SPEAKER_00 0:00

You know, the wealth is a dangerous thing really for democracy. It it might give more of the goods, but yeah, authoritarianism rises.

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Hey, welcome back. My guest today is Professor Poshotama Billy Moria. Professor Billy Moria is a philosopher and a historian. His primary contribution to the world of philosophy has been in getting that world to take Eastern philosophy more seriously, not just as a branch of spirituality and religious studies, but as an intellectual, rigorous pursuit. But that's not why I wanted to have him on. I wanted to have him on because he's also a professor, and he was my professor when I was 21 years old. And in the decades since he taught me, I've noticed this thing online. I've noticed this sort of way of talking develop, this internet accent, this this TikTok voice, this kind of podcaster intonation. You you know what I'm talking about. Honestly, I have it sometimes. But the problem with it is that it convinces us that that's what real conversations sound like, just because we hear it all the time on the internet. But that's not what real conversations sound like. In fact, the best conversations I've had don't sound like that at all. In the real world, as you know, people run away with tangents. People monologue in beautiful ways. People forget what they were talking about, but they end up saying really insightful, interesting, weird things. I've been craving a conversation like that. And who better to have a conversation like that with than my college professor and friend? And honestly, this conversation turned out exactly how I'd hoped and kind of expected. I have no earthly idea how to describe this conversation, but I think you'll like it. With that, I bring you Professor P. Illumoria. How do you feel about me calling you, Professor? Uh, I don't think in this context, no, okay. You can change now and then. Okay. That sounds good. Um, uh, thank you so much for being on the podcast, firstly. Um, in setting this up, I know we were going back and forth, and you said, you know, I don't love to talk about my personal life too much unless it's philosophically relevant, which I first of all I love that phrase. But so I I I won't go into questions that aren't philosophically relevant. Uh the first one I have for you that is about both your personal life and is philosophically relevant is what is the first philosophical quandary? What is the first philosophical question you remember wrestling with as a young man or as a child?

SPEAKER_00 2:36

Oh, that's an interesting question. Yes, you see, I I was always very interested in the sciences. So um I was doing physics, chemistry, um, biology, and a lot of questions popped up from there. So and I was very smart at doing, and I still do a bit of physics, you know, quantum and all of that. But I was intrigued by the laws of nature, the whole idea that things seem to follow law and various permutations of the so with the thermodynamics, Newton's first law, second law, third law, really intrigued by that. So those are the kind of first questions I sort of remember, and I remember saying this to my young brothers. So look up at the look up at the sky, look at the stars. How big do you think is the universe? How far does this go on and on and on and on? Does it ever stop? So the whole, you know, the tension between uh finite and infinite, you know, sort of struggling with the concept of infinite. And but I knew that in metaphysics you have a concept of infinite. But what about the universe? Is that infinite? So that was one coming from physique. So you mentioned talking to your brothers about this.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the sort of the texture of um of the world that you kind of grew up in. The the your household were oh questions, bigger questions of philosophy discussed. Uh was it more immediate concerns? What what did it feel like to be?

SPEAKER_00 4:04

Okay, so yes, um, my my my father had a kind of uh quirky side to him. Uh this these were business people who had been traveling and you know they end up in places like Fiji, New Zealand, and then eventually Australia. Uh well, I was the first one to get there, and then other other siblings followed. There was a a kind of a quirky side to him that he was very intrigued with my mind. He said he could see my mind working even in sleep. I never slept, apparently. He was picking up something. And I would get up at four in the morning and study for for for for very, very long years that I can remember. And then I would talk to him a little bit in the morning on breakfast as well. And he was very encouraging. Kept telling sort of people that this guy has got a technical mind. I don't know what he meant meant by technical, but yeah, I think he meant he meant a probing, you know, figuring things out and so on. Uh and my mother was also very encouraging of of education. Her father was a teacher, so they had a little bit of intellectual um side to them. And you but I also had very good teachers, actually, and happened to have wonderful teachers. So these were these were Colomban fathers. Uh like you know, they come to Xavier College and so forth. They were Irish. Uh for for a short span of time they were in Fiji. Uh they were Irish. And there was uh uh a couple of them, they just kind of picked up that that I I was gonna go somewhere. So they were very encouraging and made me the head prefect. And I took over I took over some of the classes because I I I I could um I could figure things out much faster and I would be able to like be yeah, but like we didn't have a TA and tutorial, so I I would be doing that, but sometimes I would take the class myself. So that's the kind of background. So the first questions were about what is it all about? How big is this universe? Where does it go? How small is it?

SPEAKER_02 6:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

Um and and why do things follow law and how how does it all work? Yeah. Much much later, of course, you can transplant that to human behavior and say, are there laws that govern our behavior as well?

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Um so I want to ground your story a little bit uh in a time and place. So you grew up in uh in Bombay, as it was called back then, right? There you mentioned um Billymore is actually the name of a village. Yes. Where is that village?

