Time magazine completed sixty years of
its existence in 1983. They brought out a special anniversary issue on that
birthday. I remember that the editor-in-chief had with many a backward glance
written a weighty column to mark the occasion; given the solemnity of the
moment and the seriousness of the subject it bore more than a faint whiff of
philosophizing. The great man said a lot of things, brought up a wide variety
of issues; all I recall today is the title of the editorial: ‘What really
mattered?’
Over
one of the most happening epochs in history this renowned journal had with one
hand collected the ‘most important’ news and views from all over the world and
distributed them among a huge and scattered readership with the other. After
sixty years of that relentless pursuit, at a juncture when well-deserved
celebration and self-congratulation was well in order, it must have occurred to
the editor, glancing once at the years gone by and again at the misty future
ahead, that he should organize and put down on paper his views on what had
transpired during this interval of time that would eventually leave permanent
marks on history. Let the erudite reader figure out for himself how difficult a
task that must have been. It was a well-written column, and my readers can find
and read it for themselves: it was not to discuss that article that I started
on this essay. For me, it is only the thought encapsulated in the title that is
worth pondering over, because several years have rolled by since it was
written, we are now poised at the fin de
siècle, our perspective is now the whole of the 20th century
C.E. – can we not today think once more, and more comprehensively, about what really mattered?
I am
not trying to compare with anybody, but I do feel that it was a remarkably
early age when I first started wondering about this. In every age thoughtful
people have indeed pondered over the question, and the need for pondering has
not diminished in the present day. Since childhood my chief field of inquiry
was the world of books, so naturally that is where I began to look for answers.
Within a relatively short while I discovered that savants in every land and age
have struggled to find satisfactory answers, and the results of their labours
have filled countless shelves in the world’s great libraries. The thing that
occurred to me then was that I should read up all or most of that stuff if I were
to be successful in that quest. I am sure any wise and experienced reader would
smile to think what a callow fool I was, with no idea of what I was letting
myself in for. Be that as it may, I had no such mentor then to warn me, and I
had convinced myself that the task might be long and hard but not impossible.
Surely in time ‘enough’ knowledge would have been acquired, and then I would be
well-equipped to formulate a good answer for myself. So I took the plunge quite
eagerly. Years passed, rivers of midnight oil were burnt, my health greatly
impaired, much important work left forever unattended, an enormous number of
books read. I reached beyond school and college textbooks to encyclopedias and
biographies of the great and famous. The little familiarity that I gained with
world literature also became grist to my mill. I also read all kinds of
‘special histories’ – the history of weapons and war, of art, of economics and
politics and literature itself, of science, and crime, of cinema and sports and
transport and religions, of education and law and slavery and women’s
liberation and environmental activism and so much more that I cannot even
recall clearly any longer.
As I
kept on reading, it slowly dawned on me that ‘facts’ are infinite in number and
variety. Just as the truly inquisitive mind can never turn away from them for
good (nor is it right to do so), so also it has to admit to itself, reconcile
itself calmly to the reality that in the world of facts, there is literally no
end to learning, either for the individual or for mankind as a whole. Facts
will keep on accumulating with the passage of time – perhaps that is not only
necessary but even a sign of a healthy civilization – but man will have to
square with the understanding that he will always have to think, judge, talk,
work and make decisions on the basis of incomplete data. On the other hand, the
amount of information that has already been accumulated is so vast that we
frequently feel at a loss as to how to handle it; the ocean of ‘just facts’
begins to seem meaningless, incoherent, all of a riddle: therefore we try to
classify and organize and tame facts into orderly and rational theories. Like
others I too felt this urgent need by and by, and it was a pretty coincidence
that I began to study formal theory just around the time when I had begun to
feel a great need for it. Over time, I got acquainted with theories of a very
wide range of tastes, aromas and hues. Little by little, I began to realize
that the world of theories is itself a vast and bewildering maze! Theory is a
powerful narcotic; little by little it swallows whole the weary and dazed
seeker like a python its prey. Gradually his vision dims, he takes leave of
common sense, countless subconscious mischiefs, selfish interests, blind weaknesses
of the heart, all kinds of dormant fears, infatuations and bigoted instincts
unnoticeably corrupt his vaunted dedication to empirical facts. Goaded by the
increasingly desperate urge to unravel all the mysteries of the universe, to
lay to rest all doubts once and for all, answer every nagging question, find
explanations for every last puzzle, provide easy solutions to all possible
problems, he grows more and more frantic, and in step with this urgency he
becomes more and more impatient and weary of the endless quantity, variety,
self-contradictoriness and mutability of the world of facts that assails and
mocks at him, until eventually he commits the ultimate sin: he begins to try to
fit in, Procrustes style, all of the knowable universe into the little cage of
his pet theory, and inevitably, this insane and stupid aim forces him to deny
everything about reality that does not fit in. He starts looking at the world
through blinkers, and works ever harder to convince himself that nothing that
is not captured through his particular brand of tunnel vision is really
interesting or important enough to take note of (think about Marxists dealing
with religion, or allopaths talking about homeopathy). Thus truth-worshipping
Man slowly imposes his weaknesses upon the world; myriad different kinds of
coloured glasses are invented to study the world with.
