NavDharmyug

'There is a crack, A crack in everything; That is how The Light gets in.' Wrote Leonard Cohen, in his song Anthem. I have been meaning to write a review of the book by Rahul Roushan called Sanghi Who Never Went to a Shakha. I was not getting around to it, the dark shadows of deaths floating around in this resurgent wave of Corona Pandemic, where each man has been reduced to an isolated island of life in the middle of a dreadful sea of unknown. Apart from that it was the structure of the book which was confusing me. Is it a memoir? or a non-fiction tome of political history?  It would come across often that Rahul does not want it to be taken as a memoir. But then he also does not want it to be taken as a political history of say, India since the Nineties. It is in a sense both. Is it a beautiful book? Is the prose enchanting, the structure captivating? I would say no. But then a memoir is not supposed to be beautiful. It is supposed to be brutal. A memoir is not a reflection of ...

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 ...