In his essay, Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translations, A K Ramanujan pointed out the astonishing number of tellings of the Indian epic, Ramayana  over the past 2,500 years in different languages, regions and mediums. For instance, in some versions Sita is Ravana’s daughter; some versions portray Ravana as a great savant rather than the asura that the Valmiki version makes him out to be; some versions portray Hanuman as a ladies’ man rather than a celibate Brahmachari. For over two decades, this essay was in the prescribed reading for the Ancient History course ( B.A) of Delhi University. However, in October this year, the essay was dropped by the academic council of Delhi University in the face of pressure from some fringe right wing groups, who complained that the essay was blasphemous. Oxford University Press, the publisher of the essay, had initially decided to discontinue its publication but later rescinded that decision. Unlike OUP however, Delhi University has not rescinded its decision.

2. Gita ‘as it is’ and extremism

Authorities in Siberia sought to ban the translation of the Bhagavad Gita written by the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) founder A.C.Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada titled ‘Bhagavad Gita as it is’ (to be sure, it  still is an interpretation though labelled ‘as it is’) on the ground that it was extremist literature which could incite violence and bring about social discord. While many sections of the Indian media portrayed this as a purported ban on the Gita tout court, the truth was that it was a purported ban on Swami Prabhupada’s translation alone. Finally, the court dismissed the arguments of the authorities and struck down the ban.

It is very easy to read the Gita as exhorting violence; after all the plain language of the text does seem to show Krishna asking Arjuna to ‘kill’. However, to literally take this as a prescription from Krishna to Arjuna to resort to violence and kill would be to miss the point completely. Bhagavad Gita is not a deontological text, specifying any do’s and don’ts. This is beautifully explained by Aldous Huxley in his introduction to the Bhagad Gita by Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda ( in my opinion, this is the best translation available in English). He argues that the Bhagavad Gita properly understood exhorts neither action nor inaction but points out that there is no actor who does any action; the very point of the Gita is to lead one to that realization.

3. Georg Simmel Returns : The Philosophy of Money

Philosophy and Money are thought to be mutually dissonant. Philosophers are thought of as abstract thinkers who have little time for anything practical and the one interested in commerce and business (the one making money, in other words) has a tin ear for philosophy. Occasionally philosophers like Berkley have turned their philosophical gaze towards money. In April 2011 Routledge  brought out an affordable edition of the hitherto rare and prohibitively expensive Philosophy of Money by the German philosopher and sociologist ,Georg Simmel. First published in 1904 , Philosophy of Money is a great analysis and meditation on the concept of value and money. While reading this classic, one cannot resist the feeling that we exert ourselves so much for money all our lives but think so little about what it is and why it matters to us. Some of the central arguments of the book may sound provocatively paradoxical. For instance, Simmel argues that when we desire a thing, it occupies our minds and the satisfaction of the desire on acquisition of the desired thing puts that occupation of mind to rest: we stop thinking about it. He argues that if we look closely we pursue a thing just because we want to stop thinking about it. The most counterintuitive of results! This implies one can achieve that state by not only achieving the thing in question but by not desiring it at all in the first place. All this may sound very Buddhist; and Simmel’s book does seem to borrow a lot from Buddhist philosophy.  A fascinating read not just for philosophers but for anyone interested in understanding the one thing that takes up so much of our lives.

4. The Man without Money

Sticking to the themes of money and philosophy, how would it be to live your life without any money at all? Henry David Thoreau experimented with the idea and put down his results in his classic Walden.  When one Irish Businessman, Mark Boyle, saw the film Gandhi it changed his life. He decided to act on his long held conviction that money causes a disconnect between us and our actions. The result: he gave up money completely and began to lead a money free life. He not only survived without money but claims to be healthier and happier without it. His experiences are chronicled in his book The Moneyless man: a year of freeconomics ( btw he doesn’t receive any royalty for this book).

P.S:Incidentally Mahatma’s Gandhi’s inspiration for civil disobedience came from some of Thoreau’s writings.

5. A Mighty loss for Indian art and culture

This year saw the passing away of some of the giants of Indian art and culture: M.F.Hussain, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi and Bhupen Hazarika. Among the many accomplishments of Pandit Bhimsen Joshi was the setting up of the Savai Gandharva music festival in Pune in the 1950’s. The Savai Gandharva festival typically takes place in the second week of December and showcases some of India’s best musicians and upcoming talents. After Pandit Joshi’s death the festival was rechristened Savai Gandharva Bhimsen festival. Ashutosh wrote a stirring obituary for Pandit Joshi on criticial twenties which can be found here.

  “Gnothi Seauton”

Inscription on the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

What if I were to tell you that this inscription conveys the greatest problem in the history of philosophy? Intuitively most of us would find it hard to accept. On the face of it this inscription appears to state a pretty effortlessly executable prescription. Knowing oneself seems to be the most obvious knowledge that anyone can have of anything in the world; you need not learn anything or go anywhere to know yourself. However, that cocksure confidence, it turns out, is seriously misplaced. Paradoxically, human beings figure out obscure things easily, it is the most obvious ones that present the hardy perennials of philosophy. In the estimation of philosophers over the millennia, spanning from the Pre-Socratics to Wittgenstein this apparently neat and innocuous question- Who am I?-  nestles  the grandmother of all philosophical problems. The problem is a somewhat slippery one so I will not jump into it straight away. I will begin with its counterpart in human physiology: the problem of blind spots in vision. The physiological problem is much easier to grasp and will give us a better handle on the philosophical problem.

The Eye and the Blind Spot

There is a blind spot in the very centre of our visual field. At certain spots in our vision we just have no retinal stimulation.  To ‘see’ your blindness with your own eyes, try out this experiment. (Please follow the instructions in the opening screen)

You would have noticed the red dot just disappears into the white background. This is because of lack of retinal stimulation: the eye has a blind spot there. But why don’t we just see the blind spot? Why do we see the white background where we should have seen the blind spot in the form of a black hole the size of the red dot? That is because this phenomenon does not involve straightforward blindness in the sense of there being an ‘absence of vision’- it is much more than that. It is blindness plus active obscuring; as you do ‘see’ the white where there previously was a red dot. Almost as though your eye pulls a white veil to cover the blind spot and shows you something that is never even there.  As Roy Sorenson, the Princeton Philosopher puts it:

“Instead of perceiving a black hole where there is no retinal stimulation, the active brain ‘fills in’ the gap in accordance with its surroundings” [in this case the white background].

This optical experiment reveals that perception is not an entirely ‘passive’ phenomena; every perception to a certain extent is also a creation.  This problem is related to some interesting debates in the philosophy of science questioning the extent to which we – to use David Hume’s phrase- ‘gild and stain’ with our minds the ‘reality’ that nature is meant to reveal. The notorious ‘observer effect’ problem in quantum physics is one not so distant cousin. Perhaps a simpler avatar of the problem- and more comprehendible for my types- is the one raised by George Berkley “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Counterintuitive as it first sounded to me when I learnt of the solution, way back in 1886 the Scientific American had answered the question in the negative. No one to hear the sound = the tree makes no sound; as sound needs a medium of perception: the ear.

The Eye, the Blind Spot and Philosophy

You may wonder what does any of this have to do with the problem of knowing oneself.  Arthur Schopenhauer (1841) remarked that ‘I’ is the blind spot in philosophy just like the ‘eye’ had a blind spot. Quite an interesting thought; and the neat use of alliteration involving the ‘I’ and the ‘Eye’. Schopenhauer was fascinated with the idea of the self or ‘I’ and it is at the heart of his philosophy.  Schopenhauer was also a learned scholar of the Upanishads. He even named his pet dog ‘Atman’. In Sanskrit atman means the self or ‘I’.

The ‘eye’ and ‘I’ not only sound similar but if you look closely there is a curious overlap between the properties they have. Having picked it up from Schopenhauer, Ludwig Wittgenstein further developed the idea of this overlap. He said in his Tractatus (1922) that the eye can see everything in the visual field but cannot see itself; and nothing in the visual field can see the eye either. Similarly Wittgenstein notes that ‘I’ observes everything but nothing that is observed by the ‘I’ can observe the ‘I’. Quite literally ‘I’ is the blind spot of philosophy. We will return to Wittgenstein in a bit. But before that it must be pointed out that there is more to the idea of ‘I’ being the blind spot of philosophy. Just like the blind spot of the eye turned out to be blindness plus an active obscuring by the mind- so it is here.

