An Appeal For Cartoonists

I speak very truly (rare, is it not, for an Ironist to do so?) when I say that I have learnt everything that I love about the English language from two series of comics, Tintin and Asterix and Obelix. (Indeed, my spirits are always dampened when I receive the reply 'No' from a person whom I have asked, 'Have you read any Tintin or Asterix?') And now I want to start a series which I shall (perhaps) call The Tribal Ironix, for which I need a cartoonist who would ideally have some acquaintance with the history of British India.

This is the 'template' for the series :

The year is 1905. The whole of India is under the British Raj. The whole? No, not quite. For there still holds out in the Central Provinces a group of tribals who are resisting the inroads being made by the firangs into their territory. The British have placed a Cambridge-educated Resident, Lord Stifflippix, in Indore, the nearest city, and the Resident has been trying to get the tribals to sign an Accord with Her Majesty's Government for the last five years. The trouble is that the tribals are represented by The Tribal Ironix who picks holes in every Accord that the Resident draws up. As a young boy, he studied at a Jesuit school in Bihar where he diligently and patiently ploughed his way through volume after volume of British history, law, politics, philosophy, literature, and poetry; consequently, no sooner has he glanced at the Resident's Accord does he see through the contradictions, latent and manifest, that it is riddled with. In the meantime, while he and the Resident hold heated discussions at the Lodge in Indore, the other tribals, in true subaltern fashion, carry out nocturnal raids on British property in Bhopal.

So, then, the 'basic idea' is that I shall do the writing (yes, leave the irony to me!), but I need a skilful cartoonist who can invent some colourful ('indigenized') characters for me. I think I shall need a few 'uneducated' tribals who are militia-guerillas; a few who know English and can mingle with the 'educated Nehru-types' in Bhopal; a few 'reformists' who get in touch with the Mira Ben sort of nativised Englishwomen; a few 'moderates' who urge their fellow tribals to embrace English-ness; a few 'radicals' who have as their motto, 'Proud To Be Tribal'; and so on and on.

The first title in the series will (perhaps) be called The Ironix And The Resident; we can then work on subsequent titles.

On Philosophy

I realise that I haven't quite said much about philosophy on this blog; though there are countless of references and allusions to theology, its estranged, embattled, and embittered sister, on the posts here. I shall not try here to define philosophy in any closed fashion, for since the very attempt to achieve such a definition is a philosophical task, there can be no non-circular manner of circumscribing the permissible limits of philosophical investigation.

I shall simply state the way I see the philosophical mode of being in the world : philosophy is a critical enquiry into and a disciplined engagement with lived experience.

Some brief comments on these words.

First, 'lived experience'. Philosophy does not spring out of thin air; it requires the tangible corporeal and visceral realities of our existence to feed on. It lives in (and, quite often, also on!) the flesh and the blood, and the bone and the marrow of human beings who have sought to answer, in the midst of the gamut of experiences that they go through in the course of their lives, perplexing and annoying questions such as, 'How should I live?', 'Does it all mean anything?', 'Can I make any difference to the ways things are today in the world?', 'Is there any point to morality?', 'How can I find out whether what I believe in most deeply is true?','Why should I try to be good towards others?', 'How should I respond to my misfortune?', and 'Is there anything that I can hope for in a world where everything is slipping away from my hands?'.

The reason why I emphasise the word 'lived' here is to indicate that a philosophical approach starts when one is not simply being buffetted by thousands of winds blowing from multifarious directions, but when one struggles to find some point, however unstable and shifting this may be, from which to reflect on these winds, their origins, their causes, and their (alleged) destinations. Or, in other words, mere experience is not enough; one must also live through them, and one does so when one begins to interrogate, challenge, and question them.

Second, 'critical enquiry', for one of the central aspects of a philosophical training is learning how to be critical. A very common misunderstanding of the term 'criticise' would have it that when you are critical of a person's views and practices, the endeavour is to prove that she is a nitwit or an imbecile. A philosophical conception of criticism, on the other hand, revolves not around establishing someone's 'wisdom' or 'stupidity' (which themselves are highly contentious notions that must first be subjected to a patient philosophical enquiry!) but demonstrating the (often latent or disguised) presuppositions from which her arguments are emerging, investigating whether or not her beliefs form a more or less coherent pattern, and enquiring how many multi-dimensional levels of our complex human experiences this pattern is able to encompass.

Third, and finally, 'disciplined engagement'. A person who lives in and interacts with 'the world' in the philosophical mode delineated above never returns from these ongoing 'encounters' as the same person, for just as she seeks to work in the world from the within pointing out to it its manifest and implicit contradictions, she is herself transformed by this disciplined engagement. This engagement is better understood as a confrontation, a collision, or a skirmish which requires that one first go through a regimen of self-discipline so that one develops the moral imaginativeness, the affective skills, and the contextual sensitivity to listen when one should be attentive, and to speak out when one should take a stance. Thus in a philosophical approach to the world, one learns, sometimes painfully, to deal with the radical ambiguities that our lives are filled with, not, of course, by allowing onself to sink into the mires of inactivism but through the disciplined engagement of a constant shifting to and forth between 'oneself' and 'the world'.

