The other day, in a WhatsApp group of my old school batchmates, a conversation took an unexpected philosophical turn. What began as a casual exchange spiralled into a debate on religion, belief, and the construction of places of worship.

Drawn as I’ve always been to the deeper currents beneath surface certainties, I offered a thought that felt instinctive to me: the mere construction of temples, mosques, or churches does not ensure the presence of spirituality. Rituals, after all, can ring hollow. True faith is not anchored in stone, but found in silence, introspection, and the intimate journey of personal awakening.

I followed up, almost as an extension to a comment appreciating the fluidity of Hinduism — not merely as a religion in the rigid, doctrinal sense, but as a way of life — by pointing out that Hinduism, despite the monolithic image often projected today, is anything but uniform. It is, in truth, a vast and intricate forest of philosophies — where Dvaita’s dualism coexists with Advaita’s non-dualism, where the logical enquiry of Samkhya lives alongside the ritual precision of Mimamsa, where the austere renunciations influenced by Jainism meet the emotive devotion of the Bhakti poets. Its true strength lies not in doctrinal rigidity, but in its embrace of plurality — a harmony of contradictions that breathes, not breaks.

It was then that one of my batchmates — a staunch communist and a man of sharp intellect—responded. His tone wasn’t hostile, but he pointedly remarked on what he perceived as a contradiction in my viewpoint.

From his Marxist lens — forged in dialectical materialism, steeped in the struggle between the oppressed and oppressor, thesis and antithesis — the idea of harmonious contradiction was almost unthinkable. For him, contradictions needed to be resolved through conflict, leading to a clear and superior synthesis. How could multiple truths coexist without erasing each other?

That question lingered with me longer than I expected.

Philosophy, unlike politics or ideology, often thrives on contradictions. It doesn’t fear them — it feeds off them. Over the years, I’ve come to see that truth is seldom a singular, fixed point. It is a spectrum — a mosaic shaped by time, experience, and the ever-changing lens of human understanding.

Dialectics, at its best, isn’t a war between ideas — it’s a dance. A dynamic interplay where opposites define, challenge, and transform each other.

In Hegel’s dialectic, every idea (thesis) births its opposite (antithesis), and their struggle leads to a synthesis — a new idea enriched by both. In Eastern thought, contradictions are not always to be resolved but held in balance. The Yin and Yang of Taoist philosophy, the middle path of Buddhism, the cyclical dualities of Shiva and Shakti — all speak to this delicate equilibrium.

Even the Bhagavad Gita, often seen as a text of devotion and duty, is riddled with contradictions. Krishna urges Arjuna to fight and kill, while simultaneously teaching detachment, peace, and the futility of ego. The point isn’t to pick a side — the point is to understand that truth often lives in paradox.

My batchmate’s discomfort was not unusual. Ideological frameworks often seek clarity, certainty, and coherence — qualities that philosophy, especially pluralistic philosophy, tends to disturb.

But for me, this pluralism is precisely what makes certain traditions — like Hinduism — intellectually resilient. They allow for atheism and theism, ritual and renunciation, logic and love, all to exist within a single philosophical canopy. Charvaka, a materialist and sceptical school of thought, denied the existence of the afterlife and divine reward, and yet, it was still part of the broader Hindu discourse.

Can communism, or any singular ideology, make space for such contradictions without internal rupture? That’s a question worth pondering.

We often live with contradictions without noticing them. We cherish freedom but crave security. We value tradition but demand change. We seek connection but fear dependence. These tensions are not signs of hypocrisy. They are signs of being human.

Perhaps what my batchmate found hard to digest wasn’t my comment, but the larger notion that philosophical and spiritual life doesn’t have to be clean, linear, or logically sealed. It can be messy. It can be layered. It can, in fact, make peace with its own contradictions.

In my years of wandering through ideas — from the cold rationality of Western philosophy to the mystical warmth of Eastern thoughts, from the ideological convictions of youth to the tempered wisdom of experience — I’ve realised one thing:

We don’t always need to solve contradictions. Sometimes, we simply need to listen to them.

They have something to say — not in unison, but in chorus. Their very dissonance can produce the music of a deeper understanding.

So when I reflect on that WhatsApp exchange, I don’t see a clash. I see a reminder that my old friend and I are standing on different banks of the same river, watching the water of thought flow by. He sees turbulence. I see reflection. But the river doesn’t ask us to agree. It simply invites us to look, to feel, to wonder.

And perhaps, that is philosophy’s greatest gift.