Essay: Philosophical in the Philippines

“The unexamined life”, the philosopher Socrates is supposed to have said, “is not worth living”. When I began, perhaps unwisely, to examine my life, I realised that day was rolling into day in a comfortably numb progression that could be summed up in TS Eliot’s famous line from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. I was measuring out my life with coffee spoons.

Different people resolve their mid-life crises in different ways. Some suddenly start running marathons. Others buy big motorcycles or launch into intermittent fasting. A few rededicate themselves to becoming CEOs or making even more money until the numbers lose meaning. I should have picked one of those tried and tested templates. Instead, I began to think.

It was a slippery slope. It led to reading non-academic books on philosophy, checking out lectures by philosophers on YouTube, and generally mulling about a question that I became convinced was the most important one in the human world: What is a good life? The modern Indian non-philosopher Vijay Mallya, now on the run from Indian law enforcement, had provided one answer through the tagline for his Kingfisher beer. It called itself “The king of good times”, and the aspirational lifestyle Mallya showcased – mansions, supercars, private jets, yachts, the works – projected the image that he was the personification of the brand, the king of good times himself… until his business empire suddenly came crashing down. Tempting as it was, however, I didn’t think I had it in me to become Vijay Mallya. I would regrettably have to make do without all that, and the pleasure of measuring out my life in cigars and single malts.

That left the books.

The philosopher AC Grayling in What is Good ?The Search for the Best Way to Live provided a survey of the intellectual history of Western answers to this question from classical Greece to what he called “The shameful twentieth century”. From the rich traditions of the East, I was at least vaguely aware of the basic Hindu conception of the good life woven around the ideas of dharma, artha, kama and moksha – although at least two of these words, dharma and moksha, could take a lifetime to understand. Nonetheless, the broad concept of dharma as moral duty was something no one exposed to the Mahabharata could escape. The late Sanskrit pundit Kshiti Mohan Sen’s slim and very readable book Hinduism, which brings together ideas from texts such as the Upanishads and the Bhagawad Gita, clarified these concepts and a few more. A fine podcast, History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, by philosophy professor Peter Adamson, had more material than I could find time for – a year’s worth of episodes – on philosophers from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian traditions starting with Ibn Sina aka Avicenna. They were interesting, but seemed also rather theological, with their ideas rooted in faith in God and holy texts. Their basic concepts of the good life arose, therefore, from adherence to the commandments of the faith.

Buddhist and Taoist traditions were more promising for a Hindu agnostic like me. After amusing myself with the enigmatic fortune-telling of the I Ching I turned to the classic Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching, and found pithy aphorisms such as “One who knows other people is wise. One who knows himself is enlightened.” Such enlightenment was very unlikely to dawn in ten days, but the “Do It Yourself” school of Buddhism appealed to me. I signed up for a stint of Vipassana meditation. This involved 10 days of “noble silence” during which no speaking, reading, or writing was allowed. One had to check in one’s mobile phone and wallet at the entrance to the meditation centre and retrieve them after ten days of rising at 4 am, eating one squarish vegetarian meal a day, and abstaining from smoking and drinking, among other things.

It was the best detox of my life. It also revealed to me afresh, for the first time since I had been a child, the wonder of the natural world. Every little wildflower looked like a living gem. The glory of the rising sun captivated me. The moon’s otherworldly beauty was hypnotic. I felt a connection to nature that I could not explain.

I may not have returned enlightened, but I did go back to Mumbai knowing myself a little better.

Then a chance encounter at a conference at which I was not even presenting a paper led to an offer to write a book on the Brahmaputra River. I signed up for it and wrote barely a word. The river was at the other end of the country, and while I managed to make one big journey a year, the day job left no mind space for serious research or writing. It was only after the company where I had worked for five years ran into trouble and I quit my job that things began to move.

To live without a salary is a fearsome thing. For anyone not rich, it means walking the tightrope of life without any safety net.

It is also the most liberating thing in the world.

What we often do not realise is that the most precious thing given to any living being is the gift of time. It will run out. In a few months, years, or decades, we will all be dead. Is a long and bad or even just crushingly boring and meaningless life better than a shorter but qualitatively better one?

I had a few things on my bucket list. I wanted to see a little more of the world, to write the books that I had always wanted to write, and, maybe, to find a partner for the journey of life.