When you ask yourself ‘who am I?’ you don’t just fall into silence; the mind throws out a welter of answers. Just like in case of the eye you don’t see the blind spot but the mind fills it in with the background colour. Just try it for yourself. There are countless candidate answers to the question ‘Who am I?’: ‘I am Indian’, ‘I am a son’, ‘I am John Doe’ ‘I am a husband’ ‘I am this’ and so on and so forth. But this is just yet another instance of the mind ‘filling in’ the blind spot just like it did in the optical experiment. The candidate answers are just so many thoughts; this is the mind actively scrambling the question. The question in the first place is who is ‘I am’? – The answer cannot be another ‘object’ that the ‘I am’ perceives, because the ‘I am’ is still behind it. This is like searching for a lost penny under a street light a mile away from the spot you lost it just because it is pitch dark there. The real thrust of the question is -who is the seer? The answer cannot be- ‘that which is seen by the seer’; and any thought is also seen by the seer. If you are lucky enough to follow Tamil you can see Rajinikant (Yes, the Superstar Rajinikant!) explaining this idea in his inimitable style here in a talk in Singapore.

This has also been the pillar of Buddhist and Advaitic Philosophy. The simple question they pose is: look for yourself- can the seer be seen? At this juncture we must seriously resist the great temptation to churn out conceptual answers because each of these answers is a product of thought and hence all uniformly illusionary. Advaitic philosophy says you must reject every such mental answer you may get. In Sanskrit this method of systematic rejection it is called ‘neti neti’ (neither this nor that). What must remain then after all thought is rejected is thoughtlessness itself: the state of ‘Shunyata’ (Zeroness). Here we are rid of these illusionary answers that masquerade themselves as the ‘I’.

Wittgenstein tackles the issue similarly in the Tractatus. He says that our language is the limit of our thought. Knowing the ‘I’ necessarily involves going beyond the mind. It involves thoughtlessness. Therefore there is no way of conceptually grasping the ‘I’ with language. And this forms the background for arguably the most intriguing aphorism in the history of Western Philosophy: ‘Where of one cannot speak thereof one must pass over in silence’. Wittgenstein ended the Tractatus with these words. Therefore no thought, no words, no language can ever answer the question ‘Who am I?’ for you. This makes the question like no other in Philosophy. For every other question, however difficult, you have at least language at your disposal to think and articulate an answer. Here you don’t even have that. You must remain silent and thoughtless in the face of this question.

“Gnothi Seauton”: An interesting etymology

“Gnothi Seauton”: Know yourself. The noun form of Gnothi is Gnosis. The Greek Gnosis and the Sanskrit word Jnana have a common ancestry having descended from the same word of the proto Indo-European Language. They even mean the same thing. In Sanskrit, Jnana means self-knowledge; not empirical knowledge. The Sanskrit term for empirical knowledge is pratyaksha. The English word ‘know’ comes from Gnosis. Moving eastwards; the word jnana when imported along with Buddhism into China came to be known as Chan. In fact Mahayana Buddhism in China is known as Chan Buddhism. Chan becomes Zen in Japanese. Hence Zen in Japanese also means ‘to know’. Zen is the practice of that very inscription at Delphi: ‘know thyself’.

The Tortoise is the Prime Minister of the Perfectionist Republic of Akrasia.  In his former avatar he was a scholar steeped and dyed in metaphysics and logic, and author of the seminal ‘Studies in Tetrapyloctomy’. He gave up his Professorship in Deflationary Logic to join public life in Akrasia. He has now completed seventeen glorious years in office.

[Note: In Greek, as in Akrasian, the word Akrasia denotes a lack of command over oneself leading to a motivational paralysis. The isomorphism of the Republic’s name with this concept is purely coincidental]

Achilles is a journalist who will be interviewing the Tortoise on some controversial and apparently inexplicable decisions taken by him recently, for which he has come under a lot of criticism.

Achilles and the Tortoise go back a long way. Lewis Carroll chronicled their dialogues on logic which had spanned a few decades. Achilles, who was then a young logician, was trying to impress upon the Tortoise that if he accepted the premises of the argument he must also accept the conclusion. But despite his best efforts Achilles was unable to convince the tortoise that if he accepts that ‘all’ tortoises are mortal then he must also accept that ‘He’, Mr.Tortoise was mortal. The Tortoise expounded eloquently on how one cannot blindly assume that what was true for ‘all’ tortoises was also true of ‘any’ particular tortoise. A dejected Achilles gave up logic and became a journalist.

[Note: A full account of their logical dialogues can be found in Lewis Carroll ‘What the Tortoise Said to Achilles’ Vol 4 Mind (1895) 278.]

—

Interview

Achilles: Good morning, Mr.Tortoise. Let me begin my interview with the customary and now, I am also told, mandatory certificate of honesty. Let it be known that I pay lip service about you being honest, of impeccable integrity, logically above board, and so on and so forth…

Would you like to shed some light on your highly controversial appointment of a goat- a gluttonous one, might I add- as the chief gardener of Akrasia and also on your being pulled up by the Supreme Oracles of Akrasia for that appointment?

Tortoise: Let me begin by paying customary lip service to how much I respect the Supreme Oracles’ judgment etc. With that ritual out of the way let me expound on the logical flaws underlying the verdict.

The ruling will put us on a slippery slope at the end of which I can only see an unimaginable paralysis of government; an akrasia of sorts, if you’ll pardon the pun. Let me explain.  Now someone says goats shouldn’t be gardeners… then you will say dacoits shouldn’t be policemen or still worse that paedophiles shouldn’t be primary school teachers. Where are such arguments going to end?  Knaves shouldn’t be chancellors? Deflationary logicians shouldn’t be Prime Ministers? At this rate governmental machinery will grind to a halt. This is what I was trying to impress upon the Oracles. As I have explained in my seminal, ‘Studies in Tetraplyoctomy’ this is an argument from wishful thinking the grand mother of all clinchers in logic. By the way.. don’t you think it is time my book was admissible evidence before the Oracles?

[Achilles remembers that all elementary books on logic classify the wishful thinking argument as a logical blunder. But he recognizes that as an argument of deflationary logic, it is unimpeachable]

Achilles: But recently after the Oracles decided to send the goat packing you argued before the Parliament that you didn’t know that the goat ate grass and that it would pose a threat to the gardens.

Tortoise: Yes. That is true. I had no idea that the goat in question ate grass. The leader of opposition told me that ‘all’ goats eat grass and this is a goat and so, sure as fate, it will eat grass; hence this goat shouldn’t be made gardener. But, you will no doubt appreciate; this is a far-fetched argument- you cannot leap from ‘all’ goats eat grass to this goat eats grass, just because it is a goat. You had wasted decades trying to prove this obviously flawed argument to me till better sense prevailed. You see the leader of opposition commits the same fallacy. She concludes that what is true of all goats is true of this goat- just because it is a goat. They would benefit greatly from a reading our dialogues as chronicled by Lewis Carroll. I am sure you would whole heartedly agree!

Achilles: But aren’t you contradicting yourself? Your argument before the Oracles was that the goat should be allowed to be gardener despite you knowing that it will eat grass and yet later you argue in the Parliament that you didn’t know that the particular goat in question would eat grass. The implication being that if you knew the goat in question ate grass you would never have appointed it as gardener.  You can’t blow hot and cold in the same breath. Contradiction is the cardinal among logical sins.

Tortoise: [Unfazed] Contradiction is a sin alright but I cannot see why I should be guilty of it. My second argument before the Parliament was without prejudice to the first one before the Oracles. Thus when I make the second argument, you will have to treat the first as a supposition, not an assertion. See… the problem vanishes. There is no contradiction; there can never be. In fact, you cannot accuse me of a contradiction even if I tell you ‘It is raining, but I don’t believe that it is raining’. I can never contradict even when I contradict.

Anyway without prejudice to both the above arguments, I would like to add … no one told me that I was appointing a goat as gardener. See, how smoothly without prejudice arguments work.

Achilles: Left to yourself  who would you have appointed  as gardener?

Tortoise: Only the dullest of minds would let a goat be a gardener when there is a whole range of bovine options to choose from. I would have gone for a fine ‘ruminating’ milch cow , if you’ll pardon the pun.

[Looking back at this argument a few days later Achilles could spot a few dozen flaws.At that moment though, the flaws in this argument succeeded each other so rapidly that his brain was pinged into a cognitive akrasia of sorts disabling him from spotting any of them. The Tortoise's puns also may have contributed to the akrasia]

Achilles: Moving on…You once said you feel that on occasions the Supreme Oracles impede the implementation of your grand metaphysical vision and stop you from turning Akrasia into a haven of deflationary logic. Could you please elaborate on that?

