Liberty

Liberty, in essence,  is not about doing what one fancies, even with the caveat that such acts should not cause harm or discomfort to others, as it is generally assumed to be. It is also not as it is generally defined that it is the availability of conditions which make people be at their best. Would not a requirement of such conditionality cast the state of so many people as unfree though they may be living quite comfortably, untroubled by others?   The essential liberty lies in one's consciousness of human worth and dignity. And it manifests as the state of liberty in mutual recognition of the same - human worth and dignity. Liberty is more of an attitude than about some conditions. Liberty is thus a cultural state.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

The Way to Common Good

Most of the people, more so if they are educated, are not equipped to know the common good. The educationists often dress doctrinaire ideas as educational topics. The best thing is that people should talk about their personal interests, their inconveniences, problems, and expectations, and in this way people may reach a good equilibrium. The tragedy is that most people do not know even their personal interests, and they end up often ideating an ideal model of society. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

About Teaching

Today, I heard a policy advisor advocating flipped classrooms and sharing the idea with a godman that students should be made to learn from the recording of lectures delivered by the best expert in the world on a topic, and teachers and students only do activities around the topics. 

I too thought like that earlier, but I realized during these devastating times that this cannot be the best method of teaching and learning. I summarise the whole idea in one sentence first. Teaching and learning can not be other than a lived experience that necessitates the presence of a person before you who lives the knowledge he or she disseminates.

A classroom is a unique place. The teachers come to know of their students and the students of their teachers and the classrooms build a rapport, which brings in education there. The milieu, the cultural consonance, and the connection are the crucial components of education. 

And the teaching is not about repeating things, as the godman was suggesting, but it is about evolving in the role and the evolution manifests in the very first class of a teacher. And gifted teachers seed the ethos of evolving at their first engagement. Teaching cannot be separated from its magical aspect, it cannot be fully mechanical. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Poor Fella

Oh, my dear!
You deify almost every human role,
one or the other every day.
But I think that
on one day in a year,
or, at least, once in your lifetime,
invite your humanity to your place,
and be in the company of the poor soul,
forgetting all the divinities for a while.
Not a burden on the earth,
let the fella feel this on that day. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Poor Fella

Oh, my dear!
You deify almost every human role,
almost every day.
At least one day a year,
or once in your lifetime,
invite your humanity to your place,
and be in the company of the poor soul.
Not a burden on the earth,
let the fella feel on that day.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Philosophizing: don't bother, there are others to take care of

To my understanding, philosophizing is embedded in human nature. Every person tries to make sense of one's existence, and, as such, one tends to philosophize. Professional philosophers or/and persons having no job other than philosophizing provision readymade philosophies to people. And there are the ideologues who seek to monopolize the business of philosophizing and insist on the use of their one-time product forever. People generally fall for them as they can avoid the pain of exercising their minds. And people must avoid this pain, makes the biggest enterprise in the world. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Leap Forward: The Need of Thinking the Necessities of Times

The pandemic made the world leap forward in the direction it was moving. Among other things, now we see that a person is more isolated and self-centered. After the crisis is over, the normal would be new in the sense that people would rely less on their community and even on family and more on public services. Life and more so death would be more mechanical, aloof, and secular and correspondingly less organic, communal, and ritualized. 

There are aspects, positive and negative, about the dynamics: for instance, real sociability has ebbed over time but at the same time we have a virtual world to socialize in a non-intrusive fashion. Moreover, the earlier sociability had this unsavory aspect that happiness of some was always at the cost of less happiness of some others. 

The foundational shifts would bring in inevitable changes and one should instead of bemoaning the loss of the old ways of life should think of the necessities of times. And the most important thing needed is the maximum rationalization of the order. It would translate to, in the context of the argument here, the seamless availability of services, hasslefree and cheating free. 

Thinking the new is the critical need of the times. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

Religion v the Right to Philosophize

Philosophy imposed is religion. A piece of philosophy served with the sword, articulated in captivating rhetoric, propagated and practiced by exemplary conviction and dedication, put across through magical performances, or passed on by mixing moral value with cock-and-bull stories, imposes itself on people. Philosophy must remain a personal tool of making sense of existence. Personal autonomy must be recognized and respected with this right to philosophizing. Denial of this right is unjust and the breeding ground of so many ills. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

Education: the Endeavour

Education is the toughest of the human endeavours. Things you have to beat, you know, include among others your genetic coding and the language that makes you express yourself. And this is why it is very rare that we encounter an educated one. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Post-university Age: A Hypothesis

The university system, as it prevails today, emerged in the medieval world and outgrew its age to become the fountains of the modern age. They emerged as adjuncts to the churches but developed to take away the main job of the churches – the education. They also moved from the domain of the Pope to the that of the King, and became the main agency of the state for disciplining the subjects. Today, with the technologies (ICT), education is about to shift to the corporations; the big corporations, or the public limited companies, would be the imparter of required skills and also the guardians of public morality. The universities would exist as churches do but education would move closer to the people, to their closer ownership. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Ideological Peril

