Author Archive: Ankit

While living in California I was only dimly aware of the reach and extent that religion has in vast swathes of America. I knew that its influence extended from the midwest to the deep south cutting through the very heart of the great plains. However, I was aware of this fact only in a very theoretical sense. I had a few friends in SD who were practicing Christians but only after moving to Chicago did I really realize how much of a sway religion has here. This experience has more or less affected me in a positive sense, making me more intimately aware of what I had always suspected, that religious people tend to be rather friendly and helpful, in contrast to what the raucous atheists would have us believe. I am an atheist myself (or agnostic with an asymptotic expansion to atheism) but I prefer to look at the debate from a different view point and through a more muted discourse.

I see the debate between religion and atheism as one which is lost as soon as it is begun. The arguments may appear new to the debaters but they have been essentially the same through at least a 100 years. What has happened over these 100 years is that either side has honed up their arguments by supplying more of what they see as irrefutable evidences and have roped in larger and larger armies to shout in ever higher volumes. None of those arguments matter and they have never amounted to anything. The debate is absolutely futile in convincing people from the other camp. The people who do end up changing their belief systems never do it because they have been convinced by good arguments in this debate but because there was some desire from within them to do so. Even though the debate is futile, it is still interesting to understand why it doesn't work. The most important reason it doesn't work is because the two sides approach it from the only directions they have at their disposal. The religious people, at the very very heart of their argument, make an appeal through emotion whereas atheists try to present their arguments in the light of reason. Religious people get away with appealing to emotion because reason hasn't yet provided all the answers that emotion and personal revelation supposedly has. Problem that atheists have is that reason, in all likelihood, will never provide convincing answers to the questions which are most important to human beings (purpose, meaning etc.) However, what religious people never seem to understand is that no explanation is better than a bad explanation. On the other hand, all too often I find atheists trying to convince themselves that there are believable humanistic and evolutionary explanations to all these questions. Just goes on to show that there are feeble minded people in either camps.

So is there a form of this debate which is still worth having? I think there is but not many people seem to be interested in having it in that form. I think it would be rather fun to converse with someone who isn't simply somebody else. Let's begin by assuming that everything that we cherish is wrong and that absolutely nothing is sacrosanct. Let's begin by throwing away what our teachers, parents, friends, religion, society, and idols have told us. Let's not pollute the discussion with dim-witted and medieval passages from scriptures. Let's also not just regurgitate thoughts, ideas, and dictum from the "leading lights" of the field. Let's especially not use them to hide our own imperfect understandings. I think it would be rather nice to have a discussion with someone who can begin from such a point. Someone who is completely alone and utterly fresh in this intellectual sense.

Now there are many facets of human behavior which rub me the wrong way but one whose dislike is harder to justify is a curious disease which primarily afflicts the 'upwardly mobile' yuppie urban classes. The disease, of course, is one where the patient suffers from an acute need of donning tight fitting clothes, wrapping an ipod or an iphone around his/her arm, inserting fashionable earplugs into their ear canal, and running aimlessly for miles on end. My instinctive aversion for this particular disease is harder to justify because it is often explained under the guise of trying to keep oneself fit and really, what can I possibly have against people wanting to be fit. I understand that this affliction cannot be criticized from an easy vantage point. Still my dislike is well and truly there and explained it must be. If not from an easy vantage point, then from a more complex one.

I think there exist various different levels and complexities of stories that one can aspire to in life. There is much to be learned, many different experiences to be had, personality developed on several different fronts, and the time to do all of it is very limited. The hue and color of the final story are dependent not just on the choices made but also the attitude with which those choices are made. For instance, there are many who read but very few who read because every new book contributes to a structure of thought and understanding which is much larger than the book itself. There is a drive towards something bigger, more coherent and lucid, more nuanced and interesting. Similarly there are many who run but very few who do because it adds something meaningful to their self and helps them grow in some important, fundamental way. All activities which when pursued with the right attitude result in some deep development, can just as easily be pursued embarrassingly superficially although this superficiality can be hidden from plain sight in some cases while it is very apparent in some others. At this point I am reminded of those women who try to look half their age by having painted their faces with too much makeup. There's nothing wrong with trying to look better than one does and, yet, the whole effort comes out as sad. Not least because they are trying to run from an inevitability and while they are completely consumed by this effort, life with all its fine potential slips by. And this is really the crux of the matter from which springs my instinctive dislike. My dislike is not for the activity per-se but for the choices made, or rather those which are not made. People who run for hours on end just so that they can postpone by a few years the day when they are not physically attractive anymore are not in a much better situation than the women with painted faces. They seem to be spending an incredible amount of time being uninteresting and learning nothing. Oh well, at least they keep me amused just like the faces with too much mascara.