SPEAKER_00 6:42

Um it's uh um it's sorry, it's uh a little south of Sura. Uh the the kind of the nearest uh town, uh nearest other towns to it is Nosari and so on. So this is a very um uh sorry, a little little little south of Broader, a little north of uh Sura. It's it's where Parsis came and settled. Yeah. So they first settled in Sunjan, which is Is your family Parsi? They are part Parsis. In fact, we uh our our blood tests show us that we probably came from Central Asia and Parsa, from which we get Parsi. So it's just much older than uh the Iranians of the present day who are mixed up with Turkish and Arab and Mongol, Mongol, or we call Mughal, right?

SPEAKER_01 7:38

All of this talk of traveling the world um actually brings me to your story, right? Where at some point, 16, 17, you leave India. Um, I I leave Fiji because we're we're we're we're settled there by Oh, I see. Yeah. Um what was that experience like? What was the experience of l moving to another country, moving away from home? What was that like for you?

SPEAKER_00 8:00

Um well, we'd already lived in a kind of you know, two, three countries. So we used to used to multicultural. Our neighbors were Jains, Muslims, uh, even Chinese and native Fijians, right? No, they were not really neighbors because Indians kept them themselves, but but they were in my school. Uh there were also people who were they are called half-castes, which you know is not a nice term, but but there were sort of Eurasians for us, you know, people in Goa, for example, uh part Portuguese and part uh India, we call them East Indians, right? It's a little kind of a gentle term, but we but they but it people want to be really rude and say, well, they're half-caste. Um so we grew up in that kind of more multicultural, so it wasn't too bad. And then we went uh went to uh went to New Zealand for for school, high school. We knew so many people with so many different religions and so many different ethnic groups that it was, you know, my my my my first my first date was with a Maori girl. So, you know, I was already that open to to um moving into a multicultural world, even though uh because of family connections, you know, we had uh I I was staying with families in in Oakland in New Zealand uh until I got to the university and decided, no, I'm just gonna have my own apartment and flat and rooming with students and so forth because we wanted to have a good time kind of thing. It was early, you know, so late 70s or so. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Well, let me ask you so when you enter uh the world of philosophy, and particularly Western philosophy, right? Which at least at the time maybe still is, it's very sort of Anglo-American, it is very, very analytic. Um how did that feel for you? You know, because I I can my summary, which is not gonna be uh accurate or complete, but my what through line I see in your career is this sort of um attempt to prove that um Eastern, in particular Indian philosophy, could be more than just a subset of religious studies and of uh mysticism. Did how did you feel entering this world of Western philosophy? Um what was the kind of reaction you got? What did it give you, did it give put a chip on your shoulder, uh feeling like you'd really needed to prove yourself? Or uh yeah, well, I'll I'll let you answer that. Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

So I just break track a little bit. Please. So when I went to university, you'd be surprised, you're an engineer. I started studying engineering because that's the only way my parents would let me go. Yes. I was I was good at sciences and so forth, you know. I mean, I had by that time had, by the way, uh because I came top in the class, they gave me a prize as I was leaving uh a huge big book like that. And then I did philosophy of science for my first graduate work, History and Philosophy of Science. In the philosophy of social sciences, we did come across these things about, you know, can we be imposing our rationality on primitive, so-called primitive people? So the Aboriginal land rights movement had by then I'm Australia too. Uh the Aboriginal land rights movement had started. Sorry, you know, I'm still in New Zealand and the Maoris had started their own indigenous. So they wanted more recognition of their culture, their political system, as well as their legal system. So I first time I had legal pluralism, bilegalism, how does that work? You know, you can have two legal systems and so on. So it was beginning to occur to me a little bit along those lines. And then I did history and philosophy of science and social sciences, where we started to ask questions about, the two other cultures perhaps think differently. Uh, you know, they'll pour if that plant is dying, they'll pour blood on it. Well, that will kill the plant even more, right? But but they believe that it will grow tomorrow morning because the spirits will come and drink the blood and rejuvenate the plant. That's what, you know, Swaziland Zulus believe in. Uh and the social anthropologists think, okay, well, that's that uh I can describe what they do, but I can't make judgment about it. Yeah. But sitting in England, people are making judgments about it. And they say these are uncivilized people, we have to civilize them. Well, let's colonize them. So that's anthropological work actually fed into uh uh inadvertently or unwittingly into colonization as well. What came the justification for it? Justification for that, you're absolutely right. But so the more the more Kant read anthropology, the more he believed that these people uh are probably you know made of the same thing as the plants are and animals are. You know, he has a picture that he does of a Hawaiian person. There's no s no skin or bones, it's entirely pineapple and fruits all put together. That's wow. That's what we are. I've I have no idea what my liver. My what my liver is made of witch fruit, perhaps probably bread fruit.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

