An ordinary life

People who pride themselves on their practical view of life often scoff at ‘philosophy’. To them, it is a pastime for professors and dreamers, a collection of abstract arguments that have little to do with the hard ground of reality. Yet what they do not realise is that philosophy is woven into the very fabric of their everyday decisions.

Every time someone decides between telling a hard truth and offering a convenient lie, they are doing ethics. Every time they weigh a career that promises wealth against one that promises fulfilment, they are entering into debates about values that philosophers have wrestled with for centuries. Every time they shake their head and say, “What’s the point of all this?” they are engaging in metaphysics, however unknowingly. And each time they demand “facts” and dismiss “theory,” they are already caught in epistemology – the philosophy of what counts as knowledge, and why.

The irony is that those who dismiss philosophy are never free from it. They simply practise it unconsciously, because without recognising its name or lineage. Philosophy is not so much a specialised subject as it is the scaffolding ( often sub-conscious ) of all our values, attitudes, thoughts, judgements which guide through situations, relationships and questions that practicalities and calculations alone cannot deal with or resolve. Many proverbs and aphorisms which are part of any spoken language and social dictums which are handed down to children by families and communities have underpinnings which are philosophical.

Practicality itself, after all, rests on unspoken philosophical assumptions. When a person claims to be practical, they are making a statement about what they value most – perhaps efficiency, perhaps survival, perhaps comfort. But each of these is a choice framed by deeper questions: Why this and not that? Why value comfort over truth, or survival over justice? These are not trivial puzzles, but fundamental ones, for they determine the direction of a life, or even of a society.

To dismiss philosophy as “impractical” is a little like dismissing language as “ornamental.” One might survive on gestures alone, but clarity, depth, and connection are lost. Philosophy does not dictate what to think – it illuminates how to think, and why certain thoughts are worth having at all.

Perhaps the most practical thing philosophy offers is perspective. In the rush of daily life, it slows us down enough to ask whether we are climbing the right mountain before we celebrate how quickly we are ascending. It teaches us that efficiency without purpose, or achievement without reflection, can leave us with a life that is well-organised but poorly understood.

In the end, philosophy is not a rejection of practicality, but its companion. It ensures that our practicality is not merely the art of doing things right, but also of doing the right things.

Humans are not just socials animals. They are philosophical animals as well. More or less.

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Somewhere along the way, I became the kind of person who can no longer drink instant coffee. It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t set out to become a coffee connoisseur – there was no solemn oath over a French press. It just happened gradually : a single-origin here, a pour-over there, a detour into freshly ground beans with tasting notes like “caramel with a whisper of citrus.”

Now, when someone cheerfully asks, “Tea or coffee?” I am trapped. I want to ask, “What kind of coffee?” but I know the risk. If they say “Nescafé” and I pause- just for a second – I may look like a snob. So I smile and say, “Tea, please,” as though that was my plan all along. Inside, a small part of me weeps for the espresso it might have been.

This is an eternal dilemma: how do you appreciate quality without looking like a snob ? I guess true connoisseurship should be about joy and curiosity, not making other people feel like they’ve failed a test.

The trick, I’ve learned, is to avoid interrogating anyone’s pantry. If you must decline, do it with warmth, not with a lecture on Arabica versus Robusta. Compliment what is on offer – or, in my case, wax poetic about the tea while my inner coffee snob sulks in silence.

Perhaps, in the end, a real connoisseur isn’t defined by what they refuse to eat or drink. They’re defined by their ability to enjoy what’s in front of them. It can be tricky applying this rule to conversations of course – but let’s visit that theme some other time. It is complicated.

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I have been a Mumbaikar for over thirty years. The city is in my body now – the pace of my walk on its treacherous footpaths, the tilt of my head in the rain. I have known it as a public servant, as a citizen, as a customer, as a critic.

It is familiar, yet undiscovered. There are so many interesting people I have not met, corners I have not turned, stories I have not heard.  A café hidden behind a shuttered shop. A studio with the smell of turpentine. An improvised theatre where the stage waits in the dark. An art gallery which had popped up over a tiny coffee shop. A hostess who creates with Love and tolerates Fools with a smile.

I have spent enough time with the rich, the powerful, the glamorous, the ‘ connected’.  Enough to know I need less of them.