An objection, possibly by those who have read through the Orthodox Canon of the Great Philosophers : have I not sacrificed on the requirements of rigour by giving my readers a diluted version of what the philosophical enterprise is? I shall reply that the biographies of many of the influential philosophers of Europe over the last six hundred years actually lend support to my description. To name just a few of them. Descartes, yes, the same man who declared, 'I think, therefore I am', was almost killed in a duel and was praised by his superiors for his bravery during his military career; Leibnitz, who (according to some people) invented calculus, was a high-flying diplomat who was associated with the Hanoverian dynasty; Russell lost his Fellowship in Cambridge because of his political views; Adorno and Marcuse were associated with a movement that actually went by the name Critical Theory; and Dummett, an Oxford professor of Mathematical Logic, took a break from the academy to join the campaign against racism.

One final comment, by way of a possible question, 'But what sort of a training or an education must one have before one can become 'philosophical' in the way that you have described above?' To which I shall reply with one of my deepest convictions concerning philosophy : Philosophy belongs to those who need it.

This, note, is not just a pandering to the ever-changing fancies of 'liberalism', 'political correctness', or 'egalitarianism' (though I am strongly committed to egalitarianism too), but an expression of my belief that there are millions of people 'out there' who 'do' philosophy in the above manner who may not necessarily have gone through an academic course in philosophical enquiry. So, then, why the academic 'discourse' of philosophy? Once again, a brief reply. Every field, technical, academic, or professional, develops a specialised vocabulary for the sake of saving time and effort when conversing with others who speak the same vocabulary. (For example, a doctor might tell you, 'You have a tumour in the brain' and spend the next half an hour explaining to you precisely what that means and what its implications are; whereas she would simply tell her colleague, 'My patient has XYZ of the ABC' and leave it at that.) Academic philosophy too has, over the centuries, spun a intricate web of inter-connected terms and phrases that can easily put-off the unwary incomer, but so long as she holds on to the above description as an Ariadne's thread through the labyrinth of academic philosophy, she can look forward to a delightful exploration into some of the most fascinating products of the human mind and the human heart.

The Wandering Dervish(es)

A quote from a book that I am reading these days :

"Every Friday there would be one or two groups of wandering dervishes gathered outside the mosque of the town's great Sufi saint, Sidi 'Abd ar-Raheem al-Qenawi, rhythmically swaying together, swinging their arms and chanting the name of Allah, to the accompaniment of a flautist and a hymn-singer equipped with crackling microphones. The fringes of the desert nearby were dotted with the shrines of saints, little mausoleums with flags fluttering; occasionally, too, a procession would pass down the street, with a gaily decorated camel ..., to celebrate a saint's birthday. The dervishes themselves, however, appeared to be drawn mostly from the poorest classes : men clothed in rather threadbare gallabiyas, with now and then an ill-fitting military uniform in amongst them. Certainly the people I got to know, that is to say, the people who could speak English --- my colleagues and students --- did not have much good to say about this tradition. They tended to see it as something irreedemably 'superstitious', vulgar and old-fashioned. Nor did they appear to have any knowledge of its history."

Andrew Shanks God and Modernity (London : Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2000), p. 133, italics mine

Humanity, Abstract And Concrete

Suppose tonight I am sitting at The Anchor on Mill Lane, Cambridge, drinking a bottle of my favourite French wine (incidentally, the only alcoholic beverage that I drink; beer is disgusting!). The time is 10:50 pm, I am talking to one of 'me mates' from the Academy, and she introduces the above girl to me as her friend. Now even before I speak one word to her, I can already form the following 'estimate' of her :

(a) She is an attractive girl. (Why? Just because she is!)

(b) She is not a pious Muslim girl. (Why? Because if she was, she would not be here with wine-guzzlers.)

(c) She is not a practising Buddhist. (Same reason as above.)

(d) She is a not a card-carrying Left-wing Party member. (Why? Because the context would be too bourgeoise for her.)

(e) She is not one of those 'moralising' girls who think that wine and the academic life should be kept separate in two hermetically-sealed compartments. (Why? Because otherwise she would not be in this pub talking to people drinking wine.)

Now, I shall let you pause a while : perhaps you are extremely irritated, offended, shocked, frustrated, or angry with me for having made this confession. 'Surely, I thought you were a very unprejudiced man? How can you jump to such conclusions even before you have talked to a person? Is that what you did when you met me the first time ('outside' this blog, that is)? Did you form an 'estimate' of me too in this manner? And, by the way, doesn't what you said above reveal, once and for all, your carefully hidden sexism? Is this how you pass judgement on the women whom you meet?'

In the rest of this post, I shall try to respond to these questions by way of making a distinction between two (closely inter-related) notions of Humanity, 'Abstract' and 'Concrete'. (Yes, hold your breath, and the picture will, hopefully, become clearer very soon.)

First, Abstract humanity, the regulative principle of which is a formalised equality so that when I meet a woman, the norms of our resulting interaction are public, civic, and (potentially) universalisable. So by abstracting from her specific individuality, I confirm that she is a rational and moral agent with a certain worth and dignity (these comprise our common 'Humanity'), and that I have some duties and obligations in responding to her. Therefore, I assume that she has the same set of rights, duties, and obligations towards me (and, potentially, towards 'Humanity') that I have towards her (and, potentially, towards 'Humanity').

However, a moment's reflection on this matter will also make it clear that we rarely, except in highly ceremonial and institutionalised contexts, reach out to people in this 'abstract' manner; quite often, we also want to meet human beings with all the 'brute' specificities of their socio-cultural-historical baggage that they carry around them. (Or, to use the offical jargon of these days, we may aspire to meet and know the Other in its inimitable and intractable Otherness.) That is, while affirming that I share with the girl who has been introduced to me an 'abstract' humanity which requires me to practise a stylised vocabulary of 'rights', 'duties' and 'obligations', I also want to know her as a singular individual with a concrete life-history, identity, and psycho-social background. At this level, it is not enough to merely know our commonalities (however important that might be), and I may also wish to know her as a unique being with distinct (and, quite often, irreplaceable) talents, capacities, needs, anxieties, skills, and aptitudes that make her who she is without 'reducing' her to just another statistic on the 2001 Census of Britain. (Note the manner in which I am emphasising the word 'also' in these sentences; this is because I am urging an integrative Both-And approach to these two levels of human(e) interaction.)

