The Socrates Express by Eric Weiner

Author:Eric Weiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

It’s now midday, and the Delhi sun has grown stronger. I ask Kailash about altercations he’s had. I’m sure he’s had his share. Elbow room is India’s scarcest commodity. Like Schopenhauer’s porcupines, India’s 1.3 billion souls are constantly calculating the ideal distance from one another. It’s an imperfect science. Sometimes you get pricked.

When attending the Franciscan boarding school my wife and I had enrolled him in, Kailash got into occasional fistfights with the other boys over a stolen pair of socks or T-shirt. Now that he’s a homeowner and landlord, Kailash needn’t worry about stolen socks. Money doesn’t liberate us from disputes, though. It shifts them to pricier arenas. And so it is with Kailash.

He tells me about a dispute with a tenant. He asked her to turn off the light outside her shop after she closed for the day, since a neighbor was taking the light as license to park his car there, blocking the entrance to Emma’s Stationery Shop.

“I said, ‘Please turn off the light,’ again and again.” She grew angry, but Kailash remained calm. For a while. One day he saw her leaving yet again without switching off the light. When he asked her to, she pointed out she, not Kailash, paid the electricity bill. He yelled at her. She yelled back. It was not a Gandhian fight.

“Did she have a point?” I ask Kailash. “Was she right?”

“She was right, but at the same time she was wrong,” he says.

That is, I think, a Gandhian response. Each side in a conflict possesses a slice of the truth, not the whole pie. Rather than trading slices, aim to enlarge the pie.

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