What were the main influences in your life that shaped your values?
The single biggest influence on my life was my mother. My father was killed in an air crash when I was 12 years’ old. And in any case my mother had moved away from my father when I was four, first to Madras, then to Shimla, while he had stayed in Lahore and was visiting us from there. After Partition, we were in Delhi, six people in one single room. My mother therefore decided to put us all in boarding school so that our highly disrupted education could be resumed. I was only eight years’ old. After my father was killed, my mother moved in the boarding school.
So on the overall I grew up under her shadow. She not only gave me many of the values I have, but also many of the values I rejected. She was a deeply religious person and often my brother and I would find that her spiritual values were wrong because of her religious beliefs, while many other spiritual values could stand alone, and did not need the sanction of religion. After all, do I desist from either killing or kissing you at this moment because the Gita says it? No, this is part of my values as a human being.

How did you end up rejecting religion?
It was a process of evolution. As a child, rituals had some attraction. Around the age of twelve, I read the entire Gita. I participated in major rituals that would take place in my village around that same time. I took them as the thing to do.

But between the age of 14 and 16, the questioning became very acute. My mother had taken up in a big way with the Swami Sivananda ashram near Rishikesh. Her idea of a happy weekend or a holiday was to go off to that ashram, or spend time doing pujas at home. I began questioning those childish rituals, pretending to bathe, feed, dress the god. I also found the whole set-up in the ashram to be very unequal. I was beginning to boil with rage at social injustice. And it was clear to me that the better off you were, the more likely of receiving the guru’s attention. And the worse off you were, the more you had to wait. I began suspecting that all the special favours my mother was receiving, was born from the bogus impression these people had that since she had three sons in the most expensive school of India, she must be a woman of some means. I also did not like the glib way in which answers were given; and the total failure on the part of acolytes to question either the assumptions or the conclusions of the gurus. In my education I was being taught there is a logical process from a hypothesis, to a theory, then to a law, all based on scepticism and repeated testing. This process of reason was for me superior to anything related to intuition, and there was no reconciliation between the two. This is why by the age of 16 I had become a raving atheist. Also this is the time I got exposed to Karl Marx and was very impressed with his value system, which said “from each according to his ability and to each according to his need”. It seemed to me a far greater spiritual injunction than the ten commandments. I could not see how believing in unreason could be reconciled with unscientific beliefs. At least not until I met a swamiji from the Ramakrishna Mission in my twenties, who explained that intuition begins where reasoning ends. What we know is comprised between the realms of scientific knowledge. And what we don’t know, we call God. I accept there is a huge amount we don’t know and I am willing to give it the name of God. But if we don’t know It, how can we give It attributes?
Since the boundaries of knowledge constantly expand, what is not known is constantly shrinking. In other words, God cannot be omnipotent, omniscient and so on. It is a constantly diminishing entity.
That reality of the unknown might explain some of the strange things that happen in life, when the unexpected occurs. There definitely is such a thing as good and bad fortune.

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