Do bear with me, O suffering and patient reader, while I, at the risk of offending you, rant on many strange things—as always, without knowing why. On history, science, the nature of discovery, epics, epic stupidity…and most incoherently, on why I am always uncertain, always a little angry because I have no idea what’s truth or half-truth or untruth any more.

First, do take a look at this screenshot of a WhatsApp message I received from a friend whom I’ve always considered to be far more erudite and rational than me.

I read the message very carefully from start to finish and from top to bottom; I studied every row and column, I even turned the phone backward to discern any hidden meanings I might have missed (succeeding only in taking a selfie of my elbow and part of one ear, which I will post separately – the selfie, I mean, not the ear).

But I discerned no hidden meanings. There was only this brave, neatly tabulated edict shining forth on my phone screen; a declaration that physicists in ancient India had discovered the principles and laws and patterns that explain how the Universe works long before pretenders of the ‘West’.

Briefly, I felt the Worm of Incredulity stir and wriggle in my mind. Quickly, I reached for my mental Bata chappal and squished the foul creature. For, I am a proud Indian; I love my Veda and Upanishad; I wanted to believe!

Staring at the awesome proclamation, I felt my mind’s heart swell with pride at the thought that my glorious scientific Indian super-ancestors had discovered all there was to discover in the Universe, as long as 9000 years before any of those ‘Western physicists’. In my mind’s eye I could see them now—a multitude of goggle-eyed Western physicists tumbling at relativistic velocities, arse-over-elbow, into the great Latrine of History, to be swallowed by the eddying and foaming waters and flushed away into the Celestial Cesspits of Dissolution. In my mind’s ear (located just below my mind’s eye), the cerebral air resonated with the throbbing, universal sound of the sacred syllable “HOME”…

Hooommmmmeeeeee

I cackled in unholy glee as I beheld Anaxagoras, Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Planck, Rutherford, Bohr, Einstein, Dirac, Fermi, Feynman, Born, Schrodinger, Chadwick — heroes of my misbegotten and ignorant youth, now exposed as charlatans and pretenders, the bloody saala kuttas!— plunge headlong into that awesome and awful Thunderbox of Time…

Alas, my celestial reverie was rudely interrupted when, in that cerebral procession of academicians, I saw the familiar and beloved faces of Satyendra Nath Bose, C V Raman and Subhramanyan Chandrasekhar. Arre bhai, I thought to myself, these are deshvaasis! Enna daa, these are my very own Indian scientists! Pioneers they were, too, in their time; pathfinders in esoteric and diverse fields of knowledge, from nuclear physics to cosmology. Were they, too, cheats and frauds, usurpers of discoveries made in Vedic times?

The Worm of Incredulity wriggled frenziedly in my cortex; abruptly, the spell was broken. I regained my normal semi-sanity, and having fortified myself with strong kaapi, replied to my friend, expressing my doubts about the veracity of the tabulated data. I wrote:

“I sometimes suspect idiotic messages like these are being created by CPM and affiliated scoundrels just to make the public ridicule ancient Hindu texts – a purpose served when gullible people forward these messages without a thought!”

Rather unfair, of course, as pointed out by another dear friend. Why point a finger at CPM alone, she asked, when the real reason why such messages work is because there are any number of idiots (including, damn nearly, you) who will believe anything they are told; who cannot, or will not, tell truth from untruth?

But then, I reflected later, what in Allah’s and Krishna’s and Marx’s names is ‘truth’?

I wandered the campus alone through the night, pondering the question. I asked the night-watchman, and the night-watchman’s dog: to no avail.

Now, as I type these meaningless words, I wonder: maybe ‘truth’ is what I choose to believe to be the truth?

Because today I can choose what I want to believe is the truth, damn the rest of the world, empowered as I am by the mainstream media and Net which allows me to sift through like 367 startlingly different versions of the same news or event to find the version of ‘truth’ that makes me the most comfortable.

“TimesNow said so!”

“I saw it on The Wire…so there!”

“Indian Express carried it!”

“Ha! NDTV will never mention it because they’re in cahoots with You-Know-Who!”

Maybe truth is simply, conveniently, what my dear friends believe to be the truth as of today; and I believe that truth because I don’t want to be seen as silly or churlish or – most scarily – apart from the group by doubting, questioning, arguing, differing.

Maybe it’s all these reasons, and more. Maybe there’s no such thing as ‘absolute truth’ anymore; if ever such a thing held …er…true.

Maybe we are all equally at sea. Lost in a stormy, ever-swelling Universe-wide ocean of information: an electromagnetic, 5G ocean that swamps our senses, numbs our brains, distorts our thoughts, impairs our cognitive processes, alters even our dreams with its mega-blather of social media twitter and chatter, its tides of toxic subliminal multimedia messages and memes. We are tossed about on its terrifying Waves of Opinion, maddened by the shrieking Winds of Hates and Lusts that lash the waters into froth, hurled again and again toward the jagged, slippery Reefs of Judgment;  our Sails of Resolve shredded, Compass of Confidence cracked, Lamp of Reason shattered, Moorings of Morality long forsaken…

And all the while, the ravenous Beasts of MAM wait impatiently for us to impale ourselves on the Reefs, or to release our despairing grips and slide into the seething waters …they, who have reduced our minds to a uniform, amoeba-like state of imbecility, the perfectly uniform baseline in which the only variants are the Truth-Feeds they manufacture and feed us with, 24/7…

The Beasts of Marketing, Advertising, Media.

Today’s Holy Trinity: Creator–Sustainer–Destroyer.

I seek, and find brief solace, in the music of that wonderful rock opera of the last century, ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’: I shudder in the terrible words of Pontius Pilate in converse with Jesus:

Jesus: I look for Truth and find that I get damned.

Pilate: But what is Truth? Is Truth unchanging law?

We both have Truths—is yours the same as mine?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVB8QBurhV0]