Ordinary life integrates within itself functionally and meaningfully everything there is but depends upon nothing in particular. Thus ordinary life is both rich and essential at the same time. It is not just the life of ordinary men and women – both its infinite richness and essentialness make it all pervasive. Life pre-supposes ordinary life. This means that wherever there is life, there is ordinary life, and the absence of the latter amounts not only to merely the absence of any other forms of life but to situations or conditions in which it makes no sense to talk of human life. Changes unleashed by information technology and bioengineering are leading to the imagining of such forms of life in future as are devoid of ordinary life. This involves a contradiction, for no life is imaginable without ordinary life. Just as you can have formal or technical languages for specific and well-defined tasks but not as a substitute for ordinary language, and just as you necessarily require ordinary language to talk about formal language – ordinary language provides both the text and context of the meaningfulness of formal languages – similarly special life forms are imaginable only through ordinary life, that is, they are consistently workable as patches of life only as embedded in a matrix of ordinary life.
Ordinary life is moral, truthful, efficacious, accurate, fast, straightforward, simple, plain, law-abiding, self-reliant, responsible, enjoyable etc. We can make this list as long as we wish. But surely ordinary life also has space for immorality, falsehood, inefficiency, vagueness, crookedness, complexity, crime, dependent behaviour, parasitism, irresponsibility, suffering etc? The latter, however do not violate ordinary life. What they do is to produce a disturbance which is handled by ordinary life in a routine manner. The undesirable qualities are undesirable, not asuri. What is asuri alone tends to violate ordinary life. So everything that is human makes ordinary life, and this makes ordinary life natural. Again, this is not to say that nothing unnatural is part of it. But it does mean that ordinary life has in it the criteria for judging what is natural and what is not. So there is a concept of the natural unity of ordinary life.
It is this natural unity of ordinary life which Gandhi recreates in thought and practice in a world dominated by satanic forces. Ordinary life, in fact, is that continuum which expresses the essence of man without ever being the same. The great traditions of the saints is a tradition of continuous creation and recreation of ordinary life in thought and practice in ever new circumstances. This is the tradition of ever producing the then contemporary criteria of ordinary life. …
Violations of ordinary life are related to those things that refuse to lend themselves to the criteria of ordinary life.
Excerpts from the Preface to the Book “Gandhi’s Challenge to Modern Science”, Sunil Sahasrabudhey, Other India Books, 2004
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