The physical journey following the Brahmaputra river came first. The river flows through Assam into Bangladesh. I had to make a trip there. I got in touch with a friend in Dhaka and ended up with a last-minute invitation to the Dhaka Literature Festival. There, over breakfast, one of the panellists for a panel I was moderating mentioned a fellowship in Tokyo. There was barely a week left to apply. I scrambled the application package together and sent it off. A month or two later, I was called for an interview in Delhi. I ended up being the sole fellow from India at that fellowship.

It was lovely being in Tokyo. Japan is a fascinating country. However, the fellowship ended without a chance for us to see Mount Fuji – and I was determined I wouldn’t leave without paying my respects to Fuji San. So, all the other seven fellows went back to their respective countries as soon as the fellowship ended, but I stayed back for a week. The morning after I reached my hostel in Kawaguchiko, a little town at the foot of Mount Fuji, it was raining. The dining room was packed; everyone had got rained in. All tables were taken. I ended up sharing a table with a girl. We got chatting. She was from the Philippines, and like me, a solo traveller.

We are now married, and our son is a year old.

Life happens.

I like the Philippines. It reminds me of home – meaning Northeast India. I usually tell people it’s like Northeast India with beaches. Some of those beaches are spectacular. The food is excellent, by my taste. There are issues – Manila traffic sucks – but mercifully, we are outside the city, in a quiet place that is not at all bad for writing.

Is it the good life? Well, let’s see.

The conception of the good life that I had arrived at, as a result of my exploratory dabbling in philosophy books, lectures and podcasts, was fairly simple. On the one hand, it was an accretion of days well lived – by my internal standards of living well. On the other hand, it was a life that added up to something meaningful – which could only be so in a wider context, such as family, society, country, or the world at large. In other words, if one could live life as a succession of quietly happy days while fulfilling one’s responsibilities and pursuing work that added up to a meaningful and positive contribution to the world… That would be a good life.

Both internal and external factors and contradictions make such a life very hard to find, and even harder to keep.

Samrat Choudhury is an author and journalist. His most recent book is The Braided River: A Journey Along the Brahmaputra

When it happened, it was most unexpected: I had not thought that I would end up living in, of all places, the Philippines. I was already well into my forties and had never lived anywhere but India. Dreams of going West, to the usual places, for the usual reasons, had loomed large in my life plans when I was in high school and college, but there was no money even for a ticket. I stayed. Jobs turned into a career and the years went by in a rush of deadlines. Before I knew it, I was suddenly 40. I think that’s when it began to hit me. Life was good – I had a good job, good health, a nice apartment in Bandra, friends and the occasional lover. And yet… Was this it? Was this all there was?

“The unexamined life”, the philosopher Socrates is supposed to have said, “is not worth living”. When I began, perhaps unwisely, to examine my life, I realised that day was rolling into day in a comfortably numb progression that could be summed up in TS Eliot’s famous line from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. I was measuring out my life with coffee spoons.

Different people resolve their mid-life crises in different ways. Some suddenly start running marathons. Others buy big motorcycles or launch into intermittent fasting. A few rededicate themselves to becoming CEOs or making even more money until the numbers lose meaning. I should have picked one of those tried and tested templates. Instead, I began to think.

It was a slippery slope. It led to reading non-academic books on philosophy, checking out lectures by philosophers on YouTube, and generally mulling about a question that I became convinced was the most important one in the human world: What is a good life? The modern Indian non-philosopher Vijay Mallya, now on the run from Indian law enforcement, had provided one answer through the tagline for his Kingfisher beer. It called itself “The king of good times”, and the aspirational lifestyle Mallya showcased – mansions, supercars, private jets, yachts, the works – projected the image that he was the personification of the brand, the king of good times himself… until his business empire suddenly came crashing down. Tempting as it was, however, I didn’t think I had it in me to become Vijay Mallya. I would regrettably have to make do without all that, and the pleasure of measuring out my life in cigars and single malts.

That left the books.

The philosopher AC Grayling in What is Good ?The Search for the Best Way to Live provided a survey of the intellectual history of Western answers to this question from classical Greece to what he called “The shameful twentieth century”. From the rich traditions of the East, I was at least vaguely aware of the basic Hindu conception of the good life woven around the ideas of dharma, artha, kama and moksha – although at least two of these words, dharma and moksha, could take a lifetime to understand. Nonetheless, the broad concept of dharma as moral duty was something no one exposed to the Mahabharata could escape. The late Sanskrit pundit Kshiti Mohan Sen’s slim and very readable book Hinduism, which brings together ideas from texts such as the Upanishads and the Bhagawad Gita, clarified these concepts and a few more. A fine podcast, History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, by philosophy professor Peter Adamson, had more material than I could find time for – a year’s worth of episodes – on philosophers from the Muslim, Jewish and Christian traditions starting with Ibn Sina aka Avicenna. They were interesting, but seemed also rather theological, with their ideas rooted in faith in God and holy texts. Their basic concepts of the good life arose, therefore, from adherence to the commandments of the faith.

