Problems, solution and the procrastination

Perhaps I might be forgiven, being in the age group I am, for making a mountain of a molehill and then considering the same as insurmountable. Imagine, therefore, my surprise, a sense of magical exhilaration when the other day I decided and was actually able to solve a simple household problem with a reasonable effort, an action I held up for months.

While in the above case the problem posed could be resolved to one’s satisfaction, I am not sure that all kinds of small problems we face both in our day to day lives and the ‘larger’ problems of life in the realms of technology, environment, health as well as in the broader social, political, economic and cultural contexts (subsuming some of our daily problems as particular instantiations of the bigger issues) can always, in a general way, be shown to possess happy or fair solutions. These may often be justifiably considered intractable.

 

Health problems of an individual

It is a common experience that some of the problems we face as individuals apparently resolve themselves given sufficient time. There is a certain degree of reversibility associated with some changes with respect to a particular position or the condition of a given system (which our life has to deal with), for instance, our body at any given instant. Changes do occur in our body or in its behaviour. Sometimes one is barely conscious of these changes or almost disregards these. On other occasions, however, these changes may be more significant and it is possible that one perceives the changes as persistent and feels uncertain about the consequences. That is when a problem with our body might come to acquire a definition. But as experienced by many of us, quite a few such apparent changes disappear on their own after a period, or if they remain, are not quite noticeable and seemingly do not interfere with our daily life. This does not mean that the problem has been resolved, but rather the body has come to terms with the apparent changes in it and taken them in its stride. It can be said to have graduated into a new steady state, may be termed better or worse than the previous state. That is a matter of perception, a subjective decision, but usually not calling for any action, a problem-solving intervention.

There are occasions, however, when the changes in one’s body may not be diagnosed as benign. There may be a threat perception about an immediate breakdown of our life or damage to its quality. The problem definition in such a case becomes more urgent with greater specialised and professional inputs. Specific solutions, mandating medically consistent actions and treatments might follow. But it is not guaranteed in all cases that the solutions would be fully satisfactory or would entirely or even partially resolve the problem(s) originally posed.

The main difference between the two cases above (pertaining to health problems of an individual) is the apparent decisiveness and wherewithal to act with the available medical means (scientific knowledge and technology) upon resolving a problem in the latter case whereas in the former hope or faith in the self-healing capacity of the body is in evidence leading to apparent inaction. The outcome in either case may not conform to a uniquely definable ‘solution’, but would be measured in terms of our expectation of what a solution in a given case should look like.

Problems – scaling from individual to community levels

In the household context, people continuously need to solve problems arising with regard to selection, procurement of various gadgets and attending to a myriad maintenance issues related to a number of appliances and procedures of routine use for convenient, smooth and trouble-free conduct of daily chores. By the same token, a cooperative housing society, a larger colony of residents with a more or less homogeneous background, and finally a much larger and a more diverse community living within the precincts of a municipality (municipal corporation) might be required to solve qualitatively similar problems, though not just with wider variability due to heterogeneity of the populace and their requirements, but with a significantly higher scale that may sometimes call for altogether different strategies and skills.

Guaranteed equitable distribution of drinking water to all residents in a large housing complex or a larger community and uninterrupted collection and environmentally safe disposal of accumulated municipal solid waste are examples of two common and pressing problems most cities in India face today, with no immediate and reliable solution on the horizon. There are many more similar problems, such as, public health, sanitation, air/water pollution, roads and efficient drainage (especially for storm water), etc.

Water supply

 While the water distribution problem is generally a large-scale citywide one, management of water supply in a smooth and equitable manner even within a much smaller residential complex may present problems to those responsible and entrusted with the job that may not be just technical (removing blockages, repair or replacement of machine parts or some related civil works) or technological (choosing a more modern and advanced technology than used in the existing installation, deciding about water conservation and rain water harvesting). On the other hand, managing city’s growing water need, with growing population, will entail not just planning and construction of new storage facilities ahead of the growing demand, but taking principled position about sanctioning new planned residential/commercial building constructions that source their water from the city’s available water storage facilities, strictly monitoring and controlling unlawful extraction of the groundwater for the same purpose. 

