The Unanswerables

To me, the Mahabharata does not answer questions but it only raises the questions - the unanswerables. It is not important to get the answers but to understand the ways of human beings and the humanity. After reading the treatise, perhaps the greatest one ever produced by the humanity, one feels sad. This is the human predicament, which we must try to avoid by applying the best of our agency, but at the end we must learn to live with it. The most tragic case in the epic, to me, is the adharma inbuilt in the dharma of the Bhishma. The good, the bad, and something abominable like gambling one’s wife or the attempt of disrobing a lady were so badly entangled that only an all annihilating war could resolve the mounting crisis. I must repeat, a human being is endowed with a very perceptive consciousness. We must cultivate it and sensibilities so acquired help us to sympathise and empathise. And thus we tend to be good.

(A comment in a facebook debate initiated by Swastik Sharma on what is good and what is bad. - NKJ)

Liberalization

Liberalization is the process of undertaking measures for expanding the scope of freedoms so that all individuals are more individual and more human. It is the decollectivization of economy and life. Some societies take a long course from its state of being feudal to becoming liberal. The prolonged slavery makes the folks to accept the collectivized state as normal. Contrarily and the least appreciated fact is that unhindered and unlimited play of private property, individual enterprises and voluntary initiatives only ensure substantive freedom. All other systems are makeovers of the bygone order of feudalism wherein people are forced to feel that they are free.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Indian Democracy

The fact I underline here is that India’s is the truest democracy despite of so many of its grave flaws. And it is so because of the values the Indic civilization inheres. The Indianness is the belief in the essential unity of the existential, and more importantly, it is the celebration of the diversity as the manifestations of the One. This is the belief which translates into India’s commitment to democracy. The difference between India and other democracies is that democracy in India represents its spirit whereas at other places this has been the product of historical circumstances. It is true that India adopted the methods of democracy from elsewhere but the way it has advanced transcends the legacy of all such foreign sourcing. 

However, the present problem is that democracies are facing crises and freedoms are under threat worldwide. The main reason for this is that democracies are facing competition from ruthless autocracies or treacherous fake democracies as well as non-democratic ideas and traditions. Such regimes or the adherents of such ideas work with total impunity whereas the democratic regimes have to follow some norms of accountability. This puts democracies at a disadvantageous position vis-à-vis non-democracies. 

Democracy needs to be defended and expanded. It is a question of our dignity and so of others. India and we Indians must do this globally. The spirit of India, which could be resurrected out of the deep abyss after the lapse of so many centuries and rather recently, needs to be reinforced. However, such an endeavour does not need dramatic things like alliances, missions, movements, wars, sanctions, persuasions, so on and so forth. India can devise levers for lifting democracy without challenging anyone. These are simple things like promoting internationalism in all walks of life and supporting free and fair trade. If India sets the standards, these would be the global standards. The humanity needs a reliable pivot. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

Liberating Libra

Technologies facilitate and necessitate seamless transactions throughout the world. The new and fast advancing technologies create templates which automate scripting of ever renewed internationalism, and so of humanism. There are indeed regulatory issues but for that the need again is to institute international regulatory mechanisms empowered enough to enforce the rules of global good against the gigantic powers, political, economic, and of their combinations. The negative part of the story is that all the big players seek to curb any new thing that negates their role. The answer is a new Comprehensive Global Social Contact having provisions harmonizing the interests of the individuals, of all sorts of groups and of the global community. The sovereign entities must cede some portions of their powers to create a space for the sovereignty of the global community, and for the global citizens. The sovereigns of the world must allow another sovereign to come up, though of a different genre.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Constitutional Formality

Constitutional formality is of worth only when it conforms to the spirit of constitutionalism. What basically helps us is not the labyrinth of laws, fundamental or otherwise, but our adherence to dharma, which combines truthfulness, justice, and the sense of empathy emanating from the idea of oneness of all beings. And at the same time, dharma is also a call for rescuing the human beings who have fallen to adharma. Any issue must be judged from the viewpoint of dharma and the passing emotions and ideas, or formalities, must not hold us.

Niraj Kumar Jha

The History and the Social Conflicts

We have histories not the history as past is ideologically accounted. The quest for the history has ever eluded the humanity. Can there be only one history? There cannot be one but we can approximate as Max Weber does in the Protestant Ethic. Yet, people in general would not recognize the best approximation as being so. One way of determining is the democratic way. Where does the larger world stand? The statement smacks of majoritarianism or the sway of superior power but there is another test, which clarifies the issue at least to my satisfaction. Does that majority view allow the contesting view to co-exist; does the view respect the other view? If yes, then the first view is correct to me and I hold them as the acceptable purveyor of history. But the contesting view may not be benign. We must judge their worldview on the same parameters and if that does not meet the standards then the venomous part of the view must be neutralized.

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Menace of the Meaning-Deficit

Some cinematic narratives, in particular the period ones or the fantastical ones of the pre-modern, along with the cricketing obsession have very serious political implications. They eclipse the formal intellectualism in their impact. Nearly a three hours long lone drama may sideline the advance of humanity made over years and decades in the case of a certain people. The professional intellectualism must see that the meaning-deficit, the way it impacts through the above-mentioned medium, does not work in the same way in their case. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

मीडिया और हम

मीडिया परोसता है जिसकी मांग होती है. मीडिया वह भी परोसता है जो सुरुचिपूर्ण और उचित है. भले ही उसकी मांग नगण्य हो. हम अपनी रुचियों और प्रवृत्तियों को भी परखें.