Consequently, while at one level the accent falls on the girl's ('abstract') humanity, at another it lies squarely with her ('concrete') individuality, and the point I am stressing here is that most of our interactions involve us in an extremely intricate interplay of these two levels between which we keep on shifting to and forth. For example, after I have come to know her for a few days or weeks (or even years!), and realised that we do live within the same horizon of an 'abstract' humanity, we need not keep on harping on this point again and again (unless, say, we are discussing Ethical Theory or, say, have got involved in some legal dispute). However, no matter how closely I get to know her in a relationship of friendship, empathy, solidarity, sharing, and care (and not just as an 'abstract' human being), this overarching horizon can never be elided, occluded, or forgotten for she remains at all times what she was the first time I met her : a moral and rational agent with some 'rights' and to whom I owe certain 'duties'.

At this stage, however, some readers might still be feeling uneasy at the manner in which I instinctively built a 'projection' of her the moment I saw her : is this not the classic illustration of how men get swayed by their 'first impressions'? Without denying that I am often under the spell of such impressions, I shall assert, somewhat dogmatically, that such impressions are necessary if we are to meet human beings as concrete individuals and not as ghostly, ethereal, disembodied, deracinated, and disembedded figures who have suddenly descended onto this planet from some unknown planet. To use a bit of technical language, there is no 'naive perception', and all human experience is experience-as : that is, I perceive a man or a woman as this man or as that woman and not as some abstract 'I-know-not-what'. Therefore, what is dangerous about our first impressions is that we so easily forget that they are our first (and not last!) impressions : that we must subject these corrigible impressions to a process of constant and even radical revision the more we get to know the person we are interacting with, that every individual is a never-ending fathomless enigma not only to those around herself but sometimes even to herself, and that every individual will defy the attempt made by others to encapsulate her within a comprehensive explanatory framework. (Note the word 'comprehensive' here, for I do not deny that we can 'explain' human beings to a significant extent.)

(So, to carry on with my example above, the more I get to know her, it might turn that out that she is, after all, an ironist like me who is simply pretending to approve of students of the Academy consuming alcohol while, in reality, she does not! Hehe, wouldn't that be awesome?)

One final point by way of conclusion. Am I then saying that relationships of care and bonding are superior to ones of duties and obligations? Some (feminist) writers have indeed jumped to this conclusion with the hackneyed notion that Care (which has to do with 'concrete' humanity) is a 'sensitive and context-dependent' feminine mode of being in this world while Justice (related to 'abstract' humanity) is a 'cold and impersonal' masculine approach to it. From my comments above, it should be clear that I do not accept such a dichotomy between Care and Justice (though whether women too can be 'cold' and men too may, sometimes at least, be 'sensitive' are intricate matters that I shall not dare to deal with here!). However, how do I conceive the relationship between these two notions, Care and Justice? I would reply that both care and justice are moral orientations, but that it is (impersonal!) justice that must provide the operating constraints within which we enter into relationships of (personal!) care with human beings (Perhaps that is yet another paradox for readers of my blog. No?). But why? Simply because some of the greatest atrocities have been committed by precisely those people who have claimed to 'care' for other people by flouting the rules of justice, for we are all aware (or are we not?) of what havoc can be (and has been) wreaked by parents who 'care' for their children, by psychonanalysts who 'care' for the 'mentally challanged', by politicians who 'care' for their constituencies, by husbands who 'care' for their wives, and by doctors who 'care' for their patients.

Therefore, to return to the point I emphasised above : what we need to do is to develop the ability to move in and out of these two levels, the one of 'abstract' humanity and the other of 'concrete' humanity, and the more effortlessly we are able to do so, the more that we shall become able to meet human beings not only in our shared humanity but also in their irreplaceable individuality.

Four Paradoxes Of Globalisation

A puzzle that troubled some philosophers in ancient Greece and ancient India was this : how could Plurality, that is, the 'Many', emerge from Unity, that is, the 'One'?; and this puzzle seems to haunt the set of contradictory forces that go by the umbrella-term of Globalisation.

(a) Globalisation has united the world only to fragment it yet further.

(b) Globalisation has dispelled local fears only to give rise to trans-national paranoias.

(c) Globalisation has produced a spate of information-overflow only to exhaust the sources of meaning.

(d) Globalisation places a high premium on rationality while debunking all forms of reason.

Their Ironic Cliches

The Transparent Ironist looks around on the cold pavement for discarded half-smoked cigarette butts. Finally, he finds one, fumbles in his grey coat pocket for his match-box, lights the butt, and lumbers towards the phone booth. With hands slightly shaking, he dials the numbers, one after the other, and listens, with a growing trepidation, to the phone ringing at the other end.

Ankita : Hello?

Ironist : Ankita, is that you?

A : Who is this?

I : Erm, well you know.

A : Mimon! Is that you?

I : Yes.

A minute of cold silence. And then the line comes alive again.

A : Are you still there?

I : Yes.

A : I can't believe this. Do you know after how many years you are calling me?

I : Yes.

A : Why didn't you phone me, email me, or write to me the last twenty years?