 

Solid waste disposal

A different set of issues become pertinent in the context of solid waste disposal problem. In this case the magnitude of the problem may grow too big and its resolution may become quite intractable with the scale due to the indecisiveness and procrastination (lack of urgency) on the part of the people responsible for its management. Simple issues like segregation of waste into dry and compostable wet garbage or separation of recyclable (such as plastic, metallics) and electronic wastes, which are relatively easy to enforce and implement at the level of individual household units within a residential society, become many times more difficult, hazardous and expensive (if not nearly impossible) to carry out if such a combined (unsegregated) mass of solid waste from a large number of housing complexes are allowed to accumulate at a municipal ward level. Choices among common treatment processes such as composting, incineration, landfill and capping etc, can become orders of magnitude difficult and ineffective, what with poor match between the feed specification of some of these machines and the actual load, poor designs or the inefficiency of the commercially available machines to be selected within municipal funds restrictions. Thus the problem here is not just techno-economic but also about planning and management.

No matter whether it is a problem faced by an individual or by a collective, difficulties in problem solving (making it an open-ended process) are often associated with an inadequate or incomplete problem definition that may happen sometime, in a typical real life scenario, due to lack of input information required and the uncertainty in the data. The indecisiveness to act in a way so as to move towards a solution may also occur when one has to make choices among multiple solution strategies resulting in outcomes which, even though include a good technically consistent solution to the original problem but makes the solution less worthy either because of incurring too much expense or for generating a new problem (like disposal of a byproduct).

Social and political over-determinants of problem-solving choices

An important difference that pertains to this class of problems vis-à-vis the problems faced by an individual household is the collaborative nature of the problem solving in the sense that the decision making in this regard can not be done individually. This might (usually, though not necessarily always) bring into play the social and or even political determinants quite apart from purely technical or technological considerations that would have decided the course of action in an individual based problem-solving scenario.   

However, it can be stated with some certainty that delaying decisive actions, even at the risk of failures or sub-optimal solutions, do not help in the long run and may actually compound the problem. This has been amply demonstrated in the case of community wide problem-solving by way of huge cost overruns and/or coming up with an outdated solution designed for a certain assumed scale that may have seen an increase by an order of magnitude during the pendency of the problem solving process.

The tree

When I happened to step into the balcony of my flat in the morning after a night of torrential rain accompanied as it was with a vicious gale, the first thing I noticed was a bit of a void in the direction of my line of sight which normally did not intersect with a part of the balcony and a good part of the terrace of the two-story house in the neighbouring bungalow society right outside the boundary wall enclosing ours. By then I realised that a stout and big branch at the upper flights on the right side of the Krishnachura (‘Royal Poinciana’) tree I am used to seeing from my balcony was no more, being substantially broken down from the main stem and was precariously dangling above and across the boundary wall with a medley of sub-branches, leaves and flowers further threatening to go where gravity would pull them to. And that meant on top of a lot of spanking cars parked on either side of that wall.    

Three things bothered me, in no particular order. Both my neighbours in the opposite two-story house and I would forego a part of the privacy (without having to pay any premium for this privilege) naturally provided by the leafy branches of the tree. The latter, which had a symmetrical expanse as it diverged upwards, well nigh lost it, much like a human shorn of an arm from the shoulder. A cuckoo that used to station itself on some branches and from the leafy incognito issued its unrelenting calls since early morning fell silent, probably confused by the mayhem had gone to a safer abode.

By mid morning there was a flurry of activities on both sides of the wall involving responsible men and a few concerned women, watchmen, safaiwallahs and later one or two babus in grey safari suits from the corporation in-charge of the garden department. They paced up and down the sidewalk, looked up the tree and estimated its broken segments, furiously argued among themselves. An hour later, a thin agile young man armed with a chopper climbed up the tree and bracing himself at a convenient junction on the stem, methodically chipped at the sides of the broken branch before chopping it off close to the corresponding Y-joint, the huge panoply of branches and leaves and flowers being caught hold of and drawn safely down by two more workers from the department standing below. Some further pruning later those workers pulled the remains of the tree, much like an animal carcass, across and out of the colony on to the main road en route to its designated transit area of the municipal ward awaiting further denudation and decapitation towards an appropriate utilitarian end.   

