Home > Work > An Examined Life: Essays and Reflections by Karan Singh
1 " Partition tore India into three pieces. Disaster struck. There was East Pakistan, there was West Pakistan, and there was the rest of India. Millions of people were uprooted from their houses, tens of thousands massacred on both sides. It was one of the greatest mass migrations and killings in human history. People today do not realize the tremendous trauma of Partition, whose negative vibrations continue to haunt us even today. "
― Karan Singh , An Examined Life: Essays and Reflections by Karan Singh
2 " I came to philosophy first through Plato. I was very interested in Plato, the person and his works.[The] Republic is a much larger work. I was fascinated particularly by his Symposium. It is a beautiful work with Plato’s signature dialogues and the speech on Socrates, Aristophanes and others. I read the history of western philosophy and eventually moved to Indian philosophy. "
3 " I have had an affinity for books throughout my life. Ever since I was little, I used to read children’s books and I loved going to book shops and buying books. My father would give me ten rupees to go to the Raina Book Depot in Srinagar, which was a great delight. When I went to Doon [a boarding school in Dehradun] I started reading more extensively. I remember reading many of the P.G. Wodehouse novels, the Sherlock Holmes and Scarlet Pimpernel series, and I loved the classics: War and Peace, A Tale of Two Cities, The Three Musketeers. I subsequently moved to more serious reading: books on philosophy and politics by Plato, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Vivekananda, the Arthurian novels by Mary Stewart and the Cretan novels of Mary Renault are some of my favourites. In poetry, I love Yeats, Wordsworth, Sri Aurobindo, Gurudev Tagore, Robert Frost in English; Ghalib, Faiz and Iqbal in Urdu, Dinkar and Tulsidas in Hindi. "
4 " I have two of these spiritual gurus (Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo) whom I did not meet. I also had two living gurus in Jawaharlal Nehru for politics and Dr Radhakrishnan for philosophy. In my spiritual quest, I have had a whole spectrum of spiritual gurus; a Shakta guru who was a Kashmiri pandit, a Vaishnava guru who was an Englishman, a Shaiva guru who was an American, a Sufi guru who was Muslim, a Kriya yoga guru who is from Kerala. So, I have been blessed with a number of gurus and teachings around the world. "
5 " We had to write a lot of essays in school. I had a very good teacher who taught us English, V. Siddharthacharry. I enjoyed the early process of learning to structure my essays. When I came home after finishing school at eighteen, I started writing extensively.I liked to be meticulous. Initially, I read a lot on western philosophy but also made notes on the administration and constitutions of different nations and civilizations. "
