కౌముది ఫిబ్రవరి 2010

Liberty is our natural right ...

Liberty is our natural right to be allowed to use our own body, intelligence, or wealth according to our will, without doing harm to others; and all the members of a society ought to have the same opportunity for obtaining wealth, education, or knowledge.

Letter to Mrinalini Bose. Written in Bengali from Deoghar on January 3, 1899. Complete Works, 5.146.

GLOBAL: International student security

The promise of education is that it advances the human subject by conferring on each person a greater measure of ability, sociability, dignity and agency, greater power to form themselves and make their own lives in their time on Earth.

The promise of higher education and research is that we might find ways to better order the world so as to universalise ability, dignity and agency, and work together to solve our problems collaboratively. I am struck by the gravity of the issues at stake in this messy and unresolved debate about international student security.

International student security is not just about higher education or the global knowledge economy. It concerns the future world society and civil culture. It is about giving meaning to every life, not just the lives of those born in our own country, who might look like us, speak like us or share a religion.

We all want our lives to have meaning. If Nitin Garg's death helps to focus world attention on the problems of mobile persons, the gaps in their human security and the need for a workable global regime of human security, his life has achieved a greater meaning. Give him that honour. That way, he still lives.

Excerpts from "GLOBAL: International student security" by Simon Marginson, Professor of higher education in the centre for the study of higher education at the University of Melbourne. This is an edited version of a keynote address he gave last week at the World Universities Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

... that man is a holy man, a saint, call him what you will.

A man may believe in all the churches in the world, he may carry in his head all the sacred books ever written, he may baptize himself in all the rivers of the earth--still, if he has no perception of God, I would class him with the rankest atheist.

And a man may have never entered a church or a mosque, nor performed any ceremony, but if he feels God within himself and is thereby lifted above the vanities of the world, that man is a holy man, a saint, call him what you will.

Talk given at Unity Hall, Hartford (Connecticut), USA, on March 8, 1895,
as reported in "Hartford Times" (March 11, 1895). Complete Works, 1.325.

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శ్రీ కౌముది జనవరి 2010

Happy New Year

నూతన సంవత్సర శుభాకాంక్షలు 2010

Merry Christmas

క్రిస్మస్ శుభాకాంక్షలు
2009

What is dharma? What is mukti?

What is dharma? Dharma is that which makes us seek for happiness in this world or the next. Dharma is established on karma, and it impels us day and night to run after and work for happiness.

What is mukti? That which teaches that even the happiness in this life is slavery, and the same is true of the happiness in the life to come, because neither this world nor the next is beyond the laws of nature... Again, happiness, wherever it may be, being within the laws of nature, is subject to death and will not last ad infinitum. So we must aspire to become mukta. We must go beyond the bondage of the body. Slavery will not do.

From "The East and the West," originally written in Bengali. Complete Works, 5.446.

Everybody wants to be a leader

Here in India, everybody wants to be a leader, and there is nobody to obey. Everyone should learn to obey before he can command. There is no end to our jealousies; and the more important the Hindu, the more jealous he is. Until this absence of jealousy and obedience to leaders are learnt by the Hindu, there will be no power of organization. We shall have to remain the hopelessly confused mob that we are now, hoping and doing nothing.

Interview in The Hindu. Chennai, 1896. Complete Works, 5: 216.

శ్రీ కౌముది డిసెంబర్ 2009

Our Tendencies

Our tendencies are the result of past conscious actions. A child is born with certain tendencies. Whence do they come? No child is born with a tabula rasa--with a clean, blank page--of a mind. The page has been written on previously. The old Greek and Egyptian philosophers taught that no child came with a vacant mind. Each child comes with a hundred tendencies generated by past conscious actions. The child did not acquire these in this life, and we are bound to admit that it must have acquired them in past lives.

Talk given at Unity Hall, Hartford (Connecticut), USA, on March 8, 1895, as reported in "Hartford Times" (March 11, 1895). Complete Works, 1.320-21.

Infinite Freedom

In whom is the universe, who is in the universe, who is the universe; in whom is the Soul, who is in the soul, who is the soul; knowing that Truth--and therefore the universe--as our Self, alone extinguishes all fear, brings an end to misery, and leads to infinite freedom.

Written by Swami Vivekananda in March 1899, to be included in the prospectus of the Advaita Ashrama at Mayavati in the Himalayas. Complete Works, 5.435.

A nation can ignore its minorities only at its peril

Excerpt from the speech of Home Minister P. Chidambaram

"A nation can ignore its minorities only at its peril. The golden rule in a democracy is that it is the duty of the majority to protect the minority, be it religious, racial or linguistic. It is a self-evident rule. It is a rule that is firmly rooted in the universality of human rights," Chidambaram said at the conference being organised by the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind.

He condemned all manifestations of communalism and said: "The worst kind of communalism is unleashing communal violence. Violence and violent means to achieve any objective is the antithesis of a civilised society governed by the rule of law.

కౌముది నవంబర్ 2009

Caste in a new mould

The Other Side | Mrinal Pande

The usual definition of caste oppression can no longer explain emerging patterns of dominance

Actually, the traditional characteristics and power of the Brahmins in the traditional upper caste hierarchy (high learning, arrogance and clever use of a certain elite language to build firewalls around knowledge and information to keep it away from the commoners) are now much more visible among India’s upper middle-class professionals, whatever their caste. Whether backward, Dalit or forward, successful children of the new dominant classes no longer acquire their basic knowledge, skills and networking abilities in Brahminical Sanskrit, but in English. Likewise, the power of the old-style, landowning Thakur (Kshatriya), who killed a thousand tigers and routinely torched Dalit huts, has been usurped by today’s political class, who ride lal batti cars with similar disregard for laws, sirens blaring and black cat commandos in tow. They hold power dialogues with neighbouring warlords, make and break treaties—not the princes and nawabs who, if they have not become penniless, have turned hoteliers and protectors of wildlife. The traditional merchant class, thanks to family-based businesses, may have retained some part of their old glory, but in the global arena they are now heavily dependent on the neo-Brahmin: the Indian Institute of Management-trained, multinationalized manager, banker and expat consultant, who strides the global village and carries vital knowledge in his laptop, as a Brahmin once carried in his almanac.

All caste systems need a cleaning class. They are today the invisible and unorganized freelancers. Moving from job to job, they help mop up the night soil of the global village and provide the paymasters with linguistic bridges into the vernacular heartland, where the markets are also the votes.

Excerpt from Mrinal Pande's column