I : Well, I don't know. It is hard to explain.

A : Nothing that hard to explain to a sister?

I : Well, you see, that is part of the problem.

A : What is?

I : That you are my sister.

A : Excuse me?

I : I mean, that's all I mean. The problem is that you are my sister.

A : What the hell is that supposed to mean? You couldn't talk to me or tell me where you have been because I am your sister?

I : Well, not quite. Let's say that you are a part of my family.

A : So what's wrong with that? I can't change it, can I, that you are my brother?

I : Yes, and that is where the problem lies.

A : Would you please tell me precisely what the problem is?

I : Well, that is just the problem. I had to stay away from you because you are family to me.

There is another sudden silence.

A : Hello? I think I don't know what to say anymore. I am too, I am too ...

I : Yes.

A : What do you mean 'yes'?

I : Well, nothing really.

A : So one more time. What is the problem if I am family to you? You mean you can't be in touch with people simply because they are family to you?

I : Yes, I guess that is a neat summary of the problem.

A : But that's utterly ridiculous. Heavens! What is that supposed to mean? Why can't you be with people who are family to you?

I : I don't know. Perhaps that's the way I am : I feel claustrophobic, suffocated, and squeezed out within any family, and can live only at the margins, the peripheries, and the boundaries of any system, but never at the centre or within the circumference.

A : Well, I don't know what to say anymore. Why are you phoning me then? Are you not coming close to the centre, my centre, right now?

I : Yes, I am.

A : So why phone me then?

I : Because I am large enough to contain contradictions within myself.

A : You idiot! I think the truth is that you were never able to face yourself in the mirror, and so you kept on running away from yourself all your life.

I : Well, I am not running away right now.

A : But how would I know?

I : Yes, indeed, how would you know?

Ankita slams the phone down, and the Ironist walks out into the pouring rain. He rushes towards a dimly-lit cafe at the corner, seats down at a table, and takes out an old thumbed copy of Hegel from under his wet coat. He opens it at page 45 and reads : 'That which is most well-known remains forever unknown to us --- precisely because it is so well-known.'

The Radical Ambiguity Of Parenthood

I sometimes wonder if people who wish to become parents have taken into account how fundamentally ambiguous, from a moral point of view, the notion of 'educating' young children is. Consider the following maxim, 'Do not inflict unnecessary suffering'. Whether or not we should inflict any suffering on other people in a specific situation, and precisely when this suffering would become 'unnecessary' are extremely delicate questions that will have to be debated by all the people concerned under two main regulative conditions guiding the discussion. First, one of moral respect : we must recognise the rights of every individual to be participants in the moral conversation; second, one of mutual reciprocity : we must allow that everyone has symmetrical rights to ask questions, to seek explanations, and to examine one another's presuppositions.

Now consider this : a girl, 6 years old, wants to go out and play, but her parents force her to stay at home and finish her home-work. Does this constitute a case of 'inflicting unnecessary suffering?'

The difficulty in answering this question is that the two conditions do not quite hold : though the parents would accept the first, the girl does not possess (as yet) the breadth of a sufficiently contextualised moral imagination that an agent must possess before she can fulfill the second condition. Nevertheless, let us assume that she is capable of making at least some elementary attempts in this direction, so that the following conversation ensues.

Girl : Why are you shutting me up in the room? You are inflicting unnecessary suffering on me.

Parents : What is this 'unnecessary suffering' that you are talking of?

Girl : Suffering that is caused by the lack of freedom to go out and play.

Parents : Yes, but sometimes one has to accept a bit of pain in the present for future gains.

Girl : But what if I refuse to accept that truth? What if I just don't care for gains in the future? What if my present and immediate happiness is all that matters to me? Why should I not be allowed to live for the moment?

Parents : I am sorry, but you have no option, young lady. I shall force you to accept this truth!

And that is where the conversation finally breaks down and the brute force on which the parental argument is based suddenly reveals itself in its brutality : all education, either implicitly or explicitly, is a form of violence inflicted on little children. The usual 'justification' for this violence of course is that it will help to bring them 'in line' and mould them into 'civilised' citizens for tomorrow. But should we not first ask the children if they want to choose this future for themselves? And if they are not in the position of being able to answer this question, should we not simply leave them to play with the birds and the dogs in the park instead of forcing them into studying when they do not wish to do so? And if they say that they do not want to study at all, should we not respect this wish of theirs?

On Being Left-Wingish (?)

Around 200 years ago, two German bigwigs had a row over the question of 'marriage'. One rather Left-Wingish (?) poet called Friedrich von Schlegel (1772 - 1829) wrote an unfinished 'romance' (once again, in the technical sense) called Lucinde where he eulogised the notion of the fulfillment of reciprocal love with no need for religious sanction or public ceremony. To this came the sharp criticism from a formidable Father-always-knows-what-is-best-for-you Right-Wingish (?) philosopher called Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831) : 'Friedrich v. Schlegel in his Lucinde, and a follower of his ..., have put forward the view that the wedding ceremony is superfluous and a formality which might be discarded. Their reason is that love is, so they say, the substance of marriage and that the celebration therefore detracts from its worth.'

Enough, then, has been said (although in my highly oblique ironical style) to indicate why I am always so much more comfortable in the presence of Left-Wingish (?) people.

(Historical note : Anticipating the Hollywood practice of coming up with sequels by more than one century, the story of the Right-Wingish (?) Hegel does not end there. There came along yet another ponderous German called Karl Marx who claimed that he had turned the philosophy of Hegel upside down. To which I can only say : 'Quite rightly' (no pun intended)).