Tortoise: Copy and paste that lip service as a prefix to this answer as well.

Unfortunately they at times end up doing just that. At times the Oracles interfere by taking too practical an approach, in the process glossing over some of the logical complexities surrounding the art and science of governance. Take for instance that order on distributing grains gloriously ageing in the granary.

Achilles: Isn’t ‘ageing’ just a euphemism for saying that those grains were ‘rotting’? Surely the Oracles were right on this. Why let the grains rot when there are millions starving? In what world would that be Constitutionally justified?

Tortoise: You too, just like the Oracles, gild and stain the issue with your emotion. Let me give you a logically impeccable justification. The granary is a functional concept. Like the knife is there to cut, and the clock to keep time, the granary is there to stock grains. A granary which does not stock grains falls short of its Platonic ideal of being full of grains. Hence when our granaries were full, we thought it would be a matter for celebration: the moment when a functional concept lives up to its Platonic ideal. To translate for the less Platonically inclined, It is the metaphysical equivalent of winning the world cup. But the Oracles broke up the party. They failed to grasp the subtle logic. All they wanted was for the granaries to be emptied. But isn’t that a violation of a metaphysical right of a functional concept? Metaphysical rights vs conventional constitutional rights? Hardly a choice, is there? One is sewn into the fabric of the cosmos, the other a mere mortal invention. I appreciate that this is a subtle argument; one that is not intuitively easy to grasp; but nevertheless it is valid. You tell me what use is a Prime Minister if he doesn’t do the logically and metaphysically right thing? You could  get a soap opera star to run things for you if all you wanted was gilding and staining with tears and emotion and let logic go… to the place where Plato currently is.

[Achilles is not convinced; but for a moment is unsure where the Tortoise was going wrong. It was to strike him later that of course Platonism was the metaphysical equivalent of a conjurer’s sleight of hand. He gets a little annoyed with the Tortoise. He must act tougher with the Tortoise he thinks. He is instanly reminded of a very blunt interviewer who he admires a lot. He then decides that being blunt is the only way he can put the Tortoise in a spot]

Achilles: A very serious allegation has surfaced recently. The charge is that three years ago you bribed some parliamentarians to keep you in power . I want to ask you just one blunt question- Did you not bribe them?

Tortoise: Achilles you ask me two questions in the garb of one. I will split the question into two and answer them separately. The first question – is it true that I bribed them? And the second- Did ‘I’ bribe them?

Let me answer the first question first. Well …actually your first question is premised on a logical error- that things can be only either true or false- and so I don’t really need to answer it. But let me answer it without prejudice anyway.  You err because you  don’t allow for the possibility of the middle way – where things could be neither true nor false, both true and false and either both true and false and neither true nor false.  Please refer to my ‘Studies in Tetraplyoctomy’ which outlines a system of logic far superior to your naïve and monotonous logic which only allows for true or false.

We have a nifty way for stating this middle position- we say we can neither confirm nor deny. You will find my government employing this phrase to good effect. And my answer to your first question is – I can neither confirm nor deny.

Now on to your second question- Did ‘I’ bribe them? Again you err logically in posing this question. Because you presuppose that the same ‘I’ which existed three years back is the same ‘I’ that exists before you now. Since you gave up logic, you have missed the seminal works on Tionian and Uqbarian logic which establish conclusively that no entity can exist through a period of time. Thus the ‘I’ that is accused of bribery three years ago is no longer in existence and this ‘I’ can hardly be blamed for what that ‘I’ did. As good old Heraclitus once said ‘ you don’t step into the same river twice’. For those uninitiated in this logic, the Tionian and Uqbarian rule is the metaphysical equivalent of a statute of limitations: a time bar of sorts. Just yesterday I appeared in the Parliament and stated this proposition beautifully. I said  you cannot try to hold me responsible for what may have been done by the time barred ‘me’ three years ago. The river has flown below that bridge no less than three years ago, if you’ll pardon the pun.

[Achilles is unsure what annoys him more: the Tortoise's bizarre metaphysical argument or his puns. He is tempted to press the Tortoise on this queer metaphysical statute of limitation, which he takes to be the grand father of all bizarre arguments;too bizarre even by the pretty bizarre standards of the rest of the Tortoise's bizarre arguments . But he feels compelled not to, as time is running out, and he has quite a few blunt questions to go through]

Achilles: Are you suggesting that there is no way in which we could question the time barred ‘you’ for your alleged actions?

Tortoise: I never meant to say that. I am always accountable in theory to the great nation of Akrasia. Of course that ‘I’ who may or may not have bribed may or may not be responsible, depending on whether that ‘I’ bribed or not. Fortunately there is a way of finding out. It is possible to travel backwards in time, hold an enquiry and also administer punishment to me retrospectively if I am found guilty.

I am also happy to report to you that I appointed a fiercely independent commission that travelled backwards in time, held an enquiry and pronounced me not guilty. If the time barred ‘I’ was guilty, the time barred ‘I’ would have forthwith( in past tense) handed in ‘my’ resignation to the time barred Parliament of three years ago. I hardly need to add, even had I done that ‘I’ would still be Prime Minister today. So even if my former ‘I’ was guilty, it would be silly to ask me to resign now. Without prejudice, of course, I can neither confirm nor deny the guilt of the former ‘me’.

Achilles: Are you going to table that report in the Parliament?

Tortoise: Of course I did retrospectively table the report… in the time barred Parliament. You are free to read a copy by travelling backwards in time. As you know we take right to information very seriously.

Achilles: But there is one problem with your account. We have not developed a time travel mechanism as yet.

Tortoise: I am aware there is not one as yet. But when did I ever claim that I used a time travel machine which is available at present?

[Achilles is really keen on pressing the Tortoise on this cryptic suggestion. Unfortunately though, the time slotted for the interview runs out and the Tortoise has to meet his dear friend the President of The Republic Dystopia who on a state visit to Akrasia.

On his way back home Achilles is reminded of the closing passage from ‘Studies in Tetraplyoctomy’ which has now become the motto of many a doctoral thesis in Akrasia.

“We only speak of that which we cannot speak of...

... Let truth and silence alike fry in...

that place where Plato currently resides”

Note: The isomorphism of the concept of dystopia with the Republic of Dystopia is not at all coincidental]

Advocate, Madras High Court

The Jasmine revolution in Tunisia and the domino effect it has had in many countries of the Arab world is symbolic of two powerful forces: the power of the internet and that the power of knowledge. Set off by simple incidents of abuse of power by state authorities, the movement has created tidal waves all throughout the world and all in a matter of a few days. No longer can rulers keep the governed ignorant of the happenings in other parts of the world. The Internet is a game changer like few we have ever seen before. It is the most equalising and homogenising force the world has seen since the invention of the printing press. Its nature is such that dictators (or State power of any character or political subscription) cannot censor or control.

Popular uprisings of this kind are a warning to rulers everywhere (I deliberately don’t say dictators because it is a warning to democratic rulers also) that the impatience of youth will not allow you to amass riches without ensuring the general prosperity of the general citizenry.

And rulers like Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak have vastly underestimated the power and the influence of this force. From their reactions, it also seems that they have been caught unawares by the sheer speed with which the anger and protests spread through social networking sites and e-mails.

But anger is not conducive to nation building. While, it is heartening to see a million people gather in Tahrir square holding their rulers to account for more than 30 years of misgovernance, there is also much to fear and to plan for. Glasnost and Perestroika must go together.

Anger against the present form of government may not mean unity or agreement in the manner of change. History teaches us that revolutions that are not inclusive will not sustain. For this, leaders who can temper the mob fury and calm the storm, uniting the various sections of society are required.  Very often, spontaneous revolutions do not give the breathing space where future leaders can be groomed. Much thought and deliberation must go into fashioning a new order that is suited to the unique genius of the people. The need of the hour is for leaders who can dream ahead and holistically create independent institutions with a system of checks and balances – and, most importantly, leaders who will not be moved by the passions of the mob for quick solutions.  But at the same time they must be able to command the legitimacy and trust of the people.

That is why many revolutions of the past only led to new dictatorships,  sometimes more sinister than the rulers they displaced.  It is the story of the first half of the twentieth century illustrated where popular revolutions were merely replaced by more sinister communist regimes which adopted the methods and tools of the past rulers while compromising on their ideals. (Satirised, so brilliantly by George Orwell in Animal Farm). Popular anger is not conducive to nation building.

