After the Flood Came the Certainty

The Dikhow flooded. Within hours, Assam had divided into competing explanations.

One account pointed to an extreme meteorological event. The Chief Minister attributed the flooding to a cloudburst in Nagaland. The India Meteorological Department later said it had found no evidence of a cloudburst, while continuing to document exceptionally heavy rainfall across the region.

Another account looked in an entirely different direction. The real story, many argued, lay in years of riverbed mining, hill cutting, altered drainage, embankments, floodplain encroachment and environmental neglect. Old reports resurfaced. Court proceedings were circulated. Satellite images appeared on social media. Everyone seemed to possess evidence.

Like many others, I began reading.

I found myself moving between weather bulletins, hydrological maps, environmental reports, court orders and official documents, trying to understand what had happened.

I should confess that I did not begin as a neutral observer. Like everyone else, I felt the temptation to decide which explanation was correct.

Then something unexpected happened.

The more I read, the less interested I became in choosing a winner.

Instead, I became fascinated by something else entirely.

I was watching certainty form in real time.

The debate itself had become more interesting than the flood.

Meteorologists were asking one set of questions.

Hydrologists would naturally ask another.

Engineers would focus on river morphology, embankments and drainage.

Ecologists would examine the cumulative effects of decades of human intervention.

Each discipline was illuminating a different part of the same landscape.

Reality, however, is under no obligation to fit neatly inside a single explanation.

The absence of evidence for a cloudburst does not mean there was no exceptionally heavy rainfall. Equally, accepting rainfall as the immediate trigger does not answer whether years of environmental change amplified its consequences.

These are complementary questions.

Public debate, however, rarely rewards complementary answers.

It rewards certainty.

Somewhere during those days, I realised that I had met an old acquaintance once again.

He appears after almost every public controversy.

Sometimes he is a politician.

Sometimes a scientist.

Sometimes an activist.

Sometimes a television panellist.

Sometimes a journalist.

Occasionally, he even writes opinion columns.

His occupation changes.

His certainty never does.

He reaches his conclusion before the evidence reaches him.

Every new fact is carefully examined—not to discover whether it is true, but to determine whether it can be recruited in support of a conclusion already reached. Contradictory evidence is dismissed as bias, propaganda or irrelevance. Supporting evidence is embraced with remarkable enthusiasm.

The curious thing is that he is usually intelligent.

Indeed, intelligence often makes him more convincing.

A powerful intellect is an excellent instrument for discovering truth.

It is also an excellent instrument for defending a position one has already chosen.

Modern psychology calls this motivated reasoning.

The phenomenon itself is much older than the name.

Perhaps that explains why humanity's greatest teachers rarely relied on straightforward argument alone.

The authors of the Panchatantra entrusted wisdom to animals. Aesop did the same. Jesus taught through parables. Zen masters preferred riddles. Great satirists exaggerated ordinary human behaviour until readers could recognise themselves in the caricature.

None rejected reason. They simply understood that reason frequently serves identity before it serves truth.

As I followed the Dikhow debate, another, much older idea returned to me.

Neti, neti.

Not this.

Not that.

It is usually read as a statement of spiritual philosophy.

Increasingly, I hear something else in those words.

Not yet.

Not because truth is unknowable.

Not because evidence does not matter.

But because our first explanation is almost always smaller than reality itself.

The discipline is not permanent scepticism.

It is resistance to premature certainty.

Science itself flourishes when it remains willing to revise its conclusions in the presence of better evidence.

Public debate, unfortunately, often moves in the opposite direction. Once a narrative becomes emotionally satisfying, it develops a remarkable resistance to correction.

The Dikhow will eventually return to its banks.

The headlines will disappear.

Another controversy will replace this one.

Another set of experts will emerge.

Another collection of confident explanations will compete for attention.

The river will continue its patient journey.

The question is whether we shall learn to be equally patient.

Every flood tests our embankments.

Every public controversy tests something far more fragile.

It tests the habits of mind with which we approach reality.

I suspect that is the more difficult test.

Somewhere, when the next controversy arrives, I know I shall meet my old acquaintance again.

This time, I hope I recognise him before he begins speaking.

Especially if he is speaking in my own voice.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of India Today NE or its affiliates)