The Mind Of The Ironist

A series of random (and perhaps disconnected) snapshots to give the reader of this blog an 'idea' of how the (restless) Mind of the Ironist 'works'.

Snapshot August 1, 2004 :

The Ironist is reading a book on Social Theory; Thesis 1 (T1) begins to develop.

Snapshot August 4, 2004 :

The Ironist is talking to a friend about the French Revolution; Anti-thesis 1 (AT1) is forming in his anarchic mind.

Snapshot August 11, 2004 :

The Ironist is thinking about his mother and the time he had spent with her feeding the ducks at the town park; Thesis 2 (T2) begins to develop.

Snapshot August 13, 2004 :

The Ironist is at a pub with a friend, discussing the caste-dynamics of Indian politics; Synthesis 1 (S1) of T1 and AT1 is born.

Snapshot August 15, 2004 :

The Ironist is reading an article in The Telegraph about globalisation; Anti-thesis 2 (AT2) begins to grow.

Snapshot August 18, 2004 :

The Ironist is watching The Pirates of the Caribbean; Anti-synthesis 1 (AS1) slithers into his mind.

Snapshot August 21, 2004 :

The Ironist is walking with a friend in the evening; an incidental remark that she makes about how 'intolerant' academics can be results in Thesis 3 (T3).

Snapshot August 22, 2004 :

The Ironist is talking to a duck about Brahman-realisation as taught by Advaita Vedanta; its Himalayan silence brings home to him Anti-thesis 3 (AT3).

Snapshot August 25, 2004 :

The Ironist meets an old friend who opines that this whole business of thesis-ing and anti-thesis-ing is a hopeless waste of time; and that he should simply burn all his books, go to an ashram in the Himalayas and meditate there on his 'inner Self'; this he carefully notes down as Thesis 4 (T4).

Snapshot August 28, 2004 :

The Ironist is watching a TV documentary on recent famines in the Sudan; he begins to formulate Anti-thesis 4 (AT4).

Snapshot September 2, 2004 :

The Ironist speaks to his brother on the phone about some family disputes in his village over the division of ancestral property; he hits upon Synthesis 3 (S3) of T3 and AT3.

Snapshot September 3, 2004 :

The Ironist meets a friend for dinner at the college Hall and talks about the movies of Federico Fellini, the paintings of Fra Angelico, the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, the plays of Eugene Ionesco, and the novels of Charlotte Bronte; he catches a glimmer of Anti-synthesis 3 (AS3) and also another aspect of AT3 which had earlier eluded him.

Snapshot September 9, 2004 :

The Ironist is reading two books, one by Georg Lukacs and the other by Antonio Gramsci, and a passing remark that Gramsci makes in his book leads him to rewatch Bicycle Thieves; he forms a complex Synthesis 4 (S4) out of T1 and AT3.

Snapshot September 21, 2004 :

The Ironist is reading four books, one on feminist epistemology, one on Iranian Sufism, one on evolutionary biology, and a fourth on some recent advances in cosmological theory; he unweaves S3 to form T'3 and AT'3 which he now stacks away somewhere in his mind.

Snapshot September 28, 2004 :

The Ironist is talking to his psychoanalyst friend who cautions him that it is precisely people like him who have carried the habit of self-introspection to such an extreme limit who can become schizoid at any time; the Ironist notes this down as Thesis 5 (T5).

Snapshot October 3, 2004 :

The Ironist is watching a fragment of a Hindi movie called Main Hoon Na; this time he forms Synthesis 4 (S4) out of AT3 and T5.

Snapshot October 9, 2004 :

The Ironist meets a friend who tells him that his monomaniacal dabbling in self-analysis is a typical 'male disease'; that he should learn how to 'loosen up' a bit, to 'chill out', to ' take it easy', to go out into the garden, and to enjoy the sun; the Ironist ponders on this suggestion which becomes Thesis 6 (T6), and which returns to haunt him in the middle of the night.

Snapshot October 20, 2004 :

The Ironist buys a 1,5 cl bottle of Sauvignon Blanc from Sainsbury's; he feels disheartened with the thought that he will die very soon with so many books unread in the University's library; he tries to overcome his despair with the white wine; but even as he does so, he already begins to see the faint outlines of Anti-thesis 6 (AT6).

Snapshot October 22, 2004 :

The Ironist is listening to the opening movement of Gustav Mahler's Symphony no 5; as the music rises to a crescendo, he realises that he had been such a fool all along not to have seen Synthesis 5 (S5) developing out of S1 and S4.

Snapshot October 25, 2004 :

The Ironist sees a young woman in the market square quarrelling with another woman whom he takes to be the former's mother; what an aunt of his had once told him about how women never really move away from their mothers (while men can, and frequently do) springs into his mind from the caverns of his memory and becomes Thesis 7 (T7).

Snapshot October 26, 2004 :

The Ironist is rereading The Speckled Band, a Sherlock Holmes story; and Asterix in Corsica, a title in a series of comics that first taught him how to make puns in English. He can already sense some theses and anti-theses knocking at the doors of his mind, trying to force their way into it; but today he gently pushes them away, and goes for a long walk along the river Cam. He remembers the last few hours of his mother's death-bed agony.

Snapshot October 27, 2004 :

The Ironist finally manages to hunt down (if the expression be allowed) a female friend who is interested in such gender-issues and places T 7 before her; she makes some astute remarks which he gratefully notes as Anti-thesis 7 (AT7).

