An ordinary life

History remembers its mass leaders by the size of the crowds they commanded. Socrates, by contrast, left behind no organisation, no movement, no manifesto, and not a single line written in his own hand. He did not seek followers; he sought interlocutors. He did not promise answers; he asked questions. If leadership is measured by mobilisation, visibility, and popular appeal, Socrates was almost its opposite. And yet, few individuals have shaped human thought as enduringly as he has.
This is precisely why a Socrates can never be a mass leader – and why he remains indispensable.
Mass leadership thrives on clarity, certainty, and emotional resonance. It simplifies the world into slogans, symbols, and shared convictions that can be repeated and rallied around. Socrates did none of this. His method was to unsettle, not reassure. Through relentless questioning, he exposed the fragility of received wisdom and the ignorance hidden beneath confident assertions. In a crowd, doubt is contagious in the wrong way; it weakens collective momentum. A mass leader must reduce complexity. Socrates insisted on expanding it.
Moreover, Socrates refused the moral shortcuts that mass leadership often requires. To lead large numbers, one must occasionally overlook contradictions, tolerate convenient untruths, or appeal to passion rather than reason. Socrates was constitutionally incapable of such compromises. His commitment was not to persuasion but to examination. He did not seek agreement; he sought understanding. This made him respected by some, resented by many, and ultimately condemned by the very democracy in which he lived.
There is also the matter of discomfort. Mass leaders offer belonging. Socrates offered unease. His conversations did not end with uplift or affirmation; they often ended in aporia – a state of puzzlement. He made people aware not of what they knew, but of how little they did. Few things are less attractive to a crowd than being told that its certainties are unfounded. A man who makes people uncomfortable for a living cannot hope to lead them en masse.
Yet to conclude from this that Socrates failed as a leader would be to misunderstand the nature of his influence. Socrates did not lead crowds; he shaped consciences. His arena was not the assembly or the battlefield, but the individual mind. He worked one person at a time, patiently dismantling intellectual complacency and ethical laziness. His legacy was not a movement but a method – the habit of critical self-examination.
This is where his enduring importance lies. Socrates represents a form of leadership that modern societies desperately need but rarely reward: leadership without followers, authority without office, influence without spectacle. He reminds us that progress does not begin with mobilisation but with reflection, not with consensus but with honesty. Every healthy society requires voices that resist simplification, that slow down collective enthusiasm, and that insist on asking inconvenient questions.
In times of mass politics and instant opinion, the Socratic presence becomes even more vital. Mass leaders shape the direction of societies; Socratic figures shape the quality of their thinking. Without the former, societies drift. Without the latter, they rush blindly. One provides momentum; the other provides balance.
Socrates was executed not because he threatened the state with rebellion, but because he threatened it with thought. That, too, is instructive. The true danger he posed was not disruption, but introspection. He forced citizens to confront the gap between their professed values and their lived realities. No mass leader can afford to do this too consistently. A Socrates exists to do little else.
In the end, Socrates matters precisely because he does not fit our conventional ideas of leadership. He is a reminder that the most transformative figures are not always those who command crowds, but those who refuse to flatter them; not those who offer certainty, but those who cultivate wisdom. Mass leaders may change the course of history. A Socrates changes the way we think about it – and about ourselves.

https://open.substack.com/pub/subratratho/p/akshaya-mohanty-when-a-voice-becomes?r=1dri7v&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

I don’t believe that dreams foretell the future, or that they carry messages from some supernatural realm. I don’t treat them as omens, warnings, or encrypted prophecies. They arrive unannounced, perform their brief theatre, and disappear – often before we have had time to take proper note of them.

These days, I make a conscious effort to revisit my dreams – the pleasant ones, at least – before they fade, as remembered dreams almost always do. I replay their images and fragments of conversation, trying to hold them in place for a few extra minutes. Experience has taught me that unpleasant dreams often have less to do with buried trauma than with what I ate or drank the night before, and how much of it. Our biome, our hormones, and the chemistry of our cells exert a far greater influence on both conscious and subconscious life than we usually acknowledge.

Dreams are not messages. They are the subconscious mind doing what it does best: making connections – often random, but rarely senseless. The mind gathers scraps of memory, anxiety, thought, feeling, sensation, and imagination, and stitches them into narratives that may defy time and space, yet remain oddly coherent in their emotional logic.

Carl Jung believed that dreams were not disguises to be decoded but expressions – the psyche speaking to itself in its own symbolic language. One need not accept his metaphysics to recognise the insight. Sometimes these connections expose old fears resurfacing under mental stress or physical discomfort. I have often found myself, in dreams, flying at great speed just above treetops in familiar landscapes, unable to slow down, dodging electrical cables at the last second, or trapped in a cave.

“Dreams are not a different world – they are a more honest one.”