Presently, the reasonable and the practical men and women from our colonies, having successfully resolved the fall out of an act of god went their ways. Safaiwallahs got busy with their daily chores. Babus sped away on their two wheelers. Then the tree was left alone to reflect on its bruises and cuts. The places where the chopper had amputated the branches were looking white in the rising sun, bright and raw.

In time the injured stem will be washed by rain of any memory of a presence and tanned by sun, collect grime and look like the others. If its fecundity serves it well the tree might shoot out new arms thereabouts or elsewhere and grow leaves on them and again aspire for the sky, no less, and fill the void in the direction of my line of vision. When the air will rise, the tree will slowly allow its bruised hope to flow up and down the sinews of the branches for them to be swayed, with leaves aflutter and flowers aflame. In time the pint-sized birds will think nothing of their busy flitting across the branches and resume their preferential perch on the lightest among these dangerously tempting gravity. And the cuckoo will be back to pull me out of my slumber with amazing persistence.

Perhaps there was no need to be despondent about this act of god and its human follow up. The tree will survive. And so will all those that animate the nature.

Meek shall inherit the earth

 “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Gospel of Matthew 5:5, New Testament). God blesses those who are humble, for they will inherit the whole earth.

In a simplistic though fairly prevalent view, the world is often seen to be naturally dominated by those species, groups that are more intelligent and resourceful, powerful, especially ones who are conscious about their dominant status and are ruthless in perpetuating the same. The directions and the dynamics of the world affairs are assumed to be decided by the duel between the extraordinary and the powerful adversaries who, though, share their vaunted ambitions to dominate these proceedings. The meek, by definition, do not figure in these power equations. They are too ordinary, small in stature and low in the scale of their ambitions. Like the grass falling in the path traversed by the horses carrying the marauding armies or under the jackboots of their equally intrepid enemies, many among the meek will be trampled, charred and decimated. But like the grass they will survive being multitudinous, even grow from the ashes, from the unlikely shelter under the boulder and cover the slopes and the ridges, plateaus and the valleys, soak the sun and the rain and continue to thrive long after the gory and destructive competition has stopped. In that sense, the meek may have a greater chance of escaping complete and systematic erasure which their more powerful and assertive brethren are likely to suffer, and therefore have, as a class (individuals may be mauled), a better prospect of survival and might inherit the earth after all, however scorched it is rendered by the big players, and grow life out of the waste land.

Karl Marx used the concept of a so-called “Asiatic mode of production” to characterise the slow and meandering dynamics of the socio-economic and political development in the Indian subcontinent till the advent of the British rule in the middle of the 18^th century. His descriptions in his writings during 1850s call to mind almost an instantiation of the above. The history of India from ancient times has been replete with instances of major kingdoms and empires being overrun and visible symbols of their rule having been razed to ground by invading armies of rival kings in a bid to expand their own fiefdoms. However, almost as a rule, Marx had observed, these big overthrows and takeovers have largely left the plebian populace to live their poor marginalised lives in isolated village communities. The latter were loosely administered by local authorities who in turn were responsible for remitting retainership fees (in turn extracting a tax from the villagers for the communally held and worked land by way of a part of the produce) for the region of their dominance to, say, the potentates of the provincial Hindu kingdoms in earlier times or the emperors under India wide Mughal rule later. For the people at the ground level, the king or the sultan was distant, deity like, dominant and dangerous but also in some way benevolent to his subjects in the matters about construction of large public works like irrigation assets. But his writ at the local level used to be less oppressive and systematic as it became with the introduction of what is known as the “Permanent Settlement” introduced in 1792 by Lord Cornwallis, the governor of the Bengal Presidency under the burgeoning British Raj in the late eighteenth century.