Ideologies, no matter how crude or sophisticated they may be, give credibility to our existential phantasies. And this is their anavoidable charm and we try to buttress those wild thoughts with our agency and material constructions. Overall, these deny reality, degrade real human beings, distort our agency, and make our life more miserable than the original from which we wanted to escape. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Shishupal Moment

Is there a transcendental mechanism of divine justice? The believers vouch for this. One may doubt this but the reality is no different even if it is viewed from a secular perspective. Persons or peoples commit wrongs and they have to pay for that; here I am talking about the phenomenon beyond the legal mechanism which societies devise for ensuring justice. And here it is not meant to explain the plight of people suffering disasters or calamities, natural or not so. Some people have the leeway; they go on doing so for say ninety-nine times, but it comes to them finally as Shishupal faced his nemesis at the hundredth time. Sometimes, it is delayed further and actually the descendants have to face the consequences of the misdeeds of their ancestors. Is it justified? The answer is not despairing as this happens only when a person willingly remains part of the heritage, that is, the person remains embedded in the legacy and thereby the person also carries the liability for the punishment. How does this happen? The existential reality is all about inter-connectedness or interdependence and though all exist as separate entities but as parts of a greater whole. Our consciousness is shaped by our personal experiences, as we can make out apparently, but it also carries inputs from our genetic coding and so many unknowns inform our consciousness, that is to say that our consciousness works as an agency of collective consciousness, transcending immediate time and space, too and it applies to species other than the human beings. All persons and their collectives act and these inevitably invite responses. If somebody commit wrongs, he may avoid the consequences but things keep on accumulating and these come back. Here is another issue, other than this obvious one, which is the intent of this post to underline. That is an act may have intrinsic merit or demerit, irrespective of what we mean by it or propagate it to be, or what the persons other than the doers perceive it to be or believe it to be and that intrinsic virtue or vice leads to corresponding consequences. And if one has to avoid the undesirable results of his doings, the person must look up to science than to the unexamined received moral precepts However, the things do not work so neatly or accurately but we see the happenings at broader scale and we get the idea of this phenomenon.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Veil of Ignorance

Not a hypothetical Rawlsian veil of ignorance but a very real one obstructs our viewing of the future. Simply we do not know what is there in the future for humanity. The aggressive reassertions of the old values and the entrenched forces though  give the impression of the return of the old twentieth century order, rather that may  only be the last bright flickering of a dying order. The present is anything but about the past but it is the big take off point for a new future with massive build-up of forces happening right now, that we live with not to realise their criticality. The new norms, practices, institutions, instruments and their absences are getting into our lives thick and fast. 

This makes the times critical for studying the unfolding of new realities with most care as the future is going to suck us into its unknown belly. This is the time for renewing contracts as people may not be sure of what may be in store for them in the future, and they would consent for a fair order with relative ease. The tasks we have before us are much more daunting than Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau had in their trying times. However, the bursts of technological innovations only contrast with the dumbness of collective minds. We are faltering badly and we may be inviting lots of pain when the new takes us along anyhow. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

Pure Secularism

 A pandemic earlier caused a separation; politics divorced religion. This pandemic we see the unease of science.

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Utopia of Statelessness

It is not only the ideology, which misleads us with such a utopia, but even the classical liberals when they say that the state is a necessary evil, they too fantasize a stateless society. The point is that this is unrealistic. Optimisation of freedoms does require a collective authority. The intellectual challenge is to fashion this organically. The protocols are already there. Rule of law geared to facilitation of freedoms by ensuring a just order can be operational provided we apply understanding instead of extra wisdom we all possess. Government we can have organically societal instead of being sui generis extraneous.

Niraj Kumar Jha

The WWII Internationalism

The internationlaism, which grew out of the the great war during the  later part of the twentieth century, is dying now. I don't think that it would be appropriate to say that it survived the Cold War. Rather I find that the Cold War was imbedded into its logic. Teh internationalism was more a design for global domination by a few powers than about the  pursuit of global good. Now the order is crumbling primiarily because of its own inherent cotradictions, and by the rise of another power, seeking global hegemony, and ethnic resurgences everywhere. It's high time for democracies and freedom loving people from all over the world to unite and work for a new internationalism facilitating freedoms all over the world. Otherwise, the world is going to face weakened resolve and agency for fighting global crises and check the rise of evil forces. 

