Socrates — a man for our times

Call it confirmational bias or a freakish coincidence but today morning when I opened the editorial in Hindu I was struck by the words - "Socrates - a man of our times" jumping out at me... I try and catch up with the Hindu editorials on a daily basis and manage to do fairly well and in the past 4 odd years that I have been reading these columns, never have I come across an editorial on Socrates or any other greek philosopher for that matter... But then over the past week, I have been reading a book on western philosophy and had read about Socrates. It is not that I didn't know about him but somehow Socrates and Descartes seemed the same to my mind because I didn't register their ideas and their thoughts in the context of a historical time line. I loved the work of Plato as he uses the "Myth of the cave" to condemn Socrates' trial. Wanting to share the same, yesterday, I had quoted some text from the book I was reading on Plato's "Myth of the cave"... I had first come across this thought experiment when I was reading Roger Penrose's "Emperor's New Mind" in whose preface he talks about the cave and the illusions therein.

In this light, when I woke up today morning and flipped through the pages of Hindu to find this beautiful article on the life and times of Socrates, I was simply stunned. I knew then that I had to post this but I was also amazed by the coincidence. I can rule it out as just a coincidence but to me it feels like there is a greater purpose behind life's various events. The good thing is that i recognize that feeling as just that, a 'feeling' and am sadly forced to accept that it is probably just a brilliant coincidence...

Anyways, here's the article...

"Two thousand four hundred years ago, one man tried to discover the meaning of life. His search was so radical, charismatic and counter-intuitive that he become famous throughout the Mediterranean. Men — particularly young men — flocked to hear him speak. Some were inspired to imitate his ascetic habits. They wore their hair long, their feet bare, their cloaks torn. He charmed a city; soldiers, prostitutes, merchants, aristocrats — all would come to listen. As Cicero eloquently put it, “He brought philosophy down from the skies.” For close on half a century this man was allowed to philosophise unhindered on the streets of his hometown. But then things started to turn ugly. His glittering city—state suffered horribly in foreign and civil wars. The economy crashed; year in, year out, men came home dead; the population starved; the political landscape was turned upside down. And suddenly the philosopher's bright ideas, his eternal questions, his eccentric ways, started to jar. And so, on a spring morning in 399BC, the first democratic court in the story of mankind summoned the 70-year-old philosopher to the dock on two charges: disrespecting the city's traditional gods and corrupting the young. The accused was found guilty. His punishment: state-sponsored suicide, courtesy of a measure of hemlock poison in his prison cell.

The man was Socrates, the philosopher from ancient Athens and arguably the true father of western thought. Not bad, given his humble origins. The son of a stonemason, born around 469BC, Socrates was famously odd. In a city that made a cult of physical beauty (an exquisite face was thought to reveal an inner nobility of spirit) the philosopher was disturbingly ugly. Socrates had a pot-belly, a weird walk, swivelling eyes and hairy hands. As he grew up in a suburb of Athens, the city seethed with creativity — he witnessed the Greek miracle at first-hand.

But when poverty-stricken Socrates (he taught in the streets for free) strode through the city's central marketplace, he would harrumph provocatively, “How many things I don't need!” Whereas all religion was public in Athens, Socrates seemed to enjoy a peculiar kind of private piety, relying on what he called his “daimonion”, his “inner voice”. This “demon” would come to him during strange episodes when the philosopher stood still, staring for hours. We think now he probably suffered from catalepsy, a nervous condition that causes muscular rigidity.

Putting aside his unshakable position in the global roll-call of civilisation's great and good, why should we care about this curious, clever, condemned Greek? Quite simply because Socrates's problems were our own. He lived in a city-state that was for the first time working out what role true democracy should play in human society. His hometown — successful, cash-rich — was in danger of being swamped by its own vigorous quest for beautiful objects, new experiences, foreign coins.

