When we read Foucault’s set of interviews on Knowledge is Power, I think that our teachers did not understand the philosopher too well because we too held the mistaken notion for long that it is indeed that knowledge brings power. Bluntly, it does not. There is no power in knowledge and there never were great inventions which fueled the wheels of the great Industrial Revolution in the late 18^th century originated as many as six centuries before then. Knowledge did not become power until it was put into praxis, or practice with a consciousness of knowledge it carries. It is not what is known, it is important what becomes the discourse, or the generally knowable and known. When knowledge is moved through the power system, whether of institutions, groups, associations, networks, cliques, media, or individuals much in circulation, it becomes discourse. The WhatsApp University is the ultimate instance of the discourse that minimizes the knowledge component and eventually eliminates it.

The circulation of posts about Guru Purnima is one such instance. A pagan festival of the full moon near the solistice, when the moon appears to be at the closest to the earth and hence feels the heaviest, and thus “guru” means heavy and large is celebrated across India. Such celebrations are accompanied by food, almost always heavy stuff, puris are stuffed and rolled large, savouries and sweets are made heavy by adding ingredients in the dough and so on. The Shaktas appropriated the custom by spelling the ambubachi, a time when the Goddess goes into menstruation. The earth gets moist and heavy and thus an agrarian society is likely to refrain from cultivating it. The Santhals have Meena Mangal and so do many tribes in the coastal region, where spawns are released into water bodies, and one refrains from eating them. Pagans let go of killing life and follow vegetarian diets albeit heavily cooked in oil. The Shaivas prepare for their annual jatras, Amarnath, Tarakeswar and the Kanwars. The Guru Purnima, then is not a specific day, instead it is a culmination or a peaking of the solistice between the months of Ashadh and Sravaan, the monsoons, which must be managed as between the rains being too light or too heavy. The rituals are many, all magical to control and contain the rains, metaphoric and allegorical. How such an ensemble of rituals becomes the ode to one’s teacher is mysterious. Yet, everyone suddenly seems to treat the pagan cult as a teacher’s day. This is the power of discourse.

The mistaken belief that it is a teacher’s day gets reinforced with each passing year where someone claims that Shiva taught some disciples, someone says that the Buddhist monks return to school. No one fact checks. That is not the problem; the problem is that no one thinks that there is something to be checked. The principal question in the circulation of fake news is why no one doubts. Then the problematic area is doubt.

Doubt emerges from a feeling that something does not fit the picture. Only those minds which have an idea of the picture can only doubt. The trouble then is that why do most minds not have a big picture? Detectives are more intelligent than most because of the way they can process data; those brains go by facts and evidence, matching a sentence to the corresponding fact. Detectives need to see data as part of a process; hence the brain would suddenly ask that worshipping a Guru on Guru Purnima seems so unusual in India because we are not those people who would have Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or a Teacher’s Day. The only day which only the Bengalis have is the Jamai Shahsthi day, the day for the sons in law, part of Shashthi celebrations, marked to the jamai in one of its months. The doubt comes from unmatched data which means that the brain must work fast in data matching. Avid reading, constant observation, sharp memory and seeing the connectedness among things is thus the way to prevent the mind from accepting fake matter.

The trouble then lies in our pedagogy; students are encouraged to cram facts and the cramming takes up so much of the time, that the mind finds no space to devote to building wholesome pictures. The students become teachers, the tradition continues and soon a mass of humans in society lose their faculties of detection. The oft repeated stories of people video shooting a fatal accident instead of trying to rescue the victim is an instance of the deep penetration of discourse in ousting knowledge. Discourse is about cramming, using sentences to support sentences while knowledge is about the matching of data to the words. Innovative societies have knowledge, insipid ones have discourses.

Discourses are manufactured consent and moves through various forms of authority, religion, family school, peers, colleges, Universities, half-baked teachers and of course the media. Popular culture is a big carrier of unquestioning suspension of disbelief; the way it achieves its purpose is the story and the emotions. Discourse based politics seeks narratives with a beginning, middle and end layered with heavy weather emotions. The acceptance of words without doubt then is also a lack of neutrality. Neither authority, emotions, nor narratives help in neutrality. Neutrality is a state of mind to accept things objectively without the judgement of what ought to be and what ought not be. As we say, science should be positive and not normative. The normative belongs to politics; for there is acceptance and rejection. Pedagogy based on ethics is bound to be normative. This happens when pedagogy emerges from politics, French Revolution, American War of Independence, American Civil War, Civil Rights Movement, Indian Freedom Struggle, People’s War in China and so on. Politics of universality guides knowledge, teaches us acceptance because of the “what a great battle it was”, the nobility, the transcendence, the sublimity, and the emotions takes knowledge out of its context and uses “power” of textbooks, school boards, teachers, peers, competitive job exams to dispense discourses.

Political upheavals where one social class of elites displace the incumbents in power, invariably advance discourses through differently plotted narratives and differently invoked emotions of nobility. They capture institutions and use the existing ones to suit their needs. Discourse is power, without the discourse that survives through the formal and institutional structures, political power is not possible. The detective remains outside of the pale, often a retired police officer, or an independent individual, unattached to a job or profession. Regimes of political uncertainty, or regimes of political contest marginalize knowledge because knowledge is useless to seek power.

Knowledge is marginalized and so is the genuine intellectual. The intellectual who stands apart from social opinion is hard to find; intellectuals shamelessly seeking approval are strewn everywhere. Hence an argument is taken to be an offence; I say, and you listen, we are becoming apostles to one another. We are supposed to only like comments and not engage because you don’t engage with saints. Very quickly thus, politics takes on the form of religion because of the apostolic nature of discourse.