I must perhaps satisfy myself with carrying out thought Experiments on Gender. Here then is one attempt, my female (?) persona writing to herself.

Dear Miss Ironist,

Yes, coming back to what I was saying, I was wondering the other day about this strange thing that we women have, the need for strong, powerful, and lasting bonds that endure throughout our fragile lives, a need which would seem impossible to be fulfilled in this fleeting world of ours that stands under the sign of impermanence where things dissolve and decay with the passing years. I wonder if men ever quite manage to get their thick heads around this thing of ours; for even when they superficially seem to do so, they immediately subsume it under technical terms of their own devising, thereby expropriating our corporeal experiences to further some etherealised theory of theirs with a view to obtaining an academic promotion. Consequently, I feel that men completely miss the visceral quality of our aches, joys, tortures, smiles, and hopes, treating these are mere categories for building up their elaborately structured conceptual cathedrals.

And yes, I even wonder whether men quite understand the deep attraction that the promise of future happiness holds out for us, an attraction that sometimes leads us to stake our entire lives on one individual, goal, or end even without being sure which way they will lead us. Men, of course, like to boast that they are singularly capable of such heroic leaps of faith into the hazy and distant unknown; however, when they do finally get around, after a lot of quasi-solipsistic cogitation, to making the long-awaited leap, they usually leave behind a smoky trail of violence, destruction, bloodshed, tyranny, and anarchy.
And yet, looking back now at all the men whom I have met, interacted with, and known in the last sixty years of my life, I cannot bring myself around to condemning them in unequivocal terms as a perfidious lump of malignant evil. Indeed, I have met my fair share of men whom I have known to be capable of perpetrating horrific evils on women by propagating their pet theories, at once bizarre and ludicruous, about their physical, mental, biological, logical, emotional, and spiritual superiority. But in spite of all that, the more men that I have got to know, the more that I have felt that there is something achingly human about this rather obstuse (and, at times, stubborn) species of our genus. Perhaps men need a bit of reminding now and then, especially every time they go running after the far end of the rainbow, that they are, after all, mortal beings made out of the clay of the earth. If only they could stop being so childish and grow up soon, for heaven's sake! Sigh.
Anyways, my dear, I have taken up too much of your time again blabbering away like an old fool. How silly of me to detain you with all this men-talk! Surely you are wise and old enough by now (oh dear, I hope I don't sound grandmotherly now, I really wouldn't wish to) to know that whereas some men aren't quite what they seem to be on the surface, some of them, for all their childish stupidities, are indeed pretty much what they seem to be, all the way up and all the way down. Knowing which is which usually turns out, believe me, to be every (?) woman's worst nightmare! (Or should I say that the worst is actually that vainglorious man who deliberately tries to pretend that he is not, in his depths, what he displays of himself on the surface, and vice versa?)
You know, in the German Rhineland where I grew up before the Second World War, there is a rural proverb that the older that women grow, the more (and not less!) obsessed that they become with men. Trust me, even at my old age of sixty today, men haven't stopped fascinating me one whit : those joyful little bundles of contradictions, slippages, and complexities, from which there emanate, once in a while, those delightfully warm rays of radiant light that make your stomach churn and urge you to overlook all their ambiguities (yet again!). Yes, we women really become such fools when it comes to our men! We would readily forgive foibles in a man that we would never put up with if a woman had committed them.

So long, you must now get back to your rings of conceptual paradoxes! And so must I too --- to be with my men!
With best wishes,

Miss Ironist

On 'The Higher Consciousness'

Many classical forms of Hinduism and Buddhism (and, more recently, the various New Age groups that these have spawned in the West) claim that it is possible to attain a Higher Consciousness where the subject-object duality that pertrains to much of our day-to-day interaction and perception will be revealed as being an illusory form of 'folk psychology', and that this duality can be transcended in the intuitive insight into Oneself. I shall neither defend nor challenge this claim here, only give the techno-savvy (and hard-nosed empiricist?) reader an example to show what it is being claimed.

