THE AGE OF REASON

Fiction always scared me both as a reader and a writer. I wished always to escape it. Unless I escape it, I know it will definitely engulf me. I was perplexed from the childhood about why I fear stories so much! the more engaging the story, the more intensely I feared the story.  The reason, I suppose, lies in the fact that the realities that we, in India, are forced to live, makes us too insecure to slip ourselves to random imaginative fictions.  Ours is a country of fictions. There exist lesser and lesser facts in this country and more and more fiction. So much fiction that it is very easy for a sane person to turn into a lunatic/ And since this kind of Lunacy is widely accepted in Indian societies, nobody suspects that a mass lunacy exists.  So, for people like me, it is really necessary to constantly force ourselves out of these fictions and try to live as much as possible in reality.  Defective peace will be, as I have planned, a set of essays on my experiences,...

 Many people and when I say many, it means my five friends have asked me that I spend my time chasing ideas of Hegel, Marx, Buddha, Lacan etc. But what is my own Philosophy? What is that which I refer to while living my own life? Is it pragmatism? Is it Idealism? Is it Marxism? Is it some spiritual doctrine?  In fact, it is a quite blunt self-made philosophy. It can find correlations with Nietzsche's "Live dangerously" doctrine or may be Sartre's Authentic existence. But, I choose to call it, my own, "Aaja Bhid le" doctrine.  It refers to the blunt outrageous aggressive way of living life when you stand against the waves of oceans of life with a straight face and say, "Aaja bhid le dam hai toh", or "Come fight with me, let's see what happens"  This is a Warcry, this is a mute acceptance of war. Yes, I yearn war. Come what you can do to me. we will see who kills who.  This can be expressed by this meme. Shizuka, the character in Dorae...

There are many things, attitudes and ways of living which people adopt and leave as per their needs and wants.  I am not being Nostalgic, I mean, I find the feeling of Nostalgia as disgusting, But objectively speaking, I used to be a Nerd, a textbook nerd. In my school days, I used to be an avid reader in Academics. Here, I am going to self-reflect on the fact that there have been changes in ways of my living which I do not consider good for me. I need to revive the Nerd in me.  I used to ask seniors how to study. I used to run after books and tried many books and which helped me a lot. This behavior, although was not liked my friends, or in general people who knew me, and probably this led me to change.  But this is where Adhyatman comes in picture. It tells you precisely how the society wishes to exploit you and gives you agency whether you really want to change or not. And in my opinion, not every change is for the better.  I lost my Nerdiness and got what? Some a...

Bhuban Badyakar, The Genius Badam Seller!  In a Zen Koans, I read this story.  Zen Monk asked his master, "How to ensure that I am enjoying meditation or any other work that I am doing?" Zen Master replied, "You should sing while working!"  Zen Monk asked, "Which song?"  Zen Master replied, "That's not your concern, you should focus on working!"  Zen Monk remain puzzled.  This wonderful Koans tell us the nature of flow and work. The song should not be a means to your enjoyment. It should be a symbol of your enjoyment, a kind of signal that your unconscious gives you that it is liking the job.  The Zen Monk was in the presumption that the master will tell him some specific song that might work like a miracle and make him more focused. But the truth is the essence of focusing is in focus. Any alternative way will be just a disguised way of focusing only.  When you focus, when you work, your brain functions in the non-sympathetic zone and thus, ...

          Three thinkers that I think changed the landscape of modern scientific thought are:  1. Darwin 2. Marx  3. Freud  I know, I know, where are Einstein, Newton and many other physicists from this list. My concern is not right now with the material physical world rather the world of humans as we have constructed it.  The social life that we lived had been dominated by voices of the dogmatic religions of the medieval times. In these times, when these three thinkers came to the scene, with their respective discoveries, it really changed the way we were forced to see reality due to dogmatic religions.  Here we are concerned with Evolutionary theory. And of course, not to say, it is not just a theory but a conclusive description of reality as we know it. But at the same time, we see, Darwin being misappropriated by the right wing, generally the Libertarian Free marketists, as the philosopher of the right.  Here the main culpr...

If you are in an illusion that the world today runs on progressive ethics and everything follows the ideals of individual freedom and liberty, you might be wrong. The roots of attempts of undermining individual liberty and life is so old as a tradition that it is very difficult to remove those weeds from the Garden of fundamental rights.  Marital Rape is one such category, not recognized by the Judiciary of India. 77 out of 185 countries criminalize it and yet we have out of those 108, still not recognizing the primacy of rights of women over a social institution. Let us dissect the whole issue, Philosophically and legally.  The relevant Legal provisions we find in the Exception 2 of Section 375 of IPC, which Categorically excludes non-consensual sexual intercourse by a husband with his wife from the definition of rape.  All the more so, if we are thinking these are just colonial legacies, wait until you hear this. In the Bhartiya Nyaya Samhita (BNS), the so called Indian...