Honnasiri's Catch

When information overwhelms us, oversimplification is the order of the day - or that is the modern state that we have evolved to (if you'd like to call that modern). We are not capable of the patience of taking in, and keeping every detail, while we build a story that's truly worthy of all of them. That is the unfortunate case with how we react when we most need to, like the Nice killing.  Let's look at the information and calculate the oversimplification. We can, then, get a clearer picture and choose an adequate response.  The Information :  The adherents of extremist belief have decided that their belief ranks above humanity, enough to consider another human worthless (and worthy of death) just because they celebrate other values. One set of sacred values directly, and oppositely, clashed with another like they were sworn enemies to begin with - except that they were not.  It's just the wrong place for both to exist together. The...

The Sushant Singh Rajput - Rhea Chakraborty media fiasco is like the nth lesson in a multitude of social behavior patterns that we refuse to take as a learning opportunity. It's giving us the opportunity not to do what is our most tribal response and rise above it to seek better horizons with better instincts.  Let's do a top assessment of its latest developments, without going into the details. An actor is dead. His girlfriend is suspected. His family and his girlfriend's family start a cycle of tit-for-tat: you speak, I oppose, and is currently in the nth Inception style sub story of that cycle. A state police started the investigation. They didn't move on it. Now with public pressure and a media trial, it went to the CBI. But the frenzy hasn't stopped. The only defense of ot is that all people want is #justice for..  some for Sushant and some for Rhea. They swear by the details that he said this and she said that. The strength in the details, they beg, is in thei...

We've just turned a new leaf in India's history that closed one wound with the building of a temple. Like every other, this one redeemed itself, but in the process, it festered another - innocently, of course. As much as wounds need to be healed, we also need to recognise that it is wounds that cause other wounds in a perpetual cycle that we've set off for generations and decades now. The world has come far, in pain and time, with history repeating itself in bigger cycles than the last, on and on.  Pain inspires justice; by that, I mean vengeance. And that inspires violence, which gives us these wounds. All this is because what we need is healing, and that's the only thing we never seek.  Wounds can be of many kinds - the death of a loved one (or people), continuous cultural oppression, being robbed of identity and/or dignity, preventing people from opportunity, etc. Each wound is, first, personal, then multiplied by the community that feels it. For this, vengeance is n...

It's never wise to throw the baby with the bath water, even if you didn't understand the figurative meaning of the idiom but just the literal. It fits in with a lot of events, especially of late - statues being taken down, cancel culture, objectionable history trying to be changed/addressed. The phrase literally originates when, in days long ago with non-existent plumbing like today, water had to be brought with difficulty and used for the entire family to bathe, before being thrown out. The last one in was the baby, being smaller and easier to forget about. Hence, the phrase. The figurative meaning is that we should not end up throwing out the attached or easy-to-miss good while throwing out the bad. This origin and meaning has massive likening to us today, as we are i.e. we are the last ones (yet) in a long line of whatever culture and values we hold. We're way younger than our ancestors when they championed it. Now, while we celebrate it, we could still have a lot of t...

As we speak, the world is getting terribly polarised everywhere. We are stretching our capacity for ideologies and beliefs to incredible extents, letting the cracks speak more than our views themselves. We're creating islands and we're not even trying to build bridges between them. This is making the ideas in our heads increasingly idealistic.  It's worth taking a step back and just, for a moment, consider what brought us here. Is it the pressure that blew, pent up for all those decades and centuries, that it just had to blow? Are our differences really worth it? Let's delve in without trying to set everybody else on fire for not aligning with what we hold true. We need to understand, first, that all political views begin with identity, which is why we are so vehement about them. When someone's against you, it's like they are being denied a part of what is essentially, undeniably, and unarguably themselves. It's as sacred as anything can get. Even if a set ...

The COVID-19 crisis in India has unleashed the mass movement of poor migrant labourers (the key word here) that has people rightly up in arms.  Whether you blame the government or not, it is something that cannot be right and needs to be righted. In response, some people have used the twitter hash tag #metoomigrant to say that they, too, are by definition migrants i.e. they migrated from their hometown to another place to make it, just like these people. When the migrant labourers came from nothing to nothing to (relatively) bargain for a little something, the #metoomigrants came from something to something else usually bargaining for a lot more (else they wouldn't even come).   We are all migrants because we all come from somewhere. Even if it wasn't us who made the arduous journey, we are here in our privilege because someone else did. That is why we sit pretty with that privilege today. As long as your ancestor many generations ago didn't move a micro inch from where t...

For those with the simplistic understanding of Government, there are only two ways that responses can swing to the many cases of police beating that has/has been happening in India under lockdown: I don't know what to do but this is ridiculous or the police know what they're doing so the person must have done something wrong. For those with more nuanced understanding, it will be: The police have a stressful job handling the lockdown, a part of which is a small percentage of error or this is wrong and the result of the lack of sensitisation. For those with a heart, it will be: this is wrong and this must stop.  Ever since India has been under lockdown till April 13th, the police have been given unusual superpowers to maintain law and order. This, itself, isn't unusual. What is, though, is the eagerness they are ready to use the stick with, when people are moving about within rules of curfew and when they aren't. All states have allowed shops selling essentials to...

COVID-19 has been turning our world upside down. People who always had maids are doing all the housework. Recipes that were hidden, feared and unknown are coming out of the woodworks. People are bucking up and learning how to stay with essentials for longer. Most of all, people have been given their right value in society faster than the blink of an eyelid. It's like a grand return to humanity. That's the biggest upside down.  The whole crisis is happening primarily because people are in ultimate danger, not businesses or economy. It brought forward the supreme perspective that people, the soul of industry, are always never indispensable in any scenario, however competitive our business instincts get. It's almost as if the world discovered the morals and ethics that they were ignoring all these centuries and decades, well influenced by an industrialised society. If we really didn't care deep down, and we are cold hearted, we wouldn't b...

One look at a map of all the world's regions, while looking up their history hand-in-hand, will tell you a tale that's wider than what any of them stand by as their cultural identity today. You will easily notice a filtered down version that's only a figment of the big picture that was decades and centuries ago. Countries came, changed, got abolished and went before the century could blink into the next one. What was communities and freer movement became polities and boundaries. When did this happen? When did we become myopic? More has become less. Multiple has become singular. Heterogeneous is becoming homogeneous. Multilingual has become unilingual. Multicolour has become black and white, or just black and white. If this hasn't happened yet, it's happening.   At a closer look, the crux of the issue is between identities (where you're from, what you eat, how you dress, what language you speak) and boundaries (i.e. political divisions i.e. countries i.e. l...

During the last few days, you would have heard much sloganeering, thanks to the opposition to the Citizenship Amendment Bill and the almost proposed nationwide NRC. To those who choose a different political voice, it can be a big nuisance to the head and the ears but there is something eerily common about the Left-influenced big, loud, brash protest style, the opposite (seemingly) rational response to issues and the main stream in-power method of creating their solutions for the country. Though each style points to different preferences, they are all trying to do the same thing for the ones who practice them—use their voice and power for the end they want it to serve. The Left (and all associated and similar) is rooted in people movements among the lower strata of society. These people don't have a big say in matters of politics. In most recent history, power had eluded them. Their voice will seek to demand what they want when they themselves can't bring it about. Speaki...