Snapshot October 31, 2004 :

The Ironist sees a beautiful yellow dog as he is walking down the road; the dog brings back memories of various times, places, animals, and people flooding into his mind; and as he sits down on a brown chair, staring at a grey stone Cross pointing towards an equally grey Cambridge sky and pondering the various thoughts that are swimming around in his anarchic mind, Anti-synthesis 3 (AS3) grows larger and larger.

Snapshot November 1, 2004 :

The Ironist is reading some pages from a short story by F. Kafka and listening to a Rabindra Sangeet Tai tomar anondo amar' por. For once, there are no theses, no antitheses and no syntheses to bother his exhausted mind. For once, he is 'living in the moment.' He looks out of the window at the brilliantly blue sky. The peaceful sky floats on, and carries him along with it to some distant idyllic village in rural Bengal where a silver-bearded wandering minstrel sits down under the cool shade of a banyan tree on the banks of the river Padma and sings Kothay khuje pabo ami amar moner manush? : Where shall I find, O' where indeed shall I find, that infinite treasure, that one true Man of my heart?

.

.

.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions. In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Address by Subroto Bagchi to the Class of 2006 at the Indian Institute of Management, July 2nd 2004

Perhaps you are more or less familiar (though, to understand what follows, the emphasis should fall rather on the more than on the less) with the New Testament's Parable of the Prodigal Son; here is my 'reply' to it in the form of a Parable of the Prodigal Daughter.

And when all the fathers and the mothers of the world were gathered unto him, the Transparent Ironist rose up with a swish of his exquisite robe made of the finest Murshidabad silk, climbed up onto the Mount and thus he spake unto them, with a voice quivering with emotion and with a face radiant with the distant glories of the setting sun (All quotes are from The Gospel According To The Transparent Ironist Chapter 15, Verses 11 - 22) :

11 A certain man in Judaea had two children, an elder son and a younger daughter.
12 And the daughter said to her Father, 'My noble Lord, my dear Father whom I cherish more than the sinews of my miserable heart, givest Thou to me the portion of my inheritance that falleth to me'. And the Father divided unto them His property.

13 And not many days after, as is the wont of impulsive young women, the daughter collected all together her goods, and made her journey into a faraway land, and there spent all her inheritance with riotous living with men from all the nations in the road-side taverns.
14 But soon there arose a great famine in that land; and she began to starve.
15 And she went and joined the farm of a landowner of that country, who sent her into his fields to feed his swine.
16 But she finally came to her senses, of which as a woman she possessed scarcely any, and she lamented, 'How many lowly servants of my own Father's have enough bread to eat, and here I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my Father, and I will say unto Him, 'Father, I have sinned against the heaven that Thou art, and before Thee, I am no more worthy to be called Thy daughter : make me as one of Thy bonded servants.' And she arose, and came to her Father.

17 But when she was yet a great way off, her Father saw her, and had compassion, and ran, and kissed her on her neck. And He shouted to His servants, 'Put my ring on her finger, and shoes on her feet: And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry.'
18 Now His elder son was in the field: and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants, and asked what these things meant. And he said unto him, 'Thy younger sister is come home; and thy Father hath killed the fatted calf, because He hath received her safe and sound'.

19 And the son was furious, and would not go in: therefore came his Father out, and intreated him.
20 And he answering said to his Father, 'Lo, these many years do I serve Thee, neither transgressed I at any time Thy commandment: and yet Thou never gavest me a lamb, that I might make merry with my friends : But as soon as this Thy miserable filthy daughter had arrived here, a daughter who hath devoured Thy money by living with countless men under the same roof, Thou hast killed for her the fatted calf!'
21 And He said unto him, 'Son dearest, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. But do you not see the truth behind my actions? I am just pretending to be happy with thy sister now that she has come back, with the hope that she shall think that I have really taken her back into my heart. But no! I just wish her to feel forgiven, so that from now on I can constantly keep her at my beck and call. A woman who is deceived into feeling forgiven by a man will do anything to keep him happy and will follow him like a dog that runs after its master. And, yes, within a year, after all this dust hath settled, I shall get her married off, and I shall wash my hands off her. This, my Son dearest, is just a little trick of your old Father to ensure that our family honour does not suffer any further disrepute from the shameful acts of your despicable sister.'

22 And He continued, 'It was therefore meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy sister was untamed once, but is civilised now; and was unmarried once, but will soon be married tomorrow'.

And when he had finished with his Sermon, the Ironist came down and slowly walked away into the horizon. Behind him, he could hear the fathers and the mothers of the world speaking to one another in whispers, 'Yes, the Ironist is so right! This is the reason why we should marry off our daughters as soon as possible. He is truly such a great moral teacher. We must come here regularly for his Sunday classes on morality.'

The Ironist sighed to himself : it is easier for a camel to pass through a needle's eye than for irony to pass through the thick skulls of the fathers and the mothers of the world.

My Christian Pessimism

I am a profoundly (and, perhaps, sickeningly as well) dialectical person, and one consequence of my dialectical nature is that I can never be satisfied beyond a certain point with any view, belief, or practice that does not challenge, criticise, change, or even invert my present way of living. Or to put it more bluntly, I feel somewhat uncomfortable being around people either with whom I agree too much or with whom I agree too little : I seek that precariously unstable balance wherein I can find enough common ground to have a transformative discussion without that shared horizon itself ossifying into a rigid position. Thus, as a (former) student of the physical sciences, I still seek the aesthetic and the intellectual satisfaction of a 'theory' that will 'coherently explain all the facts', but I long for, at the same time, a 'counter-theory' that will shatter the conceptual frameworks through which I have become accustomed to 'reading' the world, and will set me on the journey of weaving a newer theory in a spiralling process that only my death shall bring to an end.

