Honnasiri's Catch

 India is rife with cultural-socio-moral uncles and aunties who allege that Indian culture is being "threatened" with the cool crowd joining their gang lately. Their list of grievances ranges from Hindu temples being lost or neglected to the mass switch to choosing western food over Indian food. While they may have a case, let's take a deeper look at this threat that they perceive. It has four main stages: the emotional, the delusions, the justification, and the damage. The Emotional We know that sensitivity runs high in India. It's deep in our blood. We're, after all, an emotional bunch. What we're particularly sensitive about status quo. It defines who we are basis our relationship with somebody else. It's like always defining India via the idea of Pakistan, and not what India is inherently without Pakistan. It's our norm which becomes our comfort & soon enough our identity - and then all we know and love (however toxic the idea). The Delusions ...

The way we play politics tends to be magnetic, just like we are inclined to only choose leaders who display a 'magnetic' personality. When we pick either side, we stick to it wearing loyalty on our sleeves until death (or so it would seem). The only sin you can commit is changing sides, just as much you as you can never go wrong by sticking with your side, regardless of what it makes you believe or defend.  You've got to be a team player, or you're no player at all - even if you don't see sense in the strategy. Sometimes, that includes randomly taking one for the team, ironically. This results in diametric opposites in views - boxised versions of how best one's country must be run: capitalism vs. socialism/communism, welfare vs. earned privileges, affirmative action (reservation) vs. society benevolence, and the topic of this article: equality vs. equability . The whole context to this war over ideology is, on one side, the belief that the happiest world is one...

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 ...