The
wonderful thing about this is that all such philosophies have marshalled
mountains of facts in their own support, every one of them can draw upon
elaborate and closely argued justifications (though it is also to be noted that
none can ultimately stand on the footing of logic and facts alone: they all
sooner or later demand that you commit a degree of blind faith – consider the
free market orthodoxy in economics), and every one of them has attracted
legions of disciples in every land and age. Some philosophies are relatively
weak and short-lived, but many – sometimes it seems most – are immortal and
indestructible; they temporarily vanish into the dark vortex of oblivion, but
only to be resurrected with renewed vigour centuries or even millennia later,
and spread all over the world like viruses to conquer minds anew. No matter how odd or unpleasant this
assertion sounds, its truth is beyond doubt. It is applicable even to the
so-called ‘hard’ sciences (you will be amazed, if you consider yourself to be a
‘normal’ person, to find out how many people still believe in Ptolemaic
astronomy, and dismiss Darwinism as nonsense), and in the field of history and
other social sciences, of course, it is only too evident. On that battleground
virtually not one fundamental question has been permanently resolved, not one
theory has won a final decisive victory over all its rivals; none of the great
controversies dating back to Manu and Plato have been laid to rest forever, nor
seem likely to be in the foreseeable future. – Once you look again at the world
with unprejudiced eyes, you can see that the huge accretion of man-made
theories is itself a part of the vast
ocean of facts, indeed, another wave on the surface of the ocean, not much
more. In different epochs particular theories are revived (and often newly
garbed) under the ministrations of some particularly charismatic ideologue or
the pressure of particular circumstances. On the other hand, the common man
takes refuge in this or that ideology on the basis of personal tastes,
unconscious beliefs, fears or dreams, special experiences, self interest or
social persuasion: he might then try very hard to convince himself and others
that he has made his choice only after independent inquiry into all available
facts and reasoning, but that is usually no more than a convenient
rationalization. Which family one is born into, which community he is bred in,
which mentor takes him under the wing early in his life, what existential
troubles he has to cope with, what profession he enters, what kind of company
he chooses or is forced to keep – these things have varied and wondrous
influences on his innate nature, and that
eventually decides what theoretical framework he will absorb as his own; how
much noise he makes afterwards to claim the support of facts and reason for
doing so makes not the least difference.
Hard
on the heels of this realization comes another, very uncomfortable one. If one
surveys the world with some particular theoretician as his chaperon, the job of
‘understanding’ the world becomes quick and easy indeed, but anyone who can
accept such a very partial and angular vision as a holistic explanation of
reality does great wrong both to the world and to his own intellect. The fact
is, any institution-dependent intellectual (and you’d be hard put to find one
who is not these days) gradually loses the habit of looking at the world with
unblinkered eyes, he actually begins to avoid
that exercise because it makes him uneasy; if he ever opens the windows of
his mind a little to look out, it is only to find new confirmation of his pet
theory – whatever does not he quickly turns away from, shuts the window once
more, and goes back to the comforting refuge of his certain, simplified,
unchanging world of the imagination – there is little difference between trying
to figure out the real world by studying it through his glasses and accepting
fairy tales as true. If that is how 20th century history is going to
be commented upon, one will say it was primarily an age of unprecedented
technological progress, another will say that the biggest event was the
worldwide spread of democratic and egalitarian ideas with the receding tide of
imperialism; one will notice little other than the all-round decay of morals,
directionlessness in philosophy, social unrest and violence on an unrelenting
and global scale, yet another will point to the doom all mankind is hurtling
towards as a result of boundless growth in numbers, material greed and
environmental damage, while someone else will insist that in the cauldron of
all this violence and chaos was being born the first true and global
civilization. To one observer the most remarkable fact about this epoch would
remain that so many geniuses, from Tagore to Einstein to Charlie Chaplin worked
side by side on the world’s stage, another would insist that future generations
would only remember us for how far and how quickly we delved into Nature’s
deepest mysteries during this short interval, from the innards of the atom to
the farthest reaches of the starry heavens, from the mysteries of DNA to the
wonders of the human brain. In this way we could go on lengthening the list
forever, and as a rule the votary of any one of these points of view dismisses
the claims of all the others offhand – and what choice do we have? If we admit
that all of these were true and important, how can we answer, without losing
our heads completely, what really mattered?
