Being an Intellectual

A person in the business of knowing generally seeks general good. One may see it as a career or vocation for some fame and moolah but the point is that society at its best or the best of society makes it possible to get intellectualism funded.

Therefore, an intellectual must purpose its job so that it serves society to its best. For one who thinks deep, investigates, relates, and generalises social happenings around to make sense of these it is therefore imperative that the ideas must be disseminated. And, the person must not rely on finding some sensible actors to be counselled but must work relentlessly with the fellow persons, and enable them to fine-orient their behaviour in social interactions.

An idea must speak to one and all so that one who gets it grasps its import and imbibes the same instinctively. Certain jargons are a must to communicate the specializations, but the same can be narrated with some detailing to laymen. A work of social scholarship must be modified for public consumption. One must take care of fine points, nuances, and technicalities at the multiple stages of prototyping but the end product must be for mass usability. An idea must be precise, simple, lucid in a way so that the mind captures it effortlessly. An intellectual has very tough competitors, the ones who prey on people by exploiting their psychological vulnerabilities: the doomsayers, the deliverers, and a good number from among the entertainers.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Education as Substantialization of Individual Personality

Concept at the cost of Aesthetics

I speak as a layman, admit my total ignorance, and expect to be educated on the matter. Recently I saw some photographs of a newly constructed university complex, the buildings and the landscape. Two things struck me.

First, the architect's concept has cost both - utility and beauty. The matchbox like buildings with rectangular cuts surrounded by raised earthwork gives these the look of world war II time bunkers. I wish it does not look like this to one who is actually there. The particular case maybe my misjudgement, but the larger point here is that the concepts the architects try to actualise often become incongruous to the principles of architecture, and it confronts its two fundamentals, utility and beauty, as I can think.

Secondly, the occupants of the architectural marvels must have some aesthetes in their ranks, and there should be some training and a manual for them for maintaining such buildings. Such a manual must find a place in the act or bylaws of the institution. What I could see in those photographs was that the newly put signboards had totally disfigured the buildings. The architects often do not realise that their constructions are not meant for one-time photography for some picture postcard but a utility to be used and would need many conveniences fixed later on.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Democracy as an independent thesis

The general understanding is that democracy emerged as the capitalist response to the threats coming from socialist mobilisations. However, the same phenomenon can be seen as ceding power to the commoners who were empowered by capitalism. Liberalism, the ideational form of capitalism, in fact, matured as the antithesis of feudalism as it evolved to democracy. Democracy was the final product of the anti-feudalism thesis, and thus the final anti-thesis of feudalism. The problem with antitheses, in general, is that these only mirror theses, though these confront their respective thesis.

Democracy now needs to be recast as a free thesis.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Online

Online is not something which has got into our lives, but the reality is that life itself is substantially online now. And, the life being so has got greatly enriched. Online has augmented life in a way, which is an unfathomable phenomenon by itself. The virtual-real is not something that diminishes the real-life but only enhances what is life and offline.

With this in the background, this is seeable now that mainstream education would be online and international. The mainstreaming of education online would be more inclusive, useful, and would tend to be free of medieval tantrums. The offline would be optional for the rich people of leisurely class.

The species of men, with free-moving, sifting, and holding hands, are technology bearing creatures. Despite technologies being open to abuse, on the whole, it is how human beings have always found themselves in a more fulfilling and humane world.

The takeaway for us is that we must welcome the virtual and insist on more and more digitization. We must avoid the tendency of resisting liberation and life.

It is in the common men's interest that they stay away from life-beating brouhaha and focus on life-enhancing conversations.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Theology and Ideology

Ideology was coined to mean the science of ideas but it came to signify normative ordering of life to attain and to maintain it once it is attained. However, it hardly differed from theology except it abandoned the reference to the heavens. In other words, ideology is theology without God, and theology is an ideology with God.

However, this understanding of the nature of doctrines does not cover liberalism and conservatism, and also Gandhism, which contains the aspects of both and more. The fact, as I consider it, is that these are not ideologies. These are theorisations of life as it exists, unfolds, and of its necessities. These explore possibilities in place of reducing life to some preconceived state.

Now, I come to a fundamental trait of ideology/theology, and it is that these invoke equality as its prime thesis. And, in the process of their ideational or actual realisation, these end up arresting life to an imagined doctrine and disallowing the fullness of life. And, even a remote realisation of its proposed state brings in greater inequality with a cruel regime enforcing it. If life is allowed its naturalness with collective interventions to bare necessities, the people enjoy better human egalitarian ethos with all the freedoms making life worth living.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Equality is theology

Equality, people don't realise, is a theological conceptual category. Secular is liberty, and in it is embedded equality in all fairness. 

Niraj Kumar Jha