Why I Study Philosophy?
Our education system is so brilliantly designed that you struggle to finish each year just to get to the next. Until there are no more years left. And you are sitting across the desk from a person as clueless as you interviewing for a job both of you hadn’t imagined in your worst nightmares. And you have to be grateful for the opportunity to do so. The only other option is academic obscurity. Or match fixing.
Basic education is still a privilege in India. But beyond employment, a person becomes enlightened despite his education, not because of it. Any real wisdom I have received has been through books outside the curriculum.
I have always relied on books to feel whole. One can always trace it back to a nerdy story of a lonely kid who didn’t belong on the playground. But the football players aren’t exactly ruling the world either. Textbooks off course were more tedious but the books I read voluntarily helped me find meaning even within those government approved BnW pages.
I am very grateful for my science degree. In a country that often seems like being on the brink of falling back into the middle-ages, a B.Sc. is the most rational anti-dote that is as yet untouched by state hands. But a further M.Sc. seemed like an exercise in futility.
I knew I didn’t want to be in business based on a vague rather childish socialist leaning. But I ended up in a MBA anyway purely on momentum.
Through the course and several subsequent years of able bodied employment, I survived by delivering the task at hand while also trying to link it back to what I had studied both on and off syllabus. Without finding that meaning even the most celebrated job is just labour. The links are very much there but almost seem incidental to the merely educated.
Many more years of reading and stand-up later I am convinced that everyone operates on a certain philosophy or a sloppy version of it, they just don’t know it. From your Mom to your rickshaw waala. It could be randomly right wing or superficially hard knocks but it is a philosophy nonetheless. You just need to ask them two to three questions before they can scare you with their lack of depth. Anything beyond basic survival needs a set of values and if you don’t actively imbibe these, the market will do it for you.
Most people you know are operating at level one: a motley collection of pop culture references posing as life lessons: Upar waala jo karta hai, ache ke liye karta ha, Sabr ka phal meetha hota hai, hum ek baar jeete hain, ek baar…
And Bollywood is the worst source for learning real life skills. A close second is your own parents coz they have themselves modeled their lives around the pop-culture non-sense of their times.
Each of these slogans can be traced back to a certain stream of philosophy and reading it empowers you to accept or reject the idea through your own volition. But in isolation, punctuated by item numbers and badly scripted endings, movie dialogues are as misleading as election campaigns.
Then there is a level two. This is where basic education and a stable income lead to a cursory understanding of abstract concepts but not enough empathy to tolerate contrarian views. This is where propaganda works the best. God, nation and clan as over-simplified answers to the deepest questions that are fermenting inside you. This is why the somewhat educated are often more dangerous than the illiterate. They are very easily convinced of their superiority. And now in the 4G world, even the masses can be recruited to a disturbingly binary version of the world.
Self-awareness is a lifelong journey of realising your insignificance. The only way to graduate to level three and beyond is to study the arts and analyse every life experience in the most empathetic way possible.
Contemplation is always two deep breaths away but we don’t allow ourselves even that much luxury. Lest an unsettling truth seep in. The greatest achievement of mass media has been making intellectual sound like a bad word. And promoting instead a life on autopilot, career moves and life choices closely resembling Brownian motion rather than conscious thought (a joke for Science students). Caught in a cosmic pin ball machine accepting every good fortune as Providence and every wrong turn as fate.
Between life in mass tranquilisation and hard truth, shouldn’t the choice be clear? The first step; of course, is knowing that the choice exists. The next step is knowing that theory ends the moment you close the book. Come day break, you have to step out again into the world of emotional, fickle and randomly violent beings, all post-modernists without knowing it. The only way a book can help in dealing with people is if you can wack them on the head with it! But that is still better than the Brownian motion most of us call life.
- Punit Pania
