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 sin2Ɵ + cos2Ɵ = 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.


Comments

  1. 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. 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. 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

Life of a Transgender

Book Review Title: From Manjunath to Manjamma Authors: B Manjamma Jogathi with Harsha Bhat Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 171 I had an aversion towards the transgender people I met on the trains during my frequent travels as a younger man. These people came across as rude and vulgar. They would enter the train compartment in a large group, clapping hands loudly, waking up sleeping passengers and insisting on being given generous alms. They would go to the extent of hectoring the passengers, even making physical intrusions like poking and caressing body parts that we won’t let strangers touch. Reading Arundhati Roy’s novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , a few years ago, made me look at transpersons with some empathy. Anjum, the transperson protagonist, is also a Muslim. Double alienation. Anjum is an undesirable citizen of the country by virtue of being a transperson who is also a Muslim. She is pushed out of the mainstream literally and driven to living i

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Trapped in Pandora’s Shadows

Anjana Alphons George I wanted this to be a guest post from a former student. However, getting this poem from Anjana Alphons George wasn’t quite easy. So this is going to be a hybrid of the guest and the host coming together like the waves and the intertidal zone in the ocean. “I’ve become your fan,” I said to Anjana. She was in grade 10. I wasn’t teaching her since my classes were confined to grades 11 and 12. It was a few years back. Anjana had delivered a speech in the weekly morning assembly. Her speech was entirely different from all the speeches of students I had ever listened to. It sounded impromptu. It carried feelings from the heart. Convictions, rather. It was motivational. Inspiring. It moved goosebumps on my skin. “Your speech was splendid,” I told her when I met her on the corridor later in the day. She became my student in grades 11 and 12 and I watched her grow up into intellectual and emotional maturity. When I asked her to write a guest post on my blog, I ha