Fundamental questions

The philosopher also lived through (and fought in) debilitating wars, declared under the banner of demos-kratia — people power, democracy. The Peloponnesian conflict of the fifth century against Sparta and her allies was criticised by many contemporaries as being “without just cause”. Although some in the region willingly took up this new idea of democratic politics, others were forced by Athens to love it at the point of a sword. Socrates questioned such blind obedience to an ideology. “What is the point,” he asked, “of walls and warships and glittering statues if the men who build them are not happy?” What is the reason for living life, other than to love it? For Socrates, the pursuit of knowledge was as essential as the air we breathe. Rather than a brainiac grey-beard, we should think of him as his contemporaries knew him: a bustling, energetic, wine-swilling, man-loving, vigorous, pug-nosed, sword-bearing war-veteran: a citizen of the world, a man of the streets.

According to his biographers Plato and Xenophon, Socrates did not just search for the meaning of life, but the meaning of our own lives. He asked fundamental questions of human existence. What makes us happy? What makes us good? What is virtue? What is love? What is fear? How should we best live our lives? Socrates saw the problems of the modern world coming; and he would certainly have something to say about how we live today.

He was anxious about the emerging power of the written word over face-to-face contact. The Athenian agora was his teaching room. Here he would jump on unsuspecting passersby, as Xenophon records. “One day Socrates met a young man on the streets of Athens. ‘Where can bread be found?' asked the philosopher. The young man responded politely. ‘And where can wine be found?' asked Socrates. With the same pleasant manner, the young man told Socrates where to get wine. ‘And where can the good and the noble be found?' then asked Socrates. The young man was puzzled and unable to answer. ‘Follow me to the streets and learn,' said the philosopher.” Whereas immediate, personal contact helped foster a kind of honesty, Socrates argued that strings of words could be manipulated, particularly when disseminated to a mass market. “You might think words spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them they always say only one thing . . . every word . . . when ill-treated or unjustly reviled always needs its father to protect it,” he said.

When psychologists today talk of the danger for the next generation of too much keyboard and texting time, Socrates would have flashed one of his infuriating “I told you so” smiles. Our modern passion for fact-collection and box-ticking rather than a deep comprehension of the world around us would have horrified him too. What was the point, he said, of cataloguing the world without loving it? He went further: “Love is the one thing I understand.” The televised U.K. general election debates earlier this year would also have given pause. Socrates was withering when it came to a polished rhetorical performance. For him a powerful, substance-less argument was a disgusting thing: rhetoric without truth was one of the greatest threats to the “good” society.

Interestingly, the TV debate experiment would have seemed old hat. Public debate and political competition ( agon was the Greek word, which gives us our “agony”) were the norm in democratic Athens. Every male citizen over the age of 18 was a politician. Each could present himself in the open-air assembly up on the Pnyx to raise issues for discussion or to vote. Through a complicated system of lots, ordinary men might be made the equivalent of heads of state for a year; interior minister or foreign minister for the space of a day. Those who preferred a private to a public life were labelled idiotes (hence our word idiot).

Socrates died when Golden Age Athens — an ambitious, radical, visionary city-state — had triumphed as a leader of the world, and then over-reached herself and begun to crumble. His unusual personal piety, his guru-like attraction to the young men of the city, suddenly seemed to have a sinister tinge. And although Athens adored the notion of freedom of speech (the city even named one of its warships Parrhesia after the concept), the population had yet to resolve how far freedom of expression ratified a freedom to offend.

A scapegoat

Socrates was, I think, a scapegoat for Athens's disappointment. When the city was feeling strong, the quirky philosopher could be tolerated. But, overrun by its enemies, starving, and with the ideology of democracy itself in question, the Athenians took a more fundamentalist view. A confident society can ask questions of itself; when it is fragile, it fears them. Socrates' famous aphorism “the unexamined life is not worth living” was, by the time of his trial, clearly beginning to jar.

After his death, Socrates' ideas had a prodigious impact on both western and eastern civilisation. His influence in Islamic culture is often overlooked — in the Middle East and North Africa, from the 11th century onwards, his ideas were said to refresh and nourish, “like . . . the purest water in the midday heat”. Socrates was nominated one of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his nickname “The Source”. So it seems a shame that, for many, Socrates has become a remote, lofty kind of a figure.

