December: Festivals and the Carnivalesque – Part Two: Why are Festivals Important to Humans? – The Celebration of the Gift

It is time to write about celebration, when one is in mourning! It is time to write about joy, when one is sad! It is indeed time to write about the gift, when one experiences yet another cruel act of being robbed, of a snatching, of felt loss. If in the first part the aim was to understand festivals in light of the carnival or the carnivalesque, in light of Bakhtin’s rendition of it – carnival or the celebration of festivals as the revolt of the common man against the power structures – and we were able to confidently conclude that the carnivalesque was not sufficient to understand the continued powerful presence of festivals, then in this part, we will precisely go beyond the carnivalesque to seek understanding of festivals, by asking a deeper question – why are festivals important to humans?

There were two responses to the first part. The first, argued that festivals ‘express and shape the desires, emotional response and imagination of the participants offering a sense of incorporation shared with others in a wider culture…The aim in most festivals would be celebration and a sense of belonging’. The second response in the form of poetry, celebrating Christmas, as it is indeed an important festival of December. It used the language of ‘coming’ on the one hand and ‘receiving’, ‘welcoming’, recognizing’ on the other hand. It brings to fore the idea of something being ‘given’ which is consequently ‘recognized’ ‘welcomed’ and ‘received’ – what is it that is given and received during a festival? Of course, it is gifts – it is gifts that are both given and received during festivals.

In a recent post – Transforming Gratitude: Lessons from the Act of Writing, I had given three insights from the act of writing that shed light on the deeper mechanisms underlying the language of gratitude. Simply put, if gratitude is offered at the ‘reception of the gift’ then prior to the receiving, for the gift to be truly appreciated and grateful for, the receiver must exercise a ‘posture of enquiry’ and been in an ‘act of questing’ and then the gift is in some sense an answer, a recompense to this quest and enquiry. It is then and only then, when the received gift is in line with the enquiry and quest that gratitude manifests. There was a fascinating response to this post which tied these three insights to bear upon the festival of Christmas. I will quote the response at length as I believe in it lies a deep insight to the question we are addressing here – Why are festivals important to humans?

After giving a list of references and quotes from the Bible about how Christmas is God’s gift to us, Bernard Farr writes, ‘It had not struck me before that in all these cases there is an equation between the gift of Jesus and the gift of eternal life – so that to receive one is to receive the other. So perhaps the point of Christmas is not so much that it celebrates God coming to share in time-limed human life (incarnation) but the opposite. It celebrates our coming to share in the life of God which is eternal.’ He ends by writing, ‘Christmas is only truly Christmas insofar as the Christian community together appropriates the eternal. In this way God is writing in our lives as he gifts himself in his Son.’

The writing on the wall appears to get clearer now! The clear resonance between festivals and gifts or charity! Now, that is commonsensical, you claim! Of course it is, only that we had completely missed it in our first list of what constitutes festivals – celebration, commemoration, cheer and carnivalesque! So now let’s add the fifth to our list – charity as gift! It is not just an interesting idea, but something that is existentially part of festivals, in other words, the giving and receiving of charity or gifts is synonymous with the celebration of festivals. Evidence for this is found in the financial records of both persons and companies during festival times. The question that stares us in our face is – what is the conceptual structure that conjoins charity and celebration, or gifts and festivals? In other words, how is celebration of festivals related to charity or gifting or giving? And it is to this that we must turn.

But before we come to gifting in a festival, we must look at the act of gifting in its own right, as an existential act with its own ontology. So what is gifting and how is it related to the human condition? We are going to progress by looking intently at the everyday act of gifting. There are three insights about gifting that can be easily observed from (a) the act of gifting or the giving of gifts, (b) the gift, or what is given and (c) the receiving of gift.

First, the act of giving as an act of experiencing loss! The commodification of gifts and its regulation has in some sense made a mockery of gifting. In other words we have domesticated gifting. We can manage getting all our loved ones a gift if we plan well and save enough to give, and avoid experiencing loss. We have anesthetised giving. But that is precisely what giving of gift is not meant to do. The gifting is meant to leave a hole in the wallet. The giver is meant to experience loss because she has given. She is meant to experience suffering as she has paid to bring forth joy to the other in the very act of giving. The larger the gift, the smaller becomes the giver, more oblivious, and the act of giving diminishes the giver, in every respect. When the giving is truly completed, there is no trace of the giver, become invisible or disappeared, because she has given all. In this sense, the giver is hidden behind the gift, so that the giver disappears even as the gift is presented. Marion has a few interesting lines on the masking of the giving and the giver: ‘In donation, in fact, the giving (Geben) gives to presence the gift (Gabe), so completely and radically that this gift alone occupies presence and, in appearing, necessarily masks its own donation; or, more properly speaking, the gift (Gabe, beings) has no need of illegitimately obfuscating the giving (Geben, being), since it is the right of the giving itself, on the contrary, not to be able to give the gift, to offer it, to deliver it, to put it to the fore, but by concealing itself behind it, because giving can never appear as something given since it exhausts and accomplishes itself in allowing to appear – it does not occupy the opening, because it opens it.’ Simply put there is a loss of the giver in giving. But what exactly is the loss? What exactly is hidden or concealed?

For this we have to go behind Marion to Heidegger. The loss is of the infinite possibilities the gift had before being given which by the act of giving has now been limited to a bounded actuality, a historicality, if one must insist. The gift had the potential of being utilized in infinite ways to accomplish infinite purposes respectively, but the very actual act of giving to a particular, limits it to that receiver and eliminates all other possibilities hence the experience of loss. Take the example of a donor who wishes to sponsor the education of an underprivileged child. As long as she has got those pounds, dollars or rupees in her wallet, she can do whatever she wants with it. She can sponsor any child in the world. But once she decides and gives the money to that agency for that child, she is unable to use her funds for any other child. The loss is not of the money, because she did want to give it, but it is of the infinite other potentialities that the money unspent could accomplish before it was given which in the act of giving have been now lost, lost for ever. This understanding of life as potentiality with infinite possibilities which experiences loss in being actualized is a basic condition of being human. Death is the loss of possibilities and we mourn it every day in the very act of living, even as the actuality of our lived life murders a million unlived lives. In this sense, living itself is dying, dying of the infinite other possibilities that failed to be actualised in the very actualizing of our daily life. If this be the case then becoming human and mere living is to nurture a loss. This sense of loss is what we are doomed to live with and every hunt for a gift is a way of overcoming this loss. When one does not receive gifts, then one steals, one even snatches. This sets up the rationale for the reception of gift. But before that a few brief thoughts about the gift.

Secondly, gift as a presentation of a new world of possibilities. Both Heidegger and picking up from him, Jean-Luc Marion, talk a great deal about the ontological significance of the gift. Going back to Marion’s above quote, ‘In donation, in fact, the giving (Geben) gives to presence the gift (Gabe), so completely and radically that this gift alone occupies presence…’. In other words for Marion everything that has presence, or is present, is able to be present, or come into existence, has only been made possible as a gift. But what is it that has become present and has presence? Wrathall brings in the idea of a ‘sense of place’. So what exactly is a gift? It is a new place, a new possibility, a new potential that has the power to be actualized. In some sense, within the wrappings are hidden a world of possibilities. Wrathall asks, ‘But how can anything really come to matter in this thick sense in a world that is moving swiftly toward abolishing all sense of place?’ and answers his own question by saying, ‘This sort of mattering or importance is not something we can bestow upon things by a free act of will. The only way to get it would be as a gift–a gift of place or a gift of a thing of intrinsic worth.’ The only thing that contains new possibilities, a new place, is the gift, something that is unavailable to the receiver prior to the reception of the gift. For Wrathall, the power of the gift lies precisely in bestowing importance or mattering, bringing about a new sense of place. However, while the gift brings in new possibilities, the gift equally brings with it its own place and limitation. Thus even in the reception of a gift, new losses are felt and new longings born. Thus the gift is a double-edged sword – at one end it slices in new possibilities, and at the other end, these very possibilities that have the potential for actuality, bring with it its own limitation in their actualizing, thus births longings for future gifts.

