Daily Times

Once in a while I have this irrepressible urge to write something so profound that its effect can almost be felt reverberating through the minds of all my readers. Fortunately, like other seemingly irrepressible urges, I have, in the interests of self-preservation also, learned to suppress the need for profundity. Profundity though is not as self-destructive as other stuff but in its own way it can produce serious and drastically subversive side effects. First and most destructive is the realisation that by being profound or at least by believing that you are being profound you do start believing that you are indeed profound. For those that have never had to withstand the onslaught of a profound teenage person irrepressibly and profoundly spouting Sartre as was the in thing some 50 years ago, it is impossible to understand the mind-numbing effect of such profundity. Profundity then has a serious side effect on persons that are subjected to its, well, profundity.

The second disastrous side effect of being subjected to profundity is that if any ordinary and sane person starts understanding such stuff, they are soon themselves on a path to intellectual and emotional perdition. Perdition not necessarily in the biblical sense but in a similar way at least in the sense that could be meant by an ‘existentialist’ quoting Sartre’s famous saying about hell being other people. Here I must insist that I have never read Sartre beyond the first few pages of any of his books and, more importantly, I have never even been able to understand anything he ever wrote, even when explained by other writers. And even more importantly, I had a similar reaction to Marx, no, not the Groucho one. This prevented me from developing a soft spot in my brain for Marxism. Though I must admit that I have watched most of the Marx Brothers’ movies on cable.

Sadly, I had a childhood overexposed to profundity. Older cousins came to stay with us in Lahore while pursuing a university education. These cousins, plus an older sister, were deeply into English literature and some other profound stuff. Being one of the younger people around I was frequently subjected to readings from great literature and philosophy. As a consequence, by the time I was old enough to read whatever I wanted, I made a conscious decision to avoid reading almost all of the important books. No Brontes, Dickens or Gogol (not Google) for me. As a consequence I escaped into near-adulthood without subjecting myself to profundity. I did read a lot; as a matter of fact, I was a voracious reader, and my home was fortunately also stocked with a large number of non-profound books. Detective and mystery novels, P.G. Wodehouse, historical romances, history, and much other stuff without any level of profundity.

By the time I hit college profundity was everywhere. Things were so bad that people who had probably never read any of the great authors went around spouting stuff that the purported author would probably have rejected immediately. Fortunately, Latin was not yet spoken in the halls of academe in Pakistan so I was at least spared being subjected to likes of Cicero, Seneca and others of their ilk being quoted extensively in Latin. Long discussions about revolution did float around about Karl Marx, Sartre and others like them. Fortunately, being young held for me attractions beyond profound questions confronted by many of my more intellectually inclined contemporaries. The 1960s, what a time to be young! Fortunately for me, before I had to confront some serious existential questions like being conscripted into the Pakistan army, I found myself in the United States. The Vietnam War was still going on, and most liberal leftist energies were devoted to protests against the war.

In the melange of ideologies floating around I latched on to that which was the least profound or at least most easily understandable. This was summed up in the sentence: Make love not war. This is now a bit more than 40 years ago but I still adhere to that philosophy and refer to myself as an unreconstructed 1960s liberal. Fortunately for me, I was safely tucked away in the U.S. during the dark days of the 1980s in Pakistan. Pakistan for all practical purposes was on the way to perdition during that decade, and even today is still tottering in that direction albeit a lot less vigorously. However, due to the Islamisation of the 1980s, the profound questions that confronted the intellectuals of Pakistan from the 1980s onwards have more to do with matters eschatological. Here I must declare a total lack of knowledge, let alone any expertise in these matters. Clearly, eschatology like epistemology is too profound for my limited capacity to indulge in profundity.

I have been writing for this newspaper for more than 11 years, and yet I have never written anything profoundly profound. What is it then that I write about? I write about the weather, I write about mangoes, I write about hairstyles of our politicians and the effect that has on their political beliefs, I write about the missing basant and other such important stuff. And yes, I write about things or happenings that catch my eye or ear or fancy or whatever. Besides profundity, the one thing I have studiously avoided is polemics. As I mentioned above, I believe in making love not war so it is extremely difficult for me to maintain a level of anger, real or feigned to embark upon a polemic. Over the years there were only two people that I actually hated and both of them died young. So I gave up hating people with any intensity. That said, the need to write something profound does come upon me every so often. But as W.C. Field once said (or so I think) about exercise: Whenever the need for exercise comes upon me, I lie down until it passes.

The author is a former editor of the Journal of Association of Pakistani descent Physicians of North America (APPNA)