Encyclopedia Britannica on 'Hindu fundamentalism':
"What is usually called 'Hindu fundamentalism' in India has been influenced more by nationalism than by religion, in part because Hinduism does not have a specific sacred text to which conformity can be demanded. Moreover, conformity to a religious code has never been of particular importance to Hindu groups such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). For the members of such groups, Hinduism is above all a symbol of national identity rather than a set of rules to be obeyed.
"The nationalistic orientation of the RSS is reflected in its name, which means 'National Volunteer Corps'. Similarly, the name of the BJP means 'Party of the Indian People'. Neither the RSS nor the BJP advocates the creation of a Hindu state. The principal concern of both groups is the danger posed to the Hindu nation by Christian and Islamic proselytisation among the Scheduled Castes (formerly untouchables) and lower-caste Hindus. In RSS tracts, there is little reference to specific Hindu beliefs, and its members acknowledge that they are not themselves religious.
"The nationalism of the RSS and the BJP is also reflected in their religious and moral demands; in this respect they differ significantly from Christian fundamentalist groups in the United States. In a notorious incident in 1992, the Babri Masjid (Mosque of Babur) at Ayodhya was demolished by a mob of Hindu nationalists; the subsequent rioting led to the deaths of more than 1,000 people. Although there was real religious fervour associated with the belief that the site of the mosque was the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama and the location of an ancient Hindu temple, the attack was above all a reflection of the Hindu nationalists' belief in the essentially Hindu character of India. The fact that Hindu nationalism is sometimes called 'Hindu fundamentalism' illustrates how indiscriminately the term 'fundamentalism' has been used outside its original American Christian context."
27 October 2017
23 October 2017
Universalism & Absolutism, Polytheism & Monotheism, Tolerance & Intolerance
Q: What is the truth?
There are two fundamental answers for this question:
A. There are many truths
B. There is only one truth
Accordingly, there are two fundamental philosophies:
A. Universalism
B. Absolutism
Asia is the cradle of all the world's major civilisations. It has three major regions:
1. India
2. East Asia
3. West Asia
Philosophically, India and East Asia were/are universalist and West Asia was/is absolutist. India's universalist philosophy gave birth to a universalist way of life: Hinduism.
Each region gave birth to several religions:
1. India: Shaivism, Vaishnavism, Shaktism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism
2. East Asia: Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism
3. West Asia: Judaism, Christianity, Islam
Philosophy is the foundation of religion. Universalism expresses itself in religion as polytheism and tolerance. Absolutism expresses itself in religion as monotheism and intolerance.
There are two fundamental answers for this question:
A. There are many truths
B. There is only one truth
Accordingly, there are two fundamental philosophies:
A. Universalism
B. Absolutism
Asia is the cradle of all the world's major civilisations. It has three major regions:
1. India
2. East Asia
3. West Asia
Philosophically, India and East Asia were/are universalist and West Asia was/is absolutist. India's universalist philosophy gave birth to a universalist way of life: Hinduism.
Each region gave birth to several religions:
1. India: Shaivism, Vaishnavism, Shaktism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism
2. East Asia: Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism
3. West Asia: Judaism, Christianity, Islam
Philosophy is the foundation of religion. Universalism expresses itself in religion as polytheism and tolerance. Absolutism expresses itself in religion as monotheism and intolerance.
22 October 2017
'Secret Superstar': Review
Review:
* India has 940 females for every 1000 males. The natural sex ratio is 950 females for every 1000 males. So this means about 70 lakh girls and women are 'missing' in India.
* India's male life expectancy is 67 years and female life expectancy is 70 years - only 3 years more. In industrialised countries, female life expectancy is 7 years more than the male life expectancy.
* India's male literacy rate is 82% and female literacy rate is 65% - almost 20% lesser.
People say we ill-treat girls and women from their birth to their death. They are wrong. We start ill-treating them even before their birth. We kill girls before they are born. If they are born, we don't treat them as full humans having equal rights. And we say it is 'normal' for a man to beat his wife. The condition of girls and women in our country does not make for a very pretty picture.