Well, it now looking back, okay. Um, so you know, um, you have this sort of entry point into philosophy. Looking back over you know, almost 50 years uh of a career in philosophy, if you had to, I'm gonna ask you to do something somewhat uh offensive, which is if you were to reduce it down to one central question you've been trying to answer with your work, what what do you find that question to be? Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

Uh yes, I I had a little booklet, a diary kind of thing, not the daily diary, in which I wanted to write my insights. And the first word that I wrote on it and which which also remained the last word, truth. And I had no answer to that. I uh I I just left it blank, all the pages. So, but that was the question, really, in a way. Then of course we discover that in philosophy, uh, you know, truth kind of becomes um a property of a proposition, how you put a sentence together, you know, whether it coheres or not, you know, and and and then logic, you know, A, you can't have say A equals to not A's, that's false, right? So we had we did truth tables and so on. So we're not going going anywhere to truth with a capital T. See, I I remember, I remember a friend of mine, we had a we had some we had some drinks and he was British and he was very insistent. And he said, Come on, Perushalma, you've been studying philosophy for so long. Tell me what what have you found? What have you discovered? And so I pulled out this little thing and I said, Truth with a question mark. Truth with a question mark is great. That's about and then I used to wear a uh an upside down question mark, and people would say, that's upside down. And I said, Well, that's exactly where we at, right? I we don't even know what the question is. Oh, that's great.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

I um I do find that um in a way that the rest of the world does not understand, uh the Indian sort of self-identity is really wrapped up, and Gandhi is of course all over this in the concept of truth. In uh it is the national motto, of course, of India. Everything in India passes through the path of the truth alone triumphs.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

Satyamgyana Manantam. I mean, it's right one of the first verses in the Upanishad and Gandhi, as you said, you know, and it's interesting you discover that that sat is made from the satya is made from the word sat, which is being. So one of the first words in the uh nasadya shukta in the Rigved, which would be about at least 3,000 years old. But it's Nas Na Asat Na Sat. Neither was their non-existence in the beginning, nor was their existence. And and then it goes on, and at the end, well I I don't know if I can I say it in in Australian. Well, we don't think the bagger knows it either. Who knows who can tell if we don't think the bagger knows it either, you know? Um that that's that's where you know the sort of beginnings of skepticism. I mean, they start with this crazy kind of uh uh uh what's called dialethism is kind of uh uh which seems to be saying that a contradiction is true, but it's not telling us anything, you know. And it doesn't say existence and non-existence, there was neither non-existence, but then you think, oh, well, there was the existence, nor was there existence. It's it's it's a kind of a double negation that does not lead to anything positive. So you just keep going, more questions. It's ostensibly about what we would call creation, but there's no creator here, you know, it's just the beginning seems to be it's almost like it was what one of my when I read this out, one of my philosopher friends said, ah, they're saying it's British, ah, they're saying, in the beginning was the beginning. Yeah. That's about as much as you can say. Yeah, it's just wonderful. I mean, some of these concepts, and this is coming from Indian, Indian, Indian. Much, much more than, say, Plato. Plato had this similar thing as well. He already had everything there, but he needed a demiurge, he needed a person to create it. Whereas in the Indian tradition, when they do bring in a person, Purusha, you know, my namesake virtually, they dismember him, they chop him up. Yeah. Yeah. The gods chop him up, and then they say, Yeah, but the gods came after. So how did this happen? So they say, Oh well, sacrifice sacrifice itself to itself. So it took a form of a person and it chopped up and burnt everything in the sacrifice, and from which we get the universe. It's wonderful. These are some of the wonders of the poetical. You have that in Plato as well, the kind of mythos, you know, and you having Platinus and Neoplatonism. And that was a great discovery to find find find some of these earliest steering of philosophy. Yeah. And and so I studied Greek philosophy as well. And it actually sat with a classicist, and we read Greek. I had a tiny little bit of Greek.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

Turtles all the way down. Is that is that Greek?

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Because it feels like a related concept. It's actually more Buddhist, uh, and and maybe Jains, for Jain's is elephants all the way down. And I like the uh this had came up in Berkeley just the other day. Uh somebody I was responding to somebody's paper about whether there are particles or waves and this, that, the other. And it said elephants all the way down. I said, no, turtles all the way down. I said, no, Jains actually prefer turtles. I sorry, prefer elephants, because you cannot, you cannot even see all parts of one turtle. How are you going to see all parts of all the other turtles? You know, you see the you see the trunk, you think it's a tree, you see the tail, you think it's, I can't remember, it's another part of the tree, and so on. And so if you were to follow all of it down, you'd have ten times almost infinite perspectives. Yeah. The anekantawada, that's the Jain theory, that we have infinite perspectives on the universe. And each perspective changes the reality. So you're actually making your own reality, the Heisenberg principle that, you know, we'll never be able to measure anything because each observation changes the thing we are observing, because the whole thing is one. So how you how how can you break up? Say this is the object and this is the subject, there is no such thing. Yeah. It could be the other way around. Maybe the object is watching you.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