Buddhist and Taoist traditions were more promising for a Hindu agnostic like me. After amusing myself with the enigmatic fortune-telling of the I Ching I turned to the classic Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching, and found pithy aphorisms such as “One who knows other people is wise. One who knows himself is enlightened.” Such enlightenment was very unlikely to dawn in ten days, but the “Do It Yourself” school of Buddhism appealed to me. I signed up for a stint of Vipassana meditation. This involved 10 days of “noble silence” during which no speaking, reading, or writing was allowed. One had to check in one’s mobile phone and wallet at the entrance to the meditation centre and retrieve them after ten days of rising at 4 am, eating one squarish vegetarian meal a day, and abstaining from smoking and drinking, among other things.

It was the best detox of my life. It also revealed to me afresh, for the first time since I had been a child, the wonder of the natural world. Every little wildflower looked like a living gem. The glory of the rising sun captivated me. The moon’s otherworldly beauty was hypnotic. I felt a connection to nature that I could not explain.

I may not have returned enlightened, but I did go back to Mumbai knowing myself a little better.

Then a chance encounter at a conference at which I was not even presenting a paper led to an offer to write a book on the Brahmaputra River. I signed up for it and wrote barely a word. The river was at the other end of the country, and while I managed to make one big journey a year, the day job left no mind space for serious research or writing. It was only after the company where I had worked for five years ran into trouble and I quit my job that things began to move.

To live without a salary is a fearsome thing. For anyone not rich, it means walking the tightrope of life without any safety net.

It is also the most liberating thing in the world.

What we often do not realise is that the most precious thing given to any living being is the gift of time. It will run out. In a few months, years, or decades, we will all be dead. Is a long and bad or even just crushingly boring and meaningless life better than a shorter but qualitatively better one?

I had a few things on my bucket list. I wanted to see a little more of the world, to write the books that I had always wanted to write, and, maybe, to find a partner for the journey of life.

The physical journey following the Brahmaputra river came first. The river flows through Assam into Bangladesh. I had to make a trip there. I got in touch with a friend in Dhaka and ended up with a last-minute invitation to the Dhaka Literature Festival. There, over breakfast, one of the panellists for a panel I was moderating mentioned a fellowship in Tokyo. There was barely a week left to apply. I scrambled the application package together and sent it off. A month or two later, I was called for an interview in Delhi. I ended up being the sole fellow from India at that fellowship.

It was lovely being in Tokyo. Japan is a fascinating country. However, the fellowship ended without a chance for us to see Mount Fuji – and I was determined I wouldn’t leave without paying my respects to Fuji San. So, all the other seven fellows went back to their respective countries as soon as the fellowship ended, but I stayed back for a week. The morning after I reached my hostel in Kawaguchiko, a little town at the foot of Mount Fuji, it was raining. The dining room was packed; everyone had got rained in. All tables were taken. I ended up sharing a table with a girl. We got chatting. She was from the Philippines, and like me, a solo traveller.

We are now married, and our son is a year old.

Life happens.

I like the Philippines. It reminds me of home – meaning Northeast India. I usually tell people it’s like Northeast India with beaches. Some of those beaches are spectacular. The food is excellent, by my taste. There are issues – Manila traffic sucks – but mercifully, we are outside the city, in a quiet place that is not at all bad for writing.

Is it the good life? Well, let’s see.

The conception of the good life that I had arrived at, as a result of my exploratory dabbling in philosophy books, lectures and podcasts, was fairly simple. On the one hand, it was an accretion of days well lived – by my internal standards of living well. On the other hand, it was a life that added up to something meaningful – which could only be so in a wider context, such as family, society, country, or the world at large. In other words, if one could live life as a succession of quietly happy days while fulfilling one’s responsibilities and pursuing work that added up to a meaningful and positive contribution to the world… That would be a good life.

Both internal and external factors and contradictions make such a life very hard to find, and even harder to keep.

Samrat Choudhury is an author and journalist. His most recent book is The Braided River: A Journey Along the Brahmaputra