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Showing posts from 2012

The New Bad Word In Town

We, in morality replete India, are full of taboo phobia - either because we are soft (which we are) or we know that others are soft. Wait, no, not soft. Sensitive is the politically right term (and sometimes haughtily arrogant ). When you dig deeper, you also find that we also make the active (or silent) choice to be the product of ourselves. We are like that only types . We just are, we take it way more seriously than we ourselves will possibly admit or imagine and you have to respect that. Otherwise we shoot you down. Another thing we really love is our dislike for bad words. We just outright hate some words. British, America, Western... Add to that 'foreign' - the one that the F in FDI stands for in the most recent bad word dislike phobia outbreak that has occurred. It's not so much about the pros and cons. It seems like the phobia that the British instilled into us when they cushioned themselves in on our bounty and threw us out after. Modern diplomacy indeed is forg

The Exclusive Human Relationship Paradigm Constrict

Society is made of us and we are made in it. That stands true in more ways than we can ever know. Our discovery of how we naturally grow walled into them will always be only in part as it is an ever-advancing dynamic process and we wouldn't really be who we are today to even discover that little much about ourselves without them. Complicated much. One of the many effects of this is our understanding of relationships, especially the ones we are exclusive about. We pre-divide them into exclusive ones and non-exclusive ones. Going further, we conveniently subscribe to and unconsciously defend various social relationship paradigms to ensure that what we make exclusive stays exclusive - until of course it works no more for us, after which we find someone else to be exclusive with. That amounts the entire effort to more an excuse for some exclusivity, or any at all for that matter. It protects more than explores, seeks to understand or shares. It has a code word - commitment . One th

Indian? Who? You? Me?

This comes after an off-the-cuff discussion on Facebook about the British being good or bad for us. We've all had a million put together, I know, but this was a little more specific and had a lot to take home. From the many conclusions I reached during the course of the discussion, one, which was strongly contested, was about when we became India indeed. When we study about India in our history books, we are referring to what we became (and what became) years later, as a culmination of those identities. We weren't India yet, until the British proclaimed the Indian Subcontinent as one of their territories overseas. We were Bharata Varsa a long time ago, according to the Puranas. India is the Greek word for "beyond the Indus". But we really never meant what we mean so passionately when we say India now until we were one people under British suffering. Our unity was not in our common culture, but in our common suffering. Before that, we were small littl