Well, this is the Alan Watts idea too, right? An eye cannot see itself, a a tooth cannot cut itself, and consciousness cannot witness itself, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:01

Yeah, but a bit different from the consciousness. The consciousness is witnessing itself, it is witnessing itself through us. So that's probably the way to put it. I don't know about the other ones, whether they apply or not. But but this is what the physicists are also saying, that the whole thing is just one consciousness in it's watching itself. Yeah. And to be self-aware, it decided to create you and me. But we now think that the awareness is mine, you know, I have the perspective, I have the truth, and I'm seeing that. But in fact, no, the whole the whole if the whole universe is one and and it's all awareness, but it also wants to be self-aware. Well, this thing can be self-aware too, but we don't know that, you know. Yeah. Uh they they don't sort of speak out. Uh plants could be self-aware. We we we now have some sort of idea that they probably have feelings and they're probably enjoying uh listening to this conversation. You know, they they they respond to music, is you well know. Um uh animals are certainly self-aware. So what is this amazing property of self-awareness? How how can you just how can it just belong to a physical frame, you know, uniquely like ours, which is basically organic, that's all it is. Well, we're just an organic frame. How does consciousness happen inside us? But the one concept which uh I don't even have to wish that because it already did take off, not in the pop sort of sense, but in in the um uh political activist uh era, um which you know, um uh the work of Gandhi and his Satyagraha made that accessible and made that possible. So the the the the the the class that you did on civil rights was precisely to show that you know you can't take a concept like Ahinsa, non injury, which comes really from Jains, right? I the Hindus were not really committed to, they were committed to hinsa, some kind of violence, meaning sacrificing animals and you know, they were out there in the Mahabharata fighting wars and so on. There's only, you know, Bhishma and a few people were concerned about Ainsa, but but that's because they were listening, you know, they were overhearing the Buddhists and the Jains. And gradually they took that. But it was a very passive kind of a concept, right? So you don't injure. So this morning I felt very bad that um uh a a tiny little spider creature, now it's warm, uh, was in the shower. And it was trying to resist the water, was trying to run away, but they can't run too far away. So and I'm in the shower and I'm trying to rescue this thing. And I, you know, got all of some some tissue paper or whatever, uh, but it got wet and eventually the thing died, and I felt so bad. I know I thought nothing's gonna go right today. You know, well, that's how the Jains feel that if even if accidentally you killed something, so that's you know, they sweep the floor because they don't even want to step on an end. Um so that's kind of a passive reaction, because if you hurt something, you hurt yourself, you create karma to yourself. So it's it's it's as much about the uh the the the living entity feeling the pain, suffering, uh, you know, and there's the Buddha said there's just suffering, there's a lot of suffering. Uh, but it's also um uh your karma. Because Gandhi did not invent it, he changed it. And that was that great challenge that he had in South Africa when he thought, how can I fight the British and and and maintain what what Torsto had called passive resistance? It comes from really Christianity, they turn the other side of the cheek. But Gandhi said, Well, I that's too passive. I'm not going to turn the other side of the cheek. I'll I I I will go forward even if they want to hit me, right? But I will not I will not lift my finger. And and and that of course shook the world in the 1906. You know, you saw the slides and so on. Uh and that idea went right across the world and hit here in the US as well. And um, you know, W.E.B. Du Bois and and and the some of the early African uh American leaders, Berkeley Washington and uh whole bunch of people, um uh Marcus Garvey, that very uh eccentric Caribbean, although he wasn't totally inclined towards nonviolence, but a whole lot of other people picked it up and they thought, wow, there's a strategy here. You know, we so uh so anyway, Gandhi's idea became active resistance rather than passive resistance. So at the active nonviolence, that you could actually take nonviolence as a almost as a weapon, if you like, and achieve something, but without having hurt anyone, you might hurt yourself in the process. That I think is uh a a big a big take. Uh uh and and and there are countries that have fought on that in South Africa. Mandela, you know, threw his guns, gun away, um, the his militancy away and took the Gandhian. Uh it worked for a while in Burma with Ang Sus Suchi, who was a Ghanaian, but it kind of fell apart when the whole ethnic uh conflict happened and she had to take sides, which is a friend of mine actually, Ang Sus Suchi. So it was very sad to promote for this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:50

So where is she like? Have you uh have you kept in touch with her at all? Is I mean possible?

SPEAKER_00 25:55

I was not allowed to go visit her. I tried a few times, but the the the Burmese government just wouldn't let me let me enter the country nor go to uh you can enter, you can go to Rangoon, but you can't go see her. So but then when she did become the the the leader prime minister, I was planning to go visit her, but then the uh the Rohingya thing happened and and she took the side of the militants. Uh and I uh you know she was stripped off some awards and so on, and I thought, no, I can't keep keep this up because you know it's um it's like some of our prison leaders, without naming them, you know, think they're Gandhians, but you know, they they're the first ones to go bulldozing low-class um slums and and Muslim uh areas and so on.