The constitution making processes of the United States of America, India and South Africa are example of countries which changed their constitutional orders after a long struggle. They are not perfect but relatively stable because the struggle threw up many leaders in a variety of fields. In the case of India, it allowed the creation of a nation state and a constitution which has survived its critics and its own fissiparous tendencies for more than 60 years.  In contrast, Pakistan did not succeed because the gestation period for the movement did not give enough time for the creation and the overpowering image of Jinnah did not allow a second rung of leadership to grow. The refusal of George Washington to run for a third term and Nelson Mandela are decisions of far-seeing leaders who are conscious of their importance in their nation’s life. Their death whilst in office would have created a void that their newly created constitutions might not have survived.

Similarly, most of the former colonies given independence after the second world war in the spirit of the policy of self determination ushered in by the by the newly formed United Nation lost their way. This was primarily attributed to the fact that their creation was more a reflection of the demise of colonialism than the creation of a new national spirit. Independence was thrust upon them without the necessary presence of leadership.

Power is an aphrodisiac like no other. Dictators, like old soldiers, do not give up easily. The lure and trapping of power, sustained over time, deludes them into thinking that it is theirs by divine right.  While the popular pressure for their removal must be maintained, it is important that this time is used to prepare the next generation of leadership and to select leaders who are ready, willing and capable of guiding the transitioning to a new order – hopefully more just and responsive than the last. If this is not done, then it will only be old wine in a new bottle, or should we say the same despotism with a new face!

So Celebrate the revolution not on the day of deliverance from the past or ‘independence’, but on the day that the people are able to put in place a responsible transitional government. For that the passions of the mob in Tahrir square and elsewhere might have to be tempered and channelled.

‘He stole the idea from my subconscious.’ Just the sort of proposition you would have expected on the lips of a character from Inception. These words, however, are the legendary artist Salvador Dali’s; and he uttered them in all seriousness midway through the 1936 premiere of Joseph Cornell’s experimental film Rose Hobart while his hands were busy vandalizing the projector. Dali sincerely believed that he had conceived the whole of Rose Hobart down to the last detail- all in his head- but never committed it to script or discussed it with anyone; and that Cornell invaded his subconscious and stole the idea.  Never before or since has the claim of invading the subconscious and stealing an idea been made either in life or fiction, until Inception. The idea of ‘invading the subconscious’ isn’t the only connection between Salvador Dali and Inception.  Some of the themes in Inception are so evidently inspired by Dali, particularly his painting, ‘Flight of a bee’, that it comes to me as a surprise that the link between two has been hardly touched upon by commentators and critics. Whatever discussion there is invoking Dali and Inception in the same breath restricts itself to general observations of the commonality of an abstract theme: surrealism. While Dali, of course, looms large over the film, there are two other sources that Inception has been inspired by: M.C. Escher, the Dutch artist and master of illusions and Yoga Vasistha, an ancient Indian philosophical text discussing the nature of reality and illusions.

M.C. Escher

Escher was the most ostensible of Inception’s inspirations. Escher was a master of illusion. Most of his works on first glance look straightforward, but on closer inspection they reveal a deep paradox, depicting concepts that are logically and physically impossible. Escher played and twisted with notions of dimensions and space creating impossibly paradoxical, mind boggling works of art. In his Pulitzer winning Godel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid  , Douglas Hofstadter says about Escher’s art:

‘…the viewer cannot help getting caught up in Escher’s implied chain of levels, in which for any level there is always another level of greater reality; and likewise there is always a level below ‘more imaginary’ than it is. This can be mind boggling in itself. However, what happens if the chains of levels is not linear but forms a loop?  What is real then and what is fantasy?’

Inception wears Escher’s influence on its sleeve. Scenes from the movie have been picked straight out of Escher’s works with little or no change. Let’s take a look at two sketches: ‘Relativity’ and ‘Ascending Descending’ and see how they recur in Inception.

In ‘Ascending and Descending’ (top figure) the outer ring of monks are all seen ascending a loop of stairs and the inner ring of monks are all seen descending the loop. The monks traverse the same steps, but no matter how many loops they complete they end up back at the beginning, and the journey repeats itself. Regardless of whether they ascend or descend, the monks tread the same ground, ad infinitum. But how could there be a closed loop of stairs all going upwards or downwards? The very thought is paradoxical. The idea was originally that of Roger Penrose a British Mathematician (1958) and hence the loop of stairs is also commonly known as the Penrose stairs. The Penrose stairs is seen twice in Inception.  We first get to see it when Arthur takes Ariadne on a tour introducing her to possible architectural models, right after she is inducted in their team. They are seen climbing the Penrose stairs which appear to be paradoxically, all ascending in a closed loop. Arthur also reveals how the paradox of the stairs is ‘dissolved’. If you want know how the paradox behind the Penrose stairs is ‘dissolved’ look here. Interestingly, Arthur also reveals the same solution.

In ‘Relativity’ (bottom figure) Escher plays with our orientation of dimensions. We just cannot be sure where the ground is and where the sky is. The feet of the characters in ‘Relativity’ could well be planted in the sky but one man’s sky is the other man’s ground: another paradoxical thought. ‘Relativity’ is portrayed extensively in a succession of scenes in which Cobb introduces Ariadne to the basics of creating architecture for a dream. When they are walking the streets of Paris, the ground folds up, and becomes the sky. Buildings are seen inverted. Roads with cars running on them are seen in the sky. When Cobb and Ariadne begin walking, they climb up vertical roads and walk just as they would on the ground, just like the characters from ‘Relativity’. So deep is the influence of ‘Relativity’ on Inception that even its promotional posters were influenced by it. See the poster of Inception at the top of the page.

Salvador Dali

Dali was a master of surrealist art and explored a number of metaphysical and psychological themes; but none more admirably than dreams.  Dreams were Dali’s favourite subject and his paintings revealed his fascination with them. As Dali never used drugs like LSD, he had to completely rely on dreams for inspiration. With practice, he learnt to dream lucidly and was able to stay in the hypnologic state between waking and dreaming. He was also a well-read follower of Sigmund Freud and was inspired by his works on dreams.

The one work of Dali that plays out repeatedly throughout Inception is ‘Flight of a Bee’. Unlike  Escher’s patent influence on Inception , Dali’s influence, is latent, even subtle, though no less significant than Escher’s.

“Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second before Awakening” (1944),

This painting represents how an event which causes us to wake up in the ‘real’ world appears to us in our dream just before we wake up.  The experience may be familiar to some of us. When the alarm clock  on the bed side tablerings, it may trigger a dream of birds chirping or someone pushing us or the like; the dream event that startles us, culminates in our waking up. The dream event in turn is triggered by some event in the real world.

Here in this painting the lady, Gala [Dali’s wife] is seen sleeping. A bee is hovering over a pomegranate lying next to her. The sound of the humming of the bee would eventually wake Gala. But that sound triggers a flurry of scenes in Gala’s dream. Tigers appear with a bayonet out of a pomegranate and it is the sting of the bayonet or the fear of the tigers pouncing on her, or possibly a combination of the two, that will wake up Gala. It is the sound of the bee hovering over the fruit that ‘actually’ wakes her up but sound manifests in the form of the pouncing tigers and the bayonet in her dream.

Dali explains the idea behind the painting :

“[It was intended] to express for the first time in images Freud’s discovery of the typical dream with a lengthy narrative, the consequence of the instantaneousness of a chance event which causes the sleeper to wake up. Thus, as a bar might fall on the neck of a sleeping person, causing them to wake up and for a long dream to end with the guillotine blade falling on them, the noise of the bee here provokes the sensation of the sting which will awaken Gala.”

Permit me a small digression from Dali here. In the opening passage of Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky explores the very same Freudian idea. She writes of how the noise created by a midnight air raid by the German Luftwaffe manifests itself in the dreams of the sleeping Parisians:

‘those still,  asleep dreamed of waves breaking over pebbles, a march storm whipping the woods, a herd of cows trampling the ground with their hooves until finally sleep was shaken off and they struggled to open their eyes murmuring, ‘Is it an air raid’?