 I look for the others and find them. Men  and women with sparkling eyes, trusting smiles, dreams and ideas. Those who can tell an original joke. Or talk fondly about their ancestral home in or near Mathura, Amritsar, Panipat, Ajmer, Hazaribagh, Solapur, Parbhani, Sliguri, Puri, Baripada, Darjeeling, Imphal or Pallakad… Or about pickles their grandmother made. Mostly young, not yet jaded, not yet broken.

I guess they speak to me because I am interested. I ask. I listen. Sometimes I nod or smile. Sometimes I mumble. In those moments, the city slows. Its noise falls away. And I am in love with life. 

———

It is often not the subject that scandalises us, but the way it is framed. The same human body can be Venus in marble, or a poster on a backstreet wall; the same sentence can be poetry, or provocation. What changes is not the flesh or the word, but the gaze that shapes it.

While ruminating over the experience of viewing some paintings at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai recently remembers an incident from many years back. I was at university, chatting with a small group of friends in the library about books and I mentioned Nabokov’s Lolita. One friend, half-genuinely and half-provocatively, asked, “Why should that book be considered a classic and not pornography?”

I remember answering without hesitation: “In the same way that a painting or photograph of a nude may not be pornography.” I could not have unpacked the thought then, but I knew I was right. Several years later, after many books, exhibitions, experiences and conversations, I maybe able to explain what my younger self only intuited.

The difference, I realise now, is not in the subject but in the treatment. Pornography is concerned with arousal; art is concerned with awakening. One is engineered to provoke the body, the other to stir the mind, to open a space where reflection can enter. Nabokov’s novel, for all its disturbing subject, is not an invitation to desire but a dissection of it – an exploration of obsession, self-justification, and the lies we tell ourselves to survive our own moral landscapes.

Art history is filled with similar tensions. A Titian nude, an Amrita Sher-Gil study, even certain works by Picasso – each depicts the naked human form, yet none collapses into vulgarity. As John Berger noted in Ways of Seeing, the same image can be erotic, sacred, or exploitative depending on the frame that surrounds it – both literal and cultural.

Philosophy has circled this question for centuries. Kant, in The Critique of Judgment, distinguished the pleasure of beauty from the satisfaction of appetite: beauty is appreciated “without interest” – we savour it without the need to possess it. Freud, from another angle, might have called it sublimation – the transformation of primal instinct into something layered, symbolic, and socially resonant.

Lolita is unsettling because it makes us witness the coexistence of beauty and moral rot, side by side, within the same sentence. Its prose is a lattice of light and shadow, each page demanding that we hold both in view. That is the enduring power of great art: it does not flatter us with easy certainties, nor shield us from what is uncomfortable. It stays with us precisely because it refuses to let us look away.

Lately, I’ve found myself watching people a little more closely – not in judgment, but in curiosity. And these observations have led me to think about a word that seems to have quietly slipped out of our vocabulary: character.

Once, it was a word spoken often, even with a certain reverence. Like nation building, character building was seen as a shared responsibility. We spoke of how parents shaped it in the home, how teachers reinforced it in classrooms, how books nourished it in silence, and how even a sports coach, with a whistle and a sharp eye, could carve it into a young person’s spirit.

Back then, character was discussed in the context of the community – of being part of something larger than oneself. Today, the conversation has shifted. We speak instead of skills – hard and soft – as if people are machines being fine-tuned for the market. The measures are employability, salary, and promotion. The community has receded from view; even the idea of society feels faint, like an old photograph fading in the sun.

The family still remains, but here too the language has changed. Loyalty is celebrated, but the other virtues – honesty, courage, fairness, responsibility – don’t seem to get the same light. Perhaps this is what happens when the market doesn’t just visit our lives, but takes up residence – shaping our conversations, colouring our priorities, and slowly rewriting what we value.

It’s no surprise, then, that conversations feel thinner now. They skim the surface – fashion trends, celebrity gossip, the rise and fall of sports stars, and politics that is less about ideas and more about the marketing of fear and hatred.

And so I wonder: where does one go for deeper waters?

Perhaps the answer lies in the quiet companionship of books – those patient, unhurried spaces where character still matters, where it is tested, broken, rebuilt, and, sometimes, redeemed.

Maybe, if we can bring back even a fraction of those old conversations – about what it means to be trustworthy, to stand for something, to be remembered for more than our skills – we might find that character was never truly lost. It was simply waiting for us to start looking for it again.

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