SPEAKER_01 26:47

So you you just circled two very important topics, uh, one of truth and one of nonviolence, which also, if you were to pick only two pillars for the entire country of India, right? It's philosophical foundation, it's it's those two. I want to this this question will take me a little bit to set up, um uh, but it's the one I'm I think most interested, I've been most interested in talking to you about. So the class um I took with you, of course, uh was um uh about the Indian independence movement and what it taught and how it affected the American civil rights movement. Now, I find um, Professor Billy Moria, uh, that there was this vision of India that um we were all sold, right? Um, across generations about what it meant to the world, about what it could teach the world. Right. And I think you would you just nailed two of the most important principles, which was this idea of the truth and of nonviolence. And I find that I don't think it's an overstatement or an exaggeration to say that if it weren't for Gandhi, there are many countries that would not exist today. They would not have been able to find their way to decolonization, they would not have been able to find their way to peaceful uh governments, right? It was this it we felt in our own way, Indians, uh, our own form of exceptionalism. We looked at a map of the world's democracies and we found um no democracies for thousands of miles in any direction. Yeah. And we had created um, I there's this graph that we'll put up um in the podcast that I love, which is it shows um democracy index scored against uh uh against wealth of nations. And as you would expect, uh countries tend to get more and more democratic as they get wealthier. Um, you know, historically, of course, democracy has been a luxury of the wealthy. But India stands out, it it sits at a part of the chart that no one else is in. It is a completely different line. In 1947, to take a country that is mostly illiterate, that is mostly impoverished, ravished by famines, right? And to decide to form a multicultural secular democracy in a part of the world that has never seen one with a group of people that no one thought were deserving of democracy, right, with a sixth of humanity, is to me the greatest political science experiment of the last century. And it's not talked about nearly enough. Now I feel, as you can tell, a lot of pride about this, and I think a lot of Indians do. Uh, and I thought from my entire childhood and growing up that that was what we could teach the world. Now it's not clear to me that we know that lesson ourselves. So when you all of this is to build up to a question, which is when you go to India now, uh, a place you and I both grew up in, when you go to India now and you see what's going on, what are we anymore? What is an Indian I what what is India? Do we have anything left to teach the world given how we conduct ourselves today? Warm Intro is brought to you by WeFunder. WeFunder created this thing called the community round that lets you raise money directly from your community. So instead of going to VCs and rich people, angel investors, you can go straight to your friends and your family and your customers. And, you know, this is not a traditional ad read. I used Wii Funder for my company three times. We ran three rounds in Wii Fund and we raised over a million dollars. And I found that it completely changed how everybody felt about our business. Our customers all of a sudden didn't feel like they were just customers. They felt like they were owners in the business. They shopped with us more, they told their friends about us. My team felt like what we were doing was important because our community had shown up to invest in us. I tell every founder I can find to go raise a WeFund around. Especially for companies that care about community, there is nothing greater you can do than letting that community invest. Go to WeFunder.com slash join to check it out.

