About Me

I Started life as a university teacher in 1961. In 1964 I joined Indian Foreign Service and served as a diplomat in Iraq, Morocco, Lebanon, United States, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Tunisia (the last 4 as Ambassador). This gave me plenty of opportunity to observe different people in different countries. I found that despite superficial outer differences human nature everywhere is the same–same aspirations, same hopes and same fears. I found that all societies face a very basic problem. How can many diverse people live together in one society accommodating each other’s legitimate interests and concerns?Throughout my life it was my constant attempt to find answer to this question that developed my thinking.

“I cannot rest from travel, I will drink

Life to the lees……..

I am a part of all that I have met.

Yet all experience is an arch where thro’

Gleams the untraveled world whose margin fades,

Forever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rest unburnished not to shine in use.”

Ulysses Poem by Lord Tennyson.

Intellectual journey is like trying to reach the horizon, which keeps shifting as we move towards it. We never reach it, but we see and learn new things as we pursue the mirage. Each answer raises a new question and answer to that question raises yet another question. This question answer chain is endless. We never reach the final answer, the answer to all questions but in the process our understanding of issues deepens. For me the blog is an opportunity to share with others, interactively, some of the insights I acquired on this road without a final destination.

My intellect was triggered by the‘Quotable Quotes’ in the Reader’s Digest in the late fifties and early sixties. I eagerly waited for each new issue of the magazine to arrive and avidly read the quotes. Though irrelevant for my college degree studies they provided a sumptuous feast for my mind.

More than 60 years later I still remember many of them and how they influenced my thinking. Some of the more memorable and important ones are:

“To be interested in the changing seasons of life is a happier,a state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.” George Santayana 

Pondering over the implications of these words of George Santayana made me realize that maturity and happiness require acceptance of life, it’s changing seasons and circumstances. Fully living each season–spring, summer, autumn and finally winter–is key to happiness in life. I used this quote very effectively for the essay paper of the most important written examination that I ever took in 1963, which got me into the Indian Foreign Service. The topic of the essay was “Man is still only an Adolescent”.

While this quote shaped my attitude to life, more important for developing my thinking were the following two quotes: 

“If a man will begin with certainties, he will end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.” Sir Francis Bacon.

“You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.” Jonathan Swift.

I learned from these quotes that true knowledge does not begin with certainty but with doubt and question. When one doubts one investigates; one does not investigate certainties.

Doubts, questions, reason, and investigation go together. There is no place for reason and investigation with those who begin with certainties and cling to them impervious to everything to the contrary. Reason can succeed only with those people who have arrived at the conclusion by reasoning. Closed minds are not amenable to reason. That is the problem of dealing with fanatics.

But what about philosophy and art– religion, spiritualism, literature, painting, music, etc. –which cannot be evaluated by reason and empirical evidence alone. On this point I was influenced by the following quote in the Readers Digest.

“Like Moses, he,[artist, genius] with his heightened sensibilities sees God in the burning bush when the common myopic physical eye can only see the gardener burning the leaves." [Despite Google search over the years I could not find out the name of the author of the quote, but sixty years later it still remains vivid in my mind.]

Clearly, in matters of God, religion and the hereafter and arts like poetry, painting, music, indeed all things which cannot be seen and investigated by reason, we have to resort to visualization, creative imagination and intuition. Without exercising them a lot of knowledge that we receive through our senses cannot be unified, explained and made meaningful.

Ruminating over quotable quotes while walking, reading, being driven in the car and watching the stark and barren desert extending up to the horizon in UAE, I began to get my own insights on a variety of subjects relating to human beings. Then on 1st of January 1984 I decided to write my reflections. Here are some examples.

“Happiness is not absence of misery, but conquest of misery.”

“Always cherish your blessings. They do not stay long with those who do not value them.”

“Death is but a moment, but in that one moment one makes the longest journey of his life, from one world to another.”

“Is will itself predetermined? Because if it is, then it is not will. But if it is not predetermined then what are its limits?”

“Happiness is an achieved state of mind.”

“Pride is sense of self-worth; arrogance contempt for others.”

“Time does not decay anything; things decay and we measure time according to the pace and stages of decay.”

“You cannot rewrite history; you can only rewrite history books.”

“The strongest limitation on self-interest is self-interest. Taken too far self-interest self-destructs. Pursuit of self-interest requires balance.”

“You understand science; you experience art. Experience is an emotional exercise; understanding an intellectual effort.”

“You can defeat a people with arms, but you can only conquer them with ideas.”

“You can subdue a people by military force, but win their hearts only by soft power.”

"Idealism is long-term realism."

I started writing my reflections because I found that amorphous thoughts whirling in one’s mind sometimes suddenly and unexpectedly crystallize. Unless preserved by writing on a notepad then and there they rarely come back later with the same clarity and precision. So, I started to carry a small notepad and pen and would instantly note down my thought when it bubbled up in my mind, whether I was walking, talking, looking out of the car, or flying in the plane, gazing at the scene below or sunset in the distant horizon. Over a period of 37 years, I have written my reflections running into more than 3000 pages. I always thought that I will share them with others by writing short essays. Then someone suggested blogging as the way to do so.

I decided to call my blog site ‘Human Affairs’ because they are not limited to any specific discipline, topic or mission. Human Affairs is a very inclusive term; it covers everything that relates to man. All my blogs will be about man and human nature.

The key takeaway from my observation of societies, the study of history and understanding of human nature is that you cannot keep a people united by force but only by justice and equality for all. Use of force is in the end a costly failure.