• Milan Kundera

In my experience dreams often do something more generous. They invent situations involving familiar people that unfold in unpredictable yet compelling ways I could never have imagined while awake. Conversations feel uncannily real. Scenes follow their own internal logic. Stories unfold without any obligation to conclude or resolve themselves. In such moments, the dreaming mind behaves like an artist freed from the tyranny of plausibility and utility.

Perhaps both dreams and art (about which I know next to nothing) emerge from the same underground workshop. Perhaps both rely on the mind’s ability to connect distant dots and allow contradictions to coexist. Colin Wilson wrote of consciousness not as a fixed state but as something that expands and contracts, slipping into heightened modes when freed from routine perception. Dreams, in this sense, are not lapses but experiments – brief excursions into alternative ways of seeing.

And then the curtain comes down. We wake up mid-scene, left with a mood, an image, a residue of meaning that resists explanation.

Dreams remind us that even when consciousness switches off, creativity does not. As Nietzsche put it, “We have art in order not to die of the truth.” Maybe we have dreams for the same reason.

Several Indians I spoke with in the past eulogised – or at least empathised with – Donald Trump’s impatience with liberal elites, progressive language, and global institutions that often appear remote from everyday concerns. They appreciated his rejection of political correctness, his scepticism of multilateralism, and his insistence that the USA should pursue its own interests without excessive explanation. His hard line on migration and his explicitly transactional view of alliances were regarded less as moral choices and more as practical ones – an acceptance of how power is said to operate in the real world. When it was suggested that this approach might also normalise exclusion or an unusual tolerance for concentrated wealth and power, the concern was dismissed as overinterpretation.

For some time, this difference of view remained largely theoretical. Trump’s decisions were distant, their effects abstract. It was possible to admire the style without having to account for the consequences. That separation has now narrowed. Following the imposition of steep tariffs on India, alongside a visible warming of relations with Pakistan, earlier certainties have given way to a quieter reassessment. The reaction is not anger so much as puzzlement.

Trump’s distancing from India is attributed, among other things, to our continued purchase of oil from Russia. His renewed engagement with Pakistan appears to rest on considerations that are personal or transactional. This follows years of sustained effort by India to persuade the international community that the Pakistani military establishment has been a principal sponsor of global terrorism. Evidently, some positions are more negotiable than others.

The prevailing mood is one of muted disappointment. There is a recognition -expressed carefully – that admiration does not always invite reciprocity. Yet the broader orientation remains unchanged. Russia may be described as a dependable partner, but it is the United States that continues to be regarded as the more consequential relationship.

Accordingly, Trump’s current posture is being understood as temporary. A phase. An interruption. It is assumed that matters will, in time, correct themselves. Until then, patience is advised.

Tum kisi aur ko chahoge toh,

hum intezaar karenge.

Mushkil hogi toh hone doh.

Every devout Hindu usually has a favourite deity. And every deity, in turn, has one or more places of worship where prayers are believed to be more effective than elsewhere – and therefore worth the time, effort and money they demand. Be that as it may, I have no desire to question the faith of any believer, in any deity, at any place of worship, or even any idea of the divine. If worship gives someone hope, confidence, or the strength to deal with fear and uncertainty, that itself is justification enough.

What does trouble me, however, is the practice of VIP darshan.

It represents a peculiar moral shortcut – a quiet but widely accepted belief that the end justifies the means. That if one can reach the sanctum sanctorum faster by leveraging wealth, status, or connections, then one should. It is an approach to worship that fits into no precept of any scripture I am aware of, and certainly into no idea of humility that religion so often preaches.

The stated logic is usually practical: time is precious; queues are long; responsibilities are many. And yet, when one looks closely, the logic is not very different from the one used to justify cutting corners elsewhere in life. What makes it unsettling is not merely the bypassing of the ordinary devotee – standing patiently for hours, sometimes days – but the absence of any discomfort about it.

Instead of guilt, what I often see is pride.

There is pride in recounting how effortlessly one “managed” darshan. Pride in knowing the right person, paying the right amount, or belonging to the right category. Pride, even, in narrating the impatience one was spared. The queue, it seems, is for others – anonymous, faceless, dispensable. The deity, apparently, understands.

But what is being sought in that hurried moment before the idol? Grace? Blessings? Inner peace? Or simply the satisfaction of having completed a transaction efficiently?

Religions across traditions speak of equality before the divine. Of surrender. Of ego dissolving at the threshold of the sacred. And yet, VIP darshan institutionalises hierarchy at precisely that threshold. It converts faith into a fast-track system and devotion into a premium service.

One might argue that the deity does not discriminate; that these are merely human arrangements. That may well be true. But then the question shifts – from what God thinks to what we are willing to accept about ourselves.

If standing in a queue with strangers tests patience, empathy, and humility, perhaps that too is a form of prayer. And if bypassing it flatters our sense of importance, perhaps that too reveals something – but not about the divine.