SPEAKER_00 30:51

Let me uh um just go back a little bit on one of your um uh statements, which might have a presupposition that could bring bring about uh an answer, which was that uh I think you said as countries grow in wealth, democracy grows as well. Um you know, there are democratic experiments in some some some African countries, former colonies, not just British colonies, but they were French or German, uh in a sort of Zambia, Zimbabwe, some of these places, um uh uh the the Swazile and I think are very small, uh, sort of broken out from what was North Rhodesia, South Rhodesia, and so on, and are still steeped in poverty, but uh would still like to be more democratic, you know, democratic experiments. So the US as well, I mean, you know, its early forms of democracy was really more a dream. Uh it wasn't a wealthy. There was industrialization came much later in the US. I mean, they had export and cotton and this, that, but it wasn't industrial, so it wasn't really hugely um wealth generating, which is why they needed they needed quote-unquote slave people as their laborers, as the labor force. So the machine basically, um the uh machinery engines before the the machines came about. The attempt to sort of gain wealth does not always lead to a a democratic. Um China would be a great example. China would be a very good example too. I mean, there were, you know, Chenkay-second people did try to bring about uh, but you know, they had to sort of flee, really. Yeah. Um that was their idea. And and and also in a number of Eastern European countries, um Czechoslovakia was a very good experiment, but then the Russians came and destroyed uh the whole the the well the Soviet Union. Um Slovenia was a was a very beautifully well-established, almost democratic society, which they've usually gone back to, which is very nice to see. So so yeah, the wealth does not always, and I think this was Gandhi's idea. Let's not worry about it. Let's not let's not let's not wallow in the fact that we are impoverished, you know, in material terms and so forth. We'll get by. We we need to be self-sufficient. So his idea was self-sufficiency. And he he he was opposed to modernity, he was opposed to technology, he didn't want machines and so forth because he could see, how to see how oppressive these things will be are. Like, you know, people become just cogs in the wheel, as um uh Charlie Chopin sort of you know made the movie about modern times, see that uh wealth can actually um dissipate democracy because the wealth also has to be preserved. You know, uh well wealth doesn't just belong uh to the people, it belongs, it's managed by the state and is managed by corporations. Right. So once corporations get into power, uh uh uh they will serve their own interests. They will they run the banks, they want they they want the credit cut back on wages. I mean, you look you you look at the the minimum wage in the in the US compared to say even a country like New Zealand or Australia. I mean, for domestic health, we pay$45 an hour there. Well you couldn't you couldn't possibly pay anything like that here. Um and we pay high taxes as well. So uh you know the wealth is a dangerous thing really for for democracy. It it might give more of the goods, what um Rawls would call the public good, right? Your wealth, education, this, that, the other, but there is also the bank. You know? Yeah. Uh huh. Uh-huh. And that's gonna hold on to power. So yeah, authoritarianism rises. And I think what we're seeing in India is after its liberalization, uh, you know, even during the Neruvian era, it was everything was state control. Uh, was those you know, if you wanted to make shoes like that, you'd have to get license from the government to actually uh uh uh ex-import the the rubber that's that of which is made because it's not indigenous, right? We don't have rubber. Uh so in the state would take Texas and you'd have a license. And who are the ones who get license of the corporations, right? If Tata got there before you, they'll get the license. And you'd then have to get sub-license. We know that with Tyres, right? Pinto's and all this Godridge, they had they had monopoly. Yeah. The celebration of wealth in the pocket of the few, I mean, it's it's really only about 20% of the country has any wealth, really, and not the rest. Uh but five percent become the autocrats, become authoritarian, and the the basically the oligarchs, as as happened in Russia. And the then the oligarchs take over and at the cost of democracies, democracy is jeopardized, which is why we have this tension. I mean, people say, so my uh very good um friend who's you know social theorist, uh historian Deepesh Chakravarthi, say it's a broken democracy, basically, you know. Uh and he doesn't hold back from saying something like that about India as well. Well, it's probably maybe not completely broken in the way the uh American democracy is is uh in tatters in some in many ways, but it's it has its feces, you know, it's kind of yeah, it can it can collapse, it can break apart. I mean, you know, I I don't think we'd get to sort of situation like Pakistan or Afghanistan. Um but but if the you know if the judiciary is no longer an an independent instrument, you know, it's packed by the government, it's the the Indian government's sort of playing with all this just as happened in the US. Um uh the the the separation of powers are broken down, then uh then you don't have any institution that can preserve and continue uh uh democracy. Democracy can't just continue as an idea in a spirit. Uh there has to be institutions that that that support that. Now, what we see in India, and and you know, we don't single out any person in in the minutes, but it's coming from a class, and it's coming from a caste as well. So you have caste and class coming together, uh as well as quote-unquote, not a specific ethnic group, but uh if you can identify an ethnic group that you don't like, uh you're afraid of, then you're you're you're defined in terms of that. So there wasn't a term for that. As when Sawarkar came up with this idea of Hindutva, right? Yeah. And and what kind of an ethnic uh it's like, you know, we have it here. I mean, what is a white? What is a what is a Caucasian? Jews were not Caucasian, how come they're Caucasians now? Right? I mean, this weird. And how come the Japanese people in South Africa were considered white? Yeah. The crazy ideas that people have. But that's because it's not the the the definition is by default of his opposite. It's not by default of that. So by defining the negative thing. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. I mean, I I may have I may have no gender, but there's another person in front of me has a strong gender, so I then have to define myself as not being that person, that that that kind of thing. So so these things begin to happen, uh begin to happen um in democracy as well. And analytic philosophers just continue to do analytic and they don't even know what's going on around them. They they've never heard of ice, you know. They are that kind of uh that kind of that that kind of stuff. I mean, these big, big institutions. I uh I like I go to uh old campus, um, and I was just there about a last week for for some event, and it was a nice, nice day like today. And all the students are out there with their cell phone or computers, no Armenian, you know, anti uh the camps protesting against the Armenian massacre. I mean, I Armenian massacre happened a long time ago. Yeah, but every year, every every you know, few weeks, the Armenian people are there protesting against the massacre. Yeah. Next to them is the you know, uh uh the protest against what's happening in Gaza and so on. It's I thought this is a pardon my uh Australian, this is a bloody bourgeois campus now. Yeah. You know? Uh people have uh uh, you know, they like the idea of international students and so on, but that's really just filling up the coffers. I mean, the international students are around, you know, these Indian students that might have participated in a small little protest in one of the colleges, Hans Raj College in Delhi or St. Stephen's, are not even bothering any protests, of course they can't, because they have a visa. The visa would be jeopardized. So they're in a corner uh having absorbing the sun and so on. So what's happened, what's happening is that the universities uh need money, so they're going to increase their international intake, which is more money, uh, and uh curl descent and uh um and and so forth. So these is these are all signs of uh democracy crumbling. Yes, democracy crumbling. And I don't think that India at the moment stands out as a uh paragon of democracy to the rest of the world. It's history does to what you outlined, you know, the independence, how how come this man in the loin cloth could you know go up to the king and say, You're wearing you're wearing enough clothes uh to uh clothe all my people. I mean, that's basically what he said to the king. King said, You don't have any clothes on, you're naked. Uh bring him a jacket. He said, No, you've got enough clothes on that could keep all my country. Cloth entire nation. Yeah. So yeah, I mean that but yeah, I I don't know if there is a country that sort of stands out with that message. Communities do, there are communities within. I mean, the you know, the Black Lives Matter in in this country, some of the feminist movements and so on, uh the the members of the civil rights movement could, you know, uh the farm workers and and and so on.

