Another Thought

I n today's day and age, when our leading lights pour praise on ideals of democracy and rights, it can seem very natural to be in a polity based on representative democracy. In popular media and discourse, any state that is autocratic or communist is often frowned upon and considered unstable. But it is useful to remember that it wasn't always this way. In fact, for most of the time following the collapse of Athenian democracy, up to the American revolution, a democracy was frowned upon and considered unstable. None but Athenians themselves were primarily to blame for this. From Plato to Thucydides, most of them wrote in not so glowing terms of their own invention. What however was more accepted across Europe and the world, as the basis for political system, was the so called divine right of kings. Divine Rights The doctrine of divine rights, essentially in defense of monarchical absolutism, suggested that   kings derived their  authority  from God and could not...

I n the previous blog post, we briefly discussed the opinions of famous ancient Athenians on Democracy. We witnessed their skepticism and their doubts, which bore out of their solid moral foundations. It was only 2000 years later that resounding ideas of state again emerged, and this time it was from England, where trouble was brewing. The English weren't always sipping tea and sinking into their armchairs in vain colonial pride. In fact, tea was only made popular by the Catherine of Braganza, the wife of Charles II who ruled England during the restoration period, beginning from 1660. However, during the two decades preceding this, the English Civil War(or the war of the three kingdoms) brought the island to its knees, as it engulfed the nation in a spate of massacre and bloodshed, that took over 200,000 lives. Thomas Hobbes  It was in these troubled times that Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, published his political treatises, Leviathan and De Cive . We shall brief...

G eorge W Bush, the erstwhile president of The United States of America, in the October of 2005, was making a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington. It was 3 years into the now infamous Iraq War, when he famously made the following statement "It is true that the seeds of freedom have only recently been planted in Iraq — but democracy, when it grows, is not a fragile flower; it is a healthy, sturdy tree". On June 8, 2006, the Republican Speaker of the US Congress, John Boehner said "Now that's what the fight is all about in this part of the world(read Iraq), planting seeds of democracy". Planting these seeds was a messy affair though, with an estimated 98000 excess deaths or more in less than 2 years since the invasion. That the ideals of democracy and freedom were used to justify a bloody war would make anyone question the real reasons behind the war. But it should also make one question the ideals of democracy and freedom itself. Are the...

This is a summary of a part of the first chapter 'Perceptions of the Past', from Romila Thapar's book Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Prinsep Ghat, Kolkata, in memory of James Prinsep, an English scholar, orientalist and antiquary. Romila Thapar lends great simplicity to her writing by sparing the amateur from crashing into a wall of academic babble. Instead she slowly introduces the reader to nuances of the subject. In the book's introduction, she brings clarity to the nature and meaning of history as a subject, when she says "History is no information that is handed down unchanged from generation to generation". In a line, she demolishes the common myth surrounding history, as an objective series of events, as a narrative that cannot be otherwise, as a true story. She further says "Historical situations need to be explained and explanations draw on analyses of the evidence, providing generalizations that derive from the logic of the a...