Part Time Philosopher

I remember the idea for this post, came during one of my drinking orgies at spikey’s place. And like all the other ideas…it vaporized the next morning.

I should try writing when I am drunk. But that’s an issue we will not elaborate on.

Jumping straight to the point (for those who know…pun is absolutely intended!!), we have heard and quoted people like Shakespeare, Karl Marx, Aristotle, Freud even. But have we ever thought, what made these guys so quotable?

A cursory glance through some of the status messages posted on fb and twitter, makes you think there is a philosopher hiding in everyone of us. Each one of us knows how to live their life, each of us has a set of rules by which we define ourselves. Then why doesn’t anyone quote us?

Frankly, do we just need to get a book published filled with our ideologies which people would read and then bam!! You are now officially branded as a philosopher.

In one of my previous posts, I lamented the lack of content in the bottom left corner of the ToI’s editorial page,. What does one have to do if we wanted to post our feelings in that column? Is there an entrance exam of some sort which you have to pass to be called a philosopher and get your ramblings published? Or have these ‘well learned’ people passed a course where you were fed a steady diet of salman rushdie and shobhaa de?

Look at blogs, which we all write and read. Doesn’t a blog provide a window to a person’s mind? On what basis do you judge that a particular post could qualify as a good philosophical read?

One of my college seniors authors a blog which has received 2,50,000 plus hits. I mean, this guy was just a year older to me. We studied in the same environment. What level of enlightenment could he have reached to become so well read?

What the heck, I think sometimes. May be each of these philosophers had a personal Ellsworth Toohey, who made them famous. May be these guys were not so great after all, atleast no greater than us.

Each of us has found his/her own personal wonder in this life. Each of us has pondered on the answer to the ultimate question and many other smaller questions and we have received our own personal answers.

What is it that makes some answers more acceptable and the others not so. What makes these full time thinkers greater than us part time philosophers?

PS: Dhr, Chatur, Mudit and Sharad- i have disabled the automatic notifications...if i am to be read, i will be  read by choice.