Right-click on the Recycle Bin icon on your desktop : you shall see three items, 'Open', 'Expore', 'Create Shortcut' and 'Properties' highlighted and one item, 'Empty Recycle Bin', etched out. Why is that so? This is because although you can (with a bit of expertise) send everything else on the desktop into the Recycle Bin, you cannot send the Recycle Bin into itself. Therefore, even after everything else has been dissolved into the Recycle Bin, the Recycle Bin stands supreme in its absolute serenity, dispassionately gazing at Itself.

The New Age gloss on this observation will go as follows : The plurality of icons on the desktop have emerged from the unity of the One Recycle Bin. Those who are ignorant think that these icons are distinct and many, but those who have attained the Higher Consciousness will know that it is the unitary Recycle Bin that underlies all these manifestations as their innermost reality. Indeed, they shall then know that they are the Recycle Bin itself.

(Environmentalists, are you listening? It just might not be too late to turn New Age yet. Hehe.)

On Being Embodied

One of the most constitutive aspects of our existence is our embodiment, that is, simply the fact that we are creatures that live with physical bodies. (For those who have a microscopic eye, and a mind corrupted by philosophy, I report that I shall not comment further in this post on that small preposition 'with' which can potentially open up a can of worms.) Because we are embodied beings, our daily conversation is filled with corporeal metaphors which we routinely use almost unthinkingly. Here are some of them :

(a) No, really, that was such a lame argument!

(b) I don't think Edward can stand up to Mary after what he has done.

(c) She has consistently maintained an upright moral position on this issue.

(d) Within hours of his arrival at Cawnpore, Sir Havelock Ellis was able to grasp the complexity of the situation.

In such cases, we forget the original contexts of these bodily metaphors (such as a lame man on crutches) and use them liberally in situations which are not directly concerned with the body (an argument, a position or a situation, as in the above examples). That is, what is popularly called body-language can express distinctive emotions that will take us pages to describe or condense in words, and even then we shall perhaps miss the mark completely. When someone says, 'Oh my! You know what? You should have seen the way she blushed at his words!', it would perhaps defy the imagination of even an accomplished poet to explain what that means in just 'so many words'.

A Portrait Of The Ironist As A Young Gadfly

There you go, dear readers, you finally have a portrait of the Transparent Ironist that even a Michaelangelo would have died to paint. (But of course, but of course, Michaelangelo painted only super-humans and demi-humans, and the Ironist is but human, all too human.) Perhaps the most irritating facet of his (boringly one-dimensional) personality is his persistent habit of compelling people around him, even if in an extremely subtle and disguised manner, to push their arguments one step backwards until finally they hit rock-bottom (if at all). In short, the Ironist is a gadfly : he loves to know where people come from (both literally and metaphorically), what their axiomatic beliefs are, why they are arguing the way they are, and how their past environments have moulded them into becoming who they are today.

In all of this, the Ironist is only too aware (perhaps even to the point of distraction) of how his own starting-points, childhood experiences, prejudices, traits and dispositions have brought him to the position where he stands today. Therefore, when he engages in his disreputable gadfly-exercises with people around him, it is with the desire not just of knowing them but also of knowing himself in the process, for he believes, to slip momentarily into a bit of jargon, that the 'self' and the 'other' are so inextricably intertwined that the knowledge of the first is possible only with and through the knowledge of the second. Or to echo the words of an Old Master, he says : 'May I know You, so that I may then know Myself in the very same process.' Or, yet again, the reason why I am able to ask the question, 'Who am I?', is only because You have urged and instigated me to do so with Your question, 'Who are you?'

Indeed, the Transparent Ironist has, to use the fashionable term, an 'issue' with many thinkers, both past and present. They seem to think that empathy is a problem (to be 'solved' in a somewhat 'intellectual' manner?), while self-identity is guaranteed; whereas the Ironist grapples with the opposite problem which is that while for him empathy is a basic given of his existence, his self-identity is always in doubt. Which is why everytime he is asked questions such as, 'What is your view on X, Y, or Z?', he fumbles for an answer like a little boy who has lost his handkerchief yet again but is too ashamed to admit it, but he can reply before you can even bat an eyelid to questions of the sort, 'What does A, B, or C think or believe about X, Y, or Z, and why?'