And the village communities sometimes managed to maintain for even centuries a remarkable identity and a continuity of local practices – economic activities, cultural mores. They were too insignificant to have attracted notice or merit the brutal treatment meted out to the active and real adversaries to the kings and the sultans. However, this is not meant to make a case in favour of the state of affairs in pre-British India, nor a philosophical rationalisation of a state of mind that apparently helped the survival of the masses.

Time and again, it has been demonstrated empirically (in the stories upon stories of underdevelopment in the Indian subcontinent) that it is more than likely that what the meek and the docile (and they also mostly happen to be from the subaltern classes) eventually manage to inherit are the losses, the shards of shattered grandiose dreams spun and propagated by powerful rulers (including the ‘potential’ rulers), their ministers, advisers and other representatives. Not just due to their being weak and not having the ambition and the initiative to latch on to the bandwagon of progress to move out of the morass of backwardness but precisely because of their implicit trust and touching faith in those who take upon themselves the ‘onerous’ task of driving the chariot. And when the consequences of the historically wrong choices made by the latter become apparent the meek more often than not lack the wherewithal and the reserves to withstand any negative fall out over long periods or get away from them. 

Apart from the facile imagery conjured up by the biblical quote that seems to have an empirical authenticity for many, a lot of people, especially those that are religiously inclined, implicitly believe in the core idea by mixing it up with the familiar good and evil conundrum, that the good eventually prevails (does it always really?). In more modern context of pacifist activism (or what could be better described as politics of pacifism) this might have been a good slogan to be used as a strategic tool for political mobilisation through faith (ultimate triumph of the faith?). One would suspect that behind this there has been an astute appreciation of the cultural predisposition of a milieu, making a virtue of one’s weakness and make a political programme out of it. This is not necessarily a bad idea, after all the history of evolution is that of the survivors.

It is important, however, to take the proposition that ‘meek shall inherit the earth’ with more than a pinch of doubt, to ask why slogans and catch phrases such as these became necessary, who propagated them and what was the underlying purpose?

Work and life style

Many young people now a days, engaged in busy professions like finance, business management, information technology etc., in the burgeoning knowledge industry, have very little time to spare, in the course of a normal working day, either for themselves or their families. Some of them even display tendencies befitting workaholics. Their time frame is usually packed mostly with business, but sometimes also accommodates structured leisure elements or packages considered ‘cool’ or ‘in vogue’. All of these do not leave many windows allowing them to just look out watching the fading colour of the sky in the evening and wish they could become like a kite gliding into the distant horizon or do something, anything, that does not necessarily have any use value and call for approbation or sanctions of their peers.

It is as if not only are their professional life governed by parameters set by the businesses they work for, and hence ultimately, by the market, their individual life, their choices about consumption to keep their body satiated and the mind tamed, are increasingly dictated and manipulated by the omnipresent and omniscient market. Everything that they do or choose not to do must make sense in terms of a generally accepted paradigm about how to conduct life along a materially secure and prosperous path. They exist in a social ambience - in the family, within the community and wider cultural mileu, valuing and aspiring such a trajectory of life. My life, that is. Irrespective of whatever happens to the environment that supports it or the other concurrent lives in competition.   

One wonders, however, if they sometimes miss the work-life balance in an untutored common sense. Which begs the question if some of them would choose to subvert against the denominational patterns of social and cultural preferences, the choices of the items of consumption and leisure (things of desire), the subtle subservience to a ‘factory’-produced uniformity of products and customs, a fetish for efficiency and a distaste for redundancy, apprehension about asymmetry and cultural diversity that run counter to the fundamentalism of the power elite in modern democracies, especially its neo-liberal globalising variant. If they could breach this hegemony, there would have been a need to review their singular focus on profit and self-aggrandisement in both spheres of work and leisure. This also could have nucleated a question or two about the contents and organisation of their work (modularity, object-orientedness, extreme reductionism coupled with an assembly line unity), its impact on the environment and other fellow human beings and even its intellectual quality and worth. 

