Foxing the philosophers

Kannan Somasundaram enters a circle of thinkers, in vain

A few days ago, a suburban philosophical society - where I had applied for membership - invited me to present a paper. It was not a test, the amateur philosophers assured me. It was an occasion to understand my concerns. But their letter suggested that the understanding should last at least two hours (one comfort break allowed).

You will notice that the reference to the society is lower-cased and generic. The society is nameless because its tyro thinkers are divided on the branding issue. Other issues that divide them are life, cosmos, morality, and the least deceiving fruit vendor in Malad. They all, however, agree that the essential condition for a vada pav to be thus is to have at least two constituents: vada and pav.

I chose existentialism for the initiation and created a 45-slide PowerPoint presentation. PowerPoint lectures look slick and afford control over the pace of proceedings. And no one notices that you are reading from a prepared script.

Scholarly cues were vital for me. I tend to say Satyr when I mean Sartre. Jean-Paul Satyr would be considered a blameless bourgeois malapropism in most circles. But there are those who study Sartre, and his girlfriend Sunset de Boulevard, with the enthralled attentiveness I usually reserve for scrutinising my credit card statements. And such people are apt to be finicky about getting names right.

I was anxious to impress all members of the society. But I would have settled for an indulgent half-smile from just one. A chain-smoking goddess who was self-haloed by the incense of her Marlboros. Her eyes impaled those around her with the intensity of the red-chilly powder that elevates idlis, simpleton rice pancakes, to the gastronomic Elysium. Her voice was made of combustible gusts of disdain and seduction.

In short, she was the sort of woman with whom every Satyr would want an open marriage.

The presentation began with a cleverly heraldic slide titled "What is existentialism?'. My opening remarks consisted of a joke designed to disarm the audience: "Good afternoon. If you take away all the guff from existentialism," I said, "the philosophy really says 'life sucks and we all need mutual funds'. Ha Ha…er, right, we will move on."

The next slide was the gravamen of the existentialist thought, cut and pasted from a clear-headed online summary. I hit the scroll button on the borrowed laptop to get on to what I hoped would be the ripe stuff.

It was ripe stuff all right. It was a blazing picture of a blonde woman of indeterminate nationality. Her only garment was a squirrel of indeterminate sex. At precisely the moment the photographer had chosen to immortalise his subject, the squirrel - believer of the free will school - had chosen to cover the lady's throat. My roommate, from whom I had borrowed the laptop, had played a practical joke. He had wanted to 'check mail' minutes before I was due to leave for the presentation. His naked lie had been exposed now.

A hiss tore through the room. It was not a disgusted or an infuriated hiss. It was a gratified exclamation of those who had secured clinching evidence to justify the lynching of an upstart. It was a familiar sound. I had heard it in an Iyer gathering when a Punjabi neighbour was bracing himself to pronounce 'Shanmugam Doraiswamy Subramaniam'.

The Marlboro goddess left the room. At that very moment, I made the most affirming decision of my life: I would never make a presentation again on a borrowed laptop.