Honnasiri's Catch

Coming from We have no rights... In this age of rising consumerism, there is a strange sense of what's due to us — in the services these Pvt. Ltds. provide, from their very stated purpose and motive to exist and thrive to the freedoms and sops that are freely expected so that a favourable economic system is available for their growth (of course, not forgetting our benefit as well *sly wink*). A capitalistic society considers the rise of industry the foundation of its prosperity, but a more objective look will show you that we are creating a monster that we are breeding our complete dependence on. It will become its own and will control us. It's like a stilt house on a river that's poorly built but which we yet insist on additionally supporting because of the convenient, mostly blind short-term attention span that we exercise with things like success, aspiration, achievement and glory. Most obsessions over these concepts are by people who haven't been imbibed with...

You raise up your head And you ask, “Is this where it is?” And somebody points to you and says “It’s his” And you say, “What’s mine?” And somebody else says, “Where what is?” And you say, “Oh my God Am I here all alone?” - Bob Dylan, Ballad Of A Thin Man What's mine? Well, what indeed is? As a matter of fact, what's ours? How does it become ours? In the politics of grabbing to keep, this becomes a pivotal moral question. Furthermore, what should we be able to expect without question and pay back to the givers in person-to-person, customer-to-company and inter-family relations? In all the demands we make with these, there are never rules set. They are always based on reciprocation — kinda like if-we're-in-this-together-it-has-to-be-give-and-take. Kinda like we just go with the natural limits of how far we can go with how much we are getting back, and we do that with equal sanctity for the other person's kickbacks as much as we protect ours with. Tha...

In the last two posts( 1 & 2 ), I've spoken about a contributive economy - one which is created by the dynamic of individuals contributing to it, as opposed to just filling spaces that are vacated and being cogs in the ever-growing cyclic machine of the world today. Being a contributor in this economy is rather difficult, despite the noise and jargon the majority of educational institutions in this country make their sales pitches on and the  horn that the majority of the corporate world blows every so often. A contributive economy is one that is constantly original, in the sense that it only starts at the individual's conviction with what he injects into it (and which  plays out collectively, with each one contributing with this principle always intact). He shouldn't necessarily be playing by the rules, unless: 1) The economy serves/has been serving the interests it exists to serve, better than with the method of the individual. 2) The economy has less down...

Man's an animal. We've gone the old academia route to actually establish and tell our children that, way when they are in school. Before they can make a full and complete choice how, and what, they want to make of themselves in life. As this post will prove, even before they can see the potential of humanity otherwise. We layer on that teaching of good moral values and teaching that we must be human - because after all that's what we are. The truth is that, whether man is a animal or not, man has become one. One with a tie, suit and a business plan. One with a developed knowledge and intelligence that masks his animalistic instincts and gives them a shine before turning them into accolades that generations that follow must aim for. One that has made himself into a self-industrious robot to do more, more and more... more, more and more... more, more and more... and more like that... always and ever more - else life is meaningless. We have become that which our natural f...

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...

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 . O...

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...