When Socrates finally stood up to face his charges in front of his fellow citizens in a religious court in the Athenian agora, he articulated one of the great pities of human society. “It is not my crimes that will convict me,” he said. “But instead, rumour, gossip; the fact that by whispering together you will persuade yourselves that I am guilty.” As another Greek author, Hesiod, put it, “Keep away from the gossip of people. For rumour [the Greek pheme, via fama in Latin, gives us our word fame] is an evil thing; by nature she's a light weight to lift up, yes, but heavy to carry and hard to put down again. Rumour never disappears entirely once people have indulged her.” Trial by media, by pheme, has always had a horrible potency. It was a slide in public opinion and the uncertainty of a traumatised age that brought Socrates to the hemlock. Rather than follow the example of his accusers, we should perhaps honour Socrates' exhortation to “know ourselves”, to be individually honest, to do what we, not the next man, knows to be right. Not to hide behind the hatred of a herd, the roar of the crowd, but to aim, hard as it might be, towards the “good” life. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010

He was condemned to death for telling the ancient Greeks things they didn't want to hear, but his views on consumerism and trial by media are just as relevant today."

Out of the Darkness of the cave...

Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher who was also a pupil of Socrates, illustrates a beautiful philosophy through the metaphor of a cave. The following is a summary of Plato's myth of the cave as was described by Jostein Gaarder in his book " Sophie's World".

"Imagine some people living in an underground cave. They sit with their backs to the mouth of the cave and their hands and feet bound in such a way that they can only look at the back wall of the cave. Behind them is a high wall, and behind that wall pass human-like creatures, holding up various figures above the top of the wall. Because there is a fire behind these figures, they cast flickering shadows on the back wall of the cave. So the only thing the cave dwellers can see is this shadow play. They have been sitting in this position since they were born, so they think these shadows are all they are.


Imagine now that one of these cave dwellers manages to free himself from his bonds. The first thing he asks himself is where all these shadows on the cave walls come from. What do you think happens when he turns around and sees the figures being held up above the wall? To begin with he is dazzled with the sharp sunlight. He is also dazzled by the clarity of the figures because until now he has only seen their shadows. If he manages to climb over the wall and get past the fire into the world outside, he will be even more dazzled. But after rubbing his eyes he will be struck by the beauty of everything. For the first time he will see colors and clear shapes. He will see the real animals and flowers that the cave shadows were only poor reflections of. But even now he will ask himself where all the animals and flowers come from. Then he will see the sun in the sky, and realize that this is what gives life to these flowers and animals, just as the fire made the shadows visible.

The joyful cave dweller could now have gone skipping away into the countryside, delighting in his new-found freedom. But instead he thinks of all the others who are still down in the cave. He goes back and once there, he tries to convince the cave dwellers that the shadows on the cave wall are but flickering shadows of 'real' things. But they don't believe him. They point to the cave wall and say that what they see is all there is. Finally they kill him.

What Plato was illustrating in "The myth of the cave" is the philosopher's road from the shadowy images to the true ideas behind all natural phenomena. He was probably also thinking of Socrates whom the "Cave dwellers" killed because he disturbed their conventional ideas and tried to light the way to true insight. The myth of the cave illustrates Socrates' courage and his sense of pedagogic responsibility. "

This is a beautiful illustration of a philosophers' view of the world and even after two millennia this is one of the relevant examples in the fields of psychology, cognition and philosophy.

A nation losing its spirit...

The Indian media seems to be euphoric these days with the stunning performance in the Common Wealth Games. This sense of national pride is also pretty infectious as most Indians have finally found something to be proud about. Justifiably so, the brilliant sporting achievements at the games and the stellar performances at the Cricketing arena have stirred the nationalist sentiments that we have all long had but suppressed. I too would have been caught up in the frenzy, had I not been witness to an incident which really made me question the society I am living in and the nation I am a part of. Having recently been for a driving test to get my Driving License from the Indian Government, I got a first hand experience of the Indian bureaucracy and the plight of the minorities.

