Today is Father’s Day, so I guess this is a good time to remember my late father from whose loins I emanated when I decided to incarnate upon this earth almost five decades ago.  He passed away fourteen years ago, but his leaving this world did not mean much to me really.  For a start he is still present in my bedtime prayers, as if he is still around.  Moreover, I left home when I went to university, so being separated from my parents was a normal state of being for me.

The other thing is, as I get older I seem to resemble him more and more.  Not just in physical resemblance, but also in mannerism and in the things that I like and dislike.  In a good way of course.  But then I always remember my dear Papa with great fondness and invariably with a little chuckle, for he was a genuinely nice man.  A bit quirky, yet again he was a professor.

My father laughed a lot.  He had a loud and infectious laughter.  He was seldom angry.  At least not with his daughters.  That’s the thing about fathers and daughters I suppose.  They don’t have the heart to shout at them.  In any case, I would always come up with some kind of cheeky comments to which he could not reply.  And I would say cruel things like ‘you’re a bad teacher.  You can’t even teach me.  I know a lot more than you.’

I am reading the speech made by Socrates when he was tried by the Athenians with charges of ‘corrupting the youths’ and for which he was condemned to death by drinking the poison hemlock and I find it amazing how words spoken over two thousand millennia ago could still ring true today.  Here was a man put to death because he was a ‘gadfly’ to the state, an affront to the ‘polite’ society who were suspicious of teachings considered contrary to the norm and who was seen as a threat to mores and values of the day.

And what were those values?  Socrates was a philosopher whose life was dedicated to asking question and challenging assumptions people took for granted.  He was accused of godlessness and yet he was a great believer in the spirits and divine beings.  He dedicated his life to the pursuit of knowledge and the improvement of the self and for this the young followed him as a man of wisdom and a teacher who taught them about the need to pursue a life of virtue.

‘Men of Athens, I honour and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet after my manner, and convincing him, saying: O my friend, why do you who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens , care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honour and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all? Are you not ashamed of this? And if the person with whom I am arguing says: Yes, but I do care; I do not depart or let him go at once; I interrogate and examine and cross-examine him, and if I think that he has no virtue, but only says that he has, I reproach him with undervaluing the greater, and overvaluing the less.’