This interrogation of the work and its implication on the life of the workers, especially the knowledge workers, is especially important because there is an aura of superiority, novelty, modernity and of course an array of privileges associated with their exclusive domains of specialised technical competencies. There is a positive impetus, a danger if you like, for such workers to buy into an identity based on such specialised knowledge-oriented work and the consequential hubris. By allowing them to play a key role in the innovation and management of the industry and businesses and, increasingly in sprucing and speeding up governance, the work defines their relevance to those at the helm of the business and the government, in the process providing them not only their financial security but prosperity and social standing and giving them a chance and a reason to celebrate their life in style.

‘Celebration of life’ is often suggested visually on the pages of glossy coffee table books showing walls coming alive in exquisite colour and lustre, huge antique furniture pieces, plush upholstery, ethnic décor, soft lighting, sumptuous food and expensive wine laid out on a scale befitting royalty. And of course an assemblage of chic crowd with similar or higher pedigree and clout enveloped in the hubbub of good-natured banter and a sweetly nagging flavour of good and gated living.

Except that this picturesque life must unspool endlessly. For if it ever stops for want of fuel that runs the motor the response would be to quickly recover the foothold on the bandwagon. Nobody in the right mind would countenance a possibility of even a jolt to the familiar identity, let alone a loss of it.

For them the work they do is probably their only identity and their lifestyle the only acceptable one. If you take out the work, and consequently the attendant assured wherewithal and the status along with it, the emptiness of a life of ordinariness starts staring at them. A sort of life they have not been accustomed to looking at except occasionally through the windows of their cocoon and ignoring it. Work thus becomes an escape from a life which otherwise does not make much sense to them. 

Articulation and understanding

Haven’t we often come across men and women, among our friends, acquaintances, relatives who do not find it comfortable talking about most matters of public interest and importance? Or if they are forced to do so under some circumstances (over which they have little control) like suddenly becoming a part of a media campaign, involving queries or a questionaire, opinion polls on the street or at the work place, they do it in an awkward, uninspired manner.

This becomes even more glaring as in most groups one finds quite a few voluble people who like to dominate any discussion – be it soccer or cricket, gossip about stars or starlets, apparently miraculous occurrences, latest cultural trends, politics or deeper social problems. These latter set seem to have an opinion – sometimes very clear cut and at other times nebulous – on practically every issue that may or may not concern them personally or professionally but may have some bearing on the community, society or the nation in a general way and the world in the case of the international issues.

The common tendency of self-projection discernible in the behaviour such as above in many among this latter category, is rather natural and in conformity with the general social nature of engagement of most people. There may be inaccuracy in the facts and inconsistency in the logical arguments they marshal. Sometimes there could be discordant notes or even violent disagreements among those entertaining quite different perceptions formed from the same set of real life observations. But by and large they reflect the dominant paradigm (including prejudices) of the community or the cultural milieu they belong to. In this environment of preponderant urge for self-expression, it is not easy, given the brevity of expression or relative inarticulateness in many people (actually they are, probably, in the majority), to interpret the implication of what they choose to say as much as what is left unsaid.

It is possible that some among this category of people may choose to be economic with their words as their understanding is genuinely not good enough, they lack clarity in thinking and are confused, or do not have the right words to describe what they have in mind. However, can lack of articulation or ambiguity in that, by itself and in general, be taken to be an indicator of lack of understanding ? 

As it happens, the opinion of such people, if any, often go unrepresented if not ignored, simply because they do not or can not express their point of view with sufficient force, flair and urgency which some of their fellow participants in a discussion muster with relative ease. A quiet leader, who speaks occasionally and only briefly at that and not forcefully enough might find it hard to carry friends, associates and followers along unless people get to see his mind in action, in terms of planning and execution of concrete deeds leading to positive results. In the realm of the current Indian politics, names of two politicians exemplifying the two contrasting categories - a super-articulate politician, almost a hustler and a bully to boot on the one hand and an erudite but reticent, almost a reluctant counterpart - obviously come to one’s mind.

The acrimonious debate on the economic development of our country vis-à-vis the care and the protection of the endangered environment is well known. Ideologically inspired people angrily and decisively arguing on either side of this divide may win the debate on the television or at a ‘social impact’ awards function. But the complexity of the ground reality that eludes them may be understood much better by many illiterate villagers, grassroots activists and even some local administration officials with hands-on knowledge. However, the opinion of most of them are routinely ignored or overruled by their superior officers in the capital and metro cities while presenting status reports and offering false diagnoses in national and international conferences.   