Now I happened to go for the test with a colleague of mine who hails from Kashmir. This young man is a sensible, balanced and religious individual. I have not seen him miss a single Friday Namaaz in the last three years. He is well mannered and well spoken and has a rather open outlook to the political affairs of the valley. Ever so often, we have discussed the political situation in Jammu and Kashmir and I have sensed deep despondency in his voice. He is in love with his home and wants to go back there to his family after completing his education. He tells me that the situation is really bad in Kashmir because any young man can be branded as a terrorist by the Army/ police or the government and killed in an encounter without any answerability. Despite growing up in such environs, I am awed by the fact that he is not fundamentalist and Anti-India. In fact he maintains an open view of various news clippings and gives me a patient hearing as I poorly attempt to justify some of the actions of the government. Since his arrival as a PhD student in the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, he has also made attempts to learn Kannada, the local language which many people don’t even bother with. He has made more attempts than even I (as a south indian brahmin girl) have made to integrate into the society.

With this background now, I should present the actual story to you. Now, we go for a driving test and find that despite similar credentials and documents (Institute ID proof, Age proof, Name proof etc etc), I was cleared for the Driving test and he was asked to bring an affidavit… Why ? Well, because, he is a muslim and has a Kashmir address and the Inspector in charge didn’t want to clear him till he was certified by the principal of the driving school. This of course was not explicitly told to him or to me but the agent suggested such reasons to me as the reason for the delay. Now this was shocking to me… !!! I am sure this is pretty routine in a lot of places, but this is the first time I have been a witness to such direct discrimination !!!! I mean, a young man who is doing a PhD in the Indian Institute of Science… Who has given all the relevant documents, is being tormented needlessly. If this is the kind of treatment that is meted out to Kashmiris, then why on earth would they want to be a part of this country ? I mean why should there by so much discrimination against them ? I understand that there are security concerns and that the police and the security machinery needs to be vigilant but then It is not that all terrorists come from Kashmir… There are plenty of Hindutva terror groups in the country…. Even a number of muslim terror groups arise from regions other than Kashmir. LTTE also has had presence in the country through infiltration into Tamil Nadu!! Why should "he" alone be bothered ?

This is an issue which has been rattling me for a while now… It has been four days since the test but I am still not able to weed this out of my mind… How can a civilized society be so biased and prejudiced ? What is the solution to this problem ? I was horrified at the treatment meted out to my friend while I know that this is perhaps the mildest form of discrimination… I mean the inspector only wanted an affidavit, right ? But then, I shudder at the thought of what must be happening to people in other remote areas ? People who are not literate, well spoken and sophisticated ? People who cannot afford the expenses of getting the affidavit made or the agent's involvement ? How can we alienate our own people and still expect them to respect our country and our nationalistic sentiments ? The number of Kashmiris in universities and institutes across the country is increasing every year… not because they are very rich or love traveling but because that's the only hope they have… to educate and to rebuild. The rest of the country should be more proactive in over coming their stupid and baseless prejudices so that all our countrymen, be it from Sikkim or Kashmir or Rajasthan or Nagaland can actually feel a part of our country. We need to inspire confidence in all our people so that this great nation with a rich history and culture can rise above its factionalist tendencies and find its true soul….

I know that I sound preachy and political but this one incident really rattled me to the core quite simply because It happened so close to me…Had I read the same report in a newspaper or heard about it in a news channel, I would have perhaps not registered the impact and forgotten about it pretty soon. I really wish I could do more than just this protest to change things around but how do you change the mindsets of people… ?

Living in randomness...

Mornings have always been my favorite time of the day as the first rays of the sun gently nudge the world awake. The campus where I am currently residing in, is a wooded enclave and is beautiful sight in the early mornings. It is wonderful to see the first rays of the sun passing through the foliage…

Gently touched by the first rays of light, the leaves glow with a golden hue as if emanating a divine light… The sunlight filters through these leaves and envelopes you like a warm blanket. It is on one such morning that I 'saw' these trees standing tall in the early morning sun. Waking up early is not a rarity with me and I have often marveled at the beauty of this sight but then for some reason, the true import of this vision had just not hit me for so many years...