Finally, the reception of gifts as an overcoming of death! Gifts are wrapped, hidden, and there is the sense of it not being there are all for the receiver prior to the giving. Hence at the opportune time, the gift is revealed and handed over and in some cultures even asked to be unwrapped. There is an anticipation, an eagerness, even as one fumbles with the wrappings, an urgency to get beneath the covers, to hold the gift, to stand in the presence of a new naked revelation, a new actuality is born in the life of the receiver. In some cultures both the wrapping and unwrapping of gifts are rituals of equal significance. It is this reception of a gift that undoubtedly causes the joy and the celebration. The festival lies precisely in this reception of gifts. On one hand festivals are mere occasions, often excuses, to exercise this act of giving and receiving to generate celebration and joy. But before we get to festivals, let us continue to explore the ontological significance of receiving. I heard a man once claim that when he saw Bill Gates having a meal with Melinda three tables across in a Seattle restaurant, he told the waiter to pass this message to Bill that he will pick up their tab. Even as he watched the waiter lean to pass on the message and point to the benefactor of their meal, this man swore that he caught a primordial glee, joy, in Bill’s face, one that comes in receiving a gift. His point being, even the world’s richest man is joyful in getting a freebie or a gift. Why are humans besoughted with receiving gifts? Receiving has value when what is received fulfils a lack, even if it be an artificially constructed lack. But it is the condition of lack that gives currency to the reception of gifts. The fact that we come into this world crying, howling for our mother’s milk is evidence enough for the birth of the fundamental condition of lack in being human. Today’s liberalism blinds us to our existential condition of lack. But what exactly is this lack? If we dovetail this lack to what the gift signifies and what giving accomplishes, then in light of what we have said above, we can say that this lack is the lack of possibilities and potentialities. In this sense, the existential condition of being human is that of exhaustion, the actuality of being exhausts itself of all power to be. Therefore, one is constantly in need of gifts from the other. Be it food, shelter, love, material or non-material, it does not matter, but humans constantly need to be gifted so that they can have life and overcome the death that is already in operation which constantly creates the existential lack.

There are different possibilities for how these meditations can be taken forward and different conclusions arrived at. But the journey we must actualize is our quest to understand festivals and answer the question we began with – why are festivals important to humans? I am sure the reader can already begin to see, in light of the above discussion, the shape of the answer. If receiving is central to being human to overcome an existential lack, then the giving that results in receiving is surely the cause of celebration. However, we have already seen the condition of lack is a perennial human condition, and if that be so, then what are festivals? Here I claim that festivals remember, commemorate and celebrate an original event of giving, a phenomenal giving that has left its imprint in collective human memory. In other words, festivals are celebrations of cosmic ‘givings’. Within the Christian tradition, Christmas celebrates God’s giving of his son, Jesus and Easter celebrates Christ’s giving of his self. In Hindu tradition Diwali celebrates the returning or giving of Ram to the capital city, Ayodhya. Be it Hanukah or Dusshera, the originary event that is commemorated is one of giving – of new life, hence celebration of birth dates, of victory in war, of salvation to people, or whatever else form the gifting might take shape.

However, following Farr, I would like to end by arguing that the power of festivals lies not merely in the commemoration and remembrance of an old event, however cosmic, but of its significance in fulfilling present day lack. Festival is the occasion for receiving. But can one receive except what one is given! So festivals provide the occasion to give and to receive, to overcome the existential human condition of lack, to open new possibilities and potentials, to offer the presence of new places. The power of the gift lies in it being less deserved, more of a surprise, a bringing about of possibilities completely unforeseen. It is indeed loving without a reason, a giving without rationale, and a silent suffering in the presence of the other’s discovery of a new world. What better words than that of Caputo to end with – ‘But then again, must love be deserved – or is love a gift? If love must be deserved or earned, then it is something we owe to the one who earned it, and then it is more like wages for labor than a gift we give without condition. Is love given unconditionally or do you have to meet certain conditions in order to earn it? Does love always have to have be reasonable, to have a logos, why, a reason – or is love without why?’

But has the gift got anything to do with the carnivalesque? How is the carnivality of festivals related to the giving of gifts? I would like to argue that the fire that fuels the festivality of giving is none other than the carnivality of the carnivalesque. But for that we have to consider the question – How can we make the most of festivals? – to which we will turn in the last part.

December: Festivals and the Carnivalesque – Part One*

If the month of December ushers in the festive season for a large proportion of the human population, namely, Secularists and Christians, ancient Romans and other people groups, then it is indeed appropriate to pause, even if briefly, to reflect and think about ‘festivals’ in general – What are festivals? Why are festivals important to humans? How can we make the most of festivals?

I am tempted to stop right here, with just raising these questions and throw the ball to the reader, saying, ‘pray, answer these questions, please?’ Even as I pause to ponder as to whether that is fair at all, I hear your quick reply, ‘sure, but why don’t you begin with your answers, after all they are your questions!’ The implicit logic in your rejoinder – of questioners having to answer their questions first, can be definitely questioned, but conversationally speaking, you have indeed thrown the ball back into my court and to question your logic would take the focus elsewhere. ‘You have forced my hand,’ I retort, slightly irritated by the wicked grin covering your face. Here I was, thinking of a nice dialogue, which in my view was, of course, me with the questions and you with the answers, but now I am being forced to answer my own questions, which would indeed make me more vulnerable than I would want. On a side note, [now, this is silly – talking of a side note! This entire paragraph is a side note, having nothing to do with festivals!], it is indeed interesting that those who ask questions are in positions of power and those required to answer are under power. Articulations of question-answers are exercises and performances of power! The most immediate and safest example is that of a teacher-student. The teacher asks, and the student answers. The answers determine the fate of the student – being in the good graces of the teacher or…! Now, what happens when the student questions? Normally it affirms the same power relationship, because the student asks in ignorance of some knowledge possessed by the teacher which is supplied by the teacher in her response. But what happens if the student is at par with his teacher in the knowledge of a particular subject or topic and then questions her beyond it? Well, we all have different experiences of either being in or witnessing such incidents. But that is another topic and we have already strayed far off our intended discussion or maybe we will come back to this discussion and learn from it towards the end.

So let us begin with the first question, ‘what are festivals’? Immediate answers include – (1) celebration of special events of the past, (2) commemoration or remembrance of significant happenings, (3) cheer or happiness being expressed. I would add here that there is a fourth element in a festival, it is the (4) opportunity for the performance of the Carnivalesque. This term, in English translations of Mikhail Bakhtin’s works, represents both a historical phenomenon of the carnival and also a literary tendency. For Bakhtin, who set to interpret the deeper social processes involved in medieval carnivals, particularly the Feasts of Fools held in Europe from the fifth century onwards to the sixteenth century, the carnivalesque represented the inversion of the ideological, political, legal and religious authority of both the church and the state. As Terry Eagleton points out, it can be best described as ‘licensed transgression’. During the Carnival, established social, political and religious norms and behaviour were subverted through untamed revelry. Set beliefs and rules were ridiculed and mocked. Social hierarchies along with their solemn pieties and etiquettes were profaned and overturned. The public and the laity whose voices were normally subdued and suppressed were given space during the carnival. A spirit of free thinking was legally allowed during the carnival, which Bakhtin sees as the precursor to the European Renaissance. Bakhtin explores the idea of the carnivalesque at length in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929) and Rabelais and his World (1965). In Carnival and Carnivalesque, Bakhtin offers four categories of the ‘carnivalistic sense of the world’ – (1) Free and Familiar engagement between people, (2) Eccentric Behaviour, (3) Carnivalistic misalliances, and (4) Sacrilegious. Thus one could say that the idea of carnivalesque for Bakhtin entails that aspect of a carnival or festival in which there is an upturning of the regular and routine and a sacrilegious of the sacred power equations, and thus opens new space for new thinking, new alliances and new worlds. Charles Taylor, making a reference to Bakhtin in his famed The Secular Age, argues that carnivalesque entails the idea of ‘anti-structure’. The medieval world entailed within it a space for ‘anti-structure,’ a time when the normal given structures could be critiqued, parodied, critically analysed and overturned. In doing so, the power binaries within which the majority of humanity suffered throughout the year were overturned, albeit briefly, and in so doing, the entire social structure found respite, in a sense, strength to live through the tyranny of the rest of the year. During carnival the peasant is indeed king!