Sociology tells us that agricultural society is gender-unequal and industrial society is gender-equal. So as India transforms from an agricultural society to an industrial society through the technological and economic process of modernisation, the situation will improve. True. Technology and economics are powerful forces. But there is another force that is even more powerful - the most powerful force in the world: love. And the greatest love in the world is a mother's love.
Advait Chandan's Secret Superstar is a no-holds-barred examination of India's shameful treatment of its girls and women. This itself would make it a good movie. But at its heart, it is a simple story about a mother's love for her child/daughter. Secret Superstar is beautiful, wonderful and uplifting. It is a moving tribute to the heroes of the world - and the visible gods: the mothers. Maatru devo bhava . . . Janani swargaat api gariyasi . . . Vande maataram . . .
* India has 940 females for every 1000 males. The natural sex ratio is 950 females for every 1000 males. So this means about 70 lakh girls and women are 'missing' in India.
* India's male life expectancy is 67 years and female life expectancy is 70 years - only 3 years more. In industrialised countries, female life expectancy is 7 years more than the male life expectancy.
* India's male literacy rate is 82% and female literacy rate is 65% - almost 20% lesser.
People say we ill-treat girls and women from their birth to their death. They are wrong. We start ill-treating them even before their birth. We kill girls before they are born. If they are born, we don't treat them as full humans having equal rights. And we say it is 'normal' for a man to beat his wife. The condition of girls and women in our country does not make for a very pretty picture.
Sociology tells us that agricultural society is gender-unequal and industrial society is gender-equal. So as India transforms from an agricultural society to an industrial society through the technological and economic process of modernisation, the situation will improve. True. Technology and economics are powerful forces. But there is another force that is even more powerful - the most powerful force in the world: love. And the greatest love in the world is a mother's love.
Advait Chandan's Secret Superstar is a no-holds-barred examination of India's shameful treatment of its girls and women. This itself would make it a good movie. But at its heart, it is a simple story about a mother's love for her child/daughter. Secret Superstar is beautiful, wonderful and uplifting. It is a moving tribute to the heroes of the world - and the visible gods: the mothers. Maatru devo bhava . . . Janani swargaat api gariyasi . . . Vande maataram . . .
20 October 2017
America, White Racism and Donald Trump
Ta-Nehisi Coates on America, white racism and Donald Trump:
• With one immediate exception, Trump's predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness — that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them.
• It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true — his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.
• But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.
• But that is the point of white supremacy — to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump's counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.
• Trump truly is something new — the first President whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black President. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become President. He must be called by his rightful honorific — America's first white President.
• The scope of Trump's commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular disbelief in the power of whiteness.
• The collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. The indictment continues: To their neo-liberal economics, Democrats and liberals have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks the white man as history's greatest monster and prime-time television's biggest doofus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working-class people.
• That black people, who have lived for centuries under such derision and condescension, have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians.
• Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by arguments about intersectionality, and oppressed by new bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality-television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.
• Trump's white support was not determined by income. He assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker. So when white pundits cast the elevation of Trump as the handiwork of an inscrutable white working class, they are being too modest, declining to claim credit for their own economic class.
• If you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81.
• The focus on one subsector of Trump voters — the white working class — is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theatre at work in which Trump's Presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King was gunned down on a Memphis balcony — even after a black President; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black President — is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country's political life.
• But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required.
• In law and economics and then in custom, a racist distinction not limited to the household emerged between the 'help' (the 'freemen', the white workers) and the 'servants' (the 'negers', the slaves). The former were virtuous and just, worthy of citizenship, progeny of Jefferson and, later, Jackson. The latter were servile and parasitic, dim-witted and lazy, the children of African savagery.
• Black workers suffer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums. Sympathetic op‑ed columns and articles are devoted to the plight of working-class whites when their life expectancy plummets to levels that, for blacks, society has simply accepted as normal. White slavery is sin. Nigger slavery is natural.
