Shades of Madness

If I don't write what I think, what's the point of being mad? But madness is sometimes over rated. When you are not able to think and even feel, it is the worrisome part. Relevance, Idea and Technique seems as far reaching personal goals at this spot of time.

The qualities of openness, patience and insight is deceasing at a slow rate due to mechanical life. I am feeling alone and ponder over my low emotional quotient. Beneath silence, all that is intimate, delicate and refined is crushed out of experience.

Reality is dependent om our sensitivity and the nature of the consciousness. One should never do anything against conscience, even if the friends and family demands it. Conscience is what will hurt when everything and everyone will give thumbs up for the word or act.

Through writing, I want to examine intimate of human emotions and controversial issues. Shades of solidarity with others is least in me but the taboos bite me. And distilling self experiences through word gives a bizarre feeling of auto-cannibalism.

I have read few Arabic poems in English these days. Despite of the loss of feelings in the translation, this desert language is the rhythmic and haunting in the nature. Familiarity with people or words bred not contempt  but love, understanding and tolerance. Relations needs to be revisited to discover fresh nuances of meaning. Still same damned emotions inspire more non sense than life in all forms.

I am not ready to accept that absurdity and irrationality as a prime factors on the decision taking ability of the human. I respect emotional integrity of human relations that is universal in the nature for scrutiny others.

It takes conviction and courage to take a stand and be on receiving end of all ridicule and criticism. In order to turn convention upside down, one needs a particularly firm grip on convention itself. Unconventional writing is difficult and a mere arrangement of clumsy and random sentences can't form an off-beat literature. The inherent incapacity for sustained constructive thinking blocks the continuity of the observation.

Flamboyance without content is apt to degenerate into gimmick sooner or later. We invest a lot of efforts to reach for fame within mainstream and the same popularism gives one an unapproachable aura. An individual raised to Demigod status through stupidity. That is a paradox of acting or writing on the public demand.

Sarcasm suits me as I am able to observes the hate, hypocrisy and superiority complex hiding deep down in the psyche of myself and fellow people. It helps me to overcome the harshness of the reality and, eases the pain of scars, deceit, violence and deep embedded anger against them.

I had great anger on caste, cultural, regional and religious traditions that limit one's identity through ghettos. The generations after me will not live this kind of life — that’s what I decided. I will change my destiny by just existing in my own skin.

I may be the silent majority but I am a loud minority.

Cry

Procrastination leads the daily life,
Delusional and narcissistic thinking,
Anguish of dispossession and exile.
To accept that I am alone is so difficult.

A feeling of monotonous, mechanical and boring life.
The wheels of fortune seems to be stuck somewhere in the traffic jam of daily routine .

Oration skill is over rated and the silence is maddening phase.
The jumble of thoughts, the search for a partner,
The anxiety and fear of loosing everything ;
Wanna be able to say anything,
Without any fear, embarrassment or hesitation.

A thankless job.
Efficiently constructing mythical monetary security
While bearing the immense loss of creativity, spark and spontaneity inside.

Dropping the addiction habits may help in creating nothingness.
Hanging past and fearing future are eating the present moment.

Difficult to eradicate hate from the heart;
A soul that has never been loosened by unrestricted love,
Prejudices grow there, firm as weeds among rocks.

My apologies if you find it all too boring!

Wadah Khanfar: A historic moment in the Arab world

As a democratic revolution led by tech-empowered young people sweeps the Arab world, Wadah Khanfar, the head of Al Jazeera, shares a profoundly optimistic view of what's happening in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and beyond -- at this powerful moment when people realized they could step out of their houses and ask for change.

As Director General of Al Jazeera, the only international TV network based in the developing world, Wadah Khanfar works to bring rare liberties like information, transparency and dissenting voices to repressive states and political hot-zones. TED LINK



The counter-attack of people on the state is on and we all hail change in Middle East and Africa. As only words that comes in my mind are - Inquilab Zindabad ( a Hindi phrase which translates to "Long Live Revolution").

Revisiting the Global 1960s

Widely recognized not just as a decade but as a cluster of experiences that stretched over a period of time, the sixties as we now know it drew into its fold, radical politics, Black power, sexual liberation, youthful rebellion, feminism and more. Intellectual currents flowered all across the world alongside a powerful critique of cultural and political authority. The fourteen day strike by students and workers in Paris in the summer of 1968 acquired a mythical after life. The American war in Vietnam triggered a force field of protest and danger all over the world. The spirit of counterculture led to a critique of the family, the creation of alternative lifestyles and drug culture. Latin American experiences of revolutions, military terror and violence; colonialism, anti-colonialism and racial oppression in Africa; the resonance of the Cultural Revolution in China – these reverberated locally and globally. A series of political assassinations rocked the decade. All theories of civilization, race,history, politics, culture and identity were put to test.

