About Me
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
running thoughts
In the library. Have come here with the intention to study. Now that I am here dont feel like doing so. I like exams times, lots of time to spare, every one is in the edge of their seats, wish all the days were like that. This is quite a strange period. If you know you are tense if you dont you are tense. Strange. Human Nature I guess. Had abnormal psy today. At least I managed to write some answers. Some were my own creation some were not. Hope I pass though. had enough of library I guess i will go back home.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
of thought and things
'Out of some misplaced sense of self righteousness' I have finally embarked on a journey, shunning off that piece of wood that had saved me once..... from my back. On self-annihilation, on not being logical, no future, no past, just present. We are a world based on macro narrative, on sympathy....is there an end to it. "We" brought in "their" GPA but did not bring "their" culture, now its hanging between autoimmunity and university. This system this state has completely ignored to invest in our interest. What do we learn, is there any ideas given to start a company independently? is there creativity in the three hours of paper we write? We are taught how to be a CEO, MD or something to fit into the existing system. One word to define stress: Future.The state and this system is busy reproducing labours, labours to fit in to their system. I do not want to be a part of this rat race. Competition has almost become an instinct, how about just appreciating the difference? for who they are and what they are. It has managed to shake the very foundation we are standing on. Lots of thoughts coming in right on. Till some moment in time violence equaled a tool of justification for me. Now I am having second thoughts... it might be justified in a local level but not in a global manner. The naxals for instance, all we do is just read the headlines "So And So killed by the Naxals" and say Naxals are bad. Though locally naxals might get the support but nationally...hard. A few days ago we lost one of the great leader of the nation. From the place where I come from there is a fair amount of under current against him, now that he is no more those same people have nothiing but praises for him. Sympathy comes in the way of violence, macro narratives comes in the way of violence, martyrdom comes in the way of violence. I will not fight against this system I will just test myself if I can live outside this system... Not plan just do things, no failure no success. I read it somewhere it seems to fit in It said " lets not pretend art or literature or science can make the world better lets just play with the non sense.......
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Too much of Althusser, Gramci.....
Again Back in the same place like before. Almost everyone around me is excited about their future. This is it. we meet, we never meet. I have never thought about the future I am too scared to think of it. Right now I just want to vandalize things. Though I cant do in a big way it would be fun if I could do that. Destroy this education system, this culture, our ethics, sexuality, nationhood.... where all there is to us is everything, now. imagine what the state would be like. For the present moment I want to vandalize myself. Refuse this state of consciousness, refuse this state of reason, refuse civilization, refuse instructions. A person, confined to the shells of solitary, cartoon on the papers in the dustbin, has suddenly been able to see the simmering light somewhere outside, is desperately finding a place to sit rest, talk. Lots of things going around feb 21, 22, 23...., documentary, housing policies,culture paper, msw, our readings, wish i could play a small part in vandalizing some of them.....
Friday, January 1, 2010
'The Other Side Of Progress'
Who cares about morality, ethics, values. We are trapped in a matrix, a very thin line enveloped around ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘rich’ and ‘poor’, ‘free market’ and ‘democracy’. Like an adolescent reflecting one’s own self in the mirror, my understanding of morality is as unstable as that adolescent. Social security, education, infrastructure, academics is all measured by the state (which imparts morality). Am I ‘right’ or am I ‘wrong’, I don’t seek an answer, this makes the world look better. I actually wanted to write about the youths in post-colonial nation, but ended up compiling the ideas of writers, activist, lectures, seminars that I have been engaging myself with recently. The question is: are we a post-colonial or neo-colonial or still a colonial nation. To quote the Joker “I am a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it!” Some sense this ‘Niszethean slave’[1], trapped in a complex transnational state , where everyone is measured in terms of G.D.P., is somehow wanting to break free – free from all social norms, ethical norms, judicial norms (a typical youth for you). Let me now share with you some my concerns’ in issues that I can’t seem to let go.