• Speaking in 1848, Senator John C Calhoun: "With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals."
• On the eve of secession, Jefferson Davis, the eventual President of the Confederacy, pushed the idea further, arguing that such equality between the white working class and white oligarchs could not exist at all without black slavery: "I say that the lower race of human beings that constitute the substratum of what is termed the slave population of the South, elevates every white man in our community. It is the presence of a lower caste, those lower by their mental and physical organisation, controlled by the higher intellect of the white man, that gives this superiority to the white labourer."
• "These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts", Senator Barack Obama wrote in 2006: "Downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling of employer-based health-care and pension plans, and schools that fail to teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy". Obama allowed that "blacks in particular have been vulnerable to these trends" — but less because of racism than for reasons of geography and job-sector distribution. This notion — raceless anti-racism — marks the modern left, from the New Democrat Bill Clinton to the socialist Bernie Sanders. Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.
• If anyone should be angered by the devastation wreaked by the financial sector and a government that declined to prosecute the perpetrators, it is African Americans — the housing crisis was one of the primary drivers in the past 20 years of the wealth gap between black families and the rest of the country. But the cultural condescension toward and economic anxiety of black people is not news. Toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling whites raise the specter of white slavery.
• A narrative of long-neglected working-class black voters, injured by globalisation and the financial crisis, and forsaken by out-of-touch politicians, does not serve to cleanse the conscience of white people for having elected Donald Trump. Only the idea of a long-suffering white working class can do that.
• "You can't eat equality", asserts Joe Biden — a statement worthy of someone unthreatened by the loss of wages brought on by an unwanted pregnancy, a background-check box at the bottom of a job application, or the deportation of a breadwinner.
• Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.
• The white working class functions rhetorically not as a real community of people so much as a tool to quiet the demands of those who want a more inclusive America.
• What appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. All politics are identity politics — except the politics of white people, the politics of the bloody heirloom.
• Any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites.
• The real problem is that Democrats aren't the party of white people — working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labour from other white demographics; they are divided from all other labourers by the fact of their whiteness.
• Packer concludes that Obama was leaving the country "more divided and angrier than most Americans can remember", a statement that is likely true only because most Americans identify as white. Certainly the men and women forced to live in the wake of the beating of John Lewis, the lynching of Emmett Till, the firebombing of Percy Julian's home, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers would disagree.
• The triumph of Trump's campaign of bigotry presented the problematic spectacle of an American President succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly because of it. Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed.
• The implications — that systemic bigotry is still central to our politics; that the country is susceptible to such bigotry; that the salt-of-the-earth Americans whom we lionise in our culture and politics are not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos — were just too dark.
• Incorporating all of this into an analysis of America and the path forward proved too much to ask. Instead, the response has largely been an argument aimed at emotion — the summoning of the white working class, emblem of America's hardscrabble roots, inheritor of its pioneer spirit, as a shield against the horrific and empirical evidence of trenchant bigotry.
• The inference is that the Democratic Party has forgotten how to speak on hard economic issues and prefers discussing presumably softer cultural issues such as "diversity". It's worth unpacking what, precisely, falls under this rubric of "diversity" — resistance to the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to deport parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches "no excuses" to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate executives "too big to jail".
• The first black President found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base. It was thought by Obama and some of his allies that this toxicity was the result of a relentless assault waged by Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Trump's genius was to see that it was something more, that it was a hunger for revanche so strong that a political novice and accused rapist could topple the leadership of one major party and throttle the heavily favoured nominee of the other.
• Trump, more than any other politician, understood the valence of the bloody heirloom and the great power in not being a nigger.
• In a recent 'New Yorker' article, a former Russian military officer pointed out that interference in an election could succeed only where "necessary conditions" and an "existing background" were present. In America, that "existing background" was a persistent racism, and the "necessary condition" was a black President.
• And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs — the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal — to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase "grab 'em by the pussy" into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, "If a black man can be President, then any white man — no matter how fallen — can be President". And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.
