PoV of a pseudo intellectual half baked liberal feminazi cis male potato.

When it comes to education in India, the linguistic question has always been a fraught and emotive one. Recent discussions around the NEP have once again brought to the forefront some of the debates that we've been grappling with since independence; for instance, the question of the medium of instruction, and the relative places of English, Hindi, and other vernacular languages in our educational framework. One kind of framing of this linguistic debate, which is quite common, is as aspiration versus tradition (a dialectic which seems to underlie so many of the schisms and tensions of modern India). On one side is the role of English as an instrument of aspiration, as a gateway to economic opportunity; on the other side is the attachment to our native languages and their role as repositories of our culture and history. My view is that for the most part, there need be no dichotomy here, and that we should aim to both preserve our knowledge of our indigenous languages as well as acqui...

India did not win the 1971 war. It just stopped fighting in the middle of the war. And as such it was a total failure for India and a long term victory for Pakistan. Pakistan surrendered in Bengal. Not in punjab. We did not even make the return of PoK as a condition of ending the war. We did not impose any economic or military sanctions on West Pakistan as a condition of ending the war. Such conditions are the prerogative of the victor. To ensure that the enemy, in exchange for being spared, has to concede to a number of terms that take away its power to cause trouble for you again. We extracted no such concessions. We could have demanded that the return of PoK, unlimited access for Indian trade to cross Pakistan to Iran and central Asia, opening up of the Pakistani economy to Indian trade, restriction on the Pakistani military in the number of soldiers, officers, tanks and aircraft it could have, disbanding the Pakistani navy permanently and acknowledgement from Pakistan that...

60 seconds in a minute, right? Seconds? Why not 60 firsts in a minute? Or 60 thirds? Why seconds? For that you first have to ask "Minute? What's that?" Comes from Latin. The Hour is divided into 60 parts. Called "pars minuta prima". Meaning First Small Part. The first division of the hour is into 60 “minute" parts. The second division of the hour is thus, pars minuta secunda. Tada! The Second! Bet you never connected in your mind that "minute" of time is the same spelling as "minute" of size. Because for size we pronounce it as "my-nyoot" and for time we pronounce it as "minnit". And ofcourse if its Second from secunda, shouldn't the minute be Prime from prima? What's all this confusion anyway? It's about English being a mongrel language. Believe it or not but English is a dehati language, a language of undeveloped, uneducated, uncivilized barbarians. Unlike German, French, Italian, Persian, L...

Whenever an incident of rape or sexual harassment triggers widespread public anger and discussion, many men tend to respond in one of two ways: (a) Join in with narrowly focused outrage directed just at the specific perpetrators of the incident, call for extreme punishments such as hanging them or shooting them, often suggesting that the proper judicial process be bypassed. (b) Get into conspiracy theory mode, dig up some small inconsistency or incompleteness with the narrative of the incident being discussed, or dig up some parallel incident where a woman supposedly made a fake accusation, and use this to discredit the entire narrative and suggest that it is all some kind of media/feminist/leftist conspiracy. Note that (a) and (b) are quite contradictory kinds of response. While (b) is ostensibly seeking to resist a rush to judgement, and warn against the dangers of trusting the mainstream narrative, (a) is seeking to promote and intensify such a rush to judgement, and take the m...

The one thing about exponentials that many of us would remember from school calculus is that they have the special property of remaining unaltered on differentiation: the derivative of e^x is also e^x. But we may not have fully absorbed the significance of this property for grasping the notion of exponential growth. I certainly hadn't, until very recently. So let's look at it this way. Consider first a quantity n which grows linearly with time. This means that the growth function is n(t) = n0 + at, where n0 is the value of n at t=0, and 'a' is the growth per unit time or the slope of the growth line. The first time derivative of this function is n'(t) = a. And the second time derivative is n''(t) = 0. So, using the analogy with physical motion, one can think of linear growth as having a constant speed (a) and zero acceleration. Sounds pretty unremarkable, right? Now let's think of exponential growth in the same way. Here the growth function is n(t) ...

The word 'jamaat' in Urdu/Arabic simply means a gathering or congregation, similar to the Hindi 'sabha'. And it's not as if Hindi speakers ought to be unfamiliar with 'jamaat'. We frequently use the cognate 'jama', as in gathered/collected together. Yet, because we have chosen to neglect so much of our linguistic and cultural heritage, because we have somehow made Urdu a 'foreign' language, we have allowed ourselves to be conditioned by the media and public sphere around us into associating 'jamaat' only with certain organisations like the Jamaat-e-Islami, which in turn are associated in our minds with religious fundamentalism/extremism. And it is in this context that the Tablighi Jamaat, which has existed for nearly 100 years but which most non-Muslims (including me) had heard little about until last week, could be so rapidly fit by the media into a certain narrative, and painted, virtually overnight, as some kind of terrorist organ...

1. Religion has been a dominant political force for much of human history - particularly till the 15th century. Much of European awakening and the advent of modernity has been made possible because of separation of the church and the state. Will Hindu Rashtra be very different from the Dark Ages of Europe, or the pathetic middle aged kingdoms of India, always divided and fighting over petty issued? I think not. 2. Can there be a single definition of Hinduism? The Hindus of Kerela, Punjab, Bengal and Maharashtra eat different food, have different diety, speak different languages, have different belief systems, celebrate different festivals and so on. Who is to decide what Hindu Rashtra would be for everyone? 3. 'Dharm wo jo Dharan kiya jaye' - Dharma is that which is adopted and lived, this has always been the understanding of religion in India, before the British brought their Christian lens to view Dharma, and force fitted categories like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Isla...

