Let me admit, I am blind to the abstract. I have never seen a tree, a bird, an animal, a book, a newspaper, a TV channel, a fruit or a vegetable. But yes, I have seen a banyan, a sal, an ashwattha tree. I have read a Dickens, a Manto, a Premchand. I have befriended many street dogs all of whom I know and recognize by their names, the wag of their tails, their bark, the love in their eyes. I love the humble litchi; I love and recognize all the other fruits that pretend to be litchis. Pasternak’s poems move me, though they appeared as a postscript in Dr Zhivago. Banalata Sen of Natore still lives in my heart though Jibananda Das is no more. That’s the power of the specific, the glare in the Ancient Mariner’s eyes.

The flight of the kite is different from the falcon’s sweep. An unfamiliar chirp and I am out on the terrace to see who has come to make friends with me. I can shut my eyes and, from the decibel level, tell you which news channel you are watching. It’s easy, as easy as listening to a song and recognizing the raga that defines it. Or walking into a living room and naming the artists on the wall. An accent or a dialect tells you where a person is from, just as Nirad C Chaudhuri would sip a wine, any wine, and tell me where in the world, in which vineyard it was grown.

That’s the magic of the specific. When you discover it, you understand the universal. Tagore wrote that. Gandhi often spoke of it. In our specifics lie our histories, our futures and -in a sense, our destinies. Every gene in your body tells you who you are, what you will be. The specific allows us to recognize, love, respect, trust and value every individual, irrespective of colour, faith and creed.

No one’s just an African. No one’s a Muslim. No one’s an Indian. I was born in Bhagalpur, grew up in Calcutta, came to Bombay to work, went to Delhi for Parliament. That’s what makes me who I am. My language; my teachers; my parents; the books I grew up with; my meanderings through life. That’s what makes each of us unique. And that’s why nation building is an arduous task. It can only be done by those who understand our differences. Your turban is your badge of honour just as his skull cap or someone’s pheta, someone’s rosary, someone’s sacred thread.

The more you rely on specifics, the more likely you are to find actual answers. Any researcher will tell you that; any good doctor. You cannot treat all dengue patients alike. The one in front of you, with all her complications, is the one you must treat with absolute specificity or she will die. The eagle with a broken wing must be treated differently from the sparrow hopping around, unable to fly. The rain on Marine Drive is not the same as the rain in the Dharavi slums which is not the same as the rain in the Valley of Flowers. Or Cherrapunji.

Those who are cutting down hundred year old trees in Mumbai, promising to replant them elsewhere have no idea what replanting involves; that’s why the trees don’t survive. For every tree is different. And replanting cannot be done en masse. Forests take centuries to grow. A metro shed, on the other hand, is just a slash job. You destroy in one swoop what nature has nurtured for years in the only great city in the world with a forest in its midst.

What’s true for trees is also true for people, for farmers. Loan waivers are no solution. They only exacerbate the problem; they don’t stop suicides. They destroy the sanctity of debt. Once you waive farmers’ loans, why won’t you waive the loans of out-of-job industrial workers or indigent students who have taken study loans they can’t pay back? Or jobless tribal youth in Maoist hit areas whose small businesses have failed? Or the carpet weavers of Kashmir who have no customers left any more?

That’s why we must look beyond quick fixes. We must recognise our diversities, trust our differences. You cannot change a nation’s eating habits through diktat. You cannot force people to change the way they live, think, worship, marry and divorce just like that. You cannot force them to give up what they see as their identities and become digits on a giant nationwide registry so that law breakers can be traced.

We are a great nation and no, not all of us are law breakers. A vast majority are honest, law abiding citizens. You can’t label them so easily as tax evaders or beef eaters or cattle thieves or love jihadis or anti-nationals. Our jails are bursting with innocent people. Our courts have fake cases piling up. Every tax payer has a horror story to tell. It’s time to liberate the nation from bad laws, corrupt officials, a largely obsequious media, and netas looking for a quick fix.

That would be real reform. And that could take us where we want to be.