To begin with, I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman’s irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

Educators in every country except Russia tend to be constitutionally timid, and, either by their income or by their snobbery, to be adherents of the rich. On both grounds their teaching tends to over-emphasise the importance of the law and the constitution, although these give the past a paralysing hold over the present. By reaction against this over emphasis, those who desire any radical improvement in the world are compelled to be revolutionary, and the revolutionary’s conception of duty to the community is liable to be just as narrow, and in the long run just as dangerous, as that of the advocate of law and order.

Because my only love, the only value I care to live for, is that which has never been loved by the world, has never won recognition or friends or defenders: human ability. That is the love I am serving—and if I should lose my life, to what better purpose could I give it?

DK Bose has stirred a debate, and rightly so. But worryingly, the reaction is more on the hand-wringing side. Several people are holding forth on how ‘degrading’ such lyrics are to the considerable legacy of Sahir, Gulzar and Javed Akhtar. How absurd! Where were such self-appointed minders of the nation’s moral fabric when Sahir’s erotic yearning of a sex worker was put to the tune of a Vaishnav kirtan (‘Aaj sajan mohe ang laga lo’, Pyaasa, 1957)? Or when Gulzar was writing ‘…Apna kaam maal haath aye to daboch na’ (Satya, 1998)? Or when Akhtar supposedly typed in ‘I got to tell you how I feel,/Oh baby! You are the only one for me’ (Karthik Calling Karthik, 2010)?

You can describe people in words, or you can describe them in numbers. Either system can be abused, but in general words tend to create bonds while numbers tend to create distance. (There’s a reason why parents give their babies names rather than numbers.) History, though, seems to tilt toward numbers, and the tilt is getting steeper as the potential profits get larger.