Utopium

He offered utopium, the ultimate pain-numbing dope, the dream of heavens on the earth, to the sufferer. And, at the same time weaponised sufferance. However, I do not intend to flog a dead horse here. There is a long and ongoing tradition of weaponising sufferance, and one must exercise caution. Theocracies and ideocracies do the same and then we have famines in the fields and camps in the wilderness.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Schooling

Not thesising, I am only sharing my impressions. Schooling, the modern non-theological one, is one of the pedagogical means, though it is the prime one in the totalitarian political age. Its primacy is so encompassing that one hears hardly about other pedagogical means and what one can hear, but only those with trained ears, are the faint cries for deschooling and unschooling, It is no strange as schooling is a working part of a larger arrangement. 

What does schooling do? Learning 3Rs can be done in any setting, and even other knowledge elements can be learnt by reading books and taking help from elders, and now with multiple media. Certainly, this is not the USP of schooling. What is the exclusivity of schooling? Basically, it is a public institution, and it drafts the required number of kids to serve the public ends when they grow up; and to the purpose, it regiments the kids to grow as agents of some grand objective, which entails uniformising to make them comrades for a mission and training the mind to accept which the minds usually resist accepting. 

The thing is that minds resist rationalism and agency. And, the schooling thus does the right thing in that it applies some coercion to train the mind for science and enterprise. However, there is another aspect: that the schooling seeks to appropriate these two for denying humanism by creating secular colossuses. The Kremlin and the Commissariat make the most formidable of such phenomena. 

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Captive Capitalism

Yet another form of socialism is captive capitalism. Such an economy mines the capital and deploys the same to its full potential, and here the government's hands, and not the market's invisible hands, move the economic wheel. Its milder version is crony capitalism, which we often talk about.

 

Niraj Kumar Jha

If wishes were horses

If economics were a horse, the Rajapaksas would have continued with their joyful rides.

NIraj Kumar Jha

The International Order

The international order, as it exists, is not an order that streams from the nations' relations. It is a thing, an object. It was victors' booty, which they churned out of the global conditions then. It is a resource they have been keeping and exploiting thence. But, as it stands, it is overdone. It is not serving even the victors now, and more critically, it is no longer effective enough to impose itself as an order. A revamp must be thought over and carried out. 

Niraj Kumar Jha  

Mankind's Arrogance

They say men are destroying nature. Really! To say this is sheer arrogance. They are only destroying what nature has offered to them. They are on self-destruction.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Unknowable and Knowable

Truth in its final form is an unknowable abstraction. Yet, the claims and acts of divulging the truth have been incessant in history. Nothing wrong, a person has the right to their flight of imagination. But, this requires mindfulness that the so-divulged truths may be weaponised for domination or instrumentalised for contented coexistence The democratic pedagogy must include some course on the nature of the conceptualisation of truth along with how amoebas reproduce. Perhaps the former is far more important for human or civic life. Secular authoritarian regimes do concentrate on amoebas.

The Sanatana tradition kept its constituents in the know of the nature of the truth. It appears from historical analyses that the Indians on occasions got truer to the truthfulness and became complacent to the knowledge of statecraft, which requires manipulation of truths. Kautilya-Kamandaki tradition got muted. It served well their life but it turned out to be a debilitating weakness whenever hordes of brutes infested the land. Moreover, even under subjection, they made peace with 'the truth', which occurred to them.

The truth certainly cannot be known, but it remains a germane pursuit. We know and can know more of it to our benefit. And, at the same time when we align the truth with time and space and locate the regularity of conduct or the firmness of property of existential constituents, i.e. when we do science, we get the truths to favour us. In delimitations, truths are not only knowable but also workable. The history of civilization reveals that truths are evolving, unfolding, and performing.

We must see the Truth, the one beyond time and space, and the truths of time and space. The challenge is that even spacial and temporal truths inhere the transcendental nature of the Truth. Letting it not distract us, we have to see the people who are ruthless exploiters of the Truth and the truths. We have to save ourselves first and only after securing ourselves we can work for others.

Niraj Kumar Jha