Anyhow, I feel that when we talk to people, even and perhaps
especially to those whom we consider narrow minded or conservative (its tough
perhaps with strongly fundamentalist people) to interview them in ways that
create an environment of exploration and pause and the fearless-ness that nothing
is judged and so we can together go into a question, a quest. That in fact
there is a possibility of a quest of knowledge, of thought and feeling… a manthan of sorts. This itself is a
capacity that lies right at hand and is repeatedly lost… we fill the silences of reflection, when the
images/implications of our own words are being reflected back on us, and so we
keep stating what we state, with all its contradictions and emptinesses. Surely
contradiction is not a problem, but yet a freer person is more integrated, even
while we may accept that there are a million ways of being integrated… in all
this the challenge I encounter most is keeping my own mouth shut and allowing
such spaces to emerge. And also I wonder, the data that emerges from such
conversations, is it sociology? Can sociology capture a person in movement,
rather than a person revealed? Is sociology interested? We think of sociology as
therapeutic, assuming that its content will do the therapy. Perhaps sometimes
sociology has to take a backseat to therapy, better still, to ‘lived freedom’.