SPEAKER_01 41:44

Um I want to I want to move slightly uh for this last part to your life now. Sure. Um I'll start at with a couple of fun questions that I have about your life. Yeah. One would be you mentioned to me once that every Friday you sit down for dinner with a group of philosophers, um, which I you very graciously invited me to. Uh I don't think I'll have much to contribute, but I I will come. Um I guess my only question is what do you all talk about? Uh, what are those dinners like?

SPEAKER_00 42:16

We uh we know we talk about what project we've been working on. So um one of the philosophers who who actually organized this call, Anundabaidia, was a colleague of mine, taught in San Jose State University. He lived near there, and it's the wonderful cafe. And we would talk about the things we're working on. So, you know, the extended mine paper that he and I wrote kind of started in this in this cafe conversation. Uh uh, and then we would be planning conferences and so on. And one day we think, well, maybe we should all come and present something of what we're working on. So we would hire a bookshop, um, a room at the back of a bookshop, and we would have a seminar of our own instead of going to the campus or anything like that. Although we, you know, we've had conferences in uh San Jose and USF kindly uh gave us um space for that. But these are kind of you know one one morning of a Friday, and then we know we'd we'd adjourn for lunch and then we'd come back and talk somewhere and then adjourn for dinner. Uh so that's what we were doing. Um I so sometimes it's planning. Sometimes the work uh state of the art works. Sometimes there's we don't have a topic. But we would, yeah. So we would talk about state of the art work, uh uh planning, what what could be going on next. And and then we also talk about music. And you know, one of some few of us are kind of uh music uh uh uh fans of shit. Can I ask you a question off of this?

SPEAKER_01 43:52

Um so you and I were on the topic of music, uh once discussed going to a Stones concert, and then I tried to convince To you, this is a decade ago, to go to a Dylan concert with me. My question there is: who, according to you, is the best lyricist or or best musician or mess band from the 60s? And I'll the three options I'll give you are the Beatles, the Stones, and Dylan. Oh, well, that's in the Western context.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

Yes, in the Western context. Oh, yeah. Uh uh Beatles, Stones, and Dylan. Yes. Well, Dylan certainly um has very good lyrics, but he took he took them from folk traditions, a lot of a lot of them. But he, you know, he was uh he was he was uh he was uh he was a master like James Joyce of putting things together. Oh I still listen to uh Dylan for uh Dylan and Leonard Cohn, kind of, you know, people forget Leonard Cohn was also a great lyric.

SPEAKER_01 44:46

Favorite Dylan album?

SPEAKER_00 44:47

Favorite Dylan album? Uh the what about the It's a Hard Day's Rain, you know, all that's excellent. Yeah, it's a wonderful um that that that that that era Highway uh Highway 56 and so on. But I I I like uh I like Stone's um lyrics as well. I mean they were great songwriters. Uh Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, um Mick Taylor, uh uh Marian Faithful, who died recently, also contributed to some of some of the lyrics too. Uh the master lyricists. I mean uh um you know you you'd listen to some of the lyrics towards the end of Sticky Fingers. It's actually quite amazing stuff. Yeah, especially the last song in that. It's very sad. Very sad. It's uh, you know, Moonlight Mile and it's beautiful. I love when the stones get sad.

SPEAKER_01 45:39

Uh oh yeah, it's it's unexpected from them. I uh Yeah, even you know, I would we talked earlier about Sympathy for the Devil. It's an in Beggar's Banquet, by the way, is one of the best albums ever put out. I strongly believe it. Certainly, yeah, certainly. Oh, but that's the is that's in the Beggars Banquet, isn't it? Uh Sympathy for the Devil is it starts Beggar's Banquet starts with Sympathy for the Devil.