However, I can already anticipate a Zizekian critique of Bakhtin’s carnivalesque of which I am unable to find in Zizek’s writings. Zizek would or could argue that the medieval world domesticated revolution by offering legitimate space for the Taylorian anti-structure to play out during the Bakhtinian carnival. As the space of carnival is brief and temporary, so is the revolt. The real parody of the carnivalesque is the parody of revolt, as the powerful continue to be powerful and their seat of power is not truly overturned in spite of the antics of the carnival. Although the Bakhtinian carnivalesque critique offers a fresh insight into the significance of festivals and the powerful role they play in the healthy maintenance of social structure, the Zizekian counter-critique offers a powerful challenge precisely to the very celebration of festivals and carnivals. If the carnivality of festivals at the most are only able to offer a parody and mockery of existing power structures, then carnivality is truly a parody not of the power structures – but of the powerless and the oppressed, who even in their rebellion and anti-structures are following the dictate of the ruling structures.

If this be taken seriously, then celebration of any festival, including the December festivals, becomes highly problematic in three different ways. Let’s spell out the problematic explicitly: first, the naïve celebration of festivals which is in accordance with existing social structures and authority/power maintains and affirms existing power structures and necessarily even celebrates it. This can be equated to a simplistic understanding of festivals and their celebration. Often, here is where the majority of the population lies, simply unaware of the deeper structures of their celebrations. Here there is no threat, whatsoever, to the existing power structures, who stand behind as the puppeteer and watch the celebration of festivals with patronizing glee. 

Secondly, following the critique of Bakhtinian carnivalesque, the celebration can become a Taylorian anti-structure, and can mock and ridicule existing power structures. Here both the state and the religious institutions that govern the populace throughout the year become objects of fun and mockery and are delivered a fatal blow. But it is here that Zizek steps in to ask – have we really delivered a fatal blow to the puppeteer, or is he, in spite of the revelry, still standing behind the curtains with a smirk on his face and holding the strings only tighter? This brings us back to our side-note at the beginning, the power relationship between teacher-student. If the student merely replies to the teacher’s question, she is following the dictate of the powerful teacher, but equally if she questions the teacher, within the boundaries of the teacher-student relationship and the politics of knowledge, then in spite of the student questioning and the teacher replying, the power equation is not disturbed, only affirmed, even more vigorously – the student’s questioning further establishes the authority of the teacher in her answering. This reveals the really sad state of affair of the carnivalesque, because in spite of the questioning student, who appears to be revolting, rebelling, and even parodying, everyone including the student knows who the one with power is, ultimately – the teacher of course! This expression of power is more sinister and sadistic, in that it has swallowed up the revolt and makes a mockery of it and thus disarming it even in its very performance. I am reminded of time given to question-answer after a lecture or paper is presented. During this time, although questions of challenge can be presented, it is domesticated and dissent is overruled simply by being given time during the session. Rarely do we find someone stand up and walk out in true challenge!

Thus thirdly and finally, following a Zizekian counter-critique, one may have to learn a new language of celebration – which on the one hand is not naïve and complaint, constrained by the demands of the powerful even in celebration, while equally on the other hand it is not a mockery of revolt by revolting under the same conditions of oppression that enables the rebelling revelry. Then how should we celebrate? Or maybe, to push it further, should we celebrate at all? What should the student do? Should he continually listen to his teacher’s answers unquestioningly, should he respond with questioning or should he turn his gaze, get up and leave the classroom?

Probably there is another way forward in which festivals can be retained and celebrated, but not necessarily as Bakhtinian carnival. This leads us to the second question we began with – Why are festivals important to humans?

*I have taken seriously the advice of dear friends who have reminded me rather strongly that the goal of writing is for the text to be read and not abandoned midstride, and hence to write shorter pieces. Therefore I have broken this piece into three parts.

Trapped in Time

We are so trapped, the trappings have become us

We wear it, speak it and have become it

Children of history, yet it is the now that has its stranglehold on us

The trappings woven so many times over

Glued to the skin, and penetrating beneath

No difference between the trappings and the trapped

It’s like the scaffolding that has folded into the building

If being thus trapped is the human condition

And every attempt to escape only tightens the web

And the best of human intentions

With rhetoric of escape and freedom

With vain repetitions and rituals

Present only mirages of liberation

Then how is one to live? How is one to get out?

With no religion, no ideology, no state, no god able to detrap!

What should the self do? How should it be free?

What about the self’s journey inwards

Penetrating, piercing, meticulously making past every layer of trapping

Reaching beneath to touch one’s skin, one’s flesh, one’s very bone

And even the marrow below!

Flesh meets flesh – the touch, touched and the toucher merge

Don’t let any fool’s rhetoric confuse you, nor be foolhardy

It is only in that moment of self-touch can one see the beyond

The beyond of the self and the trappings

And in that sight, one flies, leaving the trappings behind

Transforming Gratitude: Lessons from the Act of Writing

‘If someone gives you a present, what do you say?’ is an oft-repeated question that parents pose to their young kids. Soon after the third or fourth time of finding oneself in this situation and being asked the same question yet once again, the child, with a blush covering her face and her eyes capturing a hint of shame, replies, ‘thank you’ first to the parent and then, turning, repeats ‘thank you’ once again to that ‘someone’ who had put that beautiful toy in her hands. You, the generous bearer and giver of that toy, lean down to her and smile back a reply, ‘you are welcome!’ Hearing that, the little girl takes the cue and flees, clutching possessively her new toy and running to her favourite corner, where she is away from those loving prying eyes, eager to look at the gift, the beautiful doll now securely in her hands. Watching the child run out of their horizons, everyone else, standing nearby and witnessing this happy-ritual, turn to one another and break into small talk. Of course the talk is not about the weather, which incidentally should have been the focus of the conversation, even as heavy storms gather without a sound outside the double-glazed windows, but the conversation is centred upon the ritual that was just performed. ‘What a well-behaved, lovely girl!’ remarked an aunt. ‘Did you catch that joy on her face when she opened the present?’ murmured another. ‘I do like how Pete and Jane bring up their kids. Her “thank you” conveyed such genuine gratitude’, claimed the giver of the present. These social rituals not only perform the rite of giving within modern societies, but also function as sites of training of acceptable social norms and mores, particularly the expression of ‘gratitude’, for the next generation.

At first blush, the vignette painted above appears flawless, rather a model of how gratitude must be negotiated within any social space. However, while the rite of giving taught the little girl to say ‘thank you’ it did not in any way explore for her what ‘gratitude’ entails leave alone its significance. Probably, if you or I were asked the significance of ‘gratitude’, we too as well might fumble for words. ‘Of course gratitude is being thankful’ you would retort, but then that is just replacing one term with another. What does it mean to be thankful or grateful? Albeit, there is a difference even between these two terms and the meanings they embody. However, my interest here is not to indulge merely in linguistic or conceptual gymnastics, rather to interrogate the mantra of gratitude that accompanies the rite of giving within social life.

My argument here is that the understanding of gratitude has been reduced to a civil and moral value by a liberal ideology for which ‘thank yous’ and ‘sorrys’ are necessary to maintain the façade of secular well-being. Most of us are soaked within liberalism to such an extent, like a fish in water, that we are unable to even articulate it as a form of life, one tradition among many, leave alone critique it. These terms are used regularly within our liberal societies often as a mantra, performing a speech-act, within the performance of the larger rituals of giving and reparation respectively. These terms have been commoditised and perform as objects of social transaction through which social equilibrium is maintained. In the bargain the underlying processes and significance of a term like gratitude is lost to a generation that venerates the language of ‘thanks’.

