Another Thought

Thoughts are a great temptation. The indulgence is effortless and instant. One just slips into a thought, as if it were a banana peel and then endlessly slides or perhaps glides? Truly, thoughts are a result of the past. Even ones ponderings on the future, are driven by ones past experiences, follies, tragedies, dreams and desires. And by this age, you tend to acquire a hull full of past, a train full of past, metric tons of past, and all of it demands to used, as if it were cotton! Be woven into threads of thought in unimaginable sequences, dipped and dyed in countless emotions to create soft & indulgent experiences. And such is the experience of simply being lost in thought.  To be lost in thought, is to be completely free of the world's demands. This is different from say thinking, which is intentional. This is also not the same as being thoughtful, which is akin to being intentionally considerate. Their is nothing contrived or intentional or planned, in being lost. It happe...

  We have long misunderstood Gita and Gandhi.  The Gita, doesn't advocate violence, and Gandhi, does advocate violence when necessary. What does this mean?  The Gita's setting in the battle field, atop a chariot has many symbolisms. That man is akin to a chariot. That life is battle field. The purpose of the Gita, was to get a wistful Arjuna, to stand up and kill his own kin. This is evidently absurd for a spiritual scripture.  Yet the Gita makes a very clear distinction between the violence of the mind and the violence of the material. It prioritizes the first, and trivializes the second. Because what are we, but flesh and bone? Instead, it draws us to our mind, where there is great violence & suffering due to illusion or Maya. We are not the body, nor the mind. We are consciousness, that which arises and dissipates. And hence, one must carry on with one's role in this transitory world, no matter what it entails. So effectively, what the Gita advocates is a stil...

Only real change can lie at the heart of real change. The real strength of ideas comes from belief in those ideas by enough number of people. Sometimes, ideas, when not actively applied or engaged with, loose their strength, just as body parts not exercised lose their vitality.  Democracy, or democratic improvements across the world, have perhaps been a result of two forces. A widespread disenchantment with the ruling dispensation, coupled with a conviction in the elite sections of society for change. But then perhaps, this is not just the case for democracy. This is the prerequisite for any idea to gain traction in a society.  An elite that has an idea or is the in grip of that idea, for ideas are the muse of the well-fed. And then there is wider group of people, who must be sufficiently disenchanted, to be willing to rally behind new ideas.  Democratic ideas in India, were an elite project, which found approval in the masses as a result of the disenchantment with the Br...

Enough of these philosophers! If philosophers could shape the world, then what need would there be for democracies? From wrecking prisons in France to filling prisons in India, it is the masses who said no to tyranny and yes to the rule of justice and humanity.  Indeed, we have discussed thinkers like Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau over the last few articles, who used the imaginary ploy of State of Nature to reveal abstract concepts of social contract , natural rights and   general will . However, the modern democracy that we see, with millions of people, a constitution, a cabinet, a parliament, courts & elections, never came out of some mythical " State of Nature ". All of these wonderful innovations, while inspired by those concepts, and being as revolutionary as the steam engine or electricity, were brought into force by men and women in the steady course of history.  Secondly, in our journey from early Greece to medieval France, we have focused only on Europe, as if...

Yes, you can, if you renege on your promise to be free.  But first, let's talk about Reason. The importance of reason in democracy is often talked about in academic circles and is not lost on us in today's time. While reason was, one of the great re-discoveries of the enlightenment period, our protagonist, Jean Jacques Rousseau wasn't quite on its' side. Instead, he is considered the founder of Romanticism. The founder of a body of ideas that preached feeling,  passionate activity and radical liberty, over the mundane and calculated, a whiff of which we may get towards the end here. He is also credited for the rise of modern nationalism and we all know what passionate nationalism looks like.  So much for Rousseau's "sensibility", his work on political theory in the book, The Social Contract lent itself a lot more to reason. He sets out a primary problem, one very similar to the questions posed by the famed duo, Hobbes and Locke.  Not another Social Contrac...

Why do we do, what we do? It's usually what the society wants us to do, an act of conformity. Be it your mother's insistence on sticking to your job or your friends' persistence on leaving it, its rarely a purely self conscious act. Of all the actions we carry out everyday, the most onerous and time consuming of all are our economic activities, or the ones we do to make living, get a house, buy some food. Our economic activity , whereby we engage in the sale of our labor in exchange for money, is the most essential act for survival. Money is unavoidable, imperative and is something for which many trade even more than labor, their dignity and freedom. While economic activity may fill the tummy and rent a shelter, who do we share it with? Who do we rejoice with about our prosperity? One hence, spends time in social activity too. In talking to our family and hanging out with our friends, the social sphere is very essential to our well-being, once our survival is taken ...