Niraj Kumar Jha
मंगलवार, 26 अगस्त 2025
Needed: an Epistemological Overhaul
Niraj Kumar Jha
रविवार, 24 अगस्त 2025
Technology as the Cornerstone of National Power
In this fast-changing environment, a nation needs to invigorate its key institutions, particularly universities, research centres and corporations, so they function at their highest potential. These institutions form the backbone of a nation's innovation ecosystem and are vital to building resilience against the often abrasive and unpredictable forces that characterise international power relations.
Entrepreneurs, especially techpreneurs and edupreneurs, also play a pivotal role in driving innovation and societal progress. Their efforts should be met with streamlined procedures, supportive policies and easy access to resources. Creating a facilitative environment that encourages agility and responsiveness will enable both technological growth and wider societal benefit.
To protect its sovereignty and ensure long-term prosperity, a nation must regard technological leadership not as a choice but as a strategic necessity. This requires a unified vision that brings together education, research, industry and entrepreneurship into a strong, forward-looking framework for national development.
Niraj Kumar Jha
शनिवार, 23 अगस्त 2025
Knowledge: Organic, Mechanical, and Pretension
Worst of all is the pretension of knowledge. Amid ignorance, a certain class of people, or those who assume the role voluntarily, take up “knowledgeing,” parading the act of making others knowledgeable, as a lofty mission, often with a touch of mysticism. They glorify “knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” which serves no real purpose and often does more harm than good. More often than not, such pretension flourishes under public patronage.
I wonder if I belong to this last category. Yet, by pointing out this very tendency, I may be spared the charge of pretension. What I seek, in truth, is not abstraction but the real, knowledge that speaks to life as it is lived here and now, even as I strive to think of it on a larger canvas.
Niraj Kumar Jha
बुधवार, 20 अगस्त 2025
Cinema and Reality
A cinematic narrative typically identifies a problem and resolves it. Yet, as the demands of the medium dictate, the problem is often exaggerated and the resolution unrealistic. Cinema transports viewers into a world where desires are fulfilled and grievances avenged. It offers an escape from reality, something troubled minds may need to recuperate, but it cannot, by itself, bring about meaningful social change. On the contrary, it can create the illusion that justice has been served. It may also lead people to believe that their fantasies and prejudices are real and justified. This, in turn, can drive them towards inappropriate behaviour. Ultimately, cinema often exacerbates problems rather than resolving them. The responsibility of engaging with reality rests with academia, which must work in concert with other institutions and agencies to shape and improve actual conditions.
Niraj Kumar Jha
सोमवार, 18 अगस्त 2025
Shifting Balance
For India, the lesson is clear. Citizens must be enthusiastic supporters of governmental measures to enhance the ease of doing business and foster an environment conducive to technological innovation. Only then can India remain competitive in a changing world. After all, the strength of a democracy lies in its people—thinking clearly, acting responsibly, and rising to the occasion.
Niraj Kumar Jha
रविवार, 17 अगस्त 2025
Reimagining Democracy in the Digital Age
A new democratic model must rest on three pillars: universal access to quality education, digital literacy that enables citizens to navigate the information age, and participatory structures that give people a genuine role in decision-making. Scholars, too, must shed their elitism, leave their ivory towers, and utilise new tools, such as social media, to engage directly with the people. To cling to monologues, closed academic circles, or unread papers is to mock the spirit of the age.
Here, Gandhi’s principle of Oceanic Circles offers a guide. He envisioned governance not as a pyramid with power concentrated at the top, but as widening circles, each individual forming the centre of a village, each village part of a wider community, until the whole world became an ocean of cooperative responsibility. Though his imagery was rural, the principle can be adapted to an urbanised and digital world, where neighbourhoods, communities and networks serve as circles of shared responsibility. In the digital age, this vision can be realised on a scale that Gandhi could only have imagined. Digital democracy, if embraced fully, can make governance more horizontal, empower citizens with knowledge, and weave them into circles of shared responsibility. It offers the promise of a more substantial democracy, a better quality of life for the common citizen, and perhaps a more peaceful life for all.
Niraj Kumar Jha
शनिवार, 16 अगस्त 2025
The Trap of the First
I have come to understand education as the transfer of culture to the next generation. Ideally, education is not only about transmission but also about renewing and rejuvenating culture. Yet its true task reaches deeper: liberating minds from the fixations imposed by those first inputs. Perhaps this is why the Vedic seers made it mandatory to pray daily to Savitr—“We meditate on the adorable glory of the radiant sun; may She inspire our intelligence.” The prayer itself is a reminder that the mind must remain open to inspiration beyond its earliest imprints. It pains me, therefore, to see many academicians—supposedly the guiding souls of society—still repeating the ideological rubbish they absorbed during their college days, unable to free themselves from the very templates education should have helped them transcend.