‘Enough critique, come on, spill out the processes and significance of gratitude that you mention and yet continue to shroud’, you remark acidly. Of course you don’t believe that I have anything profound to add to the existing common understanding of ‘gratitude’. But, it’s my turn to retort, ‘my work is half done, if I have made you think critically about the term gratitude, something I am sure you have not done in all your voicing of thanks!’ I exclaim. Without giving room for derision, I start rambling about ‘gratitude’, of course, hoping, believing, that as the rambling progresses, new understandings will emerge, evolve, and become articulated. If there were other ways of renewal and transformation, books would be written on them, or maybe those books are indeed written and do exist. But even those works can hardly miss the fact that ramblings are precursors to revelation. I think it would be wise to cite some evidence for suggesting that one discovers what one wants to say amidst rambling about it, and that without rambling or writing out, one has nothing to discover, as there is precisely nothing to discover prior to the act of discovering which I claim here to be the ‘skill of rambling or writing’. Let me cite what the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, the present Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge University, had to say about something similar to rambling or writing in pursuit of revelation or discovery:

Saunders Lewis, the Welsh poet, used to quote somebody saying – a child saying – "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" and I have always resonated rather with that. And that means that for me in writing even a straight forward prose essay or a short book or a lecture, there is that awkward moment when, if you like, the engine is turning over a bit and you are wondering exactly at what point you are going to discover what the argument is. That's a warning really about the first four pages of everything I have ever written! But I think, again, it will ring bells in some of those who are trying to write. Writing isn't translating something in here onto the page. Writing is an act. If it were just transference, no doubt you could plug in the electrodes and something would neatly type up what was going on inside your head. I hope we never get to that point and I very much doubt that we ever will. But meanwhile writing is an act, it is an action of self-discovery and an action of trying to put something into being and so it is true of prose as with poetry. - 

See more at: http://rowanwilliams.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/1998/rowan-williams-on-writing

Of course, I have gone on a tangent, to talk about the ‘act of writing’ while I should be writing about gratitude! However, this detour is not merely to justify my method or justification for how I aim to think about gratitude, rather, I claim that in this detour is found insights with regard to the processes underlying the language of gratitude that I would like to explicate. I would like to claim that there are three insights in the above quote about the ‘act of writing’ that reveal the mechanisms underlying the mantra of gratitude, which has unfortunately been forgotten in our liberal society that instructs on showering platitudes.

The first insight draws attention to the posture of enquiry preceding and enveloping the act of writing. Williams, elaborating the point made by the Welsh poet, Lewis, in ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ writes, ‘in writing…the engine is turning over a bit and you are wondering exactly at what point you are going to discover what the argument is.’ The insight here is about the posture of enquiry that is begging a discovery or a receiving or a reception. The stress is on the posture of ‘wondering’ in other words enquiring. I claim that writing is the most evident site of enquiry. When one picks up a pen to write, or settles one’s fingers over a keyboard, the primary posture one is adopting, often unconsciously, is the posture of enquiry. For words to appear and sentences formed, different strategies that come to horizon begin to articulate, different strands of thought take form, and even as ink meets paper or keys strike, these strands converge and an enquiry takes shape. I want to claim further that this posture of enquiry must be treated as an ontological posture, in which human life is lived. It is a certain way of being human, and perhaps one could say, that the primal human posture, irrespective of one’s waistline, is the posture of enquiry.

The second insight consolidates the posture of enquiry into a visible act of questing, and this is revealed in the Williams’ idea that ‘writing is an act’. This translates the ‘posture’ of enquiry into a ‘process’ of questing. The process begins with (a) an acknowledgement that there is nothing ‘inside your head’ that can be ‘neatly typ[ed] up’. It begins with the recognition of a lack. Recognizing a lack is not easy, particularly within a liberal tradition, which has neatly packaged knowledge and truth into ‘propositions’ that can be easily ‘transferred’ from one to another, accompanied with platitudes. But human life is a life of lack, a nothingness which seeks to discover and to receive, thus gravitating towards a gift. But this acknowledgement of lack must immediately be led or channelled into (b) an ‘act’ of quest, or as Williams puts it, an act of writing. But how is the act of writing an act of quest? Here Williams gives us a warning about the first four pages of everything he writes. He reveals that in them one would find the quest for discovery for the argument or proposition, for the assertion that he aims to make in his text. In other words, writing is the act of articulating and clarifying the quest. But how does this happen? The quest happens in the act of sifting through ideas, thoughts, being brought forward in memory, finding being even as fingers bang on keys, and thus questing takes place in the very act of writing. In the beginning of sentences, and the searching of words, and finding the appropriate words that complete sentences is an example of a quest in operation. This can be said of the beginning of paragraphs or even of articles and books, matter of fact any piece that is being written that they are driven by a quest that regulates the flow of thoughts and whose immediate satisfaction guarantees the completion of the piece. Perhaps that is why it is often said that books, be it theses or of any other genre, are never finished but have to be abandoned, and their endings have to be artificially constructed as the ontological questing continues to go on and is never exhausted by the written piece. There is a third element to the mechanism of questing, which is not explicit in Williams, but implicitly there by its mention. I am referring to the content of the ‘first four pages’ of what he writes. The content of these pages would reveal the (c) tradition of enquiry within which the quest takes place. The interlocutors and the concepts that are articulated and connected together, fabricated and constructed into Williams’ text reveal the ‘world of literature’ to which Williams’ own quest belongs and extends. It reveals the tradition which is not only inhabited by Williams but the tradition that is working itself out through Williams’ act of writing. It is both the tradition’s quest as well as a quest beyond the tradition, but only through the paths laid out by the tradition embodied in the ‘first four pages’ enacted out through the body of Williams. I am reminded of Nicholas Wolterstorff’s more or less ‘four-page’ Preface to his acclaimed work, Until Justice and Peace Embrace, which neatly lays out the questing reformed tradition, and Wolterstorff’s own quest embodying that tradition. It is worthwhile to cite here what he says about writing this book: ‘There is another reason as well for this emphasis [the emphasis on the Reformed tradition of Christianity] in this discussion. The Reformed/Presbyterian tradition of Christianity is my own, and these lectures represent for me an attempt to appropriate its social vision.’ Thus, we find that Wolterstorff reflexively writes that his questing or ‘attempt’ happens within the tradition of Reformed/Presbyterian tradition of Christianity. He cites a key Heideggerian/Ricoeurian mechanism in operation in questing: the mechanism of appropriation. He writes, ‘Appropriation of one’s tradition implies neither uncritical acceptance nor total rejection; it entails a discriminating adaptation of its features to one’s own situation.’ Appropriation as ‘discriminating adaptation’ of one’s tradition in one’s ‘situation’ of quest is the key insight in Wolterstorff. There is a dual process in progress in ‘discriminating adaptation’ – on the one hand the act of ‘discriminating’ which resonates with the idea of quest that we have been elaborating above and on the other hand, the content of ‘adaptation’ refers to the tradition that quests and through which the quest is embodied. Now, to summarize the three stages of the act of questing – it begins with (a) an acknowledgement of a lack, followed by (b) the act of articulating the quest, which in turn occurs through (c) the mechanism of appropriation within a tradition of enquiry.