Now what does ‘Flight of a Bee’ have to do with Inception? Inception is replete with scenes which depict this idea. In one of the early scenes when Arthur wants to wake Cobb up from his sleep, he pushes him into a bath tub. In his dream Cobb finds himself in the middle of a grand room with water gushing in from all directions and flooding the entire room. The event that triggers the waking up is Arthur pushing him into the tub. But this manifests itself in Cobb’s dream in the form of water gushing in from all directions and flooding the room. In another scene Cobb and his crew are in the van being chased by some armed men. It starts raining heavily and the driver of the van (Yusuf) is forced to drive the van precariously; swerving it violently and abruptly. This event manifests itself in the dream one level below. One level below in the dream, where Cobb is seated with Robert Fischer in a pub, it starts raining outside and the entire place starts shaking. These are manifestations in the dream of something happening ‘one level up’ in the van. The again when the van is falling off the river into the bridge, the fall manifests itself in the dream one level down. In the dream the fall manifests itself in the form of a contortion of gravity. Arthur is seeing fighting whilst defying gravity. In the dream two levels it manifests as avalanches.

Yoga Vasistha

The final inspiration for Inception is Yoga Vasistha: an ancient Indian philosophical text discussing the nature of reality and illusion (maya). The book is in the form of a dialogue between a young Rama and his spiritual preceptor, Sage Vasistha. Vasistha narrates several tales to Rama to emphasize the illusionary nature of the universe. Many of the tales focus on the subject of dreams.  They are paradoxical and tease the logical mind. One of the stories in the book is that of Lilavati. Vasistha narrates the tale of a lady taking several births and dying several times and then being a born as a queen. One day she goes off to sleep and dreams of living out her life and then dying and then being re born yet again as a holy man and living to a ripe age and then dying again. Vasistha then tells Rama that all of this was happening in a dream inside a dream inside a dream while the ‘original’ dreamer was a poor lady who was lying on a straw bed in her hut and had been asleep for only a few minutes. The starting point of the narration, it turns out was already inside a dream. The young Rama is thoroughly perplexed. He asks Vasistha how the lady could dream of epochs while she had been asleep for only a few minutes. Vasistha replies that in dreams time is distorted; in a moment of a dream an epoch can be dreamt of. Vasistha also says that while lying in a hut the lady dreamt of being a queen of vast kingdoms and then losing them all.

Inception has very similar ideas. First, it has the idea of levels of dreams, with dreams inside dreams of the sort that Yoga Vasistha talks of. Inception also explores the theme of distortion of time in dreams. They however, beat Vasistha at his game as they have ready reckoners for time distortion calculations: they are able to compute with confidence, one minute in real time is 5 minutes one dream level down and hour two dream levels down and so on and so forth.  The distortion reckoners aside, the idea is similar in nature to Vasistha’s.

In the Radia tapes, Barkha Dutt is seen holding out on behalf of the Congress in portfolio negotiations with the DMK. Few of us would have been this outraged had a Jaya TV or Sun TV journalist held out for AIADMK or DMK like Barkha Dutt is seen doing. But then these Jaya and Sun TV folks openly pin their party cards to their jackets. We know that we must take whatever these chaps say with a sack-full of salt. We hardly expect them to be serious independent journalists. None of them even pretends to be beyond reproach. But such behaviour ill behooves someone who claims to be of impeccable integrity and was honoured with a Padmasri (for her integrity one would have liked to believe). Barkha Dutt and NDTV shape the opinions of millions of Indians and they do that on the claim to clean and impartial journalism. Were it to be a well -known fact that she was holding out for a political party or corporate house, NDTV would no more have shaped our opinion than Saamna does.  Just like a judge who is seen to be affiliated to a political party loses all his credibility, so does a journalist. It is to prevent the definite erosion of faith in NDTV & co, that an exposure of these tapes may cause, that such a concerted effort is being made to bury the story.

Barkha Dutt however thinks she did no wrong. Oddly, despite her confident conviction in her innocence, she tweets her defense rather than bravely discuss it on air:

“I think there is nothing wrong in stringing along a source for info… I think EVERY journo has the right to engage a source, its NO CRIME … as a matter of record, I never passed the message. But info sharing per se is not immoral in a fluid news situation”

Does Barkha Dutt seriously think this provides her with a kosher defence? Does Barkha Dutt really appear to be stringing along a source for information? In the tapes Barkha Dutt gives every impression of someone who was holding out on behalf of the Congress. Her demeanour appears to be of one who is at ease in the power broking game. The fact that a dyed in the wool lobby shark like Radia contacts her for sealing a portfolio deal is enough to show that she is perceived as a reliable conduit to the Congress in power broking circles- whether or not she really is one. Such a perception could not have evolved spontaneously with Barkha Dutt giving Radia the impression in course of their telephone conversations over the course of two days. The more plausible and likely explanation is that Barkha must have consistently worked hard to earn that reputation over a course of time. Had Barkha not found to have been effective previously, Radia wouldn’t have approached her in a crisis. Besides Radia is not just any ordinary ‘source’; she is a mighty power broker who knows the game and knows just which string to pull when, as her phone calls to several people reveal.  Whatever appeal that ‘stringing the source argument’ might have had, dissipates rapidly when we realize that a shark like Radia wouldn’t in such a fluid situation – one where her corporate client’s interests are at stake in ensuring that Maran doesn’t get the Telecom ministry- go on a random fishing expedition and approach someone who she knew wasn’t a reliable conduit to the Congress. The fact she turns to Barkha in a political logjam  to get to the Congress gives us licence to infer that she must have done a pretty good job at getting to the Congress on previous oocasions. Also pause to consider the perception that Radia had of Barkha Dutt. When referring to the information she received from Barkha Dutt, in her conversation with an India Today journalist, Radia alludes to Barkha as her ‘Congress Source’ without naming her; the information that she attributes to the ‘congress source’ is the very information she gets from Barkha in one of the previous conversations. Again in her conversation with Ranjan Bhattacharya (Vajpayee’s son in law) she says that Barkha will get a statement from Congress as directed by her. All this shows that regardless of what Barkha Dutt may claim, there was a perception in the power broking circles that she held out for the Congress. Barkha Dutt’s other claim, that she never relayed the information, doesn’t seem any more plausible. She had six separate conversations with Radia bringing in new information in each of the conversations and also assuring to relay information to the party high command. Barkha Dutt enquires what should she convey to the party high command and also relays back the mind of the party high command. Some of the conversations are sampled here:

RADIA: And Congress is sending messages through media and through various sources, saying that. And Maran is telling everyone that he is the only acceptable person.

BARKHA: Person, yeah, yeah, yeah. That I know.

RADIA: But that’s not correct, naa?

BARKHA: No, I know. We’ve taken that off. We’ve taken that off.

Here Barkha Dutt is referring to the news that Congress wants Maran as minister and when Radia tells her that it is hampering the deal, she says that WE [Congress? or NDTV?] have taken off that story. Soon thereafter:

BARKHA: Okay. Let me talk to them again.

RADIA: Yeah? The choice of candidate we will leave to you. We have some reservation about Baalu. And let them tell the reservation. And we have not said anything about Maran. We are not talking

I don’t want to make too much of Radia saying here to Barkha ‘the choice of candidates we leave to you’ for the identification could just be a semantic point; but put in context it shows that Radia saw in Barkha Dutt a reliable conduit to the Congress and hence the identification of Barkha with Congress . And then when Barkha Dutt’s assures to ‘set up’ a meeting it does appear to be as res ipsa loquitor as it gets:

BARKHA: No, I’ll set it up as soon as they get out of RCR.

RADIA: What she saying is that, you know, that someone senior like Ghulam [Nabi Azad, senior Congress leader]—because he is the one who is authorised to speak. ….

BARKHA: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

RADIA: Right? Was to speak to her then she can tell her father that I have got this message from the Congress.

BARKHA: Theek hai, not a problem. That’s not a problem, I’ll talk to Azad—I’ll talk to Azad right after I get out of RCR [Race Course Road, presumably, the PM’s residence].

Vir Sanghvi’s is more of an open and shut case than Barkha Dutt’s. Of course on the portfolio-Congress story Sanghvi has the exact same implausible defence that Barkha has. Though the specifics of the stories differ what was said about Barkha Dutt applies with cosmetic alterations to Sanghvi as well. But Sanghvi has also been seen colluding with Radia to spin stories for Mukesh Ambani. He doesn’t even make an attempt to explain this conversation he had with Radia instead explaining some other easier case from which he could hope to escape easily:

VIR: ….You can work out a script in advance. You can go exactly according to the script. Anil can’t do any of those things, no?

RADIA: Right. But we can do that, no?

VIR: Yeah.

RADIA:Yeah?

VIR: But Mukesh has to be on board. He has to sort of realise. It has to be fully scripted.

RADIA: No, that’s what I mean. I think that’s what he’s asking me.

VIR: Yes, it has to be fully scripted.

RADIA: He is saying is that, ‘Look Niira’, that ‘I don’t want anything extempore.’