Late last night, I was taking a stroll down the street; I saw a wide spectrum of the so called ‘poor’ of our society sleeping in the street outside. For many ways it was a “moment of clarity” for me – here’s a government who does not have enough space, infrastructure and shelter for its own people in the city yet a massive ongoing process of displacement of millions and millions of people through “developmental projects”. Tribal, mostly falling its prey, and as I write now, people are being made to do so at gunpoint. Our home minister, P. Chidambaram was a former board of directors in the Vendetta Group, a multinational mining co-operation owned by Anil Agrawal(currently living in a mansion that once belonged to the Shah of Iran), currently devastating the hills of Orissa. Mr. Chidambaram also a former co-operate lawyer represented many mining co-operation; he has a vision of getting 85% of the population living in the cities. This would mean about five hundred million people being displaced, quickly turning India into a police state. I have nothing against development, but the question is whose development, whose progress are we inclined upon.[2] Recently, in the Parliament the government submitted a report researched by Tendulkar Committee appointed by the planning commission. The report said that the government had managed to bring the poverty of the country down. One word. Absurd. This is where morality comes in; ethics comes in – a pure violation of academic ethics on the part of the government and the committee. 1979 definition of poverty said that, using the nutrition norms for a person to stay above the poverty line an individual should have an intake of 2400 cal per day in urban areas and 2100 cal per day in rural areas. The report said that the poverty had come down from 15% to 9%. Not true. It’s just that the government has reduced the intake of 2400 cal per day to 1800 cal per day. Incomes reduced from Rs.800 to Rs.325. This is how the poverty has come down. Wonder why there is a frenetic media focus only on one or two notions? Wonder whose development is it, stakeholders, maybe.
Since the state liberation reform unemployment has shot up, the price of raw materials has gone up 10 times, ownership of the land by the farmers has gone down by 60% and massive reverse land reform through public policy is witnessed. A shocking act by the Supreme Court when Justice Kapadia refused to review the meaning of “public purpose” under the ‘Land Acquisition Act’, when the government was taking the land from the people in the name of “public purpose” an giving it to the private companies. The only sector that has benefited from the ‘state reform’ is the service sector; others have gone down to the dogs. India as the second highest growth rate yet 2/3 of the population constitute of farmer’s suicide. ‘Trade liberalization’ has exposed farmers to the global price which is of course very volatile, plus it seeks a sharp decrease in the domestic price. Where is our social security, provident fund for labourers, sick leaves, overtime payment, holidays (well if you are thinking of NREGA and the recent Right to food, Don’t- a lollypop for the UPA). Enough of economics. Morality is it, we were talking about.
What can we derive from the last century- Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” a unprecedented expansion of human subjectivity, two world wars that brought in the concept of war as a legitimate means of state policy and diplomacy or the ravages of the new technological marvels from aeroplanes to antibiotics to computers – a new type of violence symbolized by nuclear weapons and concentration camps. Morality now becomes politics and politics enters the domain of the public, while ethics on the other hand constitute an individual domain. Murder is wrong we all know that but it’s justified when the state awards a death penalty or right to abortion. Ethics on the other hand provide a relational measure in the context of the individual. Violence has made inroads in shaping the identity and individuality. At least 45 wars were fought in the past century with more than 200 million killed, accompanied by new technological, institutional and psychological skills that as captured our creativity. The defence budget of many countries have overtook the welfare budget, where 60% of all the scientist in the world are employed in defence research, directly or indirectly[3] (Let’s not even go into gender and queer issues). We after all inherit an evolution built on aggression. The idea of India itself is a very modern concept. Is the demise of colonialism complete? Or is it a neo-colonial state? Was there just a shift of political heads on 15th of August, 1947? I know not.