The third and final insight is about the reception of the gift which Williams articulates as ‘an action of self-discovery and an action of trying to put something into being’. If we began with the posture of enquiry, of wondering, which translates into an active questing within a tradition of enquiry driven by the recognition of a lack then appropriation as ‘discriminating adaptation’ must culminate with a finding. If the lack is truly felt, and the quest is authentic in its search, and the mechanism of appropriation is sincerely followed, then of course, there must be recompense, a satisfaction, a finding. This finding on one hand has to be a self-finding, because it is the self that is questing and therefore the discovery and the finding has to be made by the self. It is a discovery that the self makes or ‘self-discovery’. But where does the content of the discovery come from? This is where Wolterstorff’s ‘adaptation’ kicks in and therefore it is equally about bringing ‘something into being’. The being of the ‘something’ is the content of self-discovery. To make some sense of this we will have to at least for this moment discard the subject-object divide that we are trained to think within and see the integrality of ‘self-discovery’ as the ‘being of something’. The being is of course the self’s being in the discovery, although the ‘something’ that is discovered and gained being has come from elsewhere. I would like to call it the ‘gift’ – a gift that has been received in the questing and discovering by the self. The constraint of the gift is the tradition within which one is questing and the adaptation of the tradition through multiple processes of dialogue brings the gift into one’s horizon. The gift is both within the self and without. It is the conjoining of the inside and the outside due to the nature of our ‘porous’ self, a la Taylor, thus the reception of the gift and also the limit of the present gift as the gift itself is contingent on appropriation and indeed future cycles of appropriation and adaptation are yet to come. I have mentioned the idea of dialogue which I would like to claim as the deeper mechanism underlying appropriation and adaptation, but the mention alone would suffice for our purposes here.

I hope I will not be asked – what has this meditation on a piece of text from Williams, on writing, got anything to do with the rite of giving and the mantra of gratitude – precisely because, I hope, one has been able to recognize the inferences that I have already been drawing albeit implicitly between act of writing and the act of gratitude. But of course, the implicit will have to become explicit and take being. Therefore in conclusion, I will revisit the problematic of ‘gratitude’ in light of these three insights from Williams, with a hope that we can transform gratitude even as authentic gratitude transforms us.

What the opening vignette failed to reveal was the state of affairs after two days or after a week of the performance of the ritual of giving. The evidence of this can be attested by any parent. The doll, however pretty, is now lying in a corner or under the bed, and the child is waiting for the next gift, a new toy, a new wonderment to be beheld and embraced. Now, this is not just about children, we can recognize this boredom with toys, however expensive or beautiful, in our own selves. What does this ultimately mean – in spite of the rite of giving and the rituals of gratitude, the gift has not satisfied one’s quest and longing. Here is where I claim that the liberal teaching of gratitude in our societies enacted in our vignette cheapens gratitude and plays a negative role by making invisible the larger process of questing in which the reception of gifts plays only a minor part. The reception of the gift has to be seen as an end to one performance, one cycle of questing, a cycle that will have to be repeated a million times during one’s life time, and each time with a hope of receiving a better gift. The easy language of gratitude keeps invisible both the posture of enquiry and the act of questing that precedes the reception of the gift. So what am I saying? Simply this – No quick ‘thank yous’, rather a focus on enquiry and quest and probably even an evaluation of the gift received and its ontological worth. I claim that this will be an antidote to the superficial gratitude our social exchange is so full of, while often accompanied with the cheap gratitude is the simultaneous despise for what is received, precisely for the lack of fulfilment and satisfaction the gift brings; and no wonder soon, the gift finds its place under our beds. But if the reception of the gift aligns itself with our enquiry and quest, then even if the gift has only provisional value, it plays a powerful intermediary through which the quest progresses, a tradition lived, and life discovered and perhaps it would be worthwhile for our social rites and rituals to train our children in precisely these skills which precede the reception of the gift so that the gift in turn would fulfil its intention in the receiver’s life journey which itself ought to be seen as a quest of a greater life, a life that is indeed lived beyond death.

16^th November, 2013

Brainerd Prince

New Delhi

The Business of Giving

No, this is not a rant against capitalism and how the modern industry of charity is its accomplice, a sort of a safety valve, like the pressure relief valve that is necessary to keep the system from crashing.

This line of critique is put forward rather vehemently by none other than the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek in a 10-minute RSA animate (Zizek on Charity) titled First as Tragedy, then as Farce uploaded in 2010. Although Zizek successfully reveals the nexus between capitalism and charity, it is more of a description rather than an analysis. Furthermore, one cannot wholesale reduce charity to be an arm of capitalism, albeit there are definite connections. Finally, although the critique of capitalism, by the self-proclaimed neo-communist, is spot on in many places, he too acknowledges that the modern liberal capitalist structures, both economic and political, have indeed benefitted more humans than any other form of economic-political ideology in the history of the human race.

But this is not the line of enquiry I wish to pursue – mine is of a much more humble nature. I am interested in interrogating and analysing the very ‘act of giving’ and hopefully discover a few insights in the process of this interrogation.

First, everyone gives! Yes, everyone gives, and it is not restricted to the philanthropists and the religious. All we have to do is look at our credit card statements or our monthly expense lists. We will very quickly find out that we have given out a lot, sometimes more than we should have, leaving us in the bright red. Giving constitutes the primordial ontology of humans, to use a Heideggerian phrase. But all that is meant by this fancy phrase is that to be human is to give, in other words, humans are givers by constitution and giving is an intrinsic component of being human.

Secondly, if giving is a basic constituent of being human, then, why is there all this fuss about charity and capitalism? Yes, there is space for legitimate fussing here, I suppose, because although giving is a condition for being human, there are different forms of giving. In my view, the quarrel is here! Let’s get back to our credit-debit card statements and our monthly expense lists. We have already established that all humans give and these expenses are our immediate evidence. Now, what we need to do is look at the ‘particulars’ against the amounts we have given. The question that needs to be raised here is - to what have we given? I think it might be a useful exercise to analyse the particulars of our giving and maybe even categorize them. I think here I can make a bold assertion – irrespective of the particulars towards which we have given, all our giving can be traced to a person who benefits through our giving. The easiest to trace is the entry on buying that wretched iPad, which I am still trying to learn how to use – of course, I am the beneficiary of that giving, that is very simple and straightforward. Similarly, it won’t take too long to put a beneficiary against each of the particulars. Suddenly, we will have a list of people to whom we have given through the whole month by spending on different particulars. Now we begin to get a different understanding of our expenses, they are actually our giving to different people. We can play interesting games with these figures and names of beneficiaries now. For instance, we can rank these ‘individual beneficiaries’ in a descending order (highest to lowest), and one can safely speculate that the top ten in that list are the people we really love and care about. We can do other interesting things with these figures, for example, even among the top ten, we can find out the proportions of our giving to each of them. All we have to do is to add the amounts of the ten persons and take individual percentages of that whole. We might be surprised to see the difference in the proportions of our giving even among the top ten we love and cherish. Perhaps we might want to do this exercise privately, lest the numbers get us into trouble.

Thirdly, to take this line of enquiry further in a very ‘everyday’ view of life, we can ask another question, slightly different, about the top ten. How much of our giving to the top ten do we consider as an investment? What I mean is, what returns do we anticipate even as we give? Maybe an immediate answer would be, ‘No! Of course not, we don’t expect any returns!’. That is understandable, but let’s be honest and a bit ruthless about it, the iPad I bought could have been for pleasure or for business, but in both cases, it was meant to give me returns – entertainment or profits respectively or at least some sort of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ value! Now, you could say, that of course this is common sense! Who would spend any money without thinking about any returns? Whether we spend money on or give to our family, other loved ones, or even ourselves, we do it with the knowledge of returns – in other words, giving and expectation of returns go hand in hand. It would appear foolish to spend or give without thinking through or at least knowing the value that giving would generate! The interesting bit here is that it is not intuitive to associate ‘acts of giving’ with knowledge of returns, at least in an intentional manner. Perhaps this is not really so interesting and rather a naïve view in our modern economically driven world!

Fourthly, let’s explore a little more the relationship between ‘knowledge of returns’ and ‘acts of giving’. Does our knowledge of returns condition our acts of giving? Does knowledge of sure returns influence positively our giving? What happens to our giving when returns fail? The mother of all questions could be – would we give when we have sure knowledge that there will be no returns? This seems to be an absurd situation! Why would I give when I know there is no return? In our everyday living we would call that foolish spending and we are taught from childhood to be wise with our money, to spend carefully, in other words, make sure there are returns. What does knowledge of returns entail? Knowledge is not an innocent accumulation of facts rather it is a knowing of a process, a process which when invested in, brings about a desired result.  In our case, the stimulus of giving would initiate a whole range of actions all of which work together in a coordinated way to produce the desired result. This knowledge is powerful knowledge. It controls the process so that desired results are obtained. Within the charity industry, millions are spent to ensure that desired results are obtained. The language often used is that of transparency, accountability, sustainability et al. Thus, giving becomes controlled giving. If this is what giving is, then the question one could ask is, is it giving at all?