There are a number of known examples from the field of literature of an apparent disconnect between the deep understanding by an author, expressed through a body of creative work, say, plays, novels and stories, and his publicly articulated social and political opinions, moral and philosophical views. The well-known Marxist literary critic, Georg Lukacs, had extensively discussed and illustrated this dichotomy in several of his books, notably, in ‘Studies in European Realism’. For instance, Honore de Balzac in his cycle of novels ‘La Comedie Humaine’, writing on the French society during the first half of the nineteenth century, meticulously documented the real ups and downs of the various social classes – the royalists and the feudal landowners, the bourgeois or the new business and entrepreneurial classes, the cultural elites – and unfailingly indicated the decline of the erstwhile upper classes despite Balzac’s known royalist sympathies. He never flinched from a realistic depiction of growing dominance of money in the contemporary society, unscrupulousness and moral turpitude irrespective of his yearning for and espousing virtues of Christianity, especially, the catholic religion in his other writings.

Almost a similar detached noveist’s and a social historian’s judgment was delivered by Tolstoy in his novels and stories with regard to the failure of the Tsarist Russian aristocracy and the landowning noble classes (of whom he himself was very much a part) to be the vanguard of the emancipation of the Russian peasantry from their age-old misery and bondage and therefore these classes being eventually overtaken by the new and revolutionary social forces (at the time the anarchists) brewing in the mid-late nineteenth century Russia. Even his early fictional writings show that he was acutely aware of the growing chasm between the landowners and the serfs as a reality as much as the brutal role of the Tsarist state in maintaining the status quo. However, the expressed political views of the author were often critical of some of these new social movements (especially their proclaimed violent methods). On the contrary, during the later part of his life, Tolstoy propounded his Christian-anarchist and anarcho-pacifist version of a religio-social conception of morality and love (Tolstoyanism) that neither quite explained the diagnosis of the social and political changes in Russia nor its potential directions one finds glimpses of in his creative writing. 

In many areas of life and human endeavour, particularly those involving decisions regarding environment, social transformation and accretion of culture through creative work, all thinking is not necessarily and immediately actionable or possible to validate in terms of results visible in the short term. It is in such situations that the test of understanding and the long-term correctness of a judgment do not always lie in just a clear enunciation of certain inflexible premises and decisive actions based on the same. Sometimes certain ambiguities in the stated positions should not disqualify them for further serious consideration.

Rebuilding the emotional fabric in northern Sri Lanka

Had recently re-read a wonderful article ‘Beyond the scars’ published originally in The Hindu Magazine dated 23^rd October 2011 (I retained a clipping). This is about certain impressions retained by a leading Tamil musician T. M. Krishna from his then recent concert visit to a few towns in northern Sri Lanka, Jaffna, Kilinochchi, Vavuniya. Names that automatically evoke tragic images of a people caught in the apparently interminable crossfire between two implacably hostile political opponents fighting a brutal war in the name of the same ‘people’.

The savage scars the war left on the geography almost everywhere in these parts could not be glossed over even in an officially sponsored visit. Perhaps more important is the psychological mauling suffered by the Sri Lankan Tamils in terms of their linguistic, cultural and even religious identity. As if being a Tamil, speaking the language, loving and yearning for the rich cultural heritage seemed almost a crime to borrow an expression from a poem by Brecht.

It is in this backdrop that the enthusiasm, serious intent of the appreciative audience of a Carnatic music recital in Jaffna was so moving, somewhat like an awakening from a long nightmare. The accompanying picture of a large relaxed young audience at the Ramanathan Academy of Fine Arts, Jaffna (“the faces, the laughter, the curiosity, questioning, smart answers”) enhances this feeling.

One cannot agree more with the author for tasking the Indians (particularly the Tamilians) to rebuild the tattered emotional fabric using many coloured threads of culture and history in that shell-shocked island. And one hopes strident competitive politics in the mainland would not snuff out the candle the intrepid cultural ambassadors might manage to rekindle.