Niraj Kumar Jha
गुरुवार, 14 अगस्त 2025
Human Knowledge
A common person generally does not know what they come to know, or what they are made to know. Knowledge, as we typically understand it, appears benign—or even highly useful. Yet what passes as knowledge is often a multipurpose instrument to mould people’s minds to ends that may not serve the common good, or even the good of the individual concerned. For instance, the colonial regime used knowledge itself to legitimise its rule. It can make something good appear bad, and something bad seem good. Pharmaceutical companies have done the same. Those who invented the cigarette marketed it as beneficial to health, concealing the fact that it was a serious health hazard. The same pattern can be seen in every walk of life.
We must understand knowledge in a way that serves humanity. Knowledge is not a thing, though it is abstract, yet it is often treated as if it were. Real knowledge is lived knowledge. It is being aware of oneself and one’s surroundings, and seeing things objectively, to remove what hinders the good life and promote what enables it. Knowledge should not take one away from lived reality. It is not for mindless consumption but for mindful engagement. People know, decide, reflect, and practise—and thus become truly knowledgeable.AI is a threat to human beings only if we approach knowledge as it is generally done. Knowledge is what we own, not what owns us.
Niraj Kumar Jha
बुधवार, 13 अगस्त 2025
America’s Democratic Reckoning
What has gone wrong with the United States should be a cause of serious concern for democracies across the world. One point that comes to mind is that although the United States was a great democracy, it did little to nurture democracy as a struggling global phenomenon. Indeed, it often acted in ways that weakened it. If, for instance, democracy thrives in India, it is despite the actions and inactions of the Western world. In the end, karma has a way of catching up.
Any democracy, if it is to evolve in the course of democratisation, requires a conducive democratic ecology. No country, not even America, can endure as a democracy within a global environment that is non-democratic or hostile to democracy.
A more immediate cause of the American reactionary approach is its diminishing confidence in being the economic giant far ahead of any other national economy. Its economy is becoming increasingly constrained in its ability to sustain its superpower infrastructure and global manoeuvres. The present mood is more of a knee-jerk reaction to reality than a willingness to accept the inevitable and contribute to a rational and fair world order. If people do not choose wisdom, the times are bound to teach a cruel lesson.
Niraj Kumar Jha
मंगलवार, 12 अगस्त 2025
Teaching Teachers
The concept and institutionalisation of teacher training took root during colonial rule. I still wonder what exactly was on the minds of the colonial ringmasters when they promoted it. One obvious possibility is that it served to mould teachers’ minds into servitude and to acculturate society into that same tendency. To me, the idea in its original form does not seem purposeful.
If a person is to become a teacher, they should already be educated to a level where others cannot simply “teach” them in the conventional sense. The more fitting model would be for an aspiring teacher to earn further qualifications in pedagogy, exactly as is done today, but through a university’s school of pedagogy. A prospective teacher must be firmly anchored in the universe of knowledge.
The takeaway is clear: the very nomenclature of “training” and its colonial import should be discarded. Pedagogy learning ought to be fully integrated into the functional university system. The functionality of a university is another issue altogether, though.
Niraj Kumar Jha
Democratic Flipside
Niraj Kumar Jha
सोमवार, 11 अगस्त 2025
We the People for Reforms
In 1991, when economic reforms were given a notional start under duress, I was elated. I had long recognised the perils of our colonially induced, slavish mentality economic model — a mindset that had embraced self-defeating collectivist socialism. Yet I wondered: how could we open our domestic market to foreign players without first empowering our own enterprises to compete?
A preparatory phase should have come first: dismantling the bureaucratic chokehold of permits, quotas, high taxes, and the inspector raj; then bringing the economy to a truly global playing field in ease of doing business and in ease of living — the latter resting on the basic guarantee of security of person and property. We should have had a free and competitive internal market before venturing into internationalisation.
That hardly happened. Yet our businesses, built by people of steel, absorbed the shock and emerged strong enough to make their mark globally. India is a vast nation; if we put our house in order, we can shield ourselves from global turbulence and become a pivotal hub in global supply chains.
The way forward is clear. Free the domestic market to the optimal extent within our borders, while carefully calibrating the economy to face global competition and hazards. The goal is not reckless liberalisation, but an intelligently sequenced one — strengthening our internal base before taking on the world.
Many big-ticket reforms remain overdue: land and labour flexibility, rationalised taxation, infrastructure overhaul, and genuine ease of doing business. They will not materialise without public understanding and support. A nation of India’s scale cannot afford to drift between half-measures. If we expect our enterprises to compete globally, we must first give them the freedom, security, and infrastructure to thrive at home.
Niraj Kumar Jha
रविवार, 3 अगस्त 2025
On Ignorance
True knowledge begins with knowing what real knowledge is—and this is humanity’s deepest challenge. In intellectual circles, discourses are too often positional, and practices tend more toward parroting than reflecting. The point is that people should believe in the divine endowment placed inside each one's cranium. The divine has ordained each to be an autonomous thinking one.
Niraj Kumar Jha
शुक्रवार, 1 अगस्त 2025
The Age of Participatory Knowledge
Niraj Kumar Jha