Skip to main content

Philosophy ToDAY


Today is the World Philosophy Day, a friend reminded me in the morning. That friend is a philosopher. He has been a professor of philosophy for most part of his life. Great man he is like Immanuel Kant. The only one great person in my life who knew me from my infantile adolescence and stayed with me until now, the autumn of my life.

UNESCO observes the third Thursday of November as the World Philosophy Day, I learnt after I received the message from Prof. What does philosophy mean to ordinary mortals like me? [And you, may I dare to ask?] Philosophy died long ago. Poetry died a little later.

Prof and I were students of philosophy together at The Retreat in Yercaud [Tamil Nadu, India] in the early 1980s. My early twenties. His too. But he was a mature person unlike me. I was silly. So I didn’t learn much philosophy while he learnt too much and became a Doctor of Philosophy. What surprises me is that he has continued the friendship till this day in spite of my congenital silliness in contradistinction to his acute maturity. I wonder why he continued to take interest in me in spite of all the falls I had on my way.

Is he the real philosopher? Like Socrates.

He may prefer a comparison with Jesus perhaps because he is a Catholic priest. Was Jesus a philosopher? If Jesus was born in Greece, he would have been a philosopher, I think. It wasn’t easy to be a philosopher in the Jewish-Arab world, especially in those days. Even today can we expect any philosophy from those places where Jesus grew up and preached and teached [let me take this Shavian liberty with linguistics if only to honour Shaw on this day of philosophers – ah, I love to see Shaw turning in his tomb]?

My life is reaching a Shavian dramatic climax and there is no romance of the final Judgment Day in my philosophy. But my nights get disturbed by what happened in my past. That’s natural, I think. In our old age, we look back and wonder why we were like this. Does your philosophy agree with me, Prof? You can tick me off saying this is psychology. My problem is that I dabbled in too many things and lacked what you all call a focus.

I should have focused. On what?

Egolessness, I guess.

And I missed that. That’s my failure. The failure of the particular spermatozoon that won the stupid race which was clapped on by ignorance about contraceptives!

Shaw would tell me that it was a scientific problem with a nanosecond… a competition in which you won and millions lost out. And Prof would call it a miracle. My philosophy begins with the loss of millions and the idiotic miracle  that won…

 

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanNovember 16, 2023 at 10:21 PM

    Hari OM
    Ah, my friend, the minute one starts to ask the questions 'what? how? why?' one is entering the realm of philosophy. It all begins with determining the logic, or lack, in a matter then deconstructing it, exploring each detail, then reconstructing... we are all of us philosophers at some level on any given day. If we do not ask the questions, then we are merely existing. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 17, 2023 at 7:06 AM

      Yes, most of us are philosophers except that we don't use big words like hermeneutics and so on. But those who are only 'existing', without asking questions, seem to be happier. Lucky ones, I'd say.

      Delete
  2. Liz A.November 16, 2023 at 11:09 PM

    I don't think philosophy is dead. It just doesn't look like it once did back in the old days.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 17, 2023 at 7:07 AM

      As Yamini says above, as long as there are people who raise questions there will be philosophy. But not the Aristotle type.

      Delete
  3. J. S. VilaNovember 17, 2023 at 1:09 AM

    The philosophie is a world with a lot of ways. And It is one of the first science in the thinking of people.

    ReplyDelete
  4. magiceyeNovember 17, 2023 at 8:01 AM

    One can never be egoless. Philosophy is a way of life where you question everything you see and listen to.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Shalet JimmyNovember 18, 2023 at 12:07 AM

    Please don't say philosophy and poetry are dead...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 18, 2023 at 4:54 AM

      I don't want them to die. But so many unthinking people, so much hard- heartedness...

      Delete
  6. CloudiaNovember 18, 2023 at 1:34 AM

    Thank you friend for sharing this philosophical post. Aloha!🙏🏽

    ReplyDelete
  7. KayNovember 18, 2023 at 11:00 AM

    Thank you for your visit, Tomichan. I confess I've not been a good student of philosophy.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 18, 2023 at 4:14 PM

      That doesn't matter, Kay. I'm kind of dilettante - of many things.

      Delete

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 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...
18 comments
Read more

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...
10 comments
Read more

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...
8 comments
Read more

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...
22 comments
Read more