• Trump's legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagogue can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington and better schooled in the methodology of governance — and now liberated from the pretence of anti-racist civility — doing a much more effective job than Trump.
• With one immediate exception, Trump's predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness — that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them.
• It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true — his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.
• But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.
• But that is the point of white supremacy — to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything is possible. But Trump's counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people, and even more is possible.
• Trump truly is something new — the first President whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black President. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump is a white man like all the others who rose to become President. He must be called by his rightful honorific — America's first white President.
• The scope of Trump's commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular disbelief in the power of whiteness.
• The collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. The indictment continues: To their neo-liberal economics, Democrats and liberals have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks the white man as history's greatest monster and prime-time television's biggest doofus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working-class people.
• That black people, who have lived for centuries under such derision and condescension, have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians.
• Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by arguments about intersectionality, and oppressed by new bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality-television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.
• Trump's white support was not determined by income. He assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker. So when white pundits cast the elevation of Trump as the handiwork of an inscrutable white working class, they are being too modest, declining to claim credit for their own economic class.
• If you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81.
• The focus on one subsector of Trump voters — the white working class — is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theatre at work in which Trump's Presidency is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King was gunned down on a Memphis balcony — even after a black President; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black President — is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of this country's political life.
• But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required.
• In law and economics and then in custom, a racist distinction not limited to the household emerged between the 'help' (the 'freemen', the white workers) and the 'servants' (the 'negers', the slaves). The former were virtuous and just, worthy of citizenship, progeny of Jefferson and, later, Jackson. The latter were servile and parasitic, dim-witted and lazy, the children of African savagery.
• Black workers suffer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffer, something in nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums. Sympathetic op‑ed columns and articles are devoted to the plight of working-class whites when their life expectancy plummets to levels that, for blacks, society has simply accepted as normal. White slavery is sin. Nigger slavery is natural.
• Speaking in 1848, Senator John C Calhoun: "With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals."
• On the eve of secession, Jefferson Davis, the eventual President of the Confederacy, pushed the idea further, arguing that such equality between the white working class and white oligarchs could not exist at all without black slavery: "I say that the lower race of human beings that constitute the substratum of what is termed the slave population of the South, elevates every white man in our community. It is the presence of a lower caste, those lower by their mental and physical organisation, controlled by the higher intellect of the white man, that gives this superiority to the white labourer."
• "These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts", Senator Barack Obama wrote in 2006: "Downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling of employer-based health-care and pension plans, and schools that fail to teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy". Obama allowed that "blacks in particular have been vulnerable to these trends" — but less because of racism than for reasons of geography and job-sector distribution. This notion — raceless anti-racism — marks the modern left, from the New Democrat Bill Clinton to the socialist Bernie Sanders. Few national liberal politicians have shown any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.
• If anyone should be angered by the devastation wreaked by the financial sector and a government that declined to prosecute the perpetrators, it is African Americans — the housing crisis was one of the primary drivers in the past 20 years of the wealth gap between black families and the rest of the country. But the cultural condescension toward and economic anxiety of black people is not news. Toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling whites raise the specter of white slavery.
• A narrative of long-neglected working-class black voters, injured by globalisation and the financial crisis, and forsaken by out-of-touch politicians, does not serve to cleanse the conscience of white people for having elected Donald Trump. Only the idea of a long-suffering white working class can do that.
• "You can't eat equality", asserts Joe Biden — a statement worthy of someone unthreatened by the loss of wages brought on by an unwanted pregnancy, a background-check box at the bottom of a job application, or the deportation of a breadwinner.
• Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.
• The white working class functions rhetorically not as a real community of people so much as a tool to quiet the demands of those who want a more inclusive America.
• What appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. All politics are identity politics — except the politics of white people, the politics of the bloody heirloom.
• Any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites.
• The real problem is that Democrats aren't the party of white people — working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labour from other white demographics; they are divided from all other labourers by the fact of their whiteness.