The situation calls to mind the timeless visualization by Tolstoy in his masterpiece ‘War and peace’, of Natasha’s subtle awakening to life and new love from the devastation suffered by death of her betrothed Andrei in the 1812 Franco-Russian war. In a remarkably perceptive dialogue between Pierre and Natasha almost towards the end of the novel, both the characters realized through a catharsis of emotional maelstrom of grief and the new enchantment that there is more to life than death, that one can’t help feeling glad, being happy and hoping for new life while feeling sad, occasionally even somewhat guilty of leaving the past in favour of the future.

About faith, surrender, peace and reason

Let me begin by quoting, rather extensively, from an article by columnist David Brooks ‘Faith, not just creed’, Reprinted from New York Times News Service by The Hindu, January 29, 2014.

 

There is a yawning gap between the way many believers experience faith and the way that faith is presented to the world.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described one experience of faith in his book God in Search of Man : “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement ... get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal. ... To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

…

…Heschel understood that the faith expressed by many, even many who are inwardly conflicted, is often dull, oppressive and insipid — a religiosity in which “faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendour of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion.”

…

And yet there is a silent majority who experience a faith that is attractively marked by combinations of fervour and doubt, clarity and confusion, empathy and moral demand.

…..

If you are a secular person curious about how believers experience their faith, you might start with Augustine’s famous passage “What do I love when I love my God,” and especially the way his experience is in the world but then mysteriously surpasses the world: “It is not physical beauty nor temporal glory nor the brightness of light dear to earthly eyes, nor the sweet melodies of all kinds of songs, nor the gentle odor of flowers, and ointments and perfumes, nor manna or honey, nor limbs welcoming the embraces of the flesh; it is not these I love when I love my God. Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace when I love my God — a light, voice, odor, food, embrace of my innerness, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amount of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God.”

David Brooks probably was on the one hand trying to describe, using the mystic language of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel or Saint Augustine what the essence of faith in and love of God may appear to the devout and the savant, with more than a suggestion that despite persistent doubts and a conflict riven mind common men and women, at least have fleeting glimpses of these moments of ecstasy. He has also argued, I think convincingly, that this spirit of living faith, in the practice of organised religion, more often than not, have come to be hemmed in rather badly by ossified creed. 

The article prompted me to flag a few irreverent questions:

-         What does a common man’s faith in and ‘love’ for God amount to? Is there more often than not a sense of indirect quid pro quo in his expectations from a supposed communion with God? How often are the wishes really altruistic like what Swami Vivekananda had experienced in his famously rumoured first encounter with the Goddess Kali in Dakshineswar temple near Calcutta? It was said that he planned to ask the goddess to alleviate his personal financial distress, but apparently he was so enthralled (by experiencing a sort of divine presence?) all he could manage to ask the goddess to bestow on him were knowledge, wisdom and devotion.   

-         Is the ‘sublime feeling or satiation/satisfaction’ what Augustine had described in the above quotation an experience reserved for the lucky few tuned to mysticism? Is it also the most optimistic or the ideal scenario?

-         Is there a sense of peace in giving up fighting irreconcilable mental conflicts, making difficult, uncomfortable and suboptimal choices and surrendering to some superior power or consciousness that has to be only ‘believed’ (not questioned) to be capable of finding a way around (not necessarily resolving) the conflict and bringing closure to problems (by not making any choices at all)? Choosing peace over reason?  

-         Does faith provide a new paradigm not accessible to reasoning a human mind is capable of – does one have to give up reasoning (ego?) to attain faith, a different way of life?

-         Does faith encourage one to become a pacifist, a status quoist (even fatalist), a non-believer in active intervention at any level beyond the individual? What is the moral position (distinguishing right from wrong) of an individual professing faith vis-à-vis too many inhuman acts of omission and commission of other individuals and communities and nations (as collectives of individuals) all over the world? Should that provoke a breach in faith sometimes? Can faith remain immune? 

(This post has appeared in another blog elsewhere)