NavDharmyug

This week, the Narendra Modi government was expanded. However, as it turned out, it was not merely an expansion, rather complete rehash of the cabinet, with many faces, widely believed as non-performers eased out of their positions.  The expansion came with the dropping of some key names, much famed and widely seen on TV Channels, perceived to me closest to the leftist media houses. Prakash Javadekar was shunted, Ravishankar Prasad was dropped, so was Ramesh Pokhariyan Nishank. Apart from the worthies of Ministries of Information & Broadcasting, Law and IT and HRD, Dr. Harshvardhan was also dropped from health.  Before we look at the addition, it is pertinent to look at the deletions from the earlier Cabinet. Prakash Javadekar, as I&B Minister was expected to take strong stand, make statements, blast the inane propaganda in key policy initiatives that the Modi Government was taking. From Land Acquisition Bill to Demonetization to GST to Triple Talaq to CAA to...

  "Before mass leaders seize the power to fit realities to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it."                        - Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism As Delhi descends into the breathless chamber of smoke and dust another year, Delhi CM releases another tranche of full-page advertisements, and some would say, using them, buys the headlines of the newspapers in which those advertisements appear. The air quality hovers between bad and worse, as the silly anti-Deepavali order of Supreme Courts mock the powers-that-be, as Deepawali still is a month ahead. When I looked at the Hindustan Times today (NCR Edition, 18.10,2020), I am reminded of the above quote by Hannah Arendt.  An unscrupulous politician like Arvind Kejriwal is defined in the quote above, a politician who sto...

They say death is a great equalizer. The oppressor, the oppressed, the rich and the poor, the privileged and the deprived, the atheist and the fanatic, the prince and the pauper are all equal in death. They lie. They are wrong. All people are not equal in death. Death is as unequal as is life and as monstrously cruel. How we are treated in death is defined by the people we leave behind. We are quite helpless in our posthumous passivity. It is also defined by how we have lived. If we have mattered to people as name and person or only as number. What is our identity in death, numerical reality or philosophical rallying point? Many things define where we find ourselves when the cruel chariot of death has run over the fragrant floral lives and the dust settles down, giving way to the stench of dead body. From a very philosophical value, each life matters a universe in value, from a very cynical, realistic and analytic value, the quantum of loss out of any death will be defined ...

“And today, with a computer, everybody is an intellectual. So I don’t think it has anything to do with someone’s profession or with someone’s social class. According to me, an intellectual is anyone who is creatively producing new knowledge. A peasant who understands that a new kind of graft can produce a new species of apples has at that moment produced an intellectual activity. Whereas the professor of philosophy who all his life repeats the same lecture on Heidegger doesn’t amount to an intellectual. Critical creativity—criticizing what we are doing or inventing better ways of doing it—is the only mark of the intellectual function .”- Umberto Eco There is much debate on intellectuals today in India. Many of them are troubled by what they call as shrinking space of dissent. The fact remains that while in the earlier days they were relegated to the unimportant pages of local newspapers, now they are celebrity in Television news where they rant about ‘Good, old days’ and curse ...

A man walks into metro station, shoot himself. The story is a footnote on some inside pages of the newspaper. Even if someone reads it, it is security lapse which stands out. The dead doesn’t evoke attention, let alone sympathy. Without personalization, it is a lame news. I am not a journalist. I am not even a student of journalism in proper sense. If I go by the wise words by Anne Lamott , and analyze the reports, the intent and interest of the journalist stands open for scrutiny. A murder in Dadri, sad as it is, outcome of rumor or fact, is reported way differently from the way, the gory murder of a reporter in same state or killing of a soldier in same state is reported. Annie Lamott tells us that we need to be presented with the actors in a story with human perspective, that what they were as human beings, beyond a statistics or a name. We know the man murdered in Dadri was doing errands for the village, a soft-spoken man, who, with hard work did well to place his kids in...

See I Fooled You Source: MSN In a time of universal deceit- telling the truth is a revolutionary act.- George Orwell.  A dream rose from desperation. Hassled by blatant corruption, Indians rose in protest against a thoroughly corrupt government which largely laughed off those protest. Those in power were not concerned, worried. They were amused, they laughed it off, they asked the people who questioned corruption in embarrassed, scared voices- “Are you nuts?” Then, suddenly it was Y2k or Java or Cloud to use a technology equivalent. Everyone was doing it and no one knew what it meant. Technology democratized the media and the Social media split into two. It did do something good. It churned the politics and challenged the status quo. It broke the collaboration of convenience among the top two national parties. Narendra Modi was brought in as change of guard for BJP. Many called it attempt to polarize. I do not look at it that way. It was an attempt to offer what peopl...