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