Unversity to celebrate humanity

The gurukuls sent their pupils to beg for themselves and their preceptors. The venerable sages could have gotten any sum of wealth from the kings only by hinting, but, instead, they sent out even the princes under their charge with begging bowls in their hands. Gurukuls taught them humility and made them realise that they depended on the householders and would serve them. Today, the high-end public universities privilege themselves at the cost of society and churn out graduates only to lord over whom they can. A university worth its name must privilege commoners, not itself, and prepare its graduates for the purpose. They must see that their graduates personify humility and not snobbery as the case is. A university must be a running celebration of humanity.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Being a fool

Most people have this feeling about any person that the person is a fool. Indeed, everyone is so, at least, in one respect or the other, but the softer ones know that others have a similar opinion about them, and revealing to a person their reality is against courtesy.

Niraj Kumar Jha

On Philosophising

Imagination is phenomenally unlimited. One can let one's imagination fly as one fancies without care for rhyme or reason. It happens that people with their power of language or credentials get their wild imaginations accepted as philosophy. They connect factors, they have also the liberty of creating factors from their imagination, in whatever way and to whatever effect they want. They know well that social happenings are not testable in labs, and therefore they have nothing to fear about getting wrong. And, they find it to their great relish that the more fanciful an idea, the greater its appeal. But, they must know, the philosophers and also the litterateurs, that for the good of society, for the sake of the people they love and who love them, they must be very cautious about their imagining faculty. They must mediate it with experience and social and historical knowledge, and with the sensibility that ideas affect real people subject to the same pains and pleasure as anybody. Greatly fanciful ideas tend to be tyrannical and are capable of savaging lives across ages and geographies. The takeaway: philosophising is not fantasising; it is about exercising faculty with responsibility and care.

 

Niraj Kumar Jha

Historiography of Cherry-Picking

They say it is a bad history that you use the past as a storehouse and pick the facts which suit you. And, the good history, they insinuate, speaks for itself. This is a euphemism for a long ideological reading of the past. The ideologists martial the entire past for their conception of a wholesome future. They do not do cherry-picking but denude all the flora. They in the course of making the past a gigantic nothing (in its independent form, without its assigned justificatory role), undo the entire historical project: that is, you are denied of learning from your past for negotiating with your present.

Niraj Kumar Jha

On Methodology

Methodology textbooks are a violent form of scholarship. They convert the simple and instinctively doable to a complicated and riddlesome non-starter. A wannabe researcher after undergoing the course of lessons and classes is left more confused than they were earlier. But, then to their respite, they find that it is about performing a set of rituals, propitiation, and finally, they would have the voluminous production in hardcover bearing a degree. The ritualised and dogmatised process is indeed very arduous, almost like a guided scaling of the Everest, but in the end, there is something very obvious, the peak beneath your feet and the same sky over your head.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Citizens of Sustance

Something which humanity confronts today is unprecedented and that is the global environmental crisis, ironically, caused by humanity itself. I read a transcript of some discussion; the discussants betrayed the airs of global elitism in terms of both ideas and language, and the pertinence of the reference here is that they blamed the bordered and trans-bordered politics. 

What they failed to figure out is the role of commoners. In fact, their very attitude, the condescension, is belittling of the common folks. People constitute politics, whether local or global. Unless we are able to see our makeover to persons of substance, each of us, we are not going to correct anything. The whole discourse must be changed, and its casting of the people always as a tool must end. An intellectual must talk of and talk to folks as a commoner. An honest intellectual must know if their intellect is appropriated, and if not they are commoners.

The project is never meant to be completed: spacing for folks to come up as citizens, individual persons in control of themselves. 

Niraj Kumar Jha 

Why write?

If one can write, one must write. If you want to keep it to yourself, you have your diary, and if you want to share your writeups, you have social media readily available.  

Why should one write? There may be several reasons for that, but I am here with something specific. You invariably use a mirror daily, and you do this to check your appearance: whether you look proper or not? Your writing does the same to your thoughts. When you read yourself after some time, you are able to know the property of your thoughts. Your writings mirror your thoughts. And, when you read yourself, you are a better judge of yourself. 

Why should one review one's own thoughts? More than anything else it is your thoughts that you are. It affects your relations, the social milieu you are a part of, and finally yourself. It is better if you study your thoughts with care as nothing affects you more than the thoughts you hold. 

Niraj Kumar Jha