SPEAKER_00 45:59

Yeah, that's a very good, very good album. It goes off in just a bit of psychedelia and so on. But sticky thing is it's a complete. It's it's a whole from beginning to end, is is an amazing, amazingly well structured. Um and and some of the lyrics in that are uh are quite uh quite quite amazing. You know, even the thing like uh the then the origins of some of this, like you know, jumping Jack Flesh. I don't know if you an incredible guy is jumping up and down. Yeah, so what's that? Oh, that's Jack jumping, you know, as a gardener or something like that, and that and they becomes a famous song. Um, but on the uh on the on the Indian side, the the of course the singers did not write the songs like Azam Mangeshkar or Mohammed Rafi. You know, there is the there is the uh uh uh the radio Punjab with 13 10 a.m. And uh that um uh uh that uh Ajmeri Rana who runs that program, each time he takes the name of Mohammed Rafi, he says Rafiji uh uh Jindabad.

SPEAKER_01 47:06

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 47:07

I mean to this day it's like if we say Gandhi, then say Jay Hind, you know. Yeah. So Rafi Jindabad.

SPEAKER_01 47:14

It's it's for people that might not know, it's like naming the musician and then right afterwards saying long live. Yeah, so it would be like if you every time you said the Beatles or John Lennon, you said John Lennon, Long Live. Long live, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 47:26

And but every time, I mean in a two-hour program, he might have he might have played Rafi about five times, but uh I mean uh the uh 15 times, but each time his name is mentioned. Zindabad, uh Zindabad, incredible.

SPEAKER_01 47:41

I um to to finish this off, I had you just two questions for you. Um the first one would be, and we can do this rapid fire style if you would like to. Um all these years, uh you've taught uh so many Western students about non-Western philosophy. Um what is something that you think you were able to give them in their education that they would not have been able to get without you?

SPEAKER_00 48:06

Oh, I wouldn't want to take a credit for anything like that. I mean, grades is what they come for. That's great. Uh uh related. Well, I I guess one thing that students do come back, you know, years later, they say, you know, I did this class, it was just an elective, I had no idea, never done any philosophy. But, you know, you you you got us thinking, you got me thinking about things. And you know, I've I've I've I've just done nursing or something like that, but some of these questions that you put up there and some of the discussions, uh it's really enriched my life, or something like that, you know, intellectual but also personal uh and and social life as well. I have lots to talk to people about, yeah. So that's what I you know, it's like Socrates, you know, we're we're just midwives trying to, you know, give birth to thoughts and ideas, but the ability to actually think rather than what they must think. Yeah. That's beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 49:07

Um for my final question, sir. I have um so 50 years from now, 100 years from now, when they look back at your body of work, um, what do you hope the one thing is that your name get comes to be associated with? You with your work comes to be associated with?

SPEAKER_00 49:23

Oh well, well, I've I've invented uh two or three concepts. Great. Uh the the I mean uh the the I just end with two recent ones. One is uh pen and psychism. Now, pen and psychism was as made from penpsychism, which is the idea that consciousness pervades everything, right? Including now philosophers argue for that, and scientists tend to be agreeing that even every particle may have subconscious, conscious bit. But but then if the particle world disappears, then consciousness would disappear as well. But there is another theory called emergentism, which says that you know things from lower can emerge into higher and higher, but can go beyond that as well. And I think there uh I have an idea that consciousness is kind of going in that direction. Like intelligence, you know. Who would have thought that this little calculator that we had, you know, becomes a computer eventually uh uh would would be able to have the kind of intelligence that you know frightened the shit out of us, basically. Sorry to say that, uh, with AI. I mean, it's just taken off on its own and is thinking faster than than than we're able to, and has so much uh knowledge that it can play around with. But anyway, uh that's uh intelligence, you know, it's kind of exceeded the medium in which it's happening. So consciousness could be something like that as well, that it could uh exceed the world. So yeah, Ms. Beyond. That's one concept which I think uh and I still think that uh even though it's not my term, but I uh the you know this kind of nuance that I've been uh give uh giving and globalized a hintsa, non-violence, may, may, may uh give us well. So finally, I finished a paper today on prana.

SPEAKER_01 51:18

Breath.

SPEAKER_00 51:18

What we call breath, but I think I'd like I'd like the world to understand that prana is actually not breath. So people who go to do pranayama in yoga think it's about controlled breathing. But prana is like qi in Chinese, right? It's an energy, it's a viral energy. It's it's way way more than the breath. Uh and there are there are different yogas in so far. Uh and and it ends, the paper ends with kundalini, the tantra, right? And uh, you know, there's the left-hand tantra and the right-hand tantra. So the left-hand tantra can go into uh you know, very sexual sort of orgasm and so on, but the right hand would do yoga. And I've ended my last word of this paper is yogasm.

SPEAKER_01 52:06

Yogasm and truth question mark. Professor Poshotama Bilomoria, thank you so much for being on the podcast. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Enjoyed Warm Intro is produced and edited by Jimon Moon and Alex Saco. Hosted by me, Chai Mishra.