Experiments with Truth

Jamal Malik, an eighteen year old orphan from the slums of Mumbai in the movie Slumdog Millionaire, knows that a hundred dollar bill has the portrait of Benjamin Franklin but does not know what is written under the national emblem of India. He does not know if truth alone, lies alone, fashion alone, or money alone triumph! Strange isn’t it? As the inspector in the movie rightly exclaims – a five year old kid would know the answer to that question! It is one of the first things we are taught in school; to never tell a lie. It is one of the most important lessons taught to us by our parents; to always speak the truth! Heck it is what the father of this nation (Mahatma Gandhi) lived and died for. Satyameva Jayate (Truth Alone Triumphs). How hard can that be? But what does an orphan from the slums know about the truth when his entire life has been filled with deceit, injustice and hunger. What does this boy know of speaking the truth when at the age of ten he watched his mother being slaughtered in front of his own eyes by the so called “patrons of the truth” – followers of Rama? His entire life has been a quest for money so what does he know of the truth?

We have the habit of categorizing everything; good or bad, right or wrong, black or white. We categorize and then we take sides. I guess it is what lets us sleep at night. However we fail to consider the fact that there is no such thing as a universal truth. Most of the time what one believes to be the truth is in reality only his/her perception of the truth. There is such a thing as the Natural Law which by the simplest of definitions is the unwritten law that is more or less the same for everyone everywhere[1]. Natural law is common to all human kind and is recognizable by basic human reason. Even a young child knows and demands a system of “fair play”. By virtue of being alive and a part of the society he/she understands the basic concepts of justice and fair play. That is a classic example of Natural Law.

What then is the meaning of truth? Quiet honestly, I do not know the answer to this question. I think that truth is ever-evolving. Mahatma Gandhi named his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Here was a man for whom truth was a way of life and yet towards the end he could only come so far as to call the story of his life “experiments with truth”. These experiments included experiments with non-violence, celibacy, and other principles of conduct that are quite distinct from truth, but that is precisely the point. He was seeking his own meaning of truth throughout his life, just as we all are in our own separate ways. What we see, the people we meet and the stories we hear all contribute in formulating an image of this world which we then make the mistake of believing to be the ultimate truth. However we all wear different lenses; lenses of different shapes, sizes and colours, and therefore we all formulate very different images of the same world and that is precisely what keeps the world spinning. If Newton did not see a falling apple as something baffling and abnormal, the world would have known nothing about the law of gravity. The point is not for everyone to agree on one truth, but to speak what they believe to be the truth while at the same time consistently seeking and exploring the truth.

In a world where no two individuals seem to agree on anything and nations are constantly at odds on religious, social and political differences, we could do a lot better if we only acknowledged the simple fact that just like a slumdog sees the world a lot differently than another boy growing up in a high-rise apartment on Worli sea face, people are different – people see different and think different, and that is okay!

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[1] http://www.radicalacademy.com/philnaturallaw.htm