Living Civilization

A civilisation lives through its people. A flourishing civilisation retains its core values, takes pride in the deeds of its ancestors, preserves its legacies in art, literature, culture, and architecture, and continually renews itself with time in order to remain resilient and relevant. At the most basic level, a civilisation requires its people to remain alive to it, to be engaged with its traditions, enthusiastic about its future, and mindful that its inheritance is shared by all. It must cultivate a sense of belonging so that no section of society feels excluded or alienated from the civilizational whole.

History also reminds us that civilisations are not immortal. Many lands that once hosted great civilisations now bear little trace of the values, institutions, or material achievements of their past. Some survive only in fragments, in ruins, texts, and memories, while in other places, tradition and modernity stand at cross purposes rather than working in harmony. Civilisations decline or perish in many ways, through their own follies and internal decay, or by being weakened and sometimes destroyed by external aggressors. Dead civilisations serve as reminders that civilizational continuity cannot be taken for granted.

A true sense of civilisation must reside in every individual, accompanied by a critical awareness of both its strengths and its weaknesses. Blind reverence does not serve the cause of civilizational continuity. Reflection and honest appraisal are essential.

We Indians may take pride in belonging to one of the world’s most ancient living civilisations. Yet pride must be accompanied by vigilance, an awareness of past mistakes and a readiness to respond to the exigencies of changing times. Every generation carries a responsibility toward its civilisation, a duty owed to the ancestors who built it and an obligation to the descendants who will inherit it. Each generation must therefore preserve what is valuable, correct what is flawed, and carry the civilisation forward.

A civilisation may display dazzling grandeur to the observer, but it is also inherently vulnerable. Its survival ultimately depends on the consciousness, effort, and stewardship of its people.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Politics for Folks

Politics affects everyday life, regardless of the level at which it operates: local, regional, national, or international. Therefore, politics at any level, and especially international politics, must be a matter of general concern. The state of international politics has always been anarchic, but the present times appear unprecedented when considered in light of humankind's evolutionary stage.

What emerges from this scenario is that national power becomes critical for a nation’s well-being, security, and territorial integrity. Every nation must therefore have a balancing strategy not only against its immediate rivals but also against the world's most powerful countries. Otherwise, a stronger nation may dictate terms, occupy territory, forcibly extract natural resources, or compel others to pay tribute. Tragically, this remains the reality of the world today.

Among the factors that determine national power, technology is the most critical, with artificial intelligence in particular becoming decisive. Technological superiority has always influenced the outcome of conflicts, and today, with the flick of buttons, a country can overwhelm others through AI and autonomous, automated, intercommunicating machines.

However, something more human and more fundamental lies beneath this: how people live together within a polity. It concerns the quality of collective life and the management of common affairs. When people live in unity and harmony, with a shared sense of purpose, a nation becomes difficult to defeat. This depends on rationality, fairness, and mutual care. It also explains how even smaller nations can possess a strength that appears disproportionate to their geography, resources, and demography.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Soulful Poetry for Humanity

I once wrote a chapter compiling the political ideas contained in Goswami Tulsidas’ rendition of the saga of Shri Ram. Much later, I came to see that any effort to grasp such an epochal song through theory reduces it to what it was never meant to be. A work born of inward surrender cannot be contained within conceptual frames. Humanity needs soulful poetry more than theory, not because theory is without value, but because poetry speaks from a depth where the self does not assert itself. The great souls who immerse themselves in singing the essence of life serve humanity more profoundly than any theoretician, for they do not explain life; they become its voice.

Poetry may also cause irreparable harm unless poets become poetry itself, without any desire for glory or even the inward satisfaction of having created. The way it may be rendered is as it was by the Goswami. His songs flow from his heart as an outpouring of gratitude toward the Creator and of reverence for every being and thing in creation, permeated by unbounded love, without any sense of pride, vanity, or self-assertion. Such poets do not stand above their creation; rather, they sing as human beings in such inward anonymity that no creator remains separate from the song. Only then does poetry elevate rather than intoxicate. When we recite Goswami’s Ramcharit, we immerse ourselves in divinity, discover our own soul in its literary genius, and hear a voice so free of self that it awakens the human within us.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Meaningfulness Conundrum

 Human life seeks meaning or purpose. Yet most human beings are not privileged enough to consciously pursue life as something meaningful. They simply walk on as circumstances shape their paths. This is the first tragedy of human life: too many people do not know what their lives are meant for, how to live with contentment, and, for that, how to live in harmony. They cause pain to themselves and others.

The second tragedy is more serious. The meaning of human life comes from nowhere; it is invented by human beings themselves. Those who enjoy some material advantage often seek meaning in life, but even those who pursue meaningfulness do not understand what meaningfulness actually is. The real problem is to know what meaningfulness means. How do we know that something is meaningful? How do we identify its implications and consequences?

