The method that cannot arrive
I felt I was standing on the beach, with the sun setting on the horizon. The sky and the surroundings, part of the water, even the air, the birds it was carrying had turned crimson. The vast ocean lay in front. I was there for a purpose. I wanted to ask a question. I did. And when I did it made a little wave, and then the wave started to travel. Away from me, into the ocean. From where it had come. After a while my mind could not see the wave. It disappeared. Had gone beyond my vision, beyond what I could even feel about it. But very strangely something inside me assumed it was travelling. I knew it was travelling.
Was it travelling the asymptote way? I couldn’t tell myself. I continued to stand, preparing the next question in mind. And someday, before I can ask another question, make another wave, I will be gone. A younger person will come and stand exactly where I had left my footprints on the sand. He will stand and be mesmerized by the same sunset, same surroundings gone crimson, including the birds and the insects that came up on the sand from underground. He will now receive the wave that I had sent. He will smile, for he will have another question to ask, riding on what came back. He would have been carrying that question with his being. Once asked, he will immediately see it beginning to travel. He will know it is not in his lifetime that the answer will come back. But there will always be someone standing exactly as he stood on my footprint, who will receive an answer. Only to have another question to ask.
Having been born in the privileged layer of Indian society, I carried into my early thinking a fierce intellectual faith — that something was wrong with our society, profoundly wrong, and that it must be dismantled and rebuilt. I had the humility to feel the wrongness and the curiosity to keep pulling at it, but I did not yet have the prior question. I was generating answers by circling the same texts, the same inherited frameworks, producing light that was really just my own reflection thrown back at me. That was when I entered Ambedkar. I walked in carrying my unshakable faith in the process, in the method, in the slow patient work of arriving at truth. His writings did not argue with me. They shredded me. Not unkindly — but completely. The belief I had walked in with had no definition left to take home. A new prior question dawned, more ambiguous than the one before it, more painful, but it never left me. It began to inhabit me, and everything changed. It was like being twice born, in the most true ethos of Ambedkar — and never in the Vedic tradition. Maybe I am the first non-Dalit to be twice born by metabolizing Ambedkar, in this newfound tradition, by me.
This is what the Socratic method does when it is working honestly. It does not argue you into a new position. It strips the position you arrived with until nothing holds. Euthyphro of Prospalta — a prophet by his own claim, a man who knew exactly what piety was — walked into a conversation with Socrates and walked out with nothing he could stand on. Socrates did not give him a better answer. He located the exact point where Euthyphro’s answer could not hold its own weight. Not a conclusion. A map of the terrain where conclusions run out. Euthyphro ran out. So did I, inside Ambedkar. So does every wave that carries our question toward the horizon — not into oblivion, but into the prior question that was always waiting beneath the one we thought we were asking.
The asymptote
The other day I noticed something I had missed before, standing on that same beach before the same crimson dusk: the sun was not setting. It was approaching the waterline, endlessly, thinning the gap between its lower edge and the horizon, but never touching it. That gap — that persistent, luminous sliver — was the whole point. I sent my wave out and watched it travel toward that line where sea meets sky, but the wave never crashed. It kept flattening, spreading, becoming a fainter reflection of itself. The horizon itself receded with my questions, but never receded far enough to reveal the truth I was seeking.
And I realized, standing there, that the horizon is not a wall I am too slow to hit. It is the very shape of my own seeing, the edge of my own mind, and it moves because I move.
What do I call that line? Some call it God. Some call it the Tao. Some call it the final atom beyond which argument cannot go. But the name, I suspect, is just a seashell I pick up and put down — pretty, beside the point. The structure is what holds: every step toward it reveals another step, and if I ever did reach it, I would find not a destination but a door opening onto a further ocean.
So when the younger one comes to stand where my footprints have nearly washed away, he will see the same gap, the same approaching light that never arrives. He will send his own wave, and his wave will inherit the momentum of mine — not because I gave him an answer, but because I gave him the posture. The tilt of the head. The squint against the glare. The stubborn faith that the gap is not a failure but the very floor beneath our feet. We are not solving a puzzle across generations. We are passing a muscle memory earned in several lifetimes. It is a conversation so old it predates our languages, and we hold it together not by certainty but by the quiet agreement that the most honest name for what we approach is simply the next question, and the one after that.
The fraud
But imagine, while I am standing on that same beach watching the unattainable horizon, someone builds a palace of stone right at the water’s edge. They plant a gilded flag in the wet sand and declare, with trumpets and tablets: this is the shore. No water lies beyond. The wave you seek ends here.
That palace is the fraud — not because it offers rest, but because it offers finality. And finality is always, in its bones, a move of control. It is the voice that says stop asking, for we have arrived — and it knows exactly what it is doing. Closing the door on the prior question so that the current hierarchy can freeze like a statue in the courtyard.
I must be honest with myself. I stop the regress all the time. When I tie my sandal and stop watching the wave, or accept the tide schedule without deriving it from first principles, I am making an innocent halt — a pragmatic pause to live my small life. But that palace is different. It does not pause. It proclaims. And this distinction exposes something that ordinary political critique, with its talk of tyrants and taxes, cannot quite reach. The real crime is epistemological. The fraud does not just steal my grain or my freedom. It steals my permission to ask why the palace was built on sand in the first place — hijacking the very question of justification so that the conversation ends not because we have reached a natural agreement, or a stopping point, but because someone concluded it as dangerous to continue.
What would genuine arrival look like, if it could exist at all? Not this palace. It would be a lighthouse — a structure that says here is all the light we have, now look for yourself, rather than a throne that demands genuflection. It would name its own mysteries openly, admitting that its deepest certainties are just its best bets so far, and it would carry, carved into its own foundation, an exit sign for the next generation to pass through.
One evening I walk up to the palace gates and ask the priest, or the official, or the algorithm, to peel back just one more layer — to show me what holds their foundation up. They sputter. They flinch. They cite a sacred text. They call the guards. What has been proven? Only that the structure is hollow. That proof lands squarely in my own chest, a quiet and unshakeable knowing. But it proves nothing to the devotee who has built their entire identity inside those stone walls. For them the test itself is treason, and my unanswered question is simply reinterpreted as a test of their faith.
So I walk back to the water’s edge and send another wave — not to knock the palace down, for that would be a kind of arrival too, and just as false — but to lap gently at its foundations, again and again, across the years, until the stones themselves remember that they were once sand, and that sand answers to the tide, not to the flag planted upon it.
The fraud is exposed not by my single question, nor by my single wave, but by the patient, generational erosion of honest inquiry. And the only real defence — for me, for the one who will stand on my footprints, for all of us — is to keep asking. Keep walking. Keep the prior question alive. Refuse to let any authority talk us out of the one thing that makes us human: the stubborn, unglamorous right to wonder what lies just beyond that wall, just beyond that line where the sun forever approaches but never arrives.
If the physicist goes deeper than me, and someone goes deeper than the physicist, what is the thing we are all moving toward without any of us reaching it?
To me, if we ever reach it as the human race, I would have called it God.
Beyond that there will be no prior question.