मीडिया हमें गढ़ता है. हम भी मीडिया को गढ़ते हैं.

मीडिया पक्ष लेती है. हमें पता कैसे चलता है?

हम भी पक्ष लेते हैं. हम इसको नहीं स्वीकार करते हैं.

अपनी बुद्धि गिरवी रखने के लिए कोई हमें नहीं कहता.

मीडिया वास्तव में हमारी प्रतिकृति है, अन्य किसी भी अभिकरण से अधिक.

नीरज कुमार झा

The Invasion of the Idiots

“Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.”

- Umberto Eco (Trans. T. Bolin)

Nobody would perhaps mind the statement as each one considers oneself as a wise one and feels invaded by the others, the idiots. The problem, as pointed out by Eco, however, is an old criticism of democracy and any democratic space, wherein or where heads count, brains do not. Hitherto, it appears, if Eco's observation is taken as valid, that the idiots remained sidelined and hardly made an impact, whereas the wise ones were in the helm and guided the society through amiable association. This, tragically, is a gross misconception. It has been in the very symposia of the wise, the anti-philosophies and the anti-knowledge systems of thoughts proliferated and one having the patronage of the raw power prevailed over others. In reality, the knowledge hardly commanded power ever, and mostly power was counted as knowledge. And now it is the social media, which gives us the opportunity to fight for our reasoned cause in the minds of the peopple and make knowledge democratic and by only making knowledge democratic we can fight out the tyranny of the ideologies regarded as the fulcrums of perfect wisdom in the views of their respective adherents. These were the ideologies, which have been tormenting our lives in the worst way from the begining of civlization. It is the power of the social media that it provides the smallest of minority or each one having access to it, and of course even to a loony, some space. Knowledge never had a better chance to prove itself.

Niraj Kumar Jha

d NEP 19

The contemporary schooling we suffer had been devised in the heydays of ethno-militarism, imperial-possessionism, and thus, therefore, in effect, in the age of reductionism of everythng to instrumentation. It has been an effective bulwark against joyous learning, what the learning is in its essence, the development of imaginative faculty, and the compassionate orientation of human mind. The present evolution, in the form of detailed humanism, and of course, in relative moralism, and hence, on the course of the deeper realisation of the sensibilities of human psyche, makes the road-roller approach of education totally redundant. The times demand we learn to think.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Trying to Wake Up Out of a Bad Dream

Most of the must doings, so perceived, have been ideologically determined. First must do is to be dogma free but it is like trying to wake up out of a bad dream as sometimes you know that you are dreaming and you only dream waking up.

Niraj Kumar Jha

A Discovery

Being neck deep into nuisance, discharging, negotiating, and living it, turned out to be his lifetime prime responsiblity. He has been a responsible person in a responsible position throughout and has been doing all these very responsibly. A caricatured epistemology when shapes back existencial realities or ontology, if it can be said so, travesty itself becomes lives like this one.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Tears

Something went wrong, and She, perhaps therefore, created tears. But even tears are not spared and this has been an age-old practice. The idiom 'crocodile tears' says so. When tearfulness turns political, even then, very unfortunately, we hardly notice the gaping holes in the veneer we call civilization.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Science of Politics

The science of politics is the most critical necessity. Nothing affects human life more than politics and hence only the science must shape our politics. Heavenly, hellish or hideous, what our life may be, depends entirely on our political knowledge. Unfortunately our operative political perception and actions have been determined by the pseudosciences. We lament our predicament but never deconstruct our operative political philosophy. This is the tragedy.

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Thoughtfulness and the Thoughtlessness

To my utter bewilderment,
I found
there was no distinction between
the thoughtfulness
and the thoughtlessness.
Horror stricken
I looked around.
Met my eyes a landscape,
absolutely degraded,
reduced to sand dunes.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Democracy

Amidst us, the general understanding of the democracy is genetically determined. The primitive man who sits in the human genes identifies democracy with the primal ethos, which envisions each man replicating the other man. They want to reduce the civilized men to the specimen. 

Democracy is not that. It is about civilization; it is about private, personal, and advancement; it is about enterprise. The 'great' visionaries installed democracy by making people stand in long queues everywhere. Rationed living is not democracy. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

Sophistry and Wisdom

We have been told by a great master that sophistry hazards the humanity by dislodging wisdom but the greater hazard it causes is not told. And it is this - sophistry foists monstrosity in the name of wisdom as its antithesis. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

Ideas make all the difference

Ideas make all the difference. This is my reckoning. I saw all the big upheavals, wars, unimaginable technological breakthroughs taking place during this very short span of the 21st century, and yet things remain all the same in terms of the socio-political structures. People want change, as the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street, or the India against Corruption demonstrated, and yet there is hardly any change. Why is it so? There is no idea of change, the new we want. The changes are already there but there is no change. We are waiting for the idea of the new. We need to imagine a new to convert all the new phenomena into a socio-political new. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

Civilizations under Rapid Upgrade

Things are happening, phenomenally substantive and rapid, almost on monthly basis. A month of our times may dwarf a century of the bygone ages in terms of the changes it brings. Since people live with it, generally they don’t realize that they are undergoing almost a fresh revolution every day. One of such revolutions is the rapidity of the expansion and quality enhancement of the services people in growing numbers receive through apps. All these have very comprehensive and deep implications for life in general. The peoples would undergo dramatic changes in their worldviews and habits very soon. All these have political fallouts too. Certainly the devilish folks would rush in with their spanners and the good citizens therefore need  to be cautious about such vitiating evil elements. 

Niraj Kumar Jha