There is an obvious left bias in the university spaces, not just in India but probably across the world. Liberalism has been a dominant and even aspirational way of thinking and living for most of us as well (not just the university students), much due to the influence of this ideology on opinion makers like west educated academicians, English speaking elites and middle class professionals looking to be world citizens. There are some major flaws in these ideologies – rightly pointed out by the critics – that extreme left argues for use of violence to overthrow establishments, and liberalism is often, in practice, neoliberalism which favors the economically rich, and which looks down upon traditions and customs, especially religious ones. But are university students becoming Leninists-Maoists-Naxals or Neoliberal free-market monsters like the East India Company? Reading Yuval Noah Harrari, Marx, Ambedkar, Gandhi as well as listening to folks like Chomsky and Bernie Sanders could giv...

1. There is no real opposition to BJP in National politics, Congress is decimated and BJP's ideology is not challenged by any political party. 2. University campuses, especially where people study humanities, tend to be left leaning - left leaning, and not Anti National, Maoist, Leninist and Islamist as the regular media wants us to believe. Humanities teach us to be with the oppressed, the shoshit varg, and not with Adanis, Ambanis and Modis. 3. Liberalism, or for that matter any study of any kind, is based on critical thinking and questioning. We question about electricity and power when we read engineering, we question power structures and existing biases in the society when we read humanities. 4. Hence, the only group of people who are effectively and relentlessly questioning the Government - that is their job, and most societies take it positively - are the students, especially in Government funded (since private universities could be easily snubbed), humanities institu...

We are wired to fear the other-whether it be a different caste, religion or nationality. It's a primal instinct which flows from the security needs of ancient Stone age and medieval humans. However, as those security fears became unwarranted with the advent of modernisation, it was no longer beneficial to despise the other-but it was still wired. So, Western liberal thought, came up with concepts of fraternity, human rights and social justice to prevent us from turning back to our primal instincts and to help us remind ourselves, "No we don't need to fear the other." It actually became even economically beneficial in the age of industrialization to collaborate with the other. I will be very honest and say that I grew up seeing Muslims as an other. I felt out of place in Muslim living area, I got intimidated by the Kohl in the eyes of men and I wondered why do they pray so differently from us. But thanks to the right people and the right books around me, before I tu...

Gandhi envisioned an India based on Swaraj, a spiritually minded set of self sustained villages, anti-materialiatic India. Nehru wanted a scientific minded, secular, socialist republic, where the idea of rational thinking and equality would be supreme. Ambedkar wanted annihilation of caste, where Chamars and Sharmas can intermarry and eventually become one caste, where inequality based on blood is annihilated. How many of us who swear by the name of Gandhi, Nehru and Ambedkar have actually followed our leaders to any significant extend? Modi wants an India based on the idea of Hindutva, a Viraat Hindu Rashtra, where all castes which respect the ancient principle of Sanatan Dharma are welcome in the fold, where the wisdom of Ayurveda, Gita, Manusmriti will find its rightful face, and where invaders, or even natives, who oppose these timeless principles of Bharat would be shown their place. How many of us who support Modi actually believe and follow these ideals? All other cha...

1. The curious case of Indian liberals, who were never really liberal Democracy is indeed powerful, and people's vote is often a voice which cuts through layers of ideological blindness and shows one who people are and what they want. A typical Indian liberal is a high caste, high class and western educated English speaking Indian. Their background has been such that unless they have considerable empathy and a quest to really find the truth about rest of India, they will find it impossible to understand the reality of the Indians who don't live in metros. They do not mean wrong, many of them are very passionate about very relevant issues like feminism, caste descrimination and even neoliberalism, but there are certain inherent contradictions in their way of life (much of which is coming from their caste and class privilage) that for any observer, they will look hypocritical. Consider caste. Much of academia, media and even high corporate is filled with liberals who are u...

This is probably the first time in the history of independent India that criticising government has not only become something which hurts people's (citizen's) sentiments, but evokes violent reactions, trolling and even threats of physical violence from fellow citizens (not the state, which happened during emergency). This is against the basic democratic precepts of calling out what a citizen thinks is wrong, or even generally asking questions from those in power about their decisions which affect the larger public. Government is not equal to India, India is made of its people. People elect the Government, people have institutions like media, judiciary and even social media to keep the Government in check. This is class 7th Civics. Legislative, executive, judiciary and media are the four pillars of democracy. This Government, to be more precise,the legislative, which essentially is run by a single party, which essentially is largely run by two individuals, has systematica...

It's an irony that something which is supposed to be one of the best experiences of one's romantic life, dating, is so deeply entrenched in a culture of what could only be called sexual harassment and abuse that it often becomes a horrific and deeply scarring experience, mainly for women. I've been a part of this culture, and knowingly and unknowingly, have even contributed towards the same. Reading about the heart wrenching experiences of so many people during #Metoo, and recently reading about Chintan Ruparel, and a few discussions with some friends, made me think about the whole dating scene which a lot of us have been exposed to pretty recently. It's not easy to spot abuse, often for the abuser too. There is a kind of abuse which is direct and pretty easy to spot, the kind inflicted by men who believe women must remain indoors, and any woman who dares to come out of the chaardiwari is loose and could be misbehaved with. The ass grabbing, frottaging, and even ci...