Client Capitalism

Capitalism works even in a captive state. Patron forces every element to conduce the captive operatives and enterprises grow exponentially.

At first, such economies grow very vast and overwhelm the others, but after some time, the model starts crumbling.

It may be an absolute case under authoritarian regimes and partial or selective under the lesser authoritarian ones.

Client capitalism has inherent limits: the patron's imagination and position. That cannot be crossed. More critically, patrons often resort to their 'wisdom,' say whims and fancies, to drive the economy and that costs the economy badly.

The fact is overlooked that capitalism is essentially about rationalism. A regime harms the economy badly if it works to defy the principles of the market. This explains the crises which engulf many economies of the world. However, one must know that one fits all expertise does not work. Knowing, how and what of it, is critical knowledge by itself.

The mantra is simple, a regime must remain focused on its task, i.e. to ensure freedom and fair play. All other activities of a regime are deviations, and those violate the rules of civility and impoverish the national culture both materially and morally.

Niraj Kumar Jha

We, the people of Gods and Goddesses

Navratri comes and rejuvenates life. Devotees rediscover themselves by immersing themselves in penance, prayers, and celebrations. The divinity and authority of the feminine are worshipped and invoked respectively. During the very prolonged rule of Semitic religionists in India, some members of the elite among intelligentsia became apologetic for worshipping gods in human forms or in forms of other living beings or in any form. They emphasised the unity and formlessness of Godhood in the Sanatana tradition. The fact is that in the Indic traditions, the belief in one formless Supreme Being has coexisted with devotion to Gods and Goddesses always in harmony.

Believing is believing and there cannot be any rationalised justification for what to believe or how to translate your beliefs into rituals and moral behaviour in particular. Nonetheless, modern constitutionalism legitimately puts certain conditions on such practices that you would not harm or inconvenience others while practising your beliefs.

The Indic traditions relate more to life, nature, and particularised ideals in comparison. It celebrates all phenomena nourishing life, nature, and supposedly the cosmos. The Indic people respect their philosophers and holy persons and listen to their abstractions with respect and care and at the same time celebrate their divinities with gaiety.

Indians celebrate life, its forms, colours, and its pulsation as their religion. They are happy believers and do not question any form of worship and may happily accept and even participate in any religious observations.

Let us celebrate life and all beings, animate or inanimate. Salutations to all. Wish all a blissful Navaratri.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Political Theory Today

Political theoreticians inhabit their own world and they remain alien to the world they theorise about. The alienness only increases if the language they write in is also foreign to the people they articulate about. Political theory indeed shapes the world. Constitutions govern their respective country and the principles and mechanisms they provide are takeaways from past theoretical works on politics.

 
At this point in time, it is strange that despite the quantum of changes that have already happened in a short span of time and happening around the world is exceptionally phenomenal and no grand theory has appeared so far to address and guide the changes. In fact, the very idea of democracy and its institutionalisation needs a massive overhaul and upgrade. But there is nothing one can hear in the open. As a commoner, I cannot speak for what may be happening below the high ceilings of great universities or inside deep think tanks. A pandemic havoced the world and the responses lacked coherence and direction abysmally. Institutions had no memory of the basics that had been set for handling past pandemics. Such a massive crisis also did not elicit any meaningful response from the theoreticians. This is tragic.

 
The alienness of the theory workers and the datedness of their wares make them highly wanting in the present challenging scenario.

 
Niraj Kumar Jha

Socialibity and Privacy

I find that some people have incoherent feelings about sociability and privacy. A great reward of being prosperous is that one can afford privacy. But, the same people who can afford and enjoy privacy also lament the loss of sociability. This may be for two reasons: one,  they have only chanced to get their riches, have not created or inherited that, and/or they are not prosperous enough to pay for sociability. 

Earlier, not unlike the present, those who could lord the society had both private indulgences and fun with cronies. But, sociability was essentially about having and not having. Those have-nots had social life only and needed it badly for security and relief and the haves could buy both, but it had ever been problematic for the people in the middle. They too lacked privacy but could afford sociability. Nonetheless, the sociability strained the households as such and was burdensome for the women folks. Now, the nuclear families living in independent houses or flats, have come to value privacy and cleanliness, and at the same time as mutual help gets rarer and hiring help costlier, middle-class families find it very difficult to be sociable. The living rooms are deserted in most households. 

The moral of the story is that you cannot have cake and eat it too. If you can raise your income, you can have regular supplies of cakes. If not, enjoy your privacy and be friendly to whomever you interact with.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Jobs

The general political discourse on the need for jobs for the burgeoning youth population treats the shortfall of jobs as an isolated matter as if the government can generate jobs by its sheer willpower. The fact is that it is the economy or the market that creates the job. And the key to unlocking the expansion of the economy and its capacity lies in the hands of the ordinary citizens; they need to be capital friendly in their approach and articulations. Only they can drive the dispensations across the land to ease doing businesses further and make the national economy internationally competitive. There is no other way. The non-market approach of collective good failed miserably everywhere. The history of the twentieth century imparts this critical lesson with all the details of the brutalises the experiments unleashed.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Dharma Defined

What is Dharma?

Dharma, to begin with, is the mindful viewing of being.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Religionism as Intellectualism

Religionism overweighed postcolonial intellectualism and drove them to the absurd extreme to deploy secularism to cater to the religions. And, as such, academia and professional intellectuals in the main remained hostile to the spirit, forms, and practices of dharma, i.e, the mindful viewing of being. In place of knowing and practising dharma, they paid obeisance to creeds and dogmas. They mistook doctrines as principles, indoctrination as education, diktats as laws, and as such diminished life in a way that such vital contradistinctions as between sanity and insanity turned indistinguishable. Their constructions, mental and material, collapsed within decades under their own weight of incongruities, and now we sit on the heaps of debris everywhere. They are still well-ensconced and mock the people in distress. They continue to play their loud orchestra in order to drown the voices of logic and rationality.

Niraj Kumar Jha