When I noticed courses on Eastern religion being offered around town by Jehangir Chubb, a retired professor of philosophy from the University of Bombay in India, I was intrigued. Was he another dry intellectual or a genuine teacher, with something to say to us all?
We met and talked, and I was even more intrigued. He is an intellectual — he earned his doctorate at Oxford in 1937, headed the department of philosophy at Elphinstone College at the University of Bombay from 1948 to 1965, wrote Assertion and Fact — The Categories of Self-Conscious Thinking and many papers on philosophical subjects — but in addition to being a philosopher’s philosopher he is steeped in the spiritual wisdom of ancient and modern India. His manner is formal, his words precise, his presence calm and spacious. Even when turning away a question (“What is the mantra?” “One doesn’t tell the mantra.”) he is gentle, respectful.
