Dear Vivek,

Thanks for uploading your thoughts, which make for an interesting reading.
However, I must say that your notes are both dense and opaque. Dense because
too many thoughts are compressed together and there is not sufficient space in
your piece to decompress them. They are also opaque because some of these
thoughts cannot be fully grasped within the confines of this note. I want to take the
first step in thinking along with you but will do so by slicing up your note into
digestible fragments, as and when I need to.
One aspect of the skeleton in your piece appears to be the following. You talk about
three frames. The first frame, the native Indian one, teaches us to reflect on
experience. That is, it imparts some kind of practical ability. Learning the second
frame, the western one, which comprises of a way of talking (discursivity as you
call it), makes us confuse this way of talking (that includes a normative
vocabulary) with our way of thinking. That is, it covers up (or disguises) our learnt
ways of thinking by teaching us how to use a vocabulary in a syntactically correct
way and thus generating the illusion (or misapprehension) that we are really
thinking when we are not. Then there is the third frame, where we have to learn
how to express what we are doing (when we think about experience) in a systematic
way. Your problem, therefore, appears to be one of negotiating a route from the first
frame to the third without being waylaid by the second.
In this post and, hopefully, in the subsequent posts to come, I want to reflect on
what it means to think about experience. Perhaps, not so much on what these words
mean but what is entailed by (or what happens when we indulge in) this kind of
activity. I think the best way to begin this analysis is by asking the following two
questions about an activity familiar to most of us: what do we do when we think
about ourselves? Do we do it the right way? Let me begin with the first question
and postpone looking at the second for a later stage, including how we should
understand it. Because most of us know how we think about ourselves most of the
times, I will take a trivial example and skip over certain explanations and analyses.
The holes in my reasoning can either be filled by our memories or by discussing
them at a later stage.
Let us suppose, and it is true by the way, that I lose my temper rather quickly. This
makes me say unfortunate things which I regret later on or wish I had not said.
Repetitive experiences of such situations make me want to control either my
temper or control my tongue when I lose my temper. However, my experiences
have also taught me that I fail in doing both: infinite self-admonitions do not help;
endless number of promises (that I shall not speak when angry or I shall not get
angry) does not work. The only result of these efforts is being saddled with a huge
sense of remorse, self-directed anger, and an increasing sense of helplessness. I
know there is much at stake: I have had fights, hurt people needlessly and messed

up relationships, and so on. Yet, nothing, not even a study of books on psychology,
seems to help except feed the sense of helpless rage.
Not many options are open to me: I could hope for a miracle medication (there is
medication for attacks of rage but none for short temper) or undergo
psychoanalysis. The first is not there yet and, for whatever reason, I do not take the
second option. Books in Biology tell me that this anger is the animal part of me
and that some or another chemical is produced too quickly in the brain. Even if this
trait has survival value to my species, it is a handicap for me. So, it appears that I
have to live with it, but precisely that is my problem: I cannot and do not want to
live with my short temper.