Finally, this brings us to the issue of giving and acts of giving, particularly about giving without expectation of results, without control over the processes that are initiated through our acts of giving. I am already squirming at this thought, how can I give without any control, without asking for any knowledge of what is going to happen to my hard earned money. How can I trust even as I give? Paradoxically, although we are talking about giving, these thoughts reflect that what is at stake is ‘me’ and I use the language of ‘responsible giving’ to keep ‘myself’ in the centre of the act of giving – if this be the case, then how is it really a giving? This is to question the foundational structures of what we understand by giving and its relationship to returns and knowledge. Imagine giving in ignorance, complete ignorance of what is going to happen with our giving. Giving cheerfully, because there is joy in giving. Letting go of all controls and the need for knowledge and returns – enjoying and basking in the very act of giving rather than what giving accomplishes. Of course we do not let go of our cognitive and intellectual abilities in performing these acts of giving. When it comes to giving, I do not want to treat any one as stupid, I am sure none of us are. But it is more than being an intellectual it is about having the wisdom to recognize in the presence of the other, our very being in the world, how we should be and how we should give. It is being sensitive to the world in which we live, the sheer reality of the world around us. Of course there is indeed a place for knowledge and even the idea of returns that inform us in our acts of giving, but giving that is front-loaded not by these other subsidiary processes, but rather by giving itself.

I am sure this is a rather inadequate analysis of the act of giving, and I have more questions now than I had before I began writing these thoughts down. Hopefully, this will merely provide us an opportunity to begin a conversation, on actions of giving which fundamentally define our very posture in this world.

P.S. I recently read a quote that stimulated this piece, and here it is – ‘But when you do your giving, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing’.

Reading to Write: The Mechanics of Writing an Academic Paper - Draft One

Writing academic papers is all about reading. It is all about reading what and when, in the process of writing, and yet there is writing to be accomplished different from reading. So, what role does reading play in writing? I would like to claim that there are three kinds of reading in the process of writing.

First, reading to narrow down on the title or theme. Let's call this Cursory Reading, a reading widely, that often uses the tool of speed reading. We begin with a pre-understanding, informed by our past readings, of a potential theme to work on. Cursory reading, confirms the theme within us, even as it ensures that writing on that theme is a viable academic project. Here the reading enables the writer to know the material that is available on the theme, as well as how deeply has the theme been thematized in existing literature within disciplinary bounds. Cursory reading gives confidence to the writer, that she is indeed investigating a theme that is important, one that has been engaged by others, and hence has a history of engagement, which will provide her dialogue partners and finally confidence that her script will definitely take this line of enquiry further and make a meaningful contribution to a body of knowledge.

Secondly, once the theme is finalized, the next goal is to get a structure of the paper. Of course we are taught from our early time of education that a good piece has three parts - Introduction, Body, Conclusion. Guess what, it is still great advise, albeit, all these three parts or sections maybe differently understood now than then. The body is what academic writing is all about. It must have three to four main sub-sections. Each section providing evidence, engaging an argument, in support of the central claim of the theme of the paper. Now, there are no rules about how each sub-section must be related to another. This is one reason we talk about internal rationality. The rationality of the piece evolves from the inside of the piece being conceived to be written. This relating and connecting is done by the author, and hence authorial rationality. The quality of paper depends on how deeply are these sub-sections connected to each other as well as to the central argument propounded in the script. Often writers string together rather superficially sections containing similar/different ideas, but not really interconnected. That would be an example of a weak paper. What has reading to do with this? Everything! It is here that the writer begins to do what I call as Committed Reading. This is the long trudge of the night. It is reading deeply, about the sub-themes. Now, one does not have a sub-theme to begin with, these sub-themes, or the different arguments being put forward will appear to one's horizon even as one committedly reads on the theme. They come upon the reader. Let's try and put a method to this madness. When we did cursory reading, we got a theme, and also a list of bibliography that we surveyed. While sifting through texts, we identified the semantic dense texts for our project and had already made note of the central interlocutors in our paper. All of this has been accomplished through cursory reading. With committed reading, we have three aims: first, to identify the main debate upon the selected theme and the history of its development. I would say that focus on the twentieth century, and use eighteenth and nineteenth century for grounding and locating the debate. Secondly, to find the different points of views or positions of that debate and the scholars holding those positions. This is again done historically, in a sense, you can't pit Hegel against Habermas in a horizontal sense, on two sides of the debate. Having a historical sense is of extreme importance. Finally, to identify your position, and argument. This is called the central argument. An argument consists of an assertion or a claim, which is supported by premises. The evidence one provides for the premises, and the validity of the premises determines the strength of the argument. Now, these different premises and evidences, must be correlated and must possess an internal structure. Each of them provides a part to the whole argument. It is these interconnected parts that form the sub-sections of the body of the paper. Committed reading is not cursory, it reads both exhaustively and extensively on these different points. The main texts of the main interlocutors are read completely, so that you can represent their positions confidently. The conceptual structure of the script develops within yourself during this phase of committed reading. At the end of this season of reading, you should be able to put out a conceptual framework, clearly outlining the development of the argument. This is the real grind. There are absolutely no visible marks for how exhaustively and extensively you read, no one sees your hardwork, but your final script will bear the marks of your hard work. It is here that the writer would be highly tempted to take short cuts, to read summaries, to read introduction and relevant chapters, et al, and to all these devious schemes of the devil that may tempt us, I say, stand fast, don't give in. Read with commitment. It is here that boys are separated from the men.

The third phase of writing a script is to simply write the damn script out! By now not only do you know clearly the theme located within a body of literature that you are going to address in your script, but you also know the argument you are presenting, the different positions or schools of views on the theme, which you might critique positively or negatively, and you also know the premises/evidences that coherently form the structure that embodies your argument. Now to put flesh to this skeleton is the articulation of your script. It is the easiest as well as the hardest thing to do. Here there is a general misconception, that once we have the idea in our head, writing out is merely a verbalizing of the idea. It is merely putting into language what we already know. This is an epistemological issue about the relationship between idea and its representation and the role of language in it. The crucial question is can there be ideas without words? Furthermore, what do we mean by putting ideas into words. I am not going to address this issue head-on except to say that writing takes the place of an author's intent to discourse. I follow Ricoeur in this. Writing is not transcribing an already existing speech, rather takes the place of speech. Hence writing is like speaking. It is an art that is informed by both cursory and committed readings, but is a different act altogether. To construct a sentence, and to construct a paragraph requires a set of skills that are different from those required for reading and speaking. Before I talk a bit about the skills involved in writing, the question I want to address is, is there a form of reading relevant to this final phase of scripting the piece. Yes there is, and let us call it Critical Reading. Now, this is not really reading in either the cursory or committed sense. It is reading in the service of writing. Reading here plays second fiddle to writing. You read to support, to evidence, to critique. The written text bears on you to read more, in order to write and develop the script. If your cursory and committed readings have been done well, then often it is the revisiting of those texts that you have already read and underlined, or taken notes of. However, it might also be a new path that your writing forges out with, for which new readings have to be done, in support of an argument, or to clarify a point you are making. This is strictly business-reading, you have to be swift and ruthless. This is paid work, every minute counts in this reading that is called upon to serve writing. The temptation here is to read to enquire further, or your self will tell you that you need to read more to know more, but you have to resist the temptation to be carried away by reading. These temptations to read are distractions, where reading itself becomes a distraction in the composition of the script. Here the devil is on the other side. Earlier the devil didn't want you to read, and to cut corners, now the devil wants to take you on the long garden path, a wild goose chase. So keep critical reading close to the script you are constructing.

