Unsolicited thoughts from an elder citizen

Questions, observations, suggestions. The addressees should be able to recognise themselves

अहंकार व्यक्ति के अज्ञान और मूर्खता का परिचायक है : गीता (३ / २७)

The spectacle is the guardian of sleep: Guy Debord

Good is self-existent, evil is not. It is like a parasite living in and around good. It will die of itself when the support that good gives it is withdrawn: Mahatma Gandhi, Discussion with friends: September 4, 1947

For how long will you keep fighting with the Mughal Empire? It passed away in the 18th century

If a person ain’t careful; they can make a profession out of revenge: Godless, Miniseries

Which kind of political leaders thrive on civil war? Are they mentally ill?

Which countries of South Asia are not gripped by civil war or near civil war like conditions?

You can rewrite history textbooks, but can you rectify history? Do you know the difference?

The will cannot will backwards… That time does not run backward, that is his wrath; ‘that which was’ is the name of the stone he cannot move. And so he moves stones out of wrath and displeasure, and he wreaks revenge on whatever does not feel wrath and displeasure as he does. Thus the will, the liberator, took to hurting; and on all who can suffer he wreaks revenge for his inability to go backwards. This, indeed this alone, is what revenge is: the will’s ill will against time and its ‘it was. ’“Verily, a great folly dwells in our will; and it has become a curse for everything human that this folly has acquired spirit: Nietzsche, TSZ

Are we always to be identified by our past? Why?

If Mahatma Gandhi is such a useless character for some, why do they never forget to curse him?

हरिशंकर परसाई: महात्मा गाँधी को चिट्ठी पहुँचे (1977)

What happened to the Lokpal? The anti-corruption campaign of 2012-13?

Remember 1984: how many persons were punished for mass murder in Delhi?

Are police officers and bureaucrats servants of the Constitution, or of the government of the day?

The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things: Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli

Stand Up, Say No

How soon after the carnage was an election announced? in 1984, as well as 2002? Why?

गुनाह करके कहाँ जाओगे ग़ालिब // ये जमीं और आसमां सब उसी का है

Has any Indian politician (before 2024) claimed to be a man chosen by God?

You can always make money, you can never make time

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it: Lord Acton

How should we understand the fielding of God as a political entity?

Can or should religious belief be standardised, and for what ?

Treason of the Intellectuals

Why should the Creator of the Universe be interested in nations and parties on a speck of dust?

How many senior and ordinary members of the Congress joined the BJP? Why?

When someone suddenly changes their party affiliation, what this say about their principles?

Why has abuse, sneering and shouting replaced reasonable debate?

The Crisis of Ideology

Why are some people obsessed with exercising total and permanent power?

Tomorrow is a long time: Bob Dylan

Atheism is belief in unbelief

Nation-worship is the atheism of the Right; Party-worship the theism of Marxist-Leninists

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all of the time: Abraham Lincoln

Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth: George Orwell, 1984

Ten Theses on the Proliferation of Egocrats (1977)

The tree on the height is its own enemy: Lao Tzu

Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed, That he is grown so great? / Age, thou art shamed! Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods! (William Shakespeare)

Is India an empire, or a nation? Or is it an empire-nation?

विचारधारा का संकट

Everything deep loves a mask, said Nietzsche. Really? Not everything shallow?

How many masks can we wear; and for how long?

जाति न पूछो साधु की, पूछ लीजिये ज्ञान, मोल करो तरवार का, पड़ा रहन दो म्यान। कबीरदास

Dogmatism (is) the inclination to identify the goal of our thinking with the point at which we have become tired of thinking: Gottfried Lessing, 1771

Heidegger is important for showing that people will defend you from accusations of being a Nazi even if you were a member of the Nazi Party: <thedeadauthor>

And then again there are such as consider it virtuous to say, “Virtue is necessary”; but at bottom they believe only that the police is necessary: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra)

एक अजीब-सी मुश्किल / My Uncanny Paradox

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive: Sir Walter Scott

What you run away from, runs after you – Romanian proverb

The temptation of our day is to accept the intolerable, for fear of still worse to come: Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism (1939)

Ignorance is Strength; Freedom is Slavery; War is Peace

People all seek to know what they do not know yet / they ought rather seek to know what they know already. Zhuang Zhou (369-286 BC)

Khuda Hafiz

History and revolution in Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle

‘He likes scaring people’

The idea of Ram and the idea of India

A Brief History of the Sampradayikta Virodhi Andolan; Movement Against Communalism (1984-1993)

The Broken Middle