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

What is Truth?

One can say, and so very appropriately, that there are only truths, no Truth. The other way of looking the same is that there is a Truth - The Truth - which encompasses all: things, beings, phenomena, nothings, nonexistent, and noumena. It is perfectly absolute in this way. 

This Truth, nonetheless, is fathomless to mean anything. Yet, at another level, there is the Truth of humankind, an imagined pivot of everything which holds and sustains what concerns them and that it does most appropriately. It is this abstraction, which gives meaning to all human phenomena. 

This Truth is our existential touchstone. In that sense, it is absolute though its cognition is relative. It informs all human beings and leads all to decide on truthfulness in their respective milieu. 

At the very practical level, truth is what one gets to know first-hand and chooses to stand with what one knows. 

At a higher level, truthfulness is about being conscious of the possibility of deception in perception and projections as well. 

Niraj Kumar Jha 

A World of Humanity

 While global politics reverberates with polemics and manoeuvres of a century-vintage, global life leaps farther into the future. Times push individuals to be their own and, at the same time, expose the pitfalls of collective impositions and the grave dangers they pose to humanity. To the saner souls, the gigantic human formations do not inspire awe but engender disgust. They wish for a rule-based global order and barrierless borders. Nonetheless, they do not wish nations to go away but see them countervail any possibility of global tyranny. Internationalism, not globalism, they wish for.

Humanism is in the offing to define humanity in its true spirit.  Everything and being would be reduced or enlarged to their exact size. Larger-than-life images and life-dwarfing ideas overwhelming human consciousness so far would not be able to delude human eyes. We can see a world of humanity in the foreseeable future. 

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Post-untruth

    Earlier, truths came from royal mints. Now, anyone can forge these. It is the age of the Internet. Cryptos compete with fiats.
    We all know its downsides. These have been appropriated to castigate the phenomenon in totality as post-truth. But the totality contains something larger.
    Truths need to compete to prevail. Or still better, there is no truth which can claim supremacy.
    More on the brighter side, it is very difficult for the untruths to sustain. People have now the whole ocean of knowledge accessible if they are not debarred from full access to the internet.
    It is the post-untruth age.
    Truths never had better times than they have today. With so many filters, people somehow find them no matter where they are kept hidden.

Niraj Kumar Jha

दुःख और सुख

बुद्ध ने अंगुलीमाल को समझाया था
जीवन दु:खों से भरा है ।
इसे बढ़ाना बहादुरी नहीं है,

इसे कम करना है।

सहानुभूति और स्वानुभूति से युक्त होना
मानव होना है।
घृणा जीत लेना ही प्रज्ञ होना है।
किसी की पीड़ा को कम कर देना वीरता है,
दु:ख को हर लेना पराक्रम है।

सच तो यही है:
दु:ख प्रदत्त है, सुख सत्प्रयत्न  है।

अर्थ सुविधाएँ जुटाने का माध्यम है
सुख तो मानवता का संबंध ही है।

जीवन तो दु:ख ही है,
सुखविस्तार जिजीविषा हो;
कोई दु:ख व्यर्थ नहीं जाए,
प्रत्येक हमारे सुख के उद्यम की प्रेरणा बने;
ऐसी हम कामना करें,
प्रार्थना करें।

नीरज कुमार झा