VIR: No, it has to be fully scripted. I have to come in and do a run through with him before.

RADIA: Yeah, yeah.

VIR: We have to rehearse it before the cameras come in

Vir Sanghvi will find that he needs to put a lot more spin to oil out of this one. At places Vir Sanghvi is heard telling Radia that in spinning stories for Mukesh Ambani he can’t seem ‘too tilted’. This is just the smoke screen of integrity I have been referring to, all along. While they serve their corporate and political masters, they also want to be seen as being impartial and honest. If these conversations go out to millions through the mainstream media, who will take this man seriously ever again?

Rajdeep Sardesai, who is also heard in the one of the tapes agreeing to be “briefed” on a story by Radia, has come to defend Barkha Dutt and Sanghvi by enunciating a lofty moral principle which he thinks is dispositive of the case.He tweets:

” conversation between source and journo is legitimate. if quid pro quo is shown, expose it. else, dont destroy hard earned reputations”

If Mr.Sardesai does indeed think that there is nothing wrong with what these people have done, then why doesn’t his channel air those tapes and then try convincing people that there was nothing wrong in what they saw? Rajdeep Sardesai knows only too well that perception of impartiality is what makes his friends’ news shops run. If the tapes are run on air, people will stop buying the ‘custom made’ news wares they peddle.

The question is- should the historicity of Rama matter to someone taking himself to be a Hindu? Of course I am painfully aware of how this question has in fact mattered in the past to some Hindus. Had it not mattered to some of them, they wouldn’t have been moved to demolishing a mosque standing at a place, they believed to be Ramjanmabhoomi. There are many Hindus to whom it the historicity of Rama matters, though they would not in the least approve of the demolition of the mosque. But my question is this – Should it matter to any Hindu whether Rama was a historical figure? This question subsumes some cognate ones. If it were to turn out that the historicity of Rama shouldn’t matter, it also shouldn’t matter whether they get his birthplace right and have a temple for him there. I am here inviting you to a discussion at the end of which we would have hopefully made the question of the historicity of Rama redundant. That will tell us how the Ramjanmabhoomi issue could be made redundant.

There is a general lack of awareness, let alone proper understanding, amongst Hindus of what Hinduism is all about. It is too much to expect the layman to have read the Upanishads. The Bhagavad Gita is the closest that one gets to an authoritative and somewhat comprehensive summary of the Upanishadic philosophy.  In a typical kirana (grocer’s) shop, you will find above the till (galla), somewhere between the biscuit shelf and the peanut jar, a nail with a calendar hanging from it containing a Gita Saar ( a summary of the Bhagavad Gita) in not more than 10 bullet points.   I can wager an arm and a leg that even Krishna cannot come up with a 10 point summary of the Bhagavad Gita – a complex many layered philosophical work – with a modicum of sense or coherence. Unfortunately the knowledge of many Hindus of the Bhagavad Gita, or at any rate of those who lose their night’s sleep over the historicity of Rama, is worse than what can be had from the one page Gita Saar.

Had they ( the one’s to whom the historicity of Rama matters) bothered to inquire why should Rama matter in the first place, they could have consulted the Bhagavad Gita and turned to chapter XII on Bhakti Yoga (path of devotion); after all isn’t it out of bhakti (devotion) that the need to worship Rama and the need for a Rama temple is felt?  Why should Rama matter if not for Bhakti? But what is Bhakti or devotion and what does it entail?  Some context of the structure of the Gita is important to appreciate this.  The point of the Bhagavad Gita is to suggest tentative paths to ‘yoga’ (union) for the individual consciousness (ego) to rid itself of its shackles of samsara and restore it to its ever abiding true state of Brahman. The central message of the Gita is that Yoga can be complete only when the ego is quelled. As Ramana Maharishi points out ‘yoga’ is ceasing to think that you are an individual ego separate from reality. All the major paths of knowledge(jnana), devotion(bhakti) and action(karma), discussed in the Gita are all meant to achieve the very same end, namely to quell the ego. This must be read in the background of the overarching concept of maya- according to which all manifestation is an illusion. In short anything perceived as real is illusionary. Let me tell you something that follows straightaway from this. If there were figures such as Rama and Kirshna in human form, they were just as much a product of maya as anything else phenomenal in the universe.

The idea of a diety or god like Rama or Krishna is relevant only for someone who takes the Bhakti marga (the path of devotion). Someone walking on the Jnana marga doesn’t need Krishna or Rama and could very well be an atheist. Let us forget Janana marga and focus on Bhakti marga alone. As Krishna says, the goal of path of devotion or bhakti is to surrender the self completely to the imperishable,indefinable,unmanifest,the omnipresent, unthinkable’ Brahman. But Krishna recognizes that the path of knowledge is a particularly difficult one because it is difficult to set one’s mind on the unmanifested and unthinkable. As an alternative he suggests treating HIM as a placeholder or symbol for the unthinkable, ineffable Brahman and by worshipping HIM, effacing the ego. As Ramanuja sums up Bhakti is “Joining the mind with devotion to that which is not Brahman, taking it to be Brahman”. Verily worship is the process of the distinction between the thinker and thought (god) merging. Eventually even the god is a mental idea and the thought of the god has also to disappear for there to be yoga or realization. These so called ‘gods’ are mere postulates, fictions and place holders for the ultimate Brahman (truth). They are, to use a popular Vedantic and Buddhist analogy, rafts for crossing the river of samsara and are to be abandoned when on the other side. Further to what I said earlier I would add, Rama and Krishna are relevant only for Bhakti. But for Bhakti, they wouldn’t be needed. If not for Bhakti why does a Hindu need Rama?

This is what Swami Vivekananda has to say about Bhakti Yoga:

“One thing, therefore, has to be carefully borne in mind. If, as it may happen in some cases, the highly philosophic ideal, the supreme Brahman, is dragged down by Pratika–worship ( worship of a god with a form) to the level of the Pratika, and the Pratika itself is taken to be the Atman…the worshipper gets entirely misled, as no Pratika can really be the Atman… But where Brahman Himself is the object of worship, and the Pratika stands only as a substitute or a suggestion thereof, that is to say, where, through the Pratika the omnipresent Brahman is worshipped”

Rama, Krishna and all other so called ‘gods’, are symbols of the ineffable, ultimate truth. They should not be confused with the truth itself as Vivekananda says. Whether these were also ‘real’ men or not is hopelessly irrelevant. If they were men they were as much a play of maya as anything phenomenal; and truth is the dissolution of maya. Thus real worship would entail treating these men Rama and Krishna like any other object of maya. Their being historic men adds no value to their symbolism. They may or may not have been living human beings. But their function as symbols has nothing to do with their historicity.

Finding out where they were born is silly. And thinking that they can be worshipped only at that place is bordering the insane. And to think that goal must be achieved at any cost, is definitely insane. Worship is nothing but surrendering the ego. How is that purpose furthered in any way by establishing where a symbol is born and have a temple at a specific place for the symbol? I recognize the importance of temples and rituals and all of that in the bhakti marga, but the historicity of any god is never of any relevance. For a Hindu, or at any rate, one who is interested in ‘Yoga’ the Ramajanmabhoomi issue would be nothing but a silly distraction.

Anticipating an objection

I feel compelled to anticipate and meet before hand one kind of objection to what I have said here. It could be objected – This is your interpretation of Hinduism; but different people have different interpretations; how do you know yours is the right one? I am aware of similar debates surrounding the interpretation of scriptures of other religions.

To the objector I have only one thing to say. Please give me your interpretation and do nothing more than name the scripture you base your interpretation on. In case of most “interpretations” of Hinduism it turns out that people form opinions out of folk concepts, without ever having bothered to read any scripture. In other words they turn out to be ‘superstitions’ and not interpretations at all.  The best example of this is the concept of Karma the popular understanding of which is the exact opposite of what Krishna says in the Gita. Then the dispute here would between an interpretation and a mere superstition or pop conception. An objector basing his objection on such superstition would not be disagreeing with me but altogether talking past me.

The argument against  

Those opposed to expressions like ‘Hindu terror’ and ‘Islamic terror’, rely on some rather overworked- but on the whole, sound – platitudes: ‘terrorism knows no religion’; ‘terrorists belong to no religion’. Their objection, albeit obscured by these platitudes, is an understandable one: in using terms like ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Hindu terrorism’, one inadvertently projects the moral failings of few on to the entire community thus setting up an unreasonable guilt by association. Still worse, such phrases carry the implication that the religious beliefs of a few rogues, some how represent the ‘true’ belief system of the religion. There is no denying the fact that expressions such as these do at the very least carry a conversational implication of this sort, even if the speaker using such expressions may not intend his words to do so. And most significantly, this sort of language causes pain to the majority of reasonable right thinking adherents of a religion, who have nothing to do with these deviants or their misguided beliefs.