Every tree had leaves of different colors and shades not just because of their age and size but also because of how the sunlight illuminated them. Some of the leaves were shining with an inherent brilliance as the first rays of the sun gently nudged them… The others although not very far seemed to be still in the cold as they happened to be away from the path of light. Being in the same part of the world, on the same tree, on the same branch, two leaves in such close proximity indeed had very different fates. Was this destiny ? Was this fate ? Was this controlled by the hand of God ?

The only thought that sprang to my mind was "Of course not !!".... It was just chance and randomness that one leaf happened to be in the direct path of light while the other was not... And at some other point in time, the other leaf will get its share of light... in this day or another, in this month or another or perhaps even in this year or another !!!

Things will even out in the long run...

This thought actually led me to draw a parallel with our lives... Ever so often, I ask myself voicing the question of - "Why me ?", "How can life be so unfair ONLY to me?", "How can the other person be so lucky ?"... Every time things have not gone my way and randomness has played its part in keeping me at the losing end of the spectrum (at least in my perception at that point in time)…my heart and my mind have only cried out this one question… And for at least a decade now, I have explored the various possible answers to this question without a satisfactory explanation…. As a theist, an agnostic and sometimes as a deist, I have tried to understand and address this one question. It is now finally as a pantheist or perhaps an atheist that I think I have come close to finding an acceptable answer….

Why should I consider myself any different from the leaf on the tree ? Sometimes, I am farther away from the rays of light and sometimes, I get plenty of sunshine... This is just pure randomness whereby chance is shaping my life... The only difference is that I, being a sentient being, am capable of making my choices, and directing the course of my life... Why is such randomness easy to accept for me when it comes to a leaf but not when it affects me directly ?

And now every time things fall apart and don't go my way, I try and remind myself of the leaf on the tree at far end of the spectrum...

I cross my fingers and bide my time for the light to come my way... :-)

Questions that haunt...

What is life? - Abilty to procreate ? Ability to think ? Ability to feel ?

Would a robot or a computer who has been trained to feel, have life ?

What is consciousness? Would such a computer be conscious ?

The famous Chinese room thought experiment by J Searle !

What is thought?

“What’s the most resilient parasite? An Idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.” (dialogue spoken by the character Dom Cobb in the 2010 film “Inception” . . . written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan)

What is a dream ? And what is reality ?

Is the world real ? Are you sure you are not living in a dream ? How are you sure ?

Who is to say that we are all not living a dream ?

What makes your dream more real than mine ? What makes your reality more real than mine ?

"Dreams are real as long as they last. Can we say more of life?" - Havelock Ellis.

A hopeless skeptic...

What does one do when the worst comes to pass ? When what you dreaded for all those days, actually manifests ? When you have to stand at the periphery, helpless with your hands tied, watching your precious relationship drifting away….

What do I do when I see the people I love, giving up and going down… What do I do when people lose the spirit of life in them? When they choose inaction over action, submission over passion, fear over courage, obedience over defiance and tolerance over resistance ??

Can I interfere ?

Its their life and it has to be their decision. Its not my choice to make and so I have to stay away.

And so, with my hands tied, I stand at the periphery watching her give up… I scream and yell, wave my hands, but she can't see me. She is probably blinded by her tears. Her vision is probably blurred or maybe she has given up indeed. Away she goes from the dreams she hadn't yet dreamt of and the life she hadn't yet lived…

only because she refused to resist and she refused to dare.

What do you do when at such times, your heart tells you "I told you so"… when your mind refuses to accept that such irrationality can exist in the world…

When you feel cheated by hope and want to give up on it… I have always had a "love-hate" relationship with hope… It comes ever so easily into my life as if it were a lost soul mate visiting after many years… A chance encounter becomes a lovely affair as I fall in love with it all over again. My mind chooses to ignore the warnings of the heart as it lets hope rule… only till the day that reality hits back and I find myself hopeless and alone all over again…

I don’t mind hopelessness. Its brutal but its honest. It spares me the disappointment of failed hopes. It prepares me for the worst. It’s a companion for life. It stands by my side through the turmoil and does not leave me, as hope often does. It keeps me grounded for life as I take every step with caution avoiding every fall and hurt that might litter my path. It walks steady with me and holds on to me.

