Introduction: Random Thoughts

The essay builds around a few deep questions: What makes the random? Is the random chance? Is it systemic and intrinsic? Is it ontological to our existence and ways of the everyday? Is it contextual and recurrent? Can there be a concept of life without the random? The essay unfolds into two sections: the ‘random and the literary’ and ‘random and art’. In trying to see the random in the literary and critical thinking, Ghosh argues for chance and finite thinking and through the principle of necessity, possibility, non-local, post classical and entropy produces a ‘literary’ of a different order, resonance and valence. Can we do ‘chance thinking’? he asks. Can literary investigations or studies in the humanities think of itself to an extent as a product of ‘random thinking’? In the second section – ‘Random and Art’ – Ghosh tries to investigate the principle of chance/random in what he calls the plastic art of Rabindranath Tagore and Alexander Cozens and then takes the investigation into the domain of material plastic art which is an intriguing mix of the determinate, chosen, trained aspects with the unexpected, dramatic and the random dimensions.