We are told that in the current capital of world capitalism, New York, 25% of all children and 50% of Afro-American children live in families with incomes below the official poverty line. About 40,000 homeless adults live in subways, streets, under bridges and train tunnels of the city. We are not talking about African nations or the third world; we are talking about the richest country, which according to estimates spent between 5,000 billion dollars and $4 trillion only on nuclear rearmament- a clear picture of the relation between poverty and development. According to the Human Development Report of 1998, the three richest people in the world have wealth that exceeds the combined gross domestic products of the 48 least developed nations. One of them is an Indian, and instead of grimly talking of poverty all the while, many Indians have begun to celebrate such national achievement. Here they speak about our struggle, the indigenous people, tribal or the Dalits as if we had no pasts, no myths, no legend, no transmittable system of knowledge, as if our grandparents told us no stories, as if our parents sang us no lullabies. Our past is stolen from us, paradoxically, to push us into the past- very similar to the ‘white man’s burden’. Simultaneously, the lifestyle that traditionally existed between the rich and the poor begin to disappear. Till quite recently, in some traditional parts of our land, the rich lived in bricks, stones or concrete houses, the poor lived in mud houses. The rich wore expensive clothes or western dress; the poor had two sets of traditional clothes (they wore one set and washed the other, which suggests that they probably could stay clean). The rich ate well, the poor ate poorly, but they did eat. The meaning of poverty itself expands to include many kinds of lifestyle that another era would have qualified as a reasonably good one.[4] As the idea of ‘normal’ life changes so do the ideas of sub-normality and abnormality: these begin to include things that were once a part of normality. Problem arises when myths of permanent youth and immorality take over and we get busy keeping time at bay through cosmetics, tonics and fashionable technologies like cardiac bypasses which are mainly designed to bypass the fruits of overconsumption. Satish Kumar, a Jaina philosopher claims that poverty is not the problem- our idea of prosperity is.[5]
For long and in many cultures of the world, poor was not always the opposite of rich. Other consideration as falling from one’s station in life, being deprived of one’s instrument of labour, the loss of one’s status or the mark of one’s profession, lack of profession, exclusion from one’s community or public humiliation defined the poor. It was only after the expansion of mercantile economy, the process of urbanization leading to massive pauperization and, indeed, the monetization of society that the poor were defined as lacking what the rich could have in terms of money and possession.[6]
As I said before- trapped in a matrix we are, a global underworld, a substratum of consciousness that defies at every step the mainstream culture of global economics. A condition is created by the exchange mechanism symbolized by money initiating a binary between sign and reality. On one hand, we are left with the split of the world into two and on the other we witness an absence of suspicion given “a priori”[7] assumption where the logical two, ideas and parameters fail to give us an answer. For instance you can define developed but you cannot define underdeveloped without referring to the word developed. A de-constructive turn indeed, this has inaugurated the hermeneutics of suspect. “See there are morals, your codes....it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They are only as good as the world allows them to be” said the Joker, wired into a globally dominant idea of what constitutes public life. All wired up into a historical mode of reasoning which I find very disturbing in my own little space. A de-constructionist examination of the ideological state apparatus where in the domain of knowledge is itself an object of critique, trapped in a matrix we are, where the Joker represents a Focaultian model of reasoning, a global underworld, a substratum of consciousness that defies at every step the mainstream culture of global economics. Pascal: "Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." Whether it is a sub national struggle or our “concept” of our Nation itself, we need leader like Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Che Guevara, Mao Se Tung, Aung San Suu Kyi people who are something more than just political leaders, leaders not just for development but for the people, leaders beyond good and evil, leaders who stood up not just for human rights but for social justice.
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche : ‘The Birth of tragedy’, 1872.
[2] Arundhati Roy’s essay Chidambaram’s War. Nov 16, 2009. Outlook. Listening To Grasshoppers. She says, “soon-to-be-published work, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminum Cartel, Samarendra Das and Felix Padel say that the financial value of the bauxite deposits of Orissa alone is 2.27 trillion dollars. (More than twice India’s Gross Domestic Product). That was at 2004 prices. At today’s prices it would be about 4 trillion dollars. A trillion has 12 zeroes.”
[3] Ashis Nandy, Time Treks - The Uncertain Future of Old and New Despotism: The twentieth century (pub. Permanent Black, 2007) pp. 2-11.
[4] Ashis Nandy, Time Treks – The Beautiful and Expanding Future of Poverty. (Permanent Black, 2007) pp. 93-113.
[5] Satish Kumar, ‘Poverty and Progress’, Resurgence, September-October 1999, p6; and John Gary, ‘The Myth of Progress’, ibid., pp. 11-13, are only two of the most recent writers who have emphasized this old formulation.
[6] Majid Rahnema, The Development Dictionary: Poverty. (pub. Orient Longman Limited, 1997) pp. 211-236.
[7] immunial Kant: Reason.