As a result, the 'I' that I am using in the process of writing this post (in obedience to the syntactical 'subject-verb-object' convention of the English sentence) is a loose unity woven out of various strands which are being (sometimes painfully) unravelled and brought together as the 'I' moves on through various experiences.

Perhaps this is the reason why all of 'religious' symbols it is that of the (Christian) Cross that has most powerfully exercised my imaginative intellect for so many years now. It brings together into one focal point two powerful 'dispositions' in me : one is my substratum of hope for a state of affairs where 'every tear shall be removed from every eye', and the other is my growing realisation, one that occasionally drives me to the brink of despair, that this yearned-for 'paradise on earth' will perhaps never be realised, and if at all it is, it can be achieved only by our passing through the purgative fires of unspeakable suffering, horrific agony, and violent death.

Thus when I am with people who are 'all smiles', who tell me that 'everything will be fine in the end' and who claim 'to be cool and to live for the moment', I wonder if they have ever heard of the Gulag, the Holocaust, East Europe, and the Balkans; and, more uncomfortably, whether they have taken into account the clinically depressed woman next door, the abused child in their own family, and the breakdown of personal relationships that routinely mar and blight the beauty of our lives. However, when I meet people who prophesy doomsday with the claim that the world is a rotting and putrid mess that must be discarded into the dustheap of history, I cannot help thinking that they have never truly experienced the 'unbearable' joy that bursts forth through a baby's smile, lights up a newly-wed bride's face, and urges millions to withstand terrible suffering for the sake of the promise that they can make a difference to the ways in which we live.

In short, then, I am a 'Christian pessimist' : 'pessimist' because, as far as I can see (which may not be thaaaaat far given my myopic vision, in the literal and not just metaphorical sense) everything that has been constructed with human hands is hopelessly riddled with ambiguities, internal contradictions, and unresolved complexities, and stands shakily today only to be inevitably eaten away tomorrow by the corrosive acids of ruthless time; but 'Christian' because I believe that this bleak brooding on the irreparable havoc that time, the grim reaper, wreaks on our human projects, desires, wishes, and ambitions must not allow me to sink into a nihilistic despair that will deaden or anaesthetize me to the stark reality of human suffering, whether or not I am able to do anything to alleviate it.

That, indeed, is how I 'read' the symbol of the Cross : the lateral arm of the Cross stands for our mutual 'horizontal' solidarity with all human beings who are suffering (even as you are reading this very post), and the upright arm represents our 'vertical' yearning for an en-wholing vision that will give us the hope that the struggle against those impeding conditions which constrict human flourishing is one that is worth dying for. The Cross is then the dialectical union of 'horizontal agony' with 'vertical promise', and I believe that we need both these dimensions, the horizontal as much as the vertical, if we are to 'get anywhere'. Without the former, the horizontal, we shall not even begin to realise how deep down under our skins we belong to one gigantic family whose members carry agony and death in the very marrow of their bones; but without the latter, the vertical, we shall soon sink into a vertiginous abyss of cynicism, despondency, and abjection so that every individual will become a monadic world unto itself, shut up in meaninglessly alternating paroxysms of pleasure and pain.

I have postponed a fundamental question till this point : is the Christian 'scheme', 'view', 'picture', or 'description' of reality --- one that is more or less presupposed in the above paragraphs --- 'correct', 'justified', or 'true'? Or to break down the question into two smaller parts : Is there a God who loves us? and Is there a post-mortem existence of blessed communion with this God of Love who has sent 'His' Son to suffer with and for us until the end of time? To this, I shall reply, while noting that the notion of 'truth' is a highly context-sensitive one so that the questions 'Is it true that 2+2=7?' and 'Is your love true?' exist on two distinct categorical planes, that I simply do not know whether this so-called grand narrative is 'true' or 'false'. However, perhaps because of my earlier training in physics (the 'exact science'!), I refuse to 'buy' the currently fashionable ('postmodern') view that 'anything can become true provided that you believe in it hard enough'. I wish to keep open the truth-question of 'Christianity', '(Vedantic) Hinduism' and '(atheistic) French existentialism', the three broad streams at whose shifting confluence I live, move, and have my being; and, consequently, all that I have to say in this matter is that I cannot answer that question for you in any definitive and conclusive manner today on May 16, 2005.

Nevertheless, the somewhat contentious phrase 'Christian pessimism' is a convenient summary of my views about the 'world', bringing together as it does into the conceptual space of two words a host of conflicting and (sometimes) contradictory beliefs that I have learnt to make my peace with over the years. This phrase perhaps also explains the curious alternation of 'individualism' and 'anti-individualism' that haunts my posts on this blog : I am an 'individualist' in the sense that I believe that every individual must go through the painful and unavoidable discipline of carrying the Cross within the specific context of his/her own life-narrative, but I am an 'anti-invidualist' because I hold that this Cross-bearing is never a solitary enterprise but an interpersonal venture that we engage in for the sake of one another.

Thus, on the one hand, we must not seek to grasp or reach out for the Other without first subjecting ourselves to a 'crucifying' process of looking into our own depths and becoming aware simultaenously of the capabilities of evil that we bear within and the riches of goodness that lie hidden there; but, on the other hand, we must also try to ascend from these inward depths once we realise that it was the (logically) prior call, desire, or love of the Other which had made it possible for us to start this journey of self-exploration in the first place.