But then I find my will and my spirit only when hope is around. With her by my side, my labors feel lesser and my burdens lighter. My heart dares to fly only to hit the ground again but, for those few moments, it finds the wind beneath its wings and it flies. It soars above the sorrows and the miseries as it hopes for the best. It finds its spirit and its will. It dares to fight because it hopes for the change it wants.

And so my mind becomes a victim of my heart as it vacillates between hope and hopelessness.

Does Faith have a role in a judicial protocol ???

The entire country was gripped in anticipation of the Ayodhya Verdict for the last week or so...

A couple of days before the verdict was due to be announced, there was another uncertainty introduced as an appeal was filed in the Supreme court to defer the announcement of the Verdict by the High court. In view of the huge stakes on hand and the troubles facing the Central government due to the common wealth games, the law and order issues etc... this seemed like a golden opportunity to postpone the entire issue for a while !

And I had strongly expected that the Government and the Supreme court would impose an injunction on the announcement of the Verdict keeping the entire situation and the possible repercussions in mind. This was not the right thing but this was what i expected... as a populist measure to maintain law and order and to avoid any adverse consequences for the country. But then, the Supreme Court's "verdict on the verdict" came and lo and behold, i was left happily speechless... The courts had done the logical, rational thing, unmoved by the social or governmental concerns. It allowed the high court to go ahead with the decision especially since the verdict was ready and the entire issue was already under jurisdiction for far too long. Amazing indeed !! This only made me appreciate the judiciary for taking a bold step out of sheer logic and rationality. Coming as it was in the wake of the supreme courts' commentary on the wastage of surplus food grains in the country while millions starved (due to policy decisions by the government), the supreme court and the judiciary had a new found respect in my eyes.

This of course was a rather short lived state as within the next two days, the Allahabad high court announced its verdict on the Ayodhya / Babri Masjid issue.... With an earlier experience with the Supreme Court, I had high hopes from the judiciary in the High court but the verdict seemed like a safe and populist decision.

While, I was still gathering the facts and formulating my thoughts on the verdict, I came across the brilliantly written article in "The Hindu". An opinion by Mr S Varadharajan on the Ayodhya verdict. I find complete resonance in the article and would therefore like to use this article as a means to express my views too... I don't know how many people can see the points being made disparate from their emotional and religious feelings but the fact is that this decision could set a very bad example for the future. The court has accorded an important place for "faith" and "beliefs" in making its decisions. This is a very dangerous precedent and only opens a Pandora's box for the future. How much of a history do you extend to decide the claim for a piece of land - the current owners, the last decade or two, half a century, a century, the British east India company, the Hindu rulers, the afghans, the Buddhists, the Aryans ... ??? How far back in time do you go ? Where does one draw a line ? Can feelings, faith and beliefs be a criteria for settling property disputes or anything else for that matter ? Is this justice ?

Here is the article in question:

"Force of faith trumps law and reason in Ayodhya case

Siddharth Varadarajan

If left unamended by the Supreme Court, the legal, social and political repercussions of the judgment are likely to be extremely damaging

The Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court has made judicial history by deciding a long pending legal dispute over a piece of property in Ayodhya on the basis of an unverified and unsubstantiated reference to the “faith and belief of Hindus.”

The irony is that in doing so, the court has inadvertently provided a shot in the arm for a political movement that cited the very same “faith” and “belief” to justify its open defiance of the law and the Indian Constitution. That defiance reached its apogee in 1992, when a 500-year-old mosque which stood at the disputed site was destroyed. The legal and political system in India stood silent witness to that crime of trespass, vandalism and expropriation. Eighteen years later, the country has compounded that sin by legitimising the “faith” and “belief” of those who took the law into their own hands.

