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COMMENT | “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds,” sang that great Jamaican philosopher Robert Nesta Marley.

And how right he was. From the cradle to the grave we have thoughts, rituals, conventions and obligations imposed on us. We are ordered to accept certain codes of right and wrong, and required to believe mythological stories as religious truths. Faith, they call it, as if there is some great triumph of the human spirit in the blind acceptance of miracles that were allegedly witnessed by others many centuries ago.

Now, don’t get me wrong, for I do actually believe in a moral code. And I am not going to stand here and insist that 2+2=5, or argue about my right to identify as a six-and-a-half foot tall basketball-playing movie star. I do not believe in being subversive or contrarian for the sake of it.

What I do value is my freedom of thought. How I value the ability to look at convention and question it. If ain’t broke, don’t fix it, I’ve been told, but from a young age, I used to ask… why do we all follow this?

I recall this debate I once had with my grandmother, who was trying to persuade me to return to the Catholic church. “Amache, what happens if our holy book is a storybook? Each of us thinks the other religion is wrong, suppose all are wrong? What is the meaning of our lives then?” I asked her.

“Stupid fellow” she shouted in Malayalam and swiftly ended the debate as she chased me around the dinner table, briefly brandishing the Bible as a weapon...

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