He has spent so much time trying to 'get under the skin' of other people trying (and, most probably, failing disastrously) to see the world through their eyes that he has only recently begun to realise that he has no distinctive views to call his own; at the most, what he has is a collage, a patchwork, or a mosaic built from the various fragments left over from the collapse of the monuments of the past.

Perhaps that is why his mind is a seething ocean of anarchy : he is never quite satisfied with reading a book that tells you that 'A is X'; no sooner has he finished reading that book that he begins to experience a burst of his obsessive compulsive disorder which tells him that he must now run to the library and ferret out another book which will tell him that 'A is not-X'. Some of his readers will now think that the long-awaited truth is finally out; that, at the end of the day, the Ironist is just one more demagogue or sophist, the type that can 'prove' to you at high noon that it is 'actually' midnight; that he is a 'mere' collection of discarded piles of dusty books; that he can differentiate x with respect to y but cannot integrate 'life' with respect to his 'books'.

There would be much truth in this accusation, and the Ironist would readily plead guilty to it. (Though what sentence is to be imposed upon him for this crime is a more ponderous issue.) Having done that, he shall also seek, in his usual ironic fashion, to respond to it in the following manner. If you are looking for a Yes-Man, or for someone who has a ready-made blueprint for every problem that is going to crop up around the corner, or for a person who shall unearth all the secrets of human existence and lay them bare for you on your dinner table, you would be well-advised to stay at more than an arm's length from the Ironist. But if you believe that in some cases the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and that in others, the shortest distance is actually a curve, but you are not quite sure which case is which, you shall find in the Ironist a person who has been struggling with this very problem almost all his life.

In short, then, the Ironist, the gadfly, loves to probe deeper into human beings, but never in an intrusive manner. If he senses the slightest amount of discomfort experienced by others in his gadflying, he simply lets them be and moves on to find someone else to learn from. (However, beware if he does not sense this uneasiness; he is very capable of forming fanatical attachments with people, and may just stick around with them not just for the next twelve hours but even for the rest of his life.) It is perhaps for this reason that he can 'come across' to people as that ethereal cloud that floats on high over the 'ordinary' lives of 'ordinary' men and women, flitting in and out of their company whenever he finds or does not find adequate company for his Socratic jousting. Once again, there would be some justification in this, the reason probably being that he is not usually down-to-earth enough with people. That is, he would rather ask a woman for her 'ultimate values' in life (a question that can be highly unnerving, unsettling, or irritating, depending on the person being questioned) than for her star-sign or the name of her pet-dog (even given the fact that he used to be a close reader of Linda Good(wo)man and that he remains a passionate lover of dogs). As for men, they are usually unnervingly predictable, and have nothing more to say than that they have a 30,000 dollar paycheck in the pocket, an 'awesome' deal with a client in the Silicon Valley, a beautiful girl in tow, a planned holiday to Singapore in the summer, and a great Mercedes in the garage : so the conversation usually ends there.

The Ironist has also an obsessive habit of talking about himself, primarily because, in most cases, he is well-aware of his own conscious assumptions or points of departure, and wishes to lay them on the table without keeping them too close to his chest. (That is probably what he is doing in this very post? No?) He wants people with whom he talks to know the planks on which he stands and from which he engages in his obnoxious act of firing off salvos of questions at them, one after the other with no respite. Some of them probably think that the reason why he is always filled with questions for them ('Oh, why doesn't he just shut up for once and answer my questions?') is because he is 'testing' them or 'checking' how much they know. If that is indeed what they believe, they would be rather mistaken, for the reason why he asks questions is because he wants to know what they believe, and what they believe is as much an important factor for him as what he himself believes in developing, forming, or distilling his views on any issue.

It is for this reason that in an Ideal Situation, he would wish to talk to every human being for their views on every possible matter, so insatiable is his desire to know what they think and believe. It is said of an old German astronomer that on the morning he died, the moon was still shining in his tired eyes. The Ironist himself would want to die in a somewhat similar way : someday when he is engaged in an an intense conversation with a friend over some topic, he would just wish to fall over and sink to the ground, dead. His whole life would have been one extensive embodied conversation that life could never end or disrupt, and death too could only interrupt.

