I write about the world.
Irrespective of what people want to believe, The God in their minds is only a reflection of themselves. When they claim absolute belief in a particular religious doctrine, they are essentially trying to shift the moral responsibility onto something external to themselves. The god lives in their minds in the way they have conceptualised Him 1. And how do they do that? From whatever that they have…
My last article on reading the Feast of the Goat speaks nothing of the book. It is clear that I loved the book, but that article was more about my thoughts on the genre. Before stumbling upon these books some five years ago, I was entirely unaware of their existence. An honorable mention goes to the last interview series, which was an arguably expensive voyage that helped me skim over the lives of…
This book is one of the most powerful expositions of power and its ways to grace the world of literature. It remedies one of the greatest lacunae of history - the ability to feel and honestly discard objectivity as and when humanity demands it.
The spirited campaign of Zohran Mamdani has caught my attention. It has all the bells and whistles of an underdog campaign, adapted to the social media needs of the Generation Z and beyond. His “online first” campaign is being celebrated all across the globe, with the “progressive” bandwagon jumping right behind his peppy reels and zestful online persona.
The phrase, “Cultural Nationalism” is an oxymoron at best.
Perhaps psychology will help us design political systems better than philosophy. Of course, there is a lot of haggling around why psychology is hardly a science. But a few will dispute the fact that it is more sciencier (albeit less sexy) than philosophy. Polity that works for the populi cannot be learned from the philosophy or high ideals that our (and others) constitutional texts propagate. What…
One of the longest standing political projects of all times are the reflections on how to justify a carnage. Theorising to erase murder and call it by some other name; finding ways to hide dead bodies from the past - in a futile attempt to escape retribution. Sometimes, it is about delusions that are employed to escape conscience.
Long ago, I was quoted an American report that claimed that the single most important data point that leads to revolutions is a bulge in the youthful population. We were talking in the backdrop of the Arab Spring and I was very young myself. At that point, I was preoccupied with thinking that I was old and not young, even when I was barely twenty at the time. The idea of youth fuelling revolutions…
It is very important that we understand the differences between these two. The basis of modern democracy is as much philosophical and ideological as much as it is rooted in practice. The much hackneyed quote of Sir. Winston Churchill (oh, that old doyen of democracy who didn’t bat an eye murdering 43 million Bengalis by deprivation!) that it is the worst form of government - except for all the…
One of the hallmarks of Indian public discourse is the inexplicable urge to deflect a sane analysis of the nature of political processes. This doesn’t mean that the political processes are incredibly complex and the public unable to understand it.