Late last night, I was taking a stroll down the street; I saw a wide spectrum of the so called ‘poor’ of our society sleeping in the street outside. For many ways it was a “moment of clarity” for me – here’s a government who does not have enough space, infrastructure and shelter for its own people in the city yet a massive ongoing process of displacement of millions and millions of people through “developmental projects”. Tribal, mostly falling its prey, and as I write now, people are being made to do so at gunpoint. Our home minister, P. Chidambaram was a former board of directors in the Vendetta Group, a multinational mining co-operation owned by Anil Agrawal(currently living in a mansion that once belonged to the Shah of Iran), currently devastating the hills of Orissa. Mr. Chidambaram also a former co-operate lawyer represented many mining co-operation; he has a vision of getting 85% of the population living in the cities. This would mean about five hundred million people being displaced, quickly turning India into a police state. I have nothing against development, but the question is whose development, whose progress are we inclined upon.[2] Recently, in the Parliament the government submitted a report researched by Tendulkar Committee appointed by the planning commission. The report said that the government had managed to bring the poverty of the country down. One word. Absurd. This is where morality comes in; ethics comes in – a pure violation of academic ethics on the part of the government and the committee. 1979 definition of poverty said that, using the nutrition norms for a person to stay above the poverty line an individual should have an intake of 2400 cal per day in urban areas and 2100 cal per day in rural areas. The report said that the poverty had come down from 15% to 9%. Not true. It’s just that the government has reduced the intake of 2400 cal per day to 1800 cal per day. Incomes reduced from Rs.800 to Rs.325. This is how the poverty has come down. Wonder why there is a frenetic media focus only on one or two notions? Wonder whose development is it, stakeholders, maybe.
Since the state liberation reform unemployment has shot up, the price of raw materials has gone up 10 times, ownership of the land by the farmers has gone down by 60% and massive reverse land reform through public policy is witnessed. A shocking act by the Supreme Court when Justice Kapadia refused to review the meaning of “public purpose” under the ‘Land Acquisition Act’, when the government was taking the land from the people in the name of “public purpose” an giving it to the private companies. The only sector that has benefited from the ‘state reform’ is the service sector; others have gone down to the dogs. India as the second highest growth rate yet 2/3 of the population constitute of farmer’s suicide. ‘Trade liberalization’ has exposed farmers to the global price which is of course very volatile, plus it seeks a sharp decrease in the domestic price. Where is our social security, provident fund for labourers, sick leaves, overtime payment, holidays (well if you are thinking of NREGA and the recent Right to food, Don’t- a lollypop for the UPA). Enough of economics. Morality is it, we were talking about.
What can we derive from the last century- Freud’s “Interpretation of Dreams” a unprecedented expansion of human subjectivity, two world wars that brought in the concept of war as a legitimate means of state policy and diplomacy or the ravages of the new technological marvels from aeroplanes to antibiotics to computers – a new type of violence symbolized by nuclear weapons and concentration camps. Morality now becomes politics and politics enters the domain of the public, while ethics on the other hand constitute an individual domain. Murder is wrong we all know that but it’s justified when the state awards a death penalty or right to abortion. Ethics on the other hand provide a relational measure in the context of the individual. Violence has made inroads in shaping the identity and individuality. At least 45 wars were fought in the past century with more than 200 million killed, accompanied by new technological, institutional and psychological skills that as captured our creativity. The defence budget of many countries have overtook the welfare budget, where 60% of all the scientist in the world are employed in defence research, directly or indirectly[3] (Let’s not even go into gender and queer issues). We after all inherit an evolution built on aggression. The idea of India itself is a very modern concept. Is the demise of colonialism complete? Or is it a neo-colonial state? Was there just a shift of political heads on 15th of August, 1947? I know not.
