Persons can be hypocrites. Can cultures also be so? Does the hypocrisy of cultures on closer scrutiny turn out to be a contradiction in the human condition itself? For that matter, is a hypocrite only a casual cheat? Or is he someone who reaffirms the basic human values in a word hostile to such values, while himself succumbing to worldly temptations? Is a hypocrite an unwilling critic of everyday life whose personal failure signals a larger cultural crisis?
-Ashis Nandy, the Uncolonised mind: A post colonial view of India and the west, pg 83-84
“Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us because we sense dimly the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion. Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion orders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime.”
-Umberto Eco
We all have our secret chart to tastes, distastes, indifferences, don’t we?
-Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 18
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