• Packer concludes that Obama was leaving the country "more divided and angrier than most Americans can remember", a statement that is likely true only because most Americans identify as white. Certainly the men and women forced to live in the wake of the beating of John Lewis, the lynching of Emmett Till, the firebombing of Percy Julian's home, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers would disagree.
• The triumph of Trump's campaign of bigotry presented the problematic spectacle of an American President succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly because of it. Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed.
• The implications — that systemic bigotry is still central to our politics; that the country is susceptible to such bigotry; that the salt-of-the-earth Americans whom we lionise in our culture and politics are not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos — were just too dark.
• Incorporating all of this into an analysis of America and the path forward proved too much to ask. Instead, the response has largely been an argument aimed at emotion — the summoning of the white working class, emblem of America's hardscrabble roots, inheritor of its pioneer spirit, as a shield against the horrific and empirical evidence of trenchant bigotry.
• The inference is that the Democratic Party has forgotten how to speak on hard economic issues and prefers discussing presumably softer cultural issues such as "diversity". It's worth unpacking what, precisely, falls under this rubric of "diversity" — resistance to the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to deport parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches "no excuses" to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate executives "too big to jail".
• The first black President found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base. It was thought by Obama and some of his allies that this toxicity was the result of a relentless assault waged by Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Trump's genius was to see that it was something more, that it was a hunger for revanche so strong that a political novice and accused rapist could topple the leadership of one major party and throttle the heavily favoured nominee of the other.
• Trump, more than any other politician, understood the valence of the bloody heirloom and the great power in not being a nigger.
• In a recent 'New Yorker' article, a former Russian military officer pointed out that interference in an election could succeed only where "necessary conditions" and an "existing background" were present. In America, that "existing background" was a persistent racism, and the "necessary condition" was a black President.
• And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs — the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal — to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase "grab 'em by the pussy" into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, "If a black man can be President, then any white man — no matter how fallen — can be President". And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.
• Trump's legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagogue can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington and better schooled in the methodology of governance — and now liberated from the pretence of anti-racist civility — doing a much more effective job than Trump.
17 October 2017
15 October 2017
Islam & Christianity: Absolutism and Imperialism
The central feature of the West Asian religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) is absolutism. That is, all the 3 religions say:
1. It alone is true
2. All other religions are false
3. So it must replace all other religions.
Absolutism logically leads to imperialism - which consists of:
1. Military conquest
2. Political control
3. Religious conversions.
1. It alone is true
2. All other religions are false
3. So it must replace all other religions.
Absolutism logically leads to imperialism - which consists of:
1. Military conquest
2. Political control
3. Religious conversions.
12 October 2017
Demonetisation + GST = Slowdown in India's Economy?
All these days we knew that our political system is built on the foundation of corruption. Now we are realising something else: our economy is just like our politics - it is also built on a foundation of corruption. This is clear from the slowdown in the economy following two major measures against corruption: demonetisation and GST.
Last week the Prime Minister said he will not hurt the country's long-term economic interest for the sake of his short-term political interest. This sounds like a typical political statement. But its corollary is very true: the Prime Minister has hurt his party's short-term political interest for the sake of the country's long-term economic interest. In any democracy this is a bold gamble. In India it is suicide. (Forget the Uttar Pradesh election result: now it's a different ball-game altogether)
The Prime Minister has taken not one, but two big gambles. Most economists say both DeMo and GST will improve the economy over the long term. But 'long term' is an unaffordable luxury for a political party in a democracy. And this is not just any democracy - this is India. So cross your fingers and watch how the economy performs over the next several months. India-Pakistan cricket matches are just for time-pass. This is the real high-stakes edge-of-your-seat nail-biting cliffhanger . . .
PS: If this gamble works, it will be for two reasons:
1) The faith that crores of poor Indians have in the Prime Minister
2) The awesome quality of the alternative option.