My Aunt Dipsikha

My earliest memory of my Aunt Dipsikha goes back to a sunny day in a green tree-filled park near our house where she had taken me to feed the ducks. They came up to her hurriedly as she called out their names, and she took out crumbs of bread from a big brown bag and threw those at them as the ducks greedily gobbled them up.

I would see her all of a sudden one day, and then she would disappear for a long time, perhaps a year, perhaps a two, before visiting me again, never neglecting to swamp me with chocolates of various sizes and colours.

It was only many years later that I was able to understand why she would always visit me whenever she was around in town. The same month that I had been born in 1976, a daughter, Anita, had been born to her, a daughter who had tragically died of pneumonia at the age of three. Aunt Dipsikha never quite recovered from the shock. Not, of course, that you would know or feel this simply by talking to her, so consummately did she hide away her pain behind her cryptic smiles and the distant look in her soft brown eyes. My uncle was then in the Indian Foreign Service and she travelled with him to distant ends of the earth, always remembering to send me postcards with exotic stamps for my collection. He himself had, however, never managed to come to grips with his wife's 'melancholiness', always complaining to my mother about her habit of brooding over the past that she could not forget.

She was the only Bengali member and the only ray of hope in my oppressively Assamese family, and it was she who first brought into my mortal life the beauty and the joys of Rabindranath Tagore's celestial music. She would sometimes sit down with me on the banks of the river Brahmaputra at sundown during the long autumn evenings, stare into the horizon at the hazy bank on the other side, and begin to hum with a slow and hesitant beat :

How many times indeed have I thought

That in a fit of self-forgetfulness

I shall lay bare

The riddles of my heart

At Your feet?

She came to see me when I was in Delhi a year after my mother's death. Everyone else had given me the platitudes, 'Time will heal everything', 'You must be brave', and 'Everything will soon be all right.' But Aunt Dipsikha said nothing of that sort; indeed, she said absolutely nothing at all. We just sat down in silence on a black rock in the middle of the JNU campus watching the sun going down over the rough elephantine grass. I looked at her from the corner of my eye : there was an ancient sadness written all over her tired face which had refused to be beaten by the storms that it had so patiently weathered.

Later, when she came to know that I was studying Theology at Cambridge, she sent me a postcard from Kanyakumari.

My dearest Mimon,

We have this great bond between us that unites us across space and time, and will continue to tie us even from beyond the grave, this bond between two solitary inviduals who must forever live only at the forlorn peripheries of so-called human civilisation. We are like two drops of water in the vast ocean that in search of each other must first lose themselves before they can find each other through that self-annihilation. And yet how different are our destinations! Your protest against society has carried you onto God, and my reaction to it has driven me to the bottomless abyss of nihilistic despair.

Yours as ever,

Aunt Dipsikha

Kanyakumari

25 December 2001

The last time I saw her was in September 2003 when we sat down on a rain-swept afternoon in Dilli Haat, eating hot jalebis and talking about the autumn, the rains, the ducks in Cambridge, the overcrowded buses ... A young girl of my age passed by us, and my aunt lovingly stared at her as she disappeared into the anonymous crowds.

'I want to ask something of you', she said as the white flowers began to fall around us, thick and fast.

'Yes?'

'Someday when you have a daughter, will you name her Anita?'

'Yes', I replied.

This morning, my brother sent me an email that Aunt Dipsikha had peacefully passed away in her sleep last night. And tomorrow morning, she will be cremated and will cross over to the other side of the grave, once and for all. And yet the words that she had written to me from Kanyakumari continue to echo and re-echo in my mind : My dearest Mimon, we have this great bond between us that unites us across space and time, and will continue to tie us even from beyond the grave ...

The Ab/Use Of Silence

There is a very old debate that goes down the centuries between two groups of people whom I shall here refer to as the Silence-Lovers (SL) and the Logic-Lovers (LL). Let me allow them to present their cases to each other.

