I once asked my father who a profound person is. "He is a person who understands his insignificance in the grand scheme of things," my father replied.

I was in my early-20s then, and somewhat confident about my ability to succeed in the Darwinian struggle of ideas that qualifies a human being for survival in the battles of everyday life. I had been born in Kolkata to a Barrister, had gone to two top-rated English-medium schools, had graduated with Honours in English from Presidency College, and was working for The Statesman, which was royalty among the nobility of Indian newspapers.

By contrast, my father was a village-born and Bengali- educated peasant's son who went on to graduate in Law from Jesus College, Cambridge, was called to the Bar from Lincoln's Inn, joined left-wing politics, went to jail twice, was expelled from his party, kept practising at Calcutta High Court, and was elected twice to the West Bengal Legislative Assembly as an Independent by beating the candidates of the mainstream parties roundly.

And Mohamed Abdul Latif was teaching Asad-ul Iqbal Latif about the value of insignificance. I shrank back from my self-confidence. My emerging pride in my achievements vanished from the grand scheme of things. I became myself again.

Fifty years since that fateful conversation, I have picked up a few laurels along the way, including a Masters of Letters in History from Cambridge as a Chevening Scholar and a Fulbright visiting scholarship at Harvard. There have been journalistic successes as well in Hong Kong and Singapore. I have worked at two prestigious research institutes in Singapore. Today, I am privileged to be associated with the Cosmos Foundation, a role which I consider to be the pinnacle of my academic and journalistic career.

But am I now profound?

Of course not. That is because I still do not understand my insignificance in the grand scheme of things.

What is that grand scheme?

For my father, the grand scheme consisted of the inevitability of dialectical materialism emerging and succeeding as the best and final stage in the unfolding of human history. (He would have put this far more elegantly, but this in essence is what the socialist calling is all about.) As for me, I have never believed in anything remotely teleological, be it Marxist, religious or hedonist. That is because determinism of any kind destroys human agency at its roots. Determinism makes agency a slave of structure and culture. Structure, culture and agency being the three variables of human existence, to subdue agency to structure or culture or a combination of them (whether by way of material needs or metaphysical faith or both) is to destroy the self's capacity for autonomy. Without autonomy, there is no reason to stay alive. One might as well never have been born.

To me, then, the grand scheme of things is not known in its finality but only in the form of its unfolding. Hence, I do not understand even my insignificance in that scheme. I know that I am insignificant, but exactly what are the coordinates of my insignificance? How may I employ my knowledge of my insignificance to situate myself in a significant universe? Where is that significant universe?

Science is not very reassuring in providing an answer. According to the Big Bang theory, matter, space and time were created 13.7 billion years ago when the universe expanded from an extremely small, hot and dense state to become cooler and looser, making biological life ultimately possible. The universe will continue to expand this way till it extinguishes itself, and human life, in the process. (There are some variations on this theme, but this is the science of beginning and end in a nutshell.)

Within that dismal - not grand - scheme, humans, who are but an advanced form of monkeys, will disappear from the scheme (unless they do so earlier of their own volition through poverty, war and ecological destruction, a scenario which is entirely possible). Natural and biological evolution will simply cease. The universe, which began in a void, will return to a void. There will be no life, no history, no memory, no need to be human any more, and no need for any regrets. Nothingness will define all words, all emotions, all exertions, all successes, all failures. Nothingness awaits the atheist Barrister Latif's historical materialism and the agnostic fool Asad Latif's sensuous indeterminism equally, according to Big Bang. Everything will end.

Yet

Yet, there are two answers to all that I have said till now. First, of course, there is religion. I leave that issue to people who know more than I do.

Second, there is the continuing need for passing agency even in an eventually determinate world. I could die tomorrow. But that does not mean I am not alive today. What I do with my life today matters. What I do may or may not change the world. But it will change the world inside me. When I protest against injustice, even if fruitlessly; when the tears of a starving child want to make me kick the world in its smirking face; when I look upon a fellow-human as just another me; when I recall a line from Rabindranath or Nazrul in my writings in prose; when I fall in love with a world that does not love me; when I rise beyond myself, I reach the outer limits of the world.

That is when I begin to understand, ever so faintly, my insignificance in the grand scheme of things that itself is insignificant in the face, not of matter, space and time, but of their disappearance.

That is when I depart from my father's wisdom and set up a republic of the mind of my own.

Profound? No yet. Perhaps never. But trying.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com