 The simple solution: No solution at all 

Before we proceed, let us dismiss one putative solution to this problem. The all too simple solution, prompted by the objections identified earlier is- simply stop using such expressions. Just call terrorists, whatever their religious motivations, as terrorists simplicter without specifying the (religious) source they take as justification for terror. No doubt this simple- even simplistic- solution would put to rest the problem of political correctness. But this solution comes at a heavy price: one that we can ill afford. It is a sad truism about our world that people terrorize and kill, ‘believing’ sincerely that their religion injuncts them to do so.  I doubt that any religion, properly understood would encourage wanton gratuitous killing. But what a religion ‘truly’ requires, as properly understood, is beside the point. We are talking here about people who understand their religion in a particular way, though ‘objectively’, ‘truly’ such an understanding may be deeply flawed.  It is a harsh fact that some people, however misguidedly, believe that their religions injunct them to kill and ‘take’ it as a justification for terror. This is a real problem facing us today; a problem we need to tackle with great intent and alacrity. I will have nothing to say here about how this larger problem can be addressed. However, we can make no progress is tackling this problem unless we can have an honest and open discourse on these matters. How is honest discourse possible if those in public life are prevented from naming the source these terrorists ‘take’ as their justification for terror? If we cannot speak about it or discuss it, we cannot expect to arrive at solutions to the problem. Effective governmental interference would come to a grinding halt if it could not ‘describe’ a problem for what it really is.  Thus the simple solution is no solution at all.

As with all hardy perennials, we find some sense in both sides of the argument. How does one reconcile this apparently intractable conflict? We must begin by reflecting on the nature of our language as the origins of the problem we encounter here, and also its solution, lie deeply embedded in our language. Let me set out the nature of problem before proceeding to propose a solution to it.

Language and emotion

Some words are used to purely ‘describe’ objects by designating some of its characteristics. This is a point so obvious that it hardly needs stressing. As examples of ‘descriptive’ words we could take ‘Scottish’, ‘British’ or ‘Indian’. In addition to such descriptive words we also have words that though apparently descriptive carry an emotive aspect; they ‘imply’ that the speaker using the word is expressing his condemnation or admiration of a certain object. Note that these words ‘imply’ an attitude of condemnation or admiration by the speaker: the speaker’s actual intentions are irrelevant. This was famously termed by the philosophers C.K.Odgen and I.A.Richards as ‘emotive’ meaning in their classic The Meaning of Meaning. Consider the word ‘Kraut’. For many years this word was used as a purely descriptive word to denote a person of German descent just like Scottish or British. However at some point, a negative emotive component came to be associated with the word such that a person using the word Kraut, was by conventional implication expressing an unfavourable, condescending attitude towards Germans. In America, the N word, now thought too despicable to even find mention, was used to describe people of a certain race. But when the N word came to be associated with a negative attitude towards the people of the race it stood for, it was replaced by the descriptive word ‘black’. ‘Black’ for some time continued to be a purely descriptive word. But then a negative emotive meaning came to be associated with that word and has now been replaced with the descriptive word African American. What is commonly understood as political incorrectness is a process of avoiding words with a negative emotive element and carrying on discourse by replacing such emotive words with descriptive ones.

It must be noted- and this is crucial- that what the speaker actually (privately) intends in using these ‘emotive’ words is not material at all. All that matters is that conventionally these words are taken by the society as a whole to mean something condescending or derogatory. The emotive meaning of words is fixed by how it is conventionally understood by the people who hear it. To think otherwise would be falling into Humpty Dumpty’s fallacy in Through the looking Glass. Humpty Dumpty says to Alice ‘when I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ To which Alice replies `The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ One doesn’t have to be a professional logician to figure out that Alice is obviously right.

These examples show us that what politicians or journalists actually believe and intend while using phrases like ‘Islamic terror’ or ‘Hindu terror’ does not matter to what these expressions mean. The fact remains that the word ‘terror’ has the most negative of emotive meanings and when coupled with ‘Islam’ or ‘Hinduism’ it carries with it serious derogatory implications for the members of those religious denominations. These expressions predicate terror of a certain religion. They project the attitude of disapproval associated with the most emotive of terms ‘terrorism’ on to the religion. It is understood by the general public as an expression of condescension or disapproval towards their religion and their beliefs. These words carry a seriously negative emotive meaning. It is time we realized that the negative emotive meaning of these expressions is so overwhelming that we badly need to replace these words with some purely ‘descriptive’ words which do not carry any derogatory or condescending implications.

Saffron terror ? 

Being dimly aware of the problem, some politicians and journalists have tried to replace these words. Sadly, the replacement, even if well motivated, doesn’t really solve the problem. It is sometimes thought that this replacement can be carried out with a substitute word like ‘saffron’ instead of ‘Hindu’ or ‘jehadi’ instead of ‘Islam’. But this leaves the problem intact because people understand ‘saffron terror’ to be nothing more than an innuendo for ‘Hindu terror’ and ‘jehadi terror’ as innuendo for ‘Islamic terror’. When someone uses the word ‘saffron terror’ the hearer knows that the speaker is actually meaning to say ‘Hindu terror’ though he doesn’t use those exact words. That is how innuendo’s work in our language. They only replace words leaving the underlying concept or idea untouched. This is the reason why the law of defamation treats innuendos at par with direct assertions. Thus the solution involving ‘substitution’ is not a sound one.

 What we could do  

What we need is newly minted phrases, whereby we could ‘describe’ the problem in question while clearly ‘disavowing’ ourselves from attaching any emotive meaning to them. It would then be possible to use expressions to denote a problem, without thereby expressing a negative attitude towards any religion. The result could be tedious inelegant phrases instead of the snappy ones like ‘Islamic terror’ or ‘Hindu terror’. Yet, cosmetic value of a sentence is an insignificantly small price to pay for the problem it will solve. We could settle on phrases like ‘terrorists motivated by a fundamentally incorrect understanding of what Islam requires’ instead of ‘Islamic terror’ and ‘terrorists motivated by a fundamentally incorrect understanding of what Hinduism requires’ instead of ‘Hindu terror’. In using such phrases the speaker will cut off any negative meaning from being projected on Hinduism or Islam. This will enable us to freely discuss these problems for what they really are. Further, as these newly minted phrases are as ‘descriptive’ as descriptive can get- not carrying even the least of negative attitude towards any religion- they will not be found condescending by either Hindus or Muslims. We will earn ourselves the freedom to talk about these fundamental issues facing our country while at the same time respecting the sentiments of citizens. It will also negate the ground of futile dispute about these words between the political parties. Most importantly it will prevent us from getting distracted with language, and focus on the real underlying problem.

We must resist the thought that the whole issue discussed here is a merely ‘linguistic’ or ‘semantic’ one. Emotive words impact us in the deepest of ways as the history of the words ‘African American’ and ‘Kraut’ show. Using the N word is not a mere gaffe but an attack on the dignity of a certain class of persons. Mature societies sense the pulse of language and adapt themselves shifting from an emotive word to a descriptive one in problematic cases. Usually this process is a gradual like the ‘coming of winter’ as the philosopher Richard Hare once put it. However once we have realized the problem we need not passively wait for winter to come.

Zero and infinity are curious beasts; they defy our logical understanding of the world. Try this: could you name an infinitely large number? Any number you think of, however large, will be a finite number. See how a similar problem creeps in when we deal with time related notions of ‘the present’ and ‘eternity’. We tend to think of eternity as an ‘endless’ duration of time. But if it is some duration of time, however long, it cannot be eternity- just the same way as we cannot think of an infinitely large number. What is eternity then?  Ludwig Wittgenstein cautioned us against the trap of treating the present and eternity as moments in time. Rather he said they symbolize timelessness: the absence of time. (more on eternity and Wittgenstein some other day)

The properties of Zero are just as logically absurd as that of eternity. It is common knowledge now that one divided by Zero is infinity and one multiplied by Zero is Zero. I fear however most of us don’t actually grasp the profundity of these simple formulae, perhaps because we are so familiar with them. To understand Zero better, we first need to shrug off the anaesthetic soporific of familiarity with this thought experiment suggested by Charles Siefe.  Imagine an elastic band as the number line. When you multiply you stretch the band. When you divide you relax the band. This is what happens with routine divisions and multiplications with numbers other than zero. However, the bizarre happens when you operate with zero.  Now when you multiply by Zero the band is so stretched that it explodes: and nothing remains as Zero sucks any number into itself. Similarly when you divide by zero the band so contracts that it implodes; nothing of it remains. Such are the properties of the Zero. These operations represent the end of logic as we know it: any equation in the world can be proved by multiplying both sides by Zero. In what philosophical world view could any of these make sense?

