Salam,
A few months ago, during a visit to my hometown, Phalodi in Rajasthan, a muse found me in the most ordinary (yet dearest) of moments—while speaking with my grandmother and my sister. Yes. As my grandma spoke of evil eye and my sister spoke of wish-fulfilling prophesies, I couldn’t help but wonder how deeply our thinking and behaviour are shaped by the assumption that words carry stable, definite meanings—meanings that are somehow validated or approved by some higher authority, some final source, even God.
How the Conversation Began?
So, it happened that I was sitting with my sister one day, talking about the usual odd mix of things—wishes, luck, and the darn dreaded Buri Nazar (evil eye) that our grandmothers always warned us about.
Somewhere between laughter and sincerity, we came to wonder — how much of our beliefs rests on assumptions we rarely pause to probe. Assumptions that things begin at a fixed point and end at another, that every event must have a definite, definable, describable cause, that truth can always be tethered to some neat and knowable explanation.
We like to centre ourselves in a story or speech like that: I suffered because of X, or I will be blessed if Y happens. Like … ‘This’ happened because of ‘that’, period. End of story. The speaker, the wish-maker, the sufferer—always pivot around which meaning is spun. Yet in clinging to these word-ly anchors, we often miss the messier (and perhaps more beautiful reality?) that meaning is never still, singular, stable. Language itself is fluid, restless, protean. And maybe life, like language, resists the comfort of fixed points. There are far more complex networks of interdependencies around us that cannot be escaped easily through words.
That being said, I do ‘intuit’ why it happens- too much faith in the words having singular meanings. For one, language—the way we have been taught to take it— makes us believe that the speaker/listener is the centre of the speech; That their words have some definite meaning as the speaker intends. It tricks us into thinking that meaning originates from a singular source, i.e. us, and travels outward in a straight line—toward truth, impact, or divine judgment.
For example, I recently underwent some surgery, and it came at a time when other parts of my life were already in distress. At first glance, one could say (and some actually did) that “my planets aren’t aligned,” or “Maybe this is God punishing me.” But if we look at the situation differently, we can see something else entirely. That X amount I spent didn’t just disappear—it became someone’s salary. The amount I donated to a hospital helper may have been used to buy vegetables, pay rent, or care for someone else. Seeing this way changes the equation. Doesn’t it? Well. This way, my pain, my suffering, or more generally my ‘problem’, then, was not an isolated “negative” event. Instead, it was part of a much broader system of interdependence.
This reframes everything. As cliché as it may sound, things aren’t necessarily “good” or “bad” in themselves. They don’t have an intrinsic nature or value. Similarly, texts (including words, events, experiences, and things) don’t carry fixed, stable, singular, or inherent meanings. They’re always part of an ongoing circulation of meanings, relationships, and interpretations.
This reminds me of another instance that our grandmother shared with us the same day. My grandmother, that day, told me that my grandfather once said to her, “If you sleep too much in the morning, you won’t be able to sleep at night.” Later that day, when she couldn’t sleep, she took his words as a curse—as Buri Nazar. But was it so? I don’t think so. To me, this was just another instance where we assume words carry a direct, unchangeable meaning, as though someone or something—God, fate, karma—is out there eavesdropping, and then enforcing a verdict based on those words?
Take another example. Let’s say I tell someone, “You have a beautiful ring,” and the next day they lose it. If they then blame me—claiming I gave them the evil eye (it happens a lot in my town/culture)—what they’re really saying is that there’s an invisible entity that interprets my words and assigns meaning to them, entirely independent of my intention. But if that’s true, then this entity isn’t just misinterpreting my praise—it’s actively converting good intentions into harm. That’s not divine intelligence. That’s a petty and irrational being. God will get ‘the’ meaning.
This is where I see a problem with the religious and metaphysical structures that many of us inherit almost unknowingly. They tether our thinking to certain assumptions—about cause and effect, about meaning, about authority, about language, about time and space. These become, in a sense, our a priori conditions of thought and speech. And in doing so, they do not merely shape what we think or believe; they delimit what we can even think, what we can imagine believing. They circumscribe what we are permitted to say, to do, to wish, or even to desire.
Let me be clear: the problem, for me, is not with religion, nor with any particular belief system. It lies deeper—in the metaphysical faith that quietly governs our everyday use of language. We think in binaries: beginning/end, good/bad, speaker/listener, cause/effect. And we take these as natural givens. But are they? Maybe not. Perhaps they are the very traps postmodern thinkers warned us about—the illusion of stability, the tyranny of fixed meaning.
So perhaps what we need is not just new words, but new ways of thinking—ways that resist this compulsion to anchor meaning once and for all. Yet here, I run into a paradox. If words have no fixed meaning, how is it that we still communicate, write, and understand each other? Surely, there is some meaning in words, however fragile or fleeting. Or perhaps, unsettlingly, we do not need to know meanings to use them, to live through them.
Anyway, that’s a thought I’ll save for a more extended reflection in a future post. Or, in French, I would say, c’est tout!.
फिर मिलेगे … in the next post.
IP Musings 