My Manifesto

In the past year or so, I have been asked by many well-wishers to identify my passion. This, I am told, is essential to get into a good college. I must have a story. I must be about something. My life, at 16 years and some months, must already mean something. I must not only be a fount of knowledge but also be a do-gooder with a body of contributions to society.

I delved deep into my soul, scoured my innards, and the only passion I could find was an intense love of cup noodles, preferably Korean and extra spicy. Another intense interest, bordering on being passionate, is devising ways to safely annoy my younger sister, provoke her into violence, such that she alone would be the object of any parental admonition, when our fracas spilled over, out of our room into the public sphere of civil society.

Clearly, I do not have a passion worthy of its name. But I do have interests; tons of them. It is also true that I often sup upon one and then flit to the next. It could be gender politics one day, and drop-D tuning the next. Yet, I am training myself to focus, to treat all my interests with rigour, to polish and hone them, and in the process separate the wheat from the chaff. How does one do that, you might ask. What scale of values can one use to distinguish between pursuits that are worthy and those that are not? I would say, there is only one parameter that I use here – the ‘why’ question: Does this particular interest of mine answer the everyday questions I ask of life? If drop-D tuning for guitars qualifies (I will one day write a blog on why it does) then so be it.

That brings me to the name of my blog. In a certain deep structural way, it unites everything I want to know, everything that interests me, makes me curious, and exhilarates me. It can be described through this motto – De Omnibus Dubitandum, a slightly modified version of Soren Kierkegaard’s book De Omnibus Dubitandum Est, that everything must be doubted. Doubt, questioning, and scepticism are the foundations of the modern, liberal, mind. It makes us question not just the received wisdom that is passed on to us, but also our own instinctive belief systems, all that we consider to be ‘natural’ and ‘true.’ It makes us realise that all that presents itself in its sheer obviousness, is a product of power and culture. It is the construction of signs, an artefact of discourse. It makes us realise the limits of our freedom, and thus frees us from the prejudice of ‘normality.’

This blog is a record of my doubts, of my skirmishes with all that I am taught, all that I read, and all that I imbibe. I will interrogate every bit of ‘knowledge’ that I come across, as an adversary, even when I instinctively accept them as the truth. I believe that only when I honestly pose the best possible questions about everything that I accept, that I will truly understand what to stand by, what to fight for. And, perhaps, through this rigorous process, I will discover my passion, my story.