 All of this absurdity made perfect sense in the Indian world view. The Indians not only embraced the idea of Zero, they actually celebrated it. What follows is the gist – oversimplification even- of the idea of emptiness at the heart of Indian philosophy.  The central idea of Indian philosophy was that the infinite phenomenal world (apparently) emerges from emptiness. And when the appearance of the infinite phenomenal world – which is illusionary- is realized to be nothing but mere appearance, the individual consciousness is restored to its real state of attributeless and formless emptiness: Brahman (not to be confused with the caste Brahmin). By a perceptual illusion (maya) the apparently individual consciousness (atman) perceives the phenomenal world of names and forms- with the individual being the subject and the phenomenal world being the object of perception. Realization or enlightenment is end of this illusion – with there being no differentiation between the subject and the object- and state where this obtains is that of emptiness (Brahman).

 Different Indian schools of philosophy give different names to this ineffable and nameless emptiness. Some called it Sunya (Zero or emptiness) others called it Nirguna Brahman (attributeless truth) some others, Sunya Brahman. This idea forms the philosophical core of Buddhism and the many branches of Vedanta. Much has been written about whether the Buddhist Sunya and the Vedantic Nirguna Brahmana are metaphysically identical. But this is not the occasion to get into such logomachical and ultimately -I dare say- futile debates. Truth according to both Buddhism and Vedanta is ineffable, being beyond illusionary sensory perception, beyond thought, and eventually beyond language. Both assert that the truth or emptiness is neither equivalent to existence nor to non existence. And finally both assert that enlightenment is the restoration to that very truth; and the path to that involves thoughtlessness and surrender of the false sense of ego.

 In short, emptiness or zero was thought to be the truth of human existence and indeed the meaning of life. In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer, Deep Thought, after seven and a half million years of computation, computes the meaning of life to be a meaningless number: 42. This may sound amusing in a humorous fictional work. But here was a philosophy that asserted seriously that the meaning of life was a number: and the number was Zero (Sunya). Sunya is one of the many words for Zero in Sanskrit. Another Sanskrit word for Zero was Poojyam. In Tamil, Zero is still referred to as Poojyam. Poojyam in Sanskrit also means the object of worship.  The goal of human life was indeed worship (surrendering the illusionary sense of individual ego) for the realization of the ultimate emptiness (Sunya ). Thus in Zero was to be found the whole meaning and goal of existence. 

When Indian Mathematicians introduced Zero they made it clear that they were applying this very philosophical idea in the realm of mathematics. They asserted that Zero ( Sunya or Poojyam) was Nirguna Brahman (attributeless truth) and infinity (Poornam or ananta) was Saguna Brahman ( truth with attributes). Infinity was a manifestation of Zero. No doubt all this sounds too mystical and far removed from modern mathematics. Yet no less a genius than Srinivasa Ramanujam( 20^th Century) also held  this view, and expressed it in precisely the same Vedantic terminology. After Ramanujam died, amongst his papers at Trinity College, Cambridge was found a note where Ramanujam equated Zero and Infinity with Saguna and Nirguna Brahman. That note provided the inspiration for Robert Kanigel to name his biography of Ramanujam as The Man Who Knew Infinity. But Ramanujam was just one in a line of Indian mathematicians who for over 1300 years understood Zero and infinity in this way. Brahmagupta ( 7th Century AD) who formalized most of the properties of Zero we visited earlier, understood these concepts in just this way. Bhaskara (12^th Century AD) who improved upon Brahmagupta’s formalization by introducing the idea that any number divided by zero was infinity also relied on the same Vedantic equation.

The Greek Zero Phobia: Ex nihilo nihil fit (From Nothing comes Nothing) 

Looking back at the mathematics taught in school, one may well wonder that Zero has got to be the easiest bit. If I have three toffees and give away all my toffees, I will have zero toffees left. In retrospect, this seems simple enough, surely simpler than, say, the Pythagoras theorem or calculating square roots. Given zero’s intuitive simplicity we are prone to assume that zero must have been figured out way before the other complex stuff like the Pythagoras theorem. Yet, natural as zero seems to us today, for the ancient Greeks, Pythagoras included, it was a dreadful idea: an idea that threatened to bring down the edifice of their logic and philosophy. As a consequence they chose to live without the zero. As Charles Siefe notes the consequences of this were serious: ‘Zero’s absence would stunt the growth of mathematics, stifle innovation in science, and incidentally, make a mess of the calendar.’ 

Let’s first consider the least disastrous, even silly, consequence of the Greek Zero phobia. When the world celebrated the turn of the Millennium on 31^st December 1999, we celebrated a year too soon; the millennium was to actually turn on 31^st December 2000. The reason for the miscalculation: the Gregorian calendar (based on Dionysius’s 6^th Century calendar), did not have year Zero. The Gregorian calendar jumps from 1 BC to 1 AD with no year zero in between. This is akin to a digital watch starting the business of timekeeping at 1:00 hours rather 00:00 hours and showing 13:00 when it is noon. Remedying this defect the modern Astronomical calendar fixes 1BC as year Zero and 1AD as year 2. The ISO also follows a similar notation with 1 BC fixed as year 0000. 

The Roman numeral system was happy to do without a zero. Not only did they not have the number Zero, they didn’t even have a placeholder zero digit like the ones we find in 101 and 1001.As a result they settled for a convoluted system of numerals. For good reason the Roman numerals have become extinct and we don’t find them used other than on clock faces or for indicating chapter numbers in trilogies like this one.  Just imagine doing long multiplications with Roman Numerals. How tortuous would it be to manually figure out MMMDCCCLXXII multiplied by MCCIX. In the Indian system of counting- now in vogue the world over- this would read 3872 × 1209. With the positional system and the use of place holding zeros this multiplication could be done manually by a seven year old. As John Barrow notes, the Roman numerals lacked two crucial features ‘the zero sign and a positional significance… which are features that lie at the heart of the development of efficient human counting systems’. Curiously even the Romans never counted with their numerals. For counting they used the abacus and noted the results of calculations with their numerals. Later when the Indian place value system of counting was introduced in Europe, a person counting manually with the Indian position system could perform mathematical operations way quicker than the person calculating with an abacus. For an interesting depiction of this see this illustration from Gregorius Reisch’s Margarita Philosophica (1503). 

The philosophically less interesting reason for the absence of zero in Greece was that they were Geometers. For Greeks, mathematical calculations were computation of areas of geometrical figures and numbers were nothing but shapes and forms; hence the Greek obsession with square roots and ratios. But geometry has no place for Zero as it is impossible to imagine a geometrical figure without dimensions; for instance, how does one think of a square without dimensions? 

The more philosophically significant reason for the Greek Zero Phobia was their world view. The Greeks clung firmly to the dictum Ex nihilo nihil fit: out of nothing comes nothing. The Greek world of Plato, Aristotle and Ptolemy was a finite world with no place for either the concept of nothingness or that of infinity. Plato held the view that everything in the universe was a mere approximation of its ideal which existed in the world of forms. Thus there was a form of a horse, table, cup and the works which existed in the world of forms and the objects in the phenomenal universe were mere manifestations of those ideal forms. Thus everything comes out of this world of forms which is eternal and absolutely true. Before Plato, Parmenides held the view that there could be no such thing as ‘nothing’. Aristotle’s universe was finite and he strongly believed that there could be no void in it. As Brian Rotman remarked the idea of nothingness presented itself to Aristotle as ‘a dangerous sickness, a God denying madness that left him with an ineradicable horror vacui’. 

As Siefe says summing up the Greek Zero phobia, ‘it was not ignorance that led Greeks to reject Zero…nor was it the number-shape system, it was philosophy’. Platonic and Aristotelian ideas constituted the bedrock of Western Philosophy for a better part of two thousand years. Zero and its related concepts, void and infinity, threatened to unsettle this edifice. In this philosophical atmosphere Zero could never have and never did emerge. Zero needed a habitat where the void and infinity were not shunned but embraced openly. India was to be the place where that was to happen.

(To be continued…)