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Science

I learnt that science is the systematic study of a phenomenon. But what I realise is that science is about honest and intelligent pursuit of knowledge, and the methods follow. There is another dimension too, i.e. science being applied against human good. And thus honesty, as put in the context above, must mean to cover morality, the commitment to human good, along with objectivity.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Online Education

I am not aware of the ongoing debates on the online education but I can say that it is the future of education. The brick and mortar educatonal institutions would remain there as the lived centres of education parallel to the virtual mode of learning. The longer we remain in denial,more we are going to lose. And more readily we adopt and adapt, more we are likely to remain in the race for everything globally today.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Social Dynamics

Social dynamics is a very long term affair; the causative factors may span over millennia. The focus on the current conditions and actors helps little in understanding and in managing social affairs. And more profoundly, it is the intellectualist state (operative epistemology) over time which determines the unfolding social phenomena. We often overvalue great calamities or upheavals. The plague epidemic in the 14th century triggered a chain of movements bringing modernity to Europe but hardly affected Asia, from where it originated. The Arab Spring, mostly an ICT generated movement, sank the Arab nations more in obscurantism and authoritarianism. We may also talk about a completed project of recent history, the Soviet one. The promised egalitarianism never materialised and it reduced into a very dehumanising totalitarianism. And yet, the desirable changes within a foreseeable future are possible, provided we realise that wishes are not horses. They need a scientific understanding of the social organism and commensurate policy measures to materialise. A proper probing of the current must move beyond the contemporary.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Democracy Mechanism

You know the law of gravity and you also know that the rocket science is a different ballgame. You know democracy as a principle but the democracy of order, constitutionalism in operation, is a different ballgame. Most of the probems we perceive, face, or suffer as such require repairs or upgrades of the democracy mechanism but the problem is that the same elements, deficient in skills, who script malwares cry hoarse at the machine's malfunctioning. And the problem ironically afflicts even the developed democracies. We need proper knowledge and skills first.

Niraj Kumar Jha

On Entertainment

The stuffs we use for entertainment exploit our psychological vulnerabilities to the hilt. And in turn, these vitiate our mentality. This is the malady of the times that entertainment overwhelms our being and cognition (socialisation process) and thus we become the prisoners of the vilest of the minds. We mock our lives by caricaturing the make-beliefs and the fakes. The conduct of the US policeman is not a different case. By pressing the neck of the captive with his knee, hands in pocket, he was trying to create an impressive visual. None of the political commentators noted the impact the Bahubali duo made on the political dynamics of India. The entertainment contents need intellectual scrutiny, and intellectualism needs to be vested with intellect.

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Business of Knowing

One who is in know, knows that knowledges are illusive. Thence, when wise persons speak and act, they think of and are watchful of the effects, the counter-effects, and the after-effects of their words, decisions, and actions for long term. Such people are very alert readers of the past and of the contemporary social processes, and when they speak up or take up anything, that is a studied measure. And they are always ready for course –correction and even reversal of any measure. Constant watchfulness is their credo. If one judges, the person rarely finds many of the wise men so designated and more so of their followers fitting this criterion. Over generations, great numbers of human beings have been sacrificed or violated in the name of the wisdom, which turned out to be or remain misconstrued. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

बहुत सारे हैं,

बहुत सारे हैं,
डाल को सही जगह बैठकर काटते हैं.
गिरते हैं,
पूँजीवाद को कारण बताते हैं.

नीरज कुमार झा

World Order: The Covid Fatality

We have now two new landmarks to identify the 20th century: 1918 and 2019, the years of the begining of two great pandemics. The world, which we saw to emerge after the First War, take its form after the Second War, run its course through the Cold War, retire in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, finally ended in 2019 with the outbreatk of the Corona Pandemic. Now we are between the end of the old world and the emergence of the new world. Among the early fatalities of the Corona Pandemic is the World Order. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

आइडीआलजी बनाम विचारधारा

सामान्यतः आंग्लभाषा के शब्द आइडीआलजी के लिए हिन्दी में विचारधारा शब्द का प्रयोग किया जाता है. यह नितांत अनुचित है. विचारधारा विचारों का मुक्त प्रवाह है जो भारतीय परम्परा में देखी जा सकती है. आइडीआलजी की अवधारणा के प्रभाव के आधार पर इस शब्द का अनुवाद विचार-भंवर या वैचारिकी-पिंजर हो सकता है, अन्य कदापि नहीं. वास्तव में आइडीआलजी बुद्धि-विरोध की योजना है. यह कुत्सित प्रवृत्ति का विन्यास है जिसका उद्देश्य निष्ठावान और परिश्रमी जनों का दोहन है. इसकी प्रकृति संक्रामक और आनुवंशिक होती है. यह जनमानस के दुर्बल अंशों को लक्ष्य बनाकर उसके सोच को अधीन कर लेती है. यह लोगों के सम्मुख एक लुभावन गल्प प्रस्तुत करती है जिसमें उन्हें अपना उद्धार दिखता है. गल्पों में से कुछ मृत्यु से पूर्व की और कुछ उसके बाद की स्थिति से सम्बंधित होते हैं. जॉर्ज ओरवेल की पुस्तिका इस मानवीय त्रासदी का सटीक चित्रण है. यह विचारवान व्यक्तियों का दायित्व है कि वह भिन्न आइडीआलजी के भंवरजाल को तोड़े. जैसे वायरस को मात्र विज्ञान के बल पर लड़ा जा सकता है वैसे ही विचारधारा का प्रतिकार मात्र वैज्ञानिक सोच के आधार पर किया जा सकता है. यहाँ इस तथ्य को रखना समीचीन है कि विज्ञान के लिए सबसे चुनौती अज्ञान नहीं वरन छद्मविज्ञान है.