If
now I venture to say that this was only one problem and there are many others
waiting to be addressed, the reader might want to assault me, or throw up his
hands in despair. But I have no choice: I have myself had to learn the very
hard way how real the complexity is. Anyway, I do not wish to elaborate
endlessly, so I shall move on to another issue after mentioning just one other
problem. There are as many varieties of life experience as there are people on
this planet, as many different tastes, so this is another reason why there will
always be differences big and small between the way different people see and
judge the world. The urge to impose one’s point of view lock, stock and barrel
on others is always strong in savant and layman alike, but we cannot honestly
deny that many people if not all have a right as well as a justification to
hold views different from those of others (maybe ants worldwide share one
common, objective world-view, but we cannot become ants nor should want to do
so, should we?), therefore this variety must be acknowledged and factored in as
a datum, no matter how difficult it makes it for us to find an answer to our
question. If a mother loses all her sons on the same day in some ghastly
accident, will she remember the day as that on which a world war began or man
landed on the moon? And what shall we call the man who calls her sense of
history misguided, weak and biased – great scientist, or monster, or just a
fool? If a Kurosawa or Ray holds the opinion that the development of the cinema
was the biggest event of this era, does it not become necessary to look at
reality closely from their chosen point of view? The man who made the Long
March with Mao ze Dong quite understandably remembers that as the biggest thing
that happened in his lifetime, while the man who first ran a mile in less than
four minutes remembers that event in a similar way with equal justification.
While the horror of the First World War was unfolding, Anna Pavlova bewitched
mankind with her dancing, and Laurence Olivier played Shakespearean leads as
never before during the Second: how can we let history remember the killing
fields along the Somme and the Normandy invasion but let Pavlova and Olivier
slide into oblivion? If the countless famous and less-known people who devoted their
whole lives to the fulfillment of some great dream or establishment of some
noble ideal – be that equal rights for women or conservation of wildlife or
taking care of handicapped children – believe that their lives’ work is what
really marked the age, how can we lightly dismiss them? The truth is, we habitually ignore so much only because, as the poet said, ‘human kind
cannot bear very much reality’.
********************************************************
So
in the end this is how matters stood: this odyssey of mine did not lead me to
the answer to my question; instead, the possibility of ever finding an answer
became nebulous and remote. Looked at in this way, my quest of nearly half a
lifetime ended in failure. And yet the failure did not leave me deeply
frustrated – because in the course of my long journey I had found a kind of
awareness which made the sorrow of failure insignificant. I haven’t seen the
end of the road, but the journey itself has brought such a profound
satisfaction that I no longer feel that desperate urge to reach the end. I have
learnt that if you do not specify the context and the circumstances, the
question ‘what really mattered’ does not begin to make sense at all; rather, it
can be either silly or dangerous – that, I believe, is not a minor realization.
We love to use words like ‘comprehensive’ and ‘holistic’ lightly and often, but
a truly comprehensive consciousness of history is probably beyond human power –
when Sri Krishna tried to dissuade
Arjuna from seeing the vishwaroop by saying he could not bear it, He was
probably not exaggerating. I also realized that without a boundless innate
inquisitiveness and a certain impatient arrogance there can be no real
learning. When Yogavashistha said ‘Listen to the fool who speaks wisely rather
than to the savant who talks like a fool’, he was probably encouraging this
sort of fearless and insatiable hunger for learning. But on this arduous quest
men grow tired and smug too soon, that is why it is always good to remember
what they say about a little learning, so the quest must go on forever, until,
at last capable of juxtaposing the infinitude of the cosmos with one’s own
pathetic littleness one learns true humility and can say, with Socrates, ‘All I
know well is that I know nothing’ – and still the quest must go on, till one
dies, so that he is not shrouded once more by the darkness of arrogance that
has benighted pundits of every land and age. It is not yet time to fold up your
wings… orey bihongo more/ akhoni ondho bondho
koro na pakha.
[This
too was written in mid-1989, originally in Bangla]