The three learned judges of the Allahabad High Court may have rendered separate judgments on the title suit in the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi case but Justices Sudhir Agarwal, S.U. Khan and Dharam Veer Sharma all seem to agree on one central point: that the Hindu plaintiffs in the case have a claim to the disputed site because “as per [the] faith and belief of the Hindus” the place under the central dome of the Babri Masjid where the idols of Ram Lalla were placed surreptitiously in 1949 is indeed the “birthplace” of Lord Ram.

For every Hindu who believes the spot under the central dome of the Babri Masjid is the precise spot where Lord Ram was born there is another who believes something else. But leaving aside the question of who “the Hindus” referred to by the court really are and how their actual faith and belief was ascertained and measured, it is odd that a court of law should give such weight to theological considerations and constructs rather than legal reasoning and facts. Tulsidas wrote his Ramcharitmanas in 16th century Ayodhya but made no reference to the birthplace of Lord Rama that the court has now identified with such exacting precision five centuries later.

The “faith and belief” that the court speaks about today acquired salience only after the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bharatiya Janata Party launched a political campaign in the 1980s to “liberate” the “janmasthan.”

Collectives in India have faith in all sorts of things but “faith” cannot become the arbiter of what is right and wrong in law. Nor can the righting of supposed historical wrongs become the basis for dispensing justice today. In 1993, the Supreme Court wisely refused to answer a Presidential Reference made to it by the Narasimha Rao government seeking its opinion on whether a Hindu temple once existed at the Babri Masjid site. Yet, the High Court saw fit to frame a number of questions that ought to have had absolutely no bearing on the title suit which was before it.

One of the questions the court framed was “whether the building has been constructed on the site of an alleged Hindu temple after demolishing the same.” Pursuant to this question, it asked the Archaeological Survey of India to conduct a dig at the site. This was done in 2003, during the time when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government was in power at the Centre. Not surprisingly, the ASI concluded that there was a “massive Hindu religious structure” below, a finding that was disputed by many archaeologists and historians.

The territory of India — as of many countries with a settled civilisation as old as ours — is full of buildings that were constructed after pre-existing structures were demolished to make way for them. Buddhist shrines made way for Hindu temples. Temples have made way for mosques. Mosques have made way for temples. So even if a temple was demolished in the 16th century to make way for the Babri Masjid, what legal relevance can that have in the 21st century? And if such demolition is to serve as the basis for settling property disputes today, where do we draw the line? On the walls of the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi can be seen the remnants of a Hindu temple, perhaps even of the original Vishwanath mandir. Certainly many “Hindus” believe the mosque is built on land that is especially sacred to them. The denouement of the Babri case from agitation and demolition to possession might easily serve as a precedent for politicians looking to come to power on the basis of heightening religious tensions.

Even assuming the tainted ASI report is correct in its assessment that a Hindu temple lay below the ruins of the Babri Masjid, neither the ASI nor any other expert has any scientific basis for claiming the architects of the mosque were the ones who did the demolishing. And yet two of the three High Court judges have concluded that the mosque was built after a temple was demolished.

From at least the 19th century, if not earlier, we know that both Hindus and Muslims worshipped within the 2.77 acre site, the latter within the Babri Masjid building and the former at the Ram Chhabutra built within the mosque compound. This practice came to an end in 1949 when politically motivated individuals broke into the mosque and placed idols of Ram Lalla within. After 1949, both communities were denied access though Hindus have been allowed to offer darshan since 1986. In suggesting a three way partition of the site, the High Court has taken a small step towards the restoration of the religious status quo ante which prevailed before politicians got into the act. But its reasoning is flawed and even dangerous. If left unamended by the Supreme Court, the legal, social and political repercussions of the judgment are likely to be extremely damaging.

.............................................................................................."

At the same time while I was not fully in sync with the rationale behind the decision, I do appreciate the sentiments behind it. I also love the fact that there were no adverse reactions from the masses. I loved the fact that the media was also a tad more responsible when giving out its breaking news and that the politicians had their tongues in check... I loved the fact that the country as a whole seemed to behave a lot more responsibly... Maybe because there was still another chance for an appeal at the Supreme court or maybe because no of the petitioners were really left out....

So, while this entire episode smacked of political correctness than justice, the episode also seems to mark the evolution of the Indian public and media as a whole.