SL to LL : 'You LL won't really ever be able to reach God. Why not? Because the only thing you do is simply to talk, talk, and talk. You split hairs an infinite number of times until there is no hair left; you fight and quarrel with one another like a bunch of street-mongrels; and you don't know the virtues of keeping your mouth shut and sitting down quietly in one place. Come to our meditation centres, and we shall teach you how to calm your mind, loosen your body, release your senses, and obliterate all traces of emotional disturbance'.

LL to SL : 'You mean we should stop talking, discussing, and writing, and run along and do whatever you ask us to do simply because you tell us to do so?'

SL to LL : 'Yes, my friend, the things that you talk about in your text-books of logic belong to the 'lower' level of truth. What we have attained through meditation, however, is the 'higher' level which cannot be attained through your childish exercises of dialectical argumentation. At this higher supra-rational and super-cognitive dimension, there is only absolute silence in which you shall intuitively become one with the highest Truth.'

LL to SL : 'So what is the difference between our position and yours?'

SL to LL : 'The difference is this. Those who do not know the Truth, they just talk and talk. But those who know, they do not talk.'

LL to SL : 'But you have contradicted yourself!'

SL to LL : 'How so?'

LL to SL : 'Just now you said that people like you who know do not talk. So why are you talking to us? Why don't you just shut up, go away to some remote cave in the Himalayas and never emerge from it?'

At this stage, I shall now leave the reader of this post to carry on the conversation inside his/her own mind, and see where it leads him/her to.

My Favourite 4-Lettered-Word

I have had rather interesting conversations either with or about my cousins, and what particularly astounds me is the fact that I always seem to be (re-)discovering newer ones as I grow older. In 2003, for example, a college friend of mine wrote to me :

Dear Mimon,

I have got married to Swapnaa last week. Hope you are doing fine.

Stay well,

Pranav

To which I replied in my usual instinctive one-line ironic fashion : 'Is this some dream-girl you are talking about or is it for real?'

And pat came the reply : 'Oh, it is as real as it gets. Swapnaa is your cousin'.

So after a bit of investigation, it turned out that I do have a cousin called Swapnaa who (apparently) knows everything about me. Everytime I go back to Assam, I have this sinking feeling that people there are covert CIA agents; (almost) the first thing they tell me, rolling their eyes round and round, is : 'Oh, we know aaaaaall about you!'

Anyways. Back to the past, and this time we are in 1998. I first come to meet a cousin called Madonna. At first, I think that she is trying to be *cool* with a *hep* name like that; perhaps she has been listening too much to The Material Girl who hates the Vatican. But no, it is as literal as its gets : her mother is Roman Catholic.

Anyways. (I always say 'anyways' a lot when I am around her.) One day we have the following conversation.

'Mimon, what is your favourite four letter word?'

'It depends.'

'Depends on what?'

'Oh, on all sorts of things you would have never imagined.'

'Name just one?'

'Well, let's say it depends on how *chic* you are trying to become?'

There is a moment's silence between us. And then the barrage of questions is resumed.

'So, please tell me naaaaaa! What is your favourite four letter word?'

'What?'

'What what?'

'What?'

'Mimon! Please tell me what your favourite four letter word is?'

'I have. I just did!'

'What?'

'Yes. 'What' is my favourite four letter word.'

'So 'what' is your fav 4 letterD word? Right?'

'Yes!'

'And why is that?'

'Because everytime I want to pretend that I have not understood a question, I can always reply : 'W-H-A-T-?''

On The Family

When I was in India in 2003, I once enjoyed a long conversation with a rickshaw-puller over whether or not he believed his life was worth living. In the course of it, he made an amazing observation that startled me; he said that a person's beliefs, views, and dispositions can all be ultimately traced back to his/her notion of either the importance or the redundancy of the family. Here are three broad ways of viewing the family (needless to say, this is an ideal-typical picture) :

(A) The Family As The Sacred Vault : For those who hold this belief, the family provides the over-arching set of values, horizons, and meanings within which we go about the task of building our life-narratives. All our most deeply-cherished views and conceptions are imbibed from the font of the family, and it is to the family that we constantly keep on returning throughout the various crisis-stages of our life such as marriage, divorce, illness, and death. Moreover, the family acts as a shock-absorber when things go fundamentally wrong, and even if for some reason we happen to stray away from it on a particular occasion, we are always free to return to it in search of an oasis of peace in a world riven through with hatred, turmoil, and anxiety. It is therefore the great protective shield against the 'big, bad, world out there'; the last line of defence against the encroaching forces of barbarism; and the most reliable bulwark against the threat of anomie.