It would not be incorrect to suggest that cultural creativity was never quite the same after the sixties. Music, fashion, design, art, architecture, cinema,theatre and performance bear the marks and the traces of this turbulent period of global upheaval. If Minimalism in art practice emerged as a challenge to Pop Art then Conceptual Art posed a critique of formalism. Modernism and the Avant-garde faced a crisis with the rise of Postmodernism while in India, the dominance of the Progressives began to be challenged by an alternative modernism that had a polemical take on indigenism; one aspect of this developed into neo-Tantric abstraction. This decade also saw the first explorations of kitsch and popular culture that later provided the point of rupture with modernism itself. Political theatre acquired a powerful force and Brecht emerged as a new icon for both the West and the post colonial world. Beatlemania and the events of Woodstock transformed the future of rock music as technology reinvented the aesthetics of performance and reception. All Institutions of art faced political criticism even as cinephilia energized a renewed global art cinema movement. Michelangelo Antonioni captured the world of swinging London in Blow-Up, Jean Luc Godard playfully moved the camera to mount his critique of Hollywood, and the release of the first James Bond film gave rise to a new territorial and technological imagination. Latin America gave birth to the Third Cinema Movement and a politically charged Aesthetics of Hunger while in India the New Wave presented a challenge to mainstream film forms and practices.

The 1960s remains an under studied area despite two wars, the crisis of Nehruvian nationalism and modernization programmes, the genocide and traumatic birth of a new nation (Bangladesh) and revolutionary upsurges.

----Adapted from the pamphlet of conference on Revisiting the Global 1960s and its Cultural After life;

Quotation : "The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility." — John Lennon

Blog Post Number 500

The journey of four years of blogging has touch the milestone of 500th post today. What I learned in this journey has brought enormous changes inside me. Unlearning of false traditions has taken lot of time and efforts but it was a worth living experience. The idea of personal solidarity and the idea of societal cooperation are two conflicting concepts that has tormented me as a scholar. It is like dilemma of looking for the independence without becoming alien to one's surroundings.

Education is never over-rated. An institution is meant to broaden your horizon but self learning also makes you more open minded. We might go to an Ivy League/IIT/IIM and come out with nothing or might go to a decent school and come out with a lot. What has started as a hobby in the college has been taken by me as a serious learning portal and it has paid me much in the level of insights of human behavior.

These four years of writing creates the illusion of a linear narrative and gives events the semblance of a beginning, a middle, and an end. Real life is never like that; I had observed the past from a deterministic point of view, where causes lead to effects. While world is more probabilistic in nature here outcomes are driven by invisible or chance events.

To discredit uncertainty in a documenting rules of the process with the acquired knowledge is to deny the element of chaos and chance in planning for future. Predictions can be falsified and uncertainty has an empirical significance. Trial and error is only way to the growth in the world of experience and learning. That I learned on how to see the future.

We tend to fit our perceptions of the world into the model we have constructed in our minds about how the world works. It is easier to accept as valid evidence that fits our model than it is evidence that doesn’t. Some of this filtering is at an unconscious level – our minds are constantly trying to make valid perceptions out of the evidence of the senses.

I am still focused more on those matters in society which we can easily target, rather than those which needs to be self-corrected. The life has new goals as one of them is to empower individuals through education and to promote the kind of diversity which genuinely enriches a culture and democracy. I will present now a brilliant paragraph read today aptly suited on wisdom of life by Rational Fool :

Regimes come and go. So do gods, messiahs, and religions. What endure are ideas, ideas tested by reason and evidence. The ideas of liberty and equality - that all people are free and equal, and no individual or collective may be granted exclusive privileges and immunities in law - these are enduring ideals that have guided humanity along the path of civilization. The rest, however passionately embraced by the populace at a moment in history, are destined to perish in the Darwinian struggle for survival. I never tired of quoting Queen Sheelavati from the film, Anaahat, directed by Amol Palekhar: "Wisdom," she said to her troubled husband and the King of Shravasti, "is knowing the difference between the transient and the eternity".