On Literature and Secularism.

1. Good quality literature – fiction, non-fiction, poetry – is rarely prescriptive in nature. Good writers eternally engage themselves in puncturing the cloud – amorphous, ambivalent, existential – with the flaming yearning to view what lies beneath and beyond. The truth is the cloud remains dimensionless and there are infinite clouds within the cloud. Yet literature in a deterministic manner explores and exposes – unlike theology or political doctrine – the ethic of existence (without moralizing or passing strictures or judgments) as bestowed upon us by nature. I will explain. We know Anna Karenina does not end with the death of Anna on the railway tracks. It ends with the birth of Levin’s and Kitty’s child and Levin’s understanding of what he should do in life to sustain a bundle of life with whom he shares that almost strange and mysterious connection that exists between the creator and the created. I have read these 50 / 60 pages many, many times and they have in a sense made me realize the ethic (no, not responsibility) of a parent to his or her child. It is very different from a Parenting Manual, my dears! Rabindranath’s Dakghar and Raktakarabi simmer with complex ethical questions of life, existence, death and statehood.
2. Secularism is a religion too. It is a product of modernity based on industrial economics and hegemony of nation-state founded on the key principles of capitalism and free-market economy. Pamuk’s Snow reveals this fact like no other book. Secularism is very different from other religions in the sense that while other organized religions try to lay down moral codes of conduct for people secularism lays down its moral code of conduct for a nation-state. Strictly, while secular states might exist secular individuals cannot for it was not meant for them. I must add here to avoid misunderstanding: I’m an atheist and not a follower of any religion including secularism for I’m not a nation-state. Yet I’ve craved all my life for a god to keep faith to tide over my tormenting moments of despair and desolation although it has never shown its face to me. It is not as if I’m a radical because of which I’m an atheist. In fact in my early childhood I conducted a crude experiment of holding my fear against a curse directed towards me by a family elder. This made me realize: God does not exist but Evil does for I had committed something purely devilish to have attracted such a curse in the first place!