Men and women who accept this understanding of the family usually do so, however, for mutually opposed reasons : the men because it provides them with a powerful ideological tool to dominate the women by threating them with the dire consequences that would allegedly befall them if they moved away from this sanctified canopy, and the women because they have (already) been indoctrinated right from their childhood to accept this view of things as ingrained into the nature of reality.

(B) The Family As An Oppressive Totality : Not everyone, however, is willing to accept the notion of the family as outlined under (A), even while allowing that our fundamental values, impulses, and survival skills are picked up from the family. Just as Darwin's Nature cares not for the individual but for the Species alone, the family too, so it is argued, behaves as a sort of social Juggernaut that ruthlessly rolls on, caring only for its self-propagation into the next generation and riding roughshod over the interests of specific family-members. All social systems have more or less detailed sets of injunctions, norms and taboos, and every family mirrors these mandates within its own boundaries which it polices rigorously and whose transgressions it punishes meticulously. Most families therefore expend a lot of effort in bringing back to the fold the family drop-outs, but these reconciliatory attempts are viewed with scorn and repugnance by the latter as a form of higher paternalism.

These people claim that, historically speaking, the (proto-)human family was set up by (Neanderthal?) males who wanted to dominate their (Neanderthal?) females; now, however, through the process of 'ideological internalisation' or 'sociological indoctrination', these historic origins have become lost in the mists of the past so much so that men and women have started believing that the terms 'family' and 'civilisation' are co-terminous. It is this sinister equation between Civilisation and the Family (with the associated implication that people who have consciously rejected the family, for whatsoever reasons, have become inhuman, antisocial, juvenile, disruptive, pitiable, immature, childish, dilemma-ridden, unsophisticated, and morally degenerate, all at one stroke) that holders of this second view vehemently repudiate. Indeed, they would turn this argument on its head and claim that, in truth, it is the family that is the hotbed of domestic violence, mindless accumulativeness, punishment of little children for failing to learn their multiplication tables, brutalities on women, and proto-fascism : how much more of barbarism could you ask for?

(C) The Family As An Ironic Irrelevance : This third view is an unstable 'synthesis' of the first two delineated above. Those who espouse it claim, on the one hand, that it is indeed the case that most of our deeply-cherished values, views, beliefs, notions, linguistic skills, and so on, are acquired from within a familial context. On the other hand, they claim that it is precisely because of this reason that we must spend the rest of our lives re-examining (and throwing out, whenever necessary) whatever has been thrust into us by the family since our childhood, because most of our deeply-ingrained prejudices, fears, and anxieties are all insiduous after-effects of having been brought up by a family. It is the family, they believe, that generates into us the primordial divisive feelings of 'We' versus 'Them', and 'Us' against 'They'; and consequently, though they do not actually seek to uproot the family (for they know not what to replace it with), they yearn, with a detached resignation, for an unrealized (because unrealizable) utopia where the 'family shall wither away'.

Consequently, such people neither love nor hate the family : theirs is rather an attitude of ironic equanimity. They are happy to know that other people find warmth, security, and comfort within their families, but would prefer, unless it is absolutely necessary for purely pragmatic reasons, to keep themselves away from such familial associations. The family, therefore, is neither 'good' nor 'bad' in their evaluative vocabulary, it is simply irrelevant in their wider scheme of things, and this somewhat in the spirit of a James Joyce who, when asked what his religion was, replied : 'Not Applicable.' To this riposte, a holder of the third view shall only add that the family is equally inapplicable.

The Ironist and a dog are long-lost brothers, and the difference between the two can be stated rather precisely. The Ironist is a dog who occasionally forgets that he has been civilised; a dog is an Ironist who feels no need to become humanised.