Skip to main content

Colours of Truth

5 years ago in Delhi when I grappled with certain godmanly truths


There are no absolute truths except in rigidly well-defined systems like mathematics and science. Even a scientific statement like water boils at 100 degree Celsius is true only under clearly defined atmospheric conditions. Water will boil at 68oC on top of Mount Everest.

Mathematics can claim more absolute truths. A formula like sin2ÆŸ + cos2ÆŸ = 1 is absolute and won’t change even on the Everest. But what sense does that formula make to most people? The more absolute a truth is, the less valuable it is in day-to-day life. Absolute truths generally belong to specialised cliques and communes who have their own unique languages like trigonometry for example.

For ordinary mortals like me, absolute truths are like The sun rises in the east or The cow gives milk. But then if you ask me where the east is I’ll have to say that it is where the sun rises. [That’s like saying that David is Absalom’s father because Absalom is David’s son.] Imagine standing somewhere in the outer space far away from the earth and the sun. Where is the east? There is no east nor west in the infinite spaces. The absolute truth about the sun and the east is no more absolute than the cows giving milk. Some cows are too holy to give milk or anything worthwhile.

 Shelley told us two centuries ago that “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.” The ordinary truths are all stained by life. When I say I love my country and choose to live in Birmingham with a Chinese wife, my patriotism may be little more than the occasional pangs of nostalgia for some lost moments of childhood happiness or a little more adult longing for a need to belong to a more familiar environment. Or it may be genuine passion for a cause that is yet to be understood clearly.

Life’s truths are blurred like the mirror in the bathroom after your shower. The infidelity of a woman can shatter the entire universe of a Hamlet. Yet we know that not all women are unfaithful to their husbands and hardly any significant number of them actually murder their husbands in order to sleep with another man. So what was the value of Hamlet’s truth? Yet didn’t his truth drive too many people to insanity or death?

Truths are multi-coloured. Your truth may be saffron while mine is blood-red. There are green truths too. A lot of colours, in fact.

Who cares anyway? We have learnt to call it the post-truth world.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 335: Why is it so difficult to establish the truth? Why is it called naked truth? Does truth really win? #NakedTruth

Comments

  1. जितेन्द्र माथुरJuly 24, 2020 at 12:52 PM

    Very well written Sir. However let's not embrace the post-truth world though we are (unfortunately) destined to live in it. The quest for truth may not lead us to anywhere but the person who continues with that does something that deserves admiration. Post-truth world is a reality today but that shouldn't be acceptable to genuine truth-lovers. All the same, your thoughts regarding truth expressed herein deserve a deep thought from the side of the reader of this article. The tagline of a good but flop Hindi movie - Yeh Faasley (2011) was - 'You can only imagine the truth'. I feel, this statement also has some substance since several truths never come out and several mysteries always remain unravelled.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 25, 2020 at 9:27 AM

      The post-truth condition is here to stay, I think. Look at world leaders today. All frauds but very popular. If the earlier world belonged to the mediocre, today's world belongs to frauds. Sad, tragic, but all the more reason to assume that there is no God looking after us. But we shall continue to fight for the gods, with the gods, by the gods, against fellow human beings.

      Thank you for caring to express your views so frankly here. Very few people dare to write so frankly these days.

      Delete
  2. Jack | MySay.inJuly 28, 2020 at 1:23 PM

    Couldn't agree more on this! We are nothing but bunch of gathered data and reactions - from upbringing and experience. Some red, some green and some saffron, dominated! The problem is in this cosmos, the earth is smaller than an atom and on that earth 'I' am a big thing and my choice preference and knowledge is supreme and that is where all the I's conflict like the random movement of particles. Do those particles matter to us? Does some creator/or our accidental existence really mean any thing in this huge cosmos? Time to think - what has any kind of collectivism given us - in the name of faiths, ideologies. May be, there is no purpose to life but if at all there is, it cannot be collectivism of any sort, I presume.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...
13 comments
Read more

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...
29 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more