4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST of being in certain time does not, secondly, create a chain of necessity; in other words, preferred futures through choices and struggles is very much a possibility. We are all caught up inexorably in what is called modernity, whatever be our criticisms and deep reservations about the forms of entrenched modernity.2 So let us begin with a process which is inherent to modernity and is also inescapably global. Modernity is, among its other marks, also about individuated persons. Modernity as it gets embodied by mingling with and often overcoming many features of other cultures, leads to a process of individuation of persons and interests; all this on a mass scale as never before. The social being of individuated persons is something that also gives rise to a distance from others—pre-existing community of people out of which such persons emerge—and therefore also a sense of difference. Feeling oneself to be different and also, to whatever minimal degree, distant gives rise to a sense of "private" in the sense that something of (or in) "me" cannot always be open for monitoring, that unsolicited social regulation of my personal life is a kind of invasion. The process of individuation is also the moment of multiple birth—of claims and experiences and expectations in life. It is here at this point that we begin to see the emergence of the "private" in society. It is here that the need also for "rights" begins to be felt by persons who hitherto could live, even in happiness, without a sense of such a need. Now for a society on way to modernity, there is therefore a sense of unfamiliar, a strangeness, to the experience that persons becoming individuals undergo. What are the unexpected burdens that this new condition imposes on society? Are the earlier social and linguistic and conceptual resources within pre-existing traditions capable of handling this experience or rendering it communicable? At any level of discussion and debate in India or other third world countries, this aspect of the problem has not received enough philosophical attention. On the contrary, what ought to have been an independent philosophical inquiry has got lost in a puerile controversy about whether terms currently in use in social science argument have been illicitly borrowed from the West or are forced universals (because Europe' s knowledge, as is alleged, was made to become our knowledge) and are therefore necessarily an imposition on our societies.3 Let me with this as the general poser come to our situation and see if the secular is a need for us, not contingently but one of necessity, and if it has a basis for being grounded in our reality. In other words, this