Sparsh

Using Hinduism or Islam as a badge of cultural identity rather than acting from the tenets of humanism has sown seeds of bigotry and hate in us. We misguided look at the past for golden age to prototype our utopia of the future. Faith dilutes the rational thinking of the people and the destruction of Babri Masjid was one shameful incident of independent India based on such blind faith. Under the evil ideology, people lose humanity & descend into organized homicidal insane savagery. I sum up the religious glorification concept in this line. One has to unsubscribe to our polite cultural belief of respecting religions. There is a circle of violence in the name of religion going on and there is no pinpoint for me to mark the origin point. Sometimes we evaluate history using contemporary reasoning and perhaps misrepresent the events in our minds. But, the overall look on the development of religion as institutions will help in seeing the corrosion of its principles. Religion...

Only a fool writes for anything but money, the compassionate and learned can share his knowledge about anything under the sun for hours. One should write for what one stands for and not what the people demands. Writing helps in facing our fears, aspirations, perceptions and illusions about ourselves with a frankness that makes the portraits and stories as engrossing as they are disturbing. There were three basic parameters for good writers considered by me. They are command over language, observation power and experience. 1- Language is natural fracture across communities and it will always be. I can't boast of proficiency in a foreign language like English without having a good command over my own mother tongue. Learning metaphors in a language is like deep water diving into clean ocean. Gradually, one enjoys subtle humor in generating charm through understanding of medium. 2- I was advised by a reader to observe at least for 10 minutes. I started this in local transport and fo...

I was reading an article about casteism by Aditya Nigam published under Caste Politics in India in an South Asian journal. Quoting a paragraph on Mandal commission will be necessary : "What was interesting about the agitation and the highly charged public debate that followed, was that it was entirely conducted, from the side of the opponents of the Mandal Commission, in the most immaculate secular and modern language of ‘merit’ and ‘efficiency’. The question was posed as one of dilution, if not the elimination, of merit at the cost of getting in ‘unworthy’ and ‘undeserving’ people simply because they happened to belong to certain castes. 'Would you like to be operated upon by a doctor who had became one through reservations?' 'Would you like to fly by an aircraft that was piloted by a reservation pilot?' Such were the kinds of questions that were asked by the anti-Mandalites in these discussions. Not once was the question of upper-caste and brahminical privileg...

I sit in the solitude to become aware of the world and I was preparing in the silence to sail around the world. Brief spot of consciousness has zero thoughts in it. Imagination complete the illusion and fabrication of the memory fills the void of time, it is just wonderful. And when one is faced with the prospect of death very soon, one begin to think very much about everything. One become very creative, not in a survival sense but in a exploration sense. One need to understanding own nature, as many times one can know too much to be able to have a sound understanding. Even good ideas are sometime encumbered by conventional wisdom. I learn and teach creativity and dissidence. It's not about exchanging one individual for another individual. To change the basis of the system, the basis of patriarchy, the basis of class, there needs to question authority and provision of the solution as well. Anybody if knows Mark Twain's dictum: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it...

I like three points in the recent reading material on the Internet. I don't know source of them but they are quite hard to pass by without a glance. 1- A market-led urbanization policy is the accepted norm in developed countries and one that is recommended in theory. However, we should not fall in the trap of making a fetish of markets. It is often the case in developing countries that the markets that exist are incomplete or legacies of past colonial regimes whose objectives might have been at odds with those of present governments. 2- India is facing a challenge that the developed world never did - of driving growth around an entirely new energy model. Coal based manufacturing or oil led industrial revolution. Here everyone competes to destroy as those natural resources don't clearly belong to any individual or community. That is why it will be over exploited since conserving them is of no individual's interest. 3- Acknowledging the existence of every single citizen...