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Candle-lit Dinner for Two: Truth and Error

  • RK News By RK News
  • Comments 0
  • 05 Oct 2025

     HARDEEP BALI   “Humanity has always preferred seasoning its lies over swallowing a raw truth.”   Truth, as every philosopher and politician will tell you, is a noble thing—just not particularly convenient. It rarely arrives gift-wrapped; it prefers to barge in uninvited, overturning certainties, spoiling reputations, and refusing to be polite. Mistakes, on the other hand, are the charming companions of human progress—unwanted at first, later worshipped as “lessons.”    Together, truth and mistakes make a peculiar feast: one bitter, the other salty, and both impossible to digest without a strong moral stomach.   Take history, for instance. Galileo merely suggested that the Earth revolved around the Sun and promptly found himself under house arrest. Humanity, of course, later applauded him— posthumously, as it usually does—once the truth had aged enough to lose its danger.   Mahatma Gandhi, in his own laboratory of conscience, called his life “experiments with truth,” which sounds serene until you realize how much pain and contradiction that phrase conceals. His greatness lay not in moral perfection but in his willingness to stumble, admit, and try again. Truth, for him, wasn’t a destination; it was an endlessly corrected mistake.   Literature, being the more honest cousin of history, confesses this far more elegantly. Shakespeare’s King Lear learns that the loudest professions of love are often the least sincere— something most monarchs and modern influencers discover too late. His tragedy is not just filial ingratitude but the human allergy to humility. When Lear finally tastes the truth, it is flavored with madness, regret, and, ironically, wisdom.   The same culinary combination haunts Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter: her supposed sin becomes her sanctity, her scarlet shame a more authentic badge of virtue than the purity of her judges. The crowd mocks her at first, then imitates her strength later—another fine example of society’s chronic habit of ridiculing what it will one day quote.   Cultural history fares no better. Every era begins by swearing eternal loyalty to its illusions, then spends centuries apologizing for them. The Middle Ages gave us faith without freedom; the Enlightenment offered freedom without humility. The Renaissance, that splendid reconciliation, bloomed from both errors—proof that even civilization grows through trial and exquisite blunder.   The Japanese found a gentler word for it: wabi-sabi—the art of loving the imperfect. The western world calls it “damage control.” Today, truth is having an identity crisis. It has been outsourced to algorithms, verified by hashtags, and diluted into “narratives.”    Everyone wants to “speak their truth,” which is a polite way of saying facts are optional. Mistakes have become fashionable too—rebranded as “growth experiences.” We commit them deliberately now, provided they trend well. Yet even in this digital masquerade, truth manages to slip through the filters.    The #MeToo movement, for instance, began as an inconvenient truth finally spoken aloud—a collective refusal to keep mistakes buried beneath tradition’s rug. Philosophers, of course, have been dining on this paradox for centuries.    Socrates claimed to know nothing, which instantly made him the wisest man in Athens and, predictably, it’s least popular. His method—exposing the ignorance of others by exposing his own—remains the purest recipe for tasting truth. It’s no wonder they poisoned him; truth, after all, has always been bad for public digestion.   Even science thrives on errors masquerading as experiments. Edison failed ten thousand times before inventing the light bulb. Today we call that perseverance; at the time, it probably looked like madness. But history is kind to its lunatics once they illuminate the world.   In the end, truth and mistakes are twin teachers—one stern, the other mischievous. Socrates drank poison for it, Edison lit the world because of it. Truth strips you naked; mistakes make sure you stay human. Their taste is not sweet, but it is honest.    Every civilization, every soul, must learn to chew both slowly—without choking on pride. For perhaps, the only unforgivable mistake is believing one has tasted truth once and for all. (Author is a poet, columnist and doctoral researcher, Feedback: writerbali007@gmail.com)

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