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The Return of the Aam Aadmi Party
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily.)
What to make of the verdict in Delhi’s Assembly elections this month? After a dismal show in the national election last year, when many had written it off, the Aam Aadmi (‘common man’) Party achieved a crushing win in Delhi with 67/70 seats. Delhi may be electorally small but being the capital of the nation and of empires past, the headquarters of the national media, and a trendsetter for other regions, its control has great emotional significance—all too evident in AAP’s main rival BJP’s desperate eleventh-hour tactics to win in Delhi. The verdict has drawn many explanations: AAP’s strategy, grassroots campaign, and populist promises; people’s disaffection with the fueling of communal strife by RSS, VHP, and other BJP-affiliated Hindu right-wingers; the invisibility of BJP’s much-hyped ‘development’; BJP’s arrogance, disorganization in Delhi, and its dirty campaign; AAP’s success in framing this as a two-way contest which enabled anti-BJP votes to consolidate behind AAP; Modi’s $18K splurge on a suit—in retrospect, a major wardrobe malfunction, and so on. Whatever the mix of factors, last year’s ‘Modi wave’ now seems subdued, if not stalled.
Categories: Politics2 comments on The Return of the Aam Aadmi Party
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Ronald Dworkin on the Right to Ridicule
I really like the clarity and point of view in this short 2006 essay by Ronald Dworkin, American philosopher and scholar of constitutional law. The essay is relevant in light of both Perumal Murugan and Charlie Hebdo incidents.
So in a democracy no one, however powerful or impotent, can have a right not to be insulted or offended. That principle is of particular importance in a nation that strives for racial and ethnic fairness. If weak or unpopular minorities wish to be protected from economic or legal discrimination by law—if they wish laws enacted that prohