Discourses: Republican v. Subject

Republican discourses are agenda-setting. People understand and articulate the conditions they live under and create an ecology which directs the government to comply with the needful. They have masterly voices and patronise their governments.

Subject discourses mostly consist of sounds of applause or grumbling. They only react to rulers' positions and dispositions. Subject people do not talk about their own feelings, problems, and expectations. They take their predicament as destined or given. They feel they depend on their rulers and pray for their benevolence.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Inevitability of UBI

The universal basic income (UBI) is an age-old idea which found its way into the economic survey of 2017 and in other policy documents in India. Its toned-down versions are being implemented through myriad schemes in India, but invariably as doles. They lack one or the other feature of UBI like universality, unconditionally, regularity, payment in cash, and payability to individual citizens.
As different governments transfer cash to this or that section of society on different pretexts, this only confirms the inevitability of UBI. Even otherwise the growing scarcity of jobs and livelihood due to automation and international competition makes UBI unavoidable.

While it is highly imperative to implement a full-fledged UBI in the country, certain conditions must be fulfilled for ensuring its viability. It requires a substantial downsizing of the government, the closure of most of the other welfare schemes and the cessation of subsidies. It would also require the rationalisation of government functions and optimisation of efficiency and cost-effectiveness in whatever it does.

Secondly, as a corollary of the first, it needs optimisation of liberalisation. The country must be highly productive and internationally competitive so that it has a sufficient surplus after paying all its import bills to fund the basic income of a billion-plus citizens of the country.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Being a Scholar

In this post, I am expanding on an earlier post on being a scholar. I think that the job of a scholar is essentially different from a preacher and even a preceptor. A scholar studies or observes a phenomenon, shares their findings or views, and invites their appraisal. It is unbecoming of a scholar to be preachy. A scholar knows that most people are more circumstanced than free agents. A scholar struggles with others to know and negotiate circumstances in a better way.

 
Niraj Kumar Jha

Freedom of Expression

It is the freedom of expression, nothing else, that fuels progress, but it does not mean toleration of bad expressions. Good expressions must combat bad expressions, and better expressions must replace good expressions. It is the duty of each one to better their expressions by efforting to know more and testing and contesting expressions of others and also of self. It is about welcoming criticism and contesting the expressions of others in a friendly and respectful manner. One must never be sure that their ideas are correct. Correctness is about being constantly conscious of the possibility of being incorrect.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

On Tolerance

People generally need to be tolerant of the good and reasonable. What is usually espoused in the name of tolerance is the acquiescence to evil and irrationality. Propagating capitulation is not an act of sagacity but of subversion.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Being on Social Media

Being on social media is to be inevitably attached to a social cause. You may say it is not a cause but it is narcissism that overwhelms the media, but I see the very narcissism as the most consequential cause. Narcissism, I think, considerably mitigates hegemonistic sways which dictate social life. More fundamentally, being in the public domain itself is serving a social cause.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Being Selective Beings

Normally reading, seeing, and feeling are acts of unconscious selection whereas writing, showing, and touching are acts of conscious selection. One selects what to read, what to read from the reading, and what to mean by the read.  

Niraj Kumar Jha