नीरज कुमार झा

Democratisation of Discourse

On the social media, most of the people demonstrate their belief of embodying the perfect knowledge and this unnerve many of those who see themselves as having the natural claim or credentials to speak for all and sundry. What appears uncharitable to most of the people is that their worth is not recognised by their fellows. Such a feeling comes from their cognitive makeup, which sees the world as hierarchical, and in a space where there is no force applied to place people, they place themselves at the top of the world in wisdom or sagacity. For instance, in their imagination, many subalterns often think that they could do better than generals. One needs, in fact, to get rid of this hurt sentimentality. The point is to respect others and argue one’s case with humility. Only by doing so, we can enrich public life, benefiting one and all. We must accept, rather welcome, the democratisation of discourse. We must celebrate democracy. We must cheer our fellows. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

Do we need to bother about ignorance?

Many wise people hold that ignorance is our biggest problem. But the reality is that ignorance or the lack of knowledge is the least menacing compared to the other problems in the realm of epistemology. I would list them in the order of harm they cause, the most harmful comes first. 

1. Doctored knowledge - Ideologies, in its two variants – ecclesiastical and temporal, which substitute knowledges with make-believes or pseudo-reasoning, perpetuating themselves on the strength of indoctrination. These fanciful ideas find ready adherents among the vulnerable people or the dimwits.

2. Illusion of knowledge – Indoctrinated or ill educated persons as a result of bad education have this affliction. A brush with some knowledge sources gives such illusion too. And on the other end, there are people who are very well-read but in the absence of sufficient and correct training they are unable to handle the inputs they get. 

3. Lack of knowledge – This is the third category. People are not educated, have no access to knowledge-sources. They may seemingly talk inane things. But it is necessary to qualify this position. Knowledge is stratum related. What may be inanity for you is effective wisdom for some. 

I am a case of the third category but without the benefit of the caveat I have added. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

Social Media and the Pandemic

Thanks to the information and communications technology (ICT), everyone appears to be well-informed. The lack of information is not an issue. Some people, supposedly educated and well-positioned, are seen acting inappropriately, but it is not the problem of communication but of education. The ICT is the biggest defence against the scourge. In this context it is very pertinent to bring to the general notice that it is the liberal economic order, which has provided the media, the gadgets and enabled the people to avail these. Though making cutting edge technological commodities generally available is only one of the benefits of free markets. The biggest gift of a rationalist order, i.e, the liberal order, is democracy itself. The first response of a non-democratic order is to suppress the informaiton about a brewing crisis. And if it remains uncontained, a manageable crisis becomes explosive. Our faith in selves and freedoms are our strengths. The context of this post is that often calamitous times reactivate the collectivists and they try to gain by (mis)appropriating human vulnerablities.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Diogenes of Sinope की तलाश

भरी दोपहरी, बीच बाज़ार,
बत्ती लेकर वह फिर निकला है.
भारी भीड़ों में धक्का खाते
वह एक अदद शहरी की तलाश में है.

नीरज कुमार झा

अध्ययन, अनुसन्धान, और संधान

अध्ययन, अनुसंधान, और संधान का महत्त्व नहीं समझते
नहीं समझते कि अनुच्छेदों के आयात से जीवन नहीं बदलते

नीरज कुमार झा

पढ़ाई की समझ

मौके की बात है,
कोई आखेटक है
और कोई आखेट है.
कारण है कि
हर कोई आखेट पर है,
और नृवंश निषिद्ध नहीं है.
यह तब है जब
सभी में लिखित समझौता भी है.
आवश्यकता,
जीवन और मरण वाली,
शर्तों की तार्किकता व व्यवहारिकता
और उनके क्रियान्वयन के
समझ की है.
सभी पढ़ाई-पढ़ाई कहते तो हैं
पढ़ाई का मर्म समझते नहीं हैं.
पढ़ाई से आती है समझ,
लेकिन उसके लिए आवश्यक है
कि हो पढ़ाई की समझ.

नीरज कुमार झा