We are told that in the current capital of world capitalism, New York, 25% of all children and 50% of Afro-American children live in families with incomes below the official poverty line. About 40,000 homeless adults live in subways, streets, under bridges and train tunnels of the city. We are not talking about African nations or the third world; we are talking about the richest country, which according to estimates spent between 5,000 billion dollars and $4 trillion only on nuclear rearmament- a clear picture of the relation between poverty and development. According to the Human Development Report of 1998, the three richest people in the world have wealth that exceeds the combined gross domestic products of the 48 least developed nations. One of them is an Indian, and instead of grimly talking of poverty all the while, many Indians have begun to celebrate such national achievement. Here they speak about our struggle, the indigenous people, tribal or the Dalits as if we had no pasts, no myths, no legend, no transmittable system of knowledge, as if our grandparents told us no stories, as if our parents sang us no lullabies. Our past is stolen from us, paradoxically, to push us into the past- very similar to the ‘white man’s burden’. Simultaneously, the lifestyle that traditionally existed between the rich and the poor begin to disappear. Till quite recently, in some traditional parts of our land, the rich lived in bricks, stones or concrete houses, the poor lived in mud houses. The rich wore expensive clothes or western dress; the poor had two sets of traditional clothes (they wore one set and washed the other, which suggests that they probably could stay clean). The rich ate well, the poor ate poorly, but they did eat. The meaning of poverty itself expands to include many kinds of lifestyle that another era would have qualified as a reasonably good one.[4] As the idea of ‘normal’ life changes so do the ideas of sub-normality and abnormality: these begin to include things that were once a part of normality. Problem arises when myths of permanent youth and immorality take over and we get busy keeping time at bay through cosmetics, tonics and fashionable technologies like cardiac bypasses which are mainly designed to bypass the fruits of overconsumption. Satish Kumar, a Jaina philosopher claims that poverty is not the problem- our idea of prosperity is.[5]
For long and in many cultures of the world, poor was not always the opposite of rich. Other consideration as falling from one’s station in life, being deprived of one’s instrument of labour, the loss of one’s status or the mark of one’s profession, lack of profession, exclusion from one’s community or public humiliation defined the poor. It was only after the expansion of mercantile economy, the process of urbanization leading to massive pauperization and, indeed, the monetization of society that the poor were defined as lacking what the rich could have in terms of money and possession.[6]
As I said before- trapped in a matrix we are, a global underworld, a substratum of consciousness that defies at every step the mainstream culture of global economics. A condition is created by the exchange mechanism symbolized by money initiating a binary between sign and reality. On one hand, we are left with the split of the world into two and on the other we witness an absence of suspicion given “a priori”[7] assumption where the logical two, ideas and parameters fail to give us an answer. For instance you can define developed but you cannot define underdeveloped without referring to the word developed. A de-constructive turn indeed, this has inaugurated the hermeneutics of suspect. “See there are morals, your codes....it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They are only as good as the world allows them to be” said the Joker, wired into a globally dominant idea of what constitutes public life. All wired up into a historical mode of reasoning which I find very disturbing in my own little space. A de-constructionist examination of the ideological state apparatus where in the domain of knowledge is itself an object of critique, trapped in a matrix we are, where the Joker represents a Focaultian model of reasoning, a global underworld, a substratum of consciousness that defies at every step the mainstream culture of global economics. Pascal: "Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." Whether it is a sub national struggle or our “concept” of our Nation itself, we need leader like Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Che Guevara, Mao Se Tung, Aung San Suu Kyi people who are something more than just political leaders, leaders not just for development but for the people, leaders beyond good and evil, leaders who stood up not just for human rights but for social justice.
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche : ‘The Birth of tragedy’, 1872.
[2] Arundhati Roy’s essay Chidambaram’s War. Nov 16, 2009. Outlook. Listening To Grasshoppers. She says, “soon-to-be-published work, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminum Cartel, Samarendra Das and Felix Padel say that the financial value of the bauxite deposits of Orissa alone is 2.27 trillion dollars. (More than twice India’s Gross Domestic Product). That was at 2004 prices. At today’s prices it would be about 4 trillion dollars. A trillion has 12 zeroes.”
[3] Ashis Nandy, Time Treks - The Uncertain Future of Old and New Despotism: The twentieth century (pub. Permanent Black, 2007) pp. 2-11.
[4] Ashis Nandy, Time Treks – The Beautiful and Expanding Future of Poverty. (Permanent Black, 2007) pp. 93-113.
[5] Satish Kumar, ‘Poverty and Progress’, Resurgence, September-October 1999, p6; and John Gary, ‘The Myth of Progress’, ibid., pp. 11-13, are only two of the most recent writers who have emphasized this old formulation.
[6] Majid Rahnema, The Development Dictionary: Poverty. (pub. Orient Longman Limited, 1997) pp. 211-236.
[7] immunial Kant: Reason.
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