Have you noticed the general trend of massive consolidation and differentiation which is coursing through various facets of society? Consolidation of ideas, beliefs, habits, and thought into simple to understand 2 byte slogans adequately garnished with generous servings of irony, smartassery, and vitriol; into bigger and bigger groups of people with more and more homogenized thinking, behavior, and belief system. Differentiation between these vast groups of people is now more severe than when these groups were smaller. There is an ever decreasing gray area where people can have a complex world view and still be seen as reasonable by the majority. This phenomenon can be witnessed most easily on online forums such as Reddit where a truly large number of people participate in debates on all kinds of issues. But while it seemed to me that such a free flow of ideas must lead to a diverse and fruitful exchange what I find is often exactly the opposite. Discussions which once appeared to me to be fresh with their irreverent bent now just seem bland and repetitive. The irony which once appeared inspired has aged very badly. But that's the biggest irony with irony. You can only stand so much of it. What is true of Reddit is also true of other large gatherings of 'similar' minded people. Such gathering inevitably drown away dissenting voices and contrarian ideas and this has, of course, always been true. What is different now is that aided by the internet these groups of 'similar minded people' have become larger than ever resulting in massive splits of thought, large armies of more or less irrationally driven individuals who are less and less unsure of their positions. Why do I think of them as irrational. Well that must obviously be true in  a world which is clearly colored in shades of grey. Anyone too sure of himself must, therefore, be irrational. This irrationality is the price we pay for trying to belong to something larger than ourselves and there exist good reasons why we find ourselves so ready to pay that price, over and over again. However the repercussions of this simple human predilection appears to become nastier by the day as technology brings us all closer together than ever before. It's easier than ever to cling into bigger and bigger lumps and it's also easier than ever to influence those who would have been too far removed from us just 10 years ago. And as we become aware of others whose ideas appear to threaten ours, especially in the knee jerk kind of way that the relentless march of technology supports with its 140 characters and 10 second sound bytes, I feel we find it natural to wither away into our shells, in the refuge of those who agree with us. And the process of consolidation is thus reinforced.

It would be hard to argue against the benefits of technology even though the benefits are often trumpeted in those same black and white, simple to digest tones which I mentioned before. However, in this one respect technology, at least to me, has been a bit of an unmitigated disaster. It has made our societies homogenized on bigger scales than ever before and also divided it across longer faults than ever before. At the same time I must say that this is a very natural course of events. Perhaps even inevitable.

Three books which immediately come to mind when I think of especially enjoyable works are Proust's in search of lost time, Nabokov's Lolita, and Joyce's Ulysses. As it happens these three books also represent entirely different styles of prose which, of course, one would expect from writers of the highest calibre. It also goes on to show how much a writer of brilliance can mould and manipulate and create within the close boundaries which he or she may have chosen. I read not for the story or the plot or the moral or in search for some kind of identification with the characters of the story. I read to be enchanted by the novel experiments which the masters of the art perform through words, phrases, allusions, references, similes, metaphors, details, and patterns. And in my opinion nobody experiments better than the three writers I mentioned.

Of these three Nabokov is most definitely the most surgical. He writes in impeccably measured and exquisitely adorned sentences which have the compositional perfection of a brilliantly conceived and performed scientific experiment. It comes as little surprise that that is what he does so well, given his own scientific bent and training. There is something proud and snobbish about his writing. Something which makes you aware of the immense chasm that separates his intelligence and sensibility from mere mortals. Once you accept the existence of this chasm as something which must necessarily crop up in this world which plays host to all sorts of random possibilities, you can really enjoy that which lays forever outside capabilities of mere writers. Proust, on the other hand is amazingly observant and sensitive. He derives his strength not from the surgical dissection of language, which I'm sure he's plenty capable of, but from the various connections that he is able to illuminate in the world of his experiences. His writing strikes at a deeper level than mere intelligence. It strikes straight at the heart, the gut, and the soul. Through the words that he lovingly assembles to describe his own emotions and the world around him, he's able to make his experiences immediate to the reader so much so that the reader becomes unaware that the medium of words is at work. His art is so immersive that I forget that the art exists. He's able to take my imagination, hand in hand, on a stroll along the fertile green shores of his memories, through the mighty dense thicket which clearly reeks of a moist decaying undergrowth made up of layers upon layers of archaeological mnemosyne. Out of the three Joyce is the most mercurial. His writing is full of literary, historical, and popular allusions. His characters are complex and flawed and exceedingly intelligent. His sentences are brilliantly constructed so much so that each one of them is an exquisite piece of art. He doesn't seem to care so much for the compositional perfection that Nabokov goes for in his sentences. Instead he's supremely experimental and evocative. Reading every other line in Ulysses is like learning something new. It's like standing in front of a master trickster and feeling amused and amazed at the seemingly endless card tricks which he seems to be able to perform. Of course, Joyce is not just a trickster. He's a true magician. His stack of cards must have belonged to the devil himself who lent to them the kind of sorcery and sinful magnetism which seem to permeate his writing. In my limited experience as a reader I cannot think of a greater master of the language than Joyce.