With this we have seen the three forms of reading - Cursory, Committed, Critical - that are in operation in different stages of the act of writing. I will end with a few thoughts on writing and the skills it requires. In writing, the key is to write out a single coherent piece with all the various parts/sections embodied in paragraphs clearly relating and connecting together coherently. There are no points for empty descriptions that do not serve any purpose. Every paragraph must advance the central argument creatively. A good paragraph has four sections - (a) state clearly and simply the particular point it is making in other words describe the point being made, (b) discuss the point, by showing the different positions on it and by bringing together the divergent schools into a conversation, (c) evidence your position/point by debate, and (d) finally, deploy the point made towards the extension of the larger or central point/thesis/argument you are advancing in the piece. It is here in (d) that all the hard work of (a), (b), (c) will pay off if the connection to the larger thesis and argument is made strongly. This is YOUR contribution. How you connect is YOUR creation of knowledge. I must also mention about writing styles here. Each writer must develop a style unique to one's own style of discourse. However, just as everything one's own begins with imitation and only much later brings about a certain uniqueness through innovation, I suggest, that it is the same in the act of writing - imitate the styles of authors you respect. When you read don't read for substance alone, but read to understand their methodology and also styles of writing. Imitate them. Use their styles of writing and meticulously learn from them. Be an apprentice to their skill of writing. As you write fluidly, then bring your innovation to it. Make changes and create a new style for others to imitate. Finally, the skill of writing lies in re-writing. Often one can have 12-15 drafts before the script begins to make sense. But the more you write, the rewriting becomes less. But still there is rewriting, lots of it. It is like chiseling the sculpture so that it is smooth like butter. Ironing out knots, holes, straightening out unnecessary twists and turns - bringing about clarity, simplicity, and thrust.

The goal of writing is to be read, and the underlying goal of being read is that your text will give new insights, directions, and energy to the reader, so that her action in the world will imitate the structures you have laid down in your script with a hope that they will act better in the world. Thus writing is a powerful means to change the world, by changing the actions and decisions of readers. Perhaps it can be said that investing in learning the skills of writing is indeed investing in the transformation of the world. So it would only be appropriate to end by saying - read to write and write to be read.

Is Conversion still Valid?

The act of converting people to one's own religion and tradition is as old as humans when they began to organize themselves into communities and lived in the presence of 'other' communities. In olden times it was pretty straightforward - you either killed every other, or at least the males, so that the other women could bear your own children, or at least you made slaves of the other and forced migration on them, ensuring distance from their own, and thus the other was masterfully eliminated or sublated. But this swallowing up of the other brought about ontological changes to the self (within whom the other continues to live, quite literally) which was not often acknowledged. In our modern time, with increase in sophistication and tact, this form of brute power is reserved only for epochal wars or for situations where none see, however, in regular modes of living, hard power has been traded for soft power. Now it is not the guns but the goodies that power produces that are used as instruments to convert the other into one's own - education, economics and politics are three key modes of conversion. If we take education as an example, how is it used as a means of conversion? The Latin ēducātiō means 'a breeding, a bringing up, a rearing'. Different communities possess not only different methods but also different knowledge and skills in and through which the younger ones are bred or brought up or reared. However, with the use of soft power, a particular powerful tradition's knowledge and skills are (a) first of all affirmed to be universal and beneficial for all, (b) then, it is taken to the other as a goody (often with a bit of force, through international policies, world bank, etc) that is beneficial to make the other as oneself. (c) This results in the other accepting the powerful tradition's education, thus one's own tradition is lost, often forever. The other is transformed, often without understanding the deep, irreparable implications their acceptance of the goody has brought with it.

But I would still like to argue that converting is a valid act, as long as it is mutual conversion in a dialogical encounter, in which the self and the other sit together and eat at the table. Another image can be that of mutual incarnation, mutual becoming of the other, so that both embody the other within themselves. It is only this swallowing of the other that creates a new self which entails both the self and the other.

Samvada Centre for Research Resources

Samvada – The Rationale

While traditions are embodied and lived out in the different societies of our contemporary world, they need to be deeply reflected upon with a view to address the incommensurabilities and rivalries that develop between them. Therefore Samvada Centre for Research Resources seeks to make a contribution to contemporary life in our modern global societies by addressing critical issues that structure contemporary life by working with students and researchers from across the globe. Contemporary research within the Human Sciences is largely dominated by methodologies of the Natural Sciences. These methods, working out of a modernist and enlightenment epistemology of a ‘single universal frame’, focus on providing causal explanations for human phenomena through reductionism and reification of human data. These approaches, while having produced incredible results in the Material Sciences, have been unable to give appropriate accounts of human life and society. With the rejection of the scientific paradigm within the Human Sciences, new methodologies have to be evolved within the Human Sciences that are able to take seriously the indeterminacies that are constitutive of human society and human agency. Samvada chiefly focuses on addressing methodologies and conceptual frameworks that provide the ‘how’ of research programmes within the Human Sciences.

The successful functioning of any society depends on the success of its educational system, therefore education and research are the institutional vehicles through which society trains itself by theorising, modifying and transmitting the practices and knowledge that it has inherited from its past even as it engages with the practices and knowledge originating from other societies. The practices and knowledge about humans, as individuals and collectives, are generally studied under Human Sciences and particularly through the disciplines of politics, economics, religion, theology, history, philosophy, psychology etc. Therefore a healthy society necessitates the study of the Human Sciences at the highest levels.

In our contemporary world, the various social domains of most, if not all modern societies, are resourced by the modern educational system stemming out of the Western academic tradition which has been universalised within an Enlightenment understanding and has been passed on to societies around the world through the processes of colonialism and globalism. Therefore the study of the Human Sciences in any society, for example in the Indian society, is borrowed from the Enlightenment-informed Western Academia.

In the modern West, ‘protest’ against traditional religion (Latin Christianity) and subsequent quests for reforms, swung to their logical conclusion in achieving a ‘disenchanted’ worldview driven by exclusive humanism. In the new era of modernity, human life was imagined purely within an ‘immanent frame’ without reference to transcendence. Religion became bounded as irrational, mystical and private, and hence it has been displaced from pre-eminence in the public sphere. Thus the academic study of the Human Sciences in the public sphere is limited to a material understanding of the Human self and society while relegating the non-material, spiritual or religious, either to the private sphere or to a narrow bandwidth within the university. This paradigm of secularised Human Sciences has not only informed Educational Institutions in the West, but also has formed the basis for setting up modern Educational institutions in other parts of the world, such as in India. This has resulted in an exclusion of the knowledge and practices belonging to historical traditions which were termed as 'religious', only to allow them currency in the private sphere, in that they entailed an enchanted discourse without the separation of the material from the spiritual.

However, with the postmodern turn, intellectual enquiry, particularly within the Human Sciences in the Western academia, structured as it is by the ‘objectivity’ of secularity has been seriously challenged on two counts: (a) validity of material explanations for human self and society, and (b) the universalism of its objective claims. Thus, enquiry in the Human Sciences has reached an impasse through a postmodern deconstruction of the universal and secular liberalism of modern inquiry, and the insufficiency of opstmodern enquiry to provide an alternative viable proposal. Western academia is currently responding to this impasse through the proposal of a dialogical mode of enquiry within the Human Sciences, informed by the Continental philosophies of Existentialism, Phenomenology and Philosophical Hermeneutics.

However, this dialogical form of enquiry has parallels in different eras of the pre-modern West, such as in the works of Thomas Aquinas (13^th century). What is interesting is that dialogical enquiries are precisely the hallmarks of traditions of enquiry in other parts of the world such as South Asia, where intellectual enquiry has historically progressed against the backdrop of dialoguing traditions, known as Samvada - 'discoursing together'.

Samvada is a tradition of enquiry that has dialogued different intellectual enquiries such as Buddhist, Jaina and Hindu thought, with each other in South Asia. Although the Samvada tradition of enquiry is uniquely located in history, its presupposition of diverse traditions of enquiry is representative of most forms of enquiry, formal and informal, in South Asia. The Indian vāda tradition was developed in the methods used to delineate the boundaries of the discourse between the rival schools of Vedic textual exegesis in ways that clarified difference and debate.