Most people simply do not know, and they are not capable or equipped to know how certain pieces of knowledge came to be recognised as such, how meanings are constructed, and how to examine their consequences. Societies need to identify people who can think deeply, and to listen to them intently, even when they sound absurd or offensive. This knowledge of knowledge, or meaning of meaning, is indeed a very rare and challenging noetic inclination and exercise, as it seeks to extricate almost nonexistent ideas from phenomena deeply entrenched in life and defended by soulless forces.

The fact is that human beings are what they know themselves to be. Much of human suffering could be substantially reduced if people learned how to weave meaning carefully, to avoid false meanings that masquerade as genuine ones and cause profound trouble.

Yet communities must guard against people who, in pursuit of the knowledge of knowledge or meaning of meaning, get overwhelmed by the absolute darkness of meaninglessness, upon which float only tiny vessels of constructed meanings, and speak and speak as if possessed by it. The philosophically inclined ones must also save themselves from being sucked into meaninglessness.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Democrats and Democracy

Democracy functions not merely through institutions but through a habit of mind. It requires citizens who examine their experiences, question what they are given, and take responsibility for their actions. The central human problem has always been epistemic and practical: how to know and how to act. Societies tend toward cognitive ease; inherited assumptions, social cues, and now algorithmically curated information often substitute for independent judgment. The availability of better information, including that generated by advanced technologies, does not by itself produce better citizens. When individuals outsource judgment rather than refine it, informational improvement can coexist with civic passivity.

If democratic life weakens, it is not only because institutions fail but because citizens cease to exercise reflective agency. Instinct, habit, and group loyalty are natural features of human psychology, but democracy demands that they be examined rather than blindly obeyed. The responsibility here is irreducibly personal: each individual must resist passive acceptance and subject even the most ordinary claims and experiences to thought.

Yet reflection in isolation is insufficient. Democratic agency matures in conversation. Through disciplined, respectful exchange, individuals test their judgments, revise errors, and recognise others as equal participants in a shared world. Such dialogue is not ornamentation to democracy; it is the practice through which citizens sustain both political responsibility and their own humanity. Democracy endures when reflective individuals engage one another seriously, and it erodes when thought and conversation are replaced by reflex and consumption.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Excellence and Equity: On the Moral Foundations of Social Order

History has incontrovertibly validated Orwell’s depiction in Animal Farm: the bare drive for equality destroys not only liberty but equality itself, leaving the community utterly devoid of any sense of fraternity. This points to another fundamental rule of human affairs: it is the pursuit of excellence alone that brings equity to fruition. In fact, the very idea of equity emerges only when the value of human excellence is recognised and actively pursued; it cannot arise otherwise.

This brings us to a puzzling aspect of the unfolding story of the United States: a nation that occupies a commanding position in technological, economic, and institutional excellence in the modern world. It is deeply unsettling that, for certain elites, the pursuit of excellence degenerates into unbridled aggression or unrestrained sensual indulgence. What is at stake here is not individual moral failure alone, but a structural distortion in which success is increasingly measured by domination, spectacle, and excess rather than by contribution to human flourishing. This is certainly not the Protestant ethic that underpinned modern capitalism.

Excellence is intrinsically multidimensional, and at its core lies the elevation of human life through the disciplined pursuit of one’s highest capacities. The domains of excellence are manifold—service, art, literature, philosophy, science, sports, and beyond. Wealth and power are merely instrumental; they acquire meaning only insofar as they serve these higher ends.

However, entrepreneurial excellence must not be undermined, but wealth finds its meaning and purpose only when its possession elevates the holder through aesthetic pursuits and charity, rather than descending into monstrous indulgence in carnal pleasure or the sadistic thrill of domination, and when the enterprise helps meet the genuine needs of people and contributes to the betterment of life. When it does otherwise, it is demonic.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

National Power in a Post-Order World

Internationally, the truth of truth is that power is truth and might is right. For nations, power therefore acquires a significance it had ceased to possess for a long time in the evolving international order. Today, even the pretence of fair play, alliances, multilateralism, and collective security has collapsed. Every nation stands for itself, as there exists no law or organisation capable of guarding against illegitimate transgressions.

India is a great power and a nation steadily ascending to newer heights of power and prestige. Yet this is not enough. It must vastly increase its leverage to negotiate a world of great powers unhinged from any coherent order. India is a nation of nearly one and a half billion souls, many of them highly vulnerable, whose well-being is inseparably tied to the national good. It is therefore the duty of public intellectuals to identify what strengthens the nation and what weakens it, and to build public support around these questions.

Equally critical is the fact that artificial intelligence is constructing entirely new templates that script human life itself, pushing older templates into the background. These changes are creating colossal opportunities and are likely to generate equally unimaginable crises; the early signals are already highly disruptive. A country like India must consciously negotiate this unprecedented transition to mitigate its disruptions and reap the benefits of a revolution of scale unparalleled in human history.

Niraj Kumar Jha