Last week the Prime Minister said he will not hurt the country's long-term economic interest for the sake of his short-term political interest. This sounds like a typical political statement. But its corollary is very true: the Prime Minister has hurt his party's short-term political interest for the sake of the country's long-term economic interest. In any democracy this is a bold gamble. In India it is suicide. (Forget the Uttar Pradesh election result: now it's a different ball-game altogether)
The Prime Minister has taken not one, but two big gambles. Most economists say both DeMo and GST will improve the economy over the long term. But 'long term' is an unaffordable luxury for a political party in a democracy. And this is not just any democracy - this is India. So cross your fingers and watch how the economy performs over the next several months. India-Pakistan cricket matches are just for time-pass. This is the real high-stakes edge-of-your-seat nail-biting cliffhanger . . .
PS: If this gamble works, it will be for two reasons:
1) The faith that crores of poor Indians have in the Prime Minister
2) The awesome quality of the alternative option.
08 October 2017
'Blade Runner 2049' Review: Science Fiction and Philosophy
Review:
Q: What is 'the real world'?
A: The world we live in, the world we know - the world we see, hear and touch every day.
Q: What is philosophy?
A: Asking questions about the world and about life. What is truth? What is reality? Is there a truth/reality beyond this world?
Q: What is science fiction?
A: An imaginary story set in an imaginary world of the future with imaginary advanced science & technology.
We live every day in 'the real world'. We accept it as it is and don't ask any questions. Art - especially science fiction - can be a powerful tool for looking at our world in a different way and asking questions about it. That is, science fiction can be a powerful tool for philosophy.
In movies, the best examples of this are the Wachowski brothers' Matrix 1 (1999) and Matrix 2 (2003). Matrix 1 dealt with reality vs perception. Matrix 2 dealt with free will vs determinism.
In other words, science fiction is the means and philosophy is the end. This is how it should be. The problem is sometimes the opposite happens - science fiction becomes the end and philosophy becomes the means. That is - instead of using science fiction to ask philosophical questions about our real world of today, a book/movie tries to ask philosophical questions about an imaginary science-fiction world of the future. This is not philosophy - it is pseudo-philosophy.
The classic examples of this are Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). American and European critics hailed both these movies as masterpieces - because they don't know the difference between philosophy and pseudo-philosophy.
And now Dennis Villeneuve gives us the sequel to Blade Runner - Blade Runner 2049. Again, American and European critics have hailed the movie - calling it the 21st century version of Blade Runner. They are absolutely right. In Blade Runner, a man falls in love with a robot. In Blade Runner 2049, a robot falls in love with a hologram.
Q: What is 'the real world'?
A: The world we live in, the world we know - the world we see, hear and touch every day.
Q: What is philosophy?
A: Asking questions about the world and about life. What is truth? What is reality? Is there a truth/reality beyond this world?
Q: What is science fiction?
A: An imaginary story set in an imaginary world of the future with imaginary advanced science & technology.
We live every day in 'the real world'. We accept it as it is and don't ask any questions. Art - especially science fiction - can be a powerful tool for looking at our world in a different way and asking questions about it. That is, science fiction can be a powerful tool for philosophy.
In movies, the best examples of this are the Wachowski brothers' Matrix 1 (1999) and Matrix 2 (2003). Matrix 1 dealt with reality vs perception. Matrix 2 dealt with free will vs determinism.
In other words, science fiction is the means and philosophy is the end. This is how it should be. The problem is sometimes the opposite happens - science fiction becomes the end and philosophy becomes the means. That is - instead of using science fiction to ask philosophical questions about our real world of today, a book/movie tries to ask philosophical questions about an imaginary science-fiction world of the future. This is not philosophy - it is pseudo-philosophy.
The classic examples of this are Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). American and European critics hailed both these movies as masterpieces - because they don't know the difference between philosophy and pseudo-philosophy.
And now Dennis Villeneuve gives us the sequel to Blade Runner - Blade Runner 2049. Again, American and European critics have hailed the movie - calling it the 21st century version of Blade Runner. They are absolutely right. In Blade Runner, a man falls in love with a robot. In Blade Runner 2049, a robot falls in love with a hologram.
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