To suffer with and for others without either sinking into a derisive misanthropy or raising suffering to the status of an end-in-itself by glorifying in it : that is the perennial challenge of the reality of the Cross, a reality that continues to provoke, challenge and unsettle me, in ways that are as new as they are old. To see Christ crucified in every human being that I meet in my life, and yet not to know whether I should move in or move out to lend a helping hand to him/her or even not to have the strength, courage, or will to do so, these are ambiguities and ambivalences that cannot perhaps be overcome within my mortal limitations. Will they ever be though? In some (putative) state of post-mortem existence where, to use my earlier phrase, 'every tear shall be removed from every eye'? That is a question that I continue to grapple with, not knowing whether it is even meaningful to seek an answer to it.

And yet, to return to the key with which I started this composition, my dialectical nature already begins to catch up with me. I am beginning to feel that whatever I have written here is as useless as a pile of straw to be burnt for the summer-night's bonfire and forgotten the next morning as a nightmare. And yet, I know that it is not entirely worthless either, for the dialectical union that the Cross is cautions me : 'You are correct, but not quite'. If someday I wish to be buried (instead of being cremated), I would ask that my epitaph should carry these words :

Here lies a man who had the following words for life :

Yes, but not quite.

A Post On Guilt For Its Cultured Despisers

Some centuries ago, a German 'Romantic' (in the technical and not (quite) the Romeo-and-Juliet sense of the term; to see the precise difference, go to 'Romanticism' at www.wikepedia.org) called F. D. E. Schleiermacher wrote a book called Speeches on Religion for its Cultured Despisers, a sort of back-handed compliment (!) for his friends who felt that religion was an outdated bag of superstititions. Hell no!, don't worry, I am not going to throw at you any more of that religion nonsense out here; instead, I shall give you, in keeping with the spirit of the times we live in, a fully secularised 'theory' of Guilt that we can all be comfortable (?) with.

So what is Guilt? Guilt is the element of perversion built into both the personal and the structural dimensions of our existence as a consequence of which we are never able to attain the full conditions which we think will maximally promote and foster human flourishing.

Let me unpack that rather condensed statement. Our motives, desires, and wishes are immensely complex and are never quite transparent to ourselves so that the possibilities of self-deception are never far from the horizon. What that implies in turn is that we are always in the dubious position of simultaneously being 'sinners' and being 'sinned'-against (though we would usually like to believe that we are only the latter). The same timid office clerk who is shouted at by his obnoxious superiors in the local town office goes home drunk in the evening and shouts at his wife and his little children; the same leader of the ethnic community who claims that his group is being oppressed by the surrounding majority exercises a brutal hegemony over its members; the same woman who underwent physical, mental, and emotional torture at the hands of her mother-in-law now viciously pours out her internalised misery onto her daughter-in-law, and so on and on ... Nobody, in short, is absolutely free from guilt which encompasses all human beings in a vast sea of mutual responsibility in the face of one another.

Whether it is the dehumanizing and the depersonalising atrocities brought about by environmental degradation, international warfare, globalised deprivations, racial/gender discrimination, or political repression, we are all being slowly caught up in ever-widening reciprocal circles of implication, and we cannot simply pretend not to be within them. This means that we are never purely Spectators or purely Victims but are both at the same time, so that we are all enclosed in gigantic webs of collective guilt because of our failings before one another. Those who suffer from racial prejudice in a British inner city are Victims with respect to the majority white population, but they are also Spectators with respect to the starving children in Ethiopia; members of the Indian urban elite are (arguably) Victims of the forces unleashed through globalisation but they are also (arguably) Spectators of the desolation that these forces have left behind in their wake on the rural economy.

What is all of this meant to do though, this tedious insistence that none of us can claim to be able to come out of these patterns of human tragedy with untarnished hands and unblemished consciences? Firstly, it is a deliberate affirmation intended to heckle those who would like to congratulate themselves with the belief that they have somehow managed to reach the sanitised towers without any soiled clothes and muddy shoes. Those who deceive themselves into thinking that they are cosily ensconsced in a transcendent Archimedean point located far above the grim, bloody, and messy realities of history must be brought down to the earth, and shown how their ethereal existence is made possible through the horrific levels of human costs that do not show up on the digitalised screens of their speculators and their investors in 'human resources'.

Secondly, on the other hand, although it is not an invitation to throw up our hands in despair, nor an excuse for inaction in the face of the gross levels of deprivation and injustice that we see around us, it is also a reminder that we must move through the killing-fields of this world with fear and trembling, never knowing what new injustices we ourselves might be unwittingly, unknowingly, and unwantingly perpetrating on precisely those people whose distress we are trying to relieve, and whose conditions we are attempting to be ameliorate.

Thirdly, and finally, it is to stress how the virtue of Hope must always go with us as our protective-shield if we are to genuinely immerse ourselves in relationships of costly and painful solidarity with those who are suffering from various types of injustices, both personal and structural. We must remain alive to the possibility that there exists forms of wickedness and malevolence that no amount of human good-will can set right, and no acts of heroic solidarity can wipe out from this earth. And this is where that much-abused word 'God' comes in : we must continue to Hope, even in the midst of all the ambiguities of our existence, that there exists a Power that has the capacity of drawing us upwards by plumbing the infernal depths of human perversion and healing the brokenness that has radically corrupted the human heart. If we are religious, we shall give the name 'God' to this Power; if we are atheistic, we shall claim that this Power is identical with ourselves; what we cannot do, however, is to go into the living hell that this world is without being gifted with suprabundant resources of Hope.