Therefore, Samvada Centre for Research Resources will integrate modern hermeneutical tradition with a revival of the Samvada dialogical tradition of enquiry (a) to make a critical contribution to the Western academic tradition by enabling it to go beyond the modern-postmodern impasse that it is faced with currently, (b) to offer a conceptual framework to enable dialogue between traditions of enquiry arising historically from different societies, (c) and particularly to enable these societies to articulate their self-traditions within their own internal categories. This threefold aim arises out of the core beliefs of the Samvada Centre for Research Resources, which emphasises that all research enquiries must be dialogical in nature. Therefore the Samvada tradition and the modern hermeneutical tradition of the West, rather than being rival traditions of enquiry, can mutually inform each other. The researcher is required to Know oneself to identify the tradition(s) informing her view of the world, to Understand the ‘other’ within the historical traditions by which the other is constituted, and to respond Dialogically in speaking the language of another as one’s own, even as differences are clarified, paradoxes resolved and Human Sciences advanced in our predominantly global societies.

Check Samvada out HERE

A Holiday from Myself – A Walk into the Wilderness

Even before I wake up

I am already someone

Some I want to be, most I don’t

I am a father, a brother, a son

A wife, sister, mother

Roles I was born with

Promotion I didn't demand

Doctor, Architect, Lawyer

Banker, florist, cabdriver

A character in a drama

A drama I didn’t consent to play

A script I didn’t write

But time keeps turning the pages

And the story continues

Roles I am forced to play

Even when I resist and refuse

All I do

Crawl into another story

The plot again is already set

Little change I can bring

Not just the plot of the dramas I play

But the master plot, the mother of all plots

The plot of the story itself

It is tiring to play these roles

Enact all these parts

Scripts to voice

Rituals to play

Practices to perform

Tiring, exhausting, all-consuming

I need out, I need a holiday

I need a place to recuperate

But if I am the parts I play

And the roles I perform

Even if the parts and roles exhaust

How do I escape and run

I need a holiday from myself

From all parts and roles

Stories that give significance

Narratives that provide meaning

But how can that be?

How can one flee from oneself?

Even death does not provide a way of escape

As long as the story continues and the drama plays

I live on and continue to perform

Even after death in the memory of time

If even death cannot set free

How else can I fly?

Move past the constraints

Placed by the characters

Roles I am forced to play

Into the wilderness I must go

Into the wilderness I must disappear

The blackhole of narratives

The death of the story

The oblivion of meaning

I yearn for the wilderness

To strengthen, to refresh

To help me understand

To be beyond me

In order to be me

Idols: Material and Conceptual

When one thinks of idols, the image that immediately comes to mind is an image of a material thing. Hence those traditions that 'appear' not to have any material idols (I say 'appear', because on careful inspection, every tradition can be said to have its share of material idols) claim superiority over those who do. But then the question one must ask is, what is so abominable about 'material idols'? Simply put, the idea that any material form can have the arrogance to stand in place of the immaterial divine! But this view entails a certain understanding of what is material and divine respectively. This view draws a distinction between matter and spirit and holds them as mutually exclusive and thus in opposition to one another. While this view represents the best of 18th and 19th century western intellectual tradition, which exalted the matter-spirit binary, it needs to be radically updated for those of us living in the 21st century. Matter was then seen in a substantialist sense and opposed to spirit, a view which has since been discarded. 20th century Science and Philosophy has long gone past this opposition. Therefore the real critique of material idol lies in the critique of material substances that claim to stand in place of the divine who is seen as formless and non-material. This view has to be now radically challenged and updated given the contemporary critique of the matter-spirit binary. however that is not what I am particularly interested in this morning.

My interest lies in the idea of 'idol' itself which is seen in a material sense. At the heart of the critique is the view that idols limit and bound that which is infinite and unbounded. If this is what an idol is then I want to assert that not only material idols accomplish this, but equally conceptual idols. The assertion can be seen to have legitimacy because concepts too cannot escape the critique that is advanced against material idols. Concepts limit as much as material idols. One could even say that underlying every material idol there is a conceptual idol, or perhaps even argue that ultimately all we have access to are conceptual idols. But those traditions that oppose material idols do not cease to possess concepts and thus conceptual idols even if they do not have corresponding material idols. For example, the concept 'God' can be seen as a conceptual idol. But this leads to further questions about the nature of language and the delimiting function that appears innate to all language, although this view of language itself can be challenged. But that is another debate.

However, the point being made here is that the distinction that is made between material and conceptual idols is a false opposition and that the onus is particularly on those who believe they do not possess material idols, to examine the conceptual idols to which they give their allegiance. Examples of conceptual idols are identities, institutions, structures, definitions et al. If this be the case, then the larger question for us is to ask ourselves, if we can ever escape idols, and if not then how should we view idols - conceptual and material? A reasonable response could possibly be to begin (a) by accepting the reality of idols and not be naively opposed to the idea of idols. (b) But then to quickly recognize that since they are idols, they do not have the power to stand in for the divine. (c) All concepts and material idols are limited and bounded and hence are unable to represent the unbounded and the beyond, thus even the best of idols, conceptual and material, need to be held provisionally with a willingness to kiss them goodbye when encountered with a deeper revelation.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

...many in the past have attributed success to 'standing on the shoulders of giants'. Although this metaphor can be traced back to Bernard of Chartres, the twelfth-century French philosopher, it is Newton who made it a household metaphor with his 'if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants'. However, as John of Salisbury noted in his Metalogicon (1159), Bernard of Chartres' use of the metaphor is fascinating and insightful - 'Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.' Therefore, according to Bernard of Chartres, the secret of success begins with (a) realizing that one is a dwarf, a dwarf without any 'sharpness of sight' or even 'physical distinction', something that some of us would rather die than admit. (b) Secondly, to know that success comes only in following after giants. This requires one to bend one's knee to climb the giant even as one submits oneself and be dependent on them. (c) But if we allow ourselves to realize our dwarf stature and diligently follow after the giants, Bernard of Chartres argues that we will 'see more than they and things at a greater distance', in other words we will become more successful than even the giants on whose shoulders we stand. Following Bernard of Chartres, Newton became both successful and a household name; maybe we too should and by that could and would...

A Stereotype about Stereotypes

The image one inadvertently has of a ‘stereotype’ is definitely not positive. If stereotype is understood as a clichéd view of something, or simply as a fixed simplified notion, then stereotypes are something that one would want to avoid in our thinking about anything, be it – a person, vocation, culture or even about abstract concepts. At first glance, yes, we must fight stereotypes! But let’s pause and ask why? What advantage is there in fighting stereotypes? We want to get at the truth, we claim – we want to know what is behind the stereotype, to know what it is, we reply. But then what guarantee is there that what one gets behind today’s stereotypes, that ‘true’ view which our struggles ultimately succeed in getting will not succumb to the same process of stereotyping in time and produce a stereotype soon after? In other words, can we escape stereotyping at all? On one hand, stereotypes are the dominant views that have survived time even if as a parody or a bad representation. They have survived and thus are given to us – similar to the Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ in terms of ideas. On the other hand, our daily living and experience challenges these ‘fittest’ stereotypes at every point and every moment, challenging precisely their claim to be the fittest representations of what they seek to represent. In turn we produce new views, new ‘truth’, often unaware that these too have the full potential of becoming stereotypes given time, when something ‘more truer’ will replace them. Is this not the history of knowledge? If there is anything that the philosophy of science has taught us, it is precisely this – the changing paradigms of knowledge. If all the three ingredients that constitute a stereotype – language, the subject who stereotypes, the object being stereotyped – are constantly undergoing change then although we inherit stereotypes from a past time, they will necessarily be altered in time to produce new stereotypes that too will be altered in time, and this process goes on ad infinitum. Thus it appears that it is the stereotyped notion of a stereotype, that stereotypes are 'fixed notions' that needs to be challenged. We will just have to live by negotiating the stereotypes our age has bequeathed upon us even as we create our own stereotypes for posterity, although, we would never, even in our humblest of moments, term our findings as stereotypes.