In recent few years, post truth has become a well known term in intelligencia, as if, it is a platonic concept, living its realities in a specific age of history. To think about truth in information age is the hardest stuff. Each day you read some piece in newspaper and get convinced that our world is becoming impoverished, miserable, and what not. Believe me, I started not to read these web pages since March, 2020. But I have felt something is missing. Definitely, I was not missing any sense of truth. It was stimulated habit to know something bad was a part of the daily routine, which was normalized in such a way that misery or at least miserable news were passing through mind without affecting anything. It was a new normal, which, in fact, affected the very sense of empathy. Everything became just a piece of news. On every issue, there were myriad version of information without any possibility to extract truth from information. Post truth is not a new phenomenon. It started with post modern jargons, which questioned every reality without questioning the very tool of questioning. Post modern condition brought self under strain, too much questioning has left every one of us confused if fact exists or everything is a part of agenda? Reading too many versions of fact makes the possibility of truth impossible to conceive. In recent tragedy in Indo-China relationship, for example, has attracted all too news reporting, opinion pages, electronic media coverages, and many versions of the incident which are unfathomable for any ordinary reader to grasp. Too many information hide the the truth in various perspectives. Friedrich Nietzsche's aphorism about perspectivism has come true not ontologically as a question of metaphysics but a real reality. At least, this much of sense is recovered from all too perspectivized truths. I often wonder, what happens to public reason, when the masses are left bewildered about what is real and what is hyper-real. Are we living in a post modern condition, to borrow a celebrated term from Lyotard? Or illusionistic landscape is simulated reality our mind is projecting like a platonic allegory of cave? Our knowledge, rather I would say, the oceanic circles of information has turned the question of being into oblivion. We are just a bundle of information, aspiring to accumulate more, amidst it, the real self is numb and silent.
Aristotle once wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics that there are four significant virtues for human beings, namely Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Courage. There are a few judges who have courage and sense of justice, both. Hon'ble Mr. Justice Rohinton Nariman has been truly an exemplar judge and erudite historian, theologian and philologist, a great scholar of music as well as a courageous and meticulous jurist of our country. He did his Master of Laws from Harvard Law School in 1980-81 and taught by one of the finest jurists of the last century, Roberto Unger. He became Senior Advocate in 1993 in the age of 37 and also served as Solicitor General of India in 2011 before he was elevated as a judge of the Supreme Court of India in 2014. He delivered many landmark judgments, including Shreya Singhal v. Union of India. There are a few people with whom time moves too fast, but to count that experience takes ages. Justice Rohinton Nariman is one of those great jurists with whom a meet...
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