Liberty

Liberty, in essence,  is not about doing what one fancies, even with the caveat that such acts should not cause harm or discomfort to others, as it is generally assumed to be. It is also not as it is generally defined that it is the availability of conditions which make people be at their best. Would not a requirement of such conditionality cast the state of so many people as unfree though they may be living quite comfortably, untroubled by others?   The essential liberty lies in one's consciousness of human worth and dignity. And it manifests as the state of liberty in mutual recognition of the same - human worth and dignity. Liberty is more of an attitude than about some conditions. Liberty is thus a cultural state.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

The Way to Common Good

Most of the people, more so if they are educated, are not equipped to know the common good. The educationists often dress doctrinaire ideas as educational topics. The best thing is that people should talk about their personal interests, their inconveniences, problems, and expectations, and in this way people may reach a good equilibrium. The tragedy is that most people do not know even their personal interests, and they end up often ideating an ideal model of society. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

About Teaching

Today, I heard a policy advisor advocating flipped classrooms and sharing the idea with a godman that students should be made to learn from the recording of lectures delivered by the best expert in the world on a topic, and teachers and students only do activities around the topics. 

I too thought like that earlier, but I realized during these devastating times that this cannot be the best method of teaching and learning. I summarise the whole idea in one sentence first. Teaching and learning can not be other than a lived experience that necessitates the presence of a person before you who lives the knowledge he or she disseminates.

A classroom is a unique place. The teachers come to know of their students and the students of their teachers and the classrooms build a rapport, which brings in education there. The milieu, the cultural consonance, and the connection are the crucial components of education. 

And the teaching is not about repeating things, as the godman was suggesting, but it is about evolving in the role and the evolution manifests in the very first class of a teacher. And gifted teachers seed the ethos of evolving at their first engagement. Teaching cannot be separated from its magical aspect, it cannot be fully mechanical. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Poor Fella

Oh, my dear!
You deify almost every human role,
one or the other every day.
But I think that
on one day in a year,
or, at least, once in your lifetime,
invite your humanity to your place,
and be in the company of the poor soul,
forgetting all the divinities for a while.
Not a burden on the earth,
let the fella feel this on that day. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Poor Fella

Oh, my dear!
You deify almost every human role,
almost every day.
At least one day a year,
or once in your lifetime,
invite your humanity to your place,
and be in the company of the poor soul.
Not a burden on the earth,
let the fella feel on that day.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Philosophizing: don't bother, there are others to take care of

To my understanding, philosophizing is embedded in human nature. Every person tries to make sense of one's existence, and, as such, one tends to philosophize. Professional philosophers or/and persons having no job other than philosophizing provision readymade philosophies to people. And there are the ideologues who seek to monopolize the business of philosophizing and insist on the use of their one-time product forever. People generally fall for them as they can avoid the pain of exercising their minds. And people must avoid this pain, makes the biggest enterprise in the world. 

Niraj Kumar Jha

The Leap Forward: The Need of Thinking the Necessities of Times

The pandemic made the world leap forward in the direction it was moving. Among other things, now we see that a person is more isolated and self-centered. After the crisis is over, the normal would be new in the sense that people would rely less on their community and even on family and more on public services. Life and more so death would be more mechanical, aloof, and secular and correspondingly less organic, communal, and ritualized. 

There are aspects, positive and negative, about the dynamics: for instance, real sociability has ebbed over time but at the same time we have a virtual world to socialize in a non-intrusive fashion. Moreover, the earlier sociability had this unsavory aspect that happiness of some was always at the cost of less happiness of some others. 

The foundational shifts would bring in inevitable changes and one should instead of bemoaning the loss of the old ways of life should think of the necessities of times. And the most important thing needed is the maximum rationalization of the order. It would translate to, in the context of the argument here, the seamless availability of services, hasslefree and cheating free. 

Thinking the new is the critical need of the times. 

Niraj Kumar Jha