In the Beginning

A Welcome to My Readers

The dialogue, as a literary form, has its origins in antiquity. Plato’s are literary devices that limn Socrates’s philosophical positions and stage his aphoristic wisdom. In the Indian tradition, the Bhagavad Gita, set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, is the most famous example, but there are dialogues in the Vedic mantras, the Upanishads, and the Puranas. Indeed, the sutra, the cryptic statement, the scaffolding of much Indian philosophical exposition, invites a response, a conversation.

What will differentiate The Vikram Dialogues from the classical archetypes is their surprise. There is no set agenda; no wisdom staged to erupt from an argument or dramatic setting, and no Lord of the Universe elucidating the paths to liberation. I hope those interested in the topic will find them engaging and sometimes fun. As (I think) Voltaire said, “one must entertain to edify.”

I have been thinking about religion since childhood. First, because I had one unlike the Christianity and Judaism I grew up with. It was colorful, disorganized, haphazard -- the sum of whatever my mother and my father happened to be doing in front of the devas perched in the little alcove in our home. There was no single book, no set of tenets or commandments, no mandatory Sunday school. It meant the ancient tales my mother told on wintry nights when we lived in the shadow of Manhattan, a modern Kurukshetra, the light from its skyscrapers glinting on our walls. It meant the red tilak she daubed on my forehead after an evening puja, which I smeared away before bed.

More than this, I always entertained the claims of the sants, the sadhus, the mystics – that life as it is, with its sanctioned chase for money and status, its urge for comfort and stability, is just the conditioned response of the collective: it is fragile, transient, and generates repeated bouts of suffering, no matter what accolades one happens to gather along the way. Meditation, the chant, and what we call prayer might mitigate the worst of it, and if we can master desire or redirect it, we could attain, if even for some moments, samadhi or what Sri Aurobindo called the “Brahmic condition,” a subjectivity delighting in itself. Its outward form, its test, as Aurobindo might say, was equality – all-encompassing compassion for humans, regardless of class or status, and indeed for all creatures.

Now, I recognize that the term “religion” is a contested category. Some opine that it has no meaning at all for dharmic traditions, since praxis, the things we do, is far more important than what we believe. I will debate this issue with worthy interlocutors in the coming months. But I’ll bring back the mystics for a moment and evoke the American philosopher of religious experience William James, who thought that all religions began with the seers, the rishis, those who saw or experienced something extraordinary -- Zeus, Logos, Brahman – after which those with less talent took it down and organized it.

I thought about becoming a monk throughout my adolescence, particularly on trips to India -- witnessing thickets of hairy sadhus in Delhi, hearing the Brahmin’s chants in the great South Indian temples, communing with sadhaks in Rishikesh on cool winter mornings – it made me, awkward in many ways, want to don the ochre robe and grab a begging bowl. But life and love interfered, and that is all good – there is time for one or two more rounds of samsara, a few days of beauty and joy, and a few good conversations with worthy strangers and friends.

Readers, I am going to open this venture with quite the detonation. Amit Majmudar, one of America’s foremost poets and author of the forthcoming novel, The Map and the Scissors, and Vishal Ganesan, curator of Hindoo History and a rising diaspora public intellectual, will honor my pages with a dialogue on the Classics.

Thereafter I hope to produce dialogues in “seasons” of five or six episodes. Think David Letterman’s Netflix show. Such a goal seems eminently attainable for a working man like me!