I learned a new word today: doxa. It's not even a new word; it goes back nearly 350 years before Christ, when a Greek called Plato decided it was a useful word for describing much of the bullshit that people around him unquestioningly believed to be true. For example, it was believed that a gang of gods lived, had all kinds of strange sex and played mind games on top of Mount Olympus. Doxa.

Plato defined doxa as common sense or popular opinion. Things that are taken for granted as true and therefore, don't require further proof or argument. So a few days ago, when my friend Jayant Kripalani put out a bunch of interesting posts on Facebook, each one of them the spoken codswallop of some reigning BJP luminary, I perked up. We are clearly ruled by a gallery of unscientific, well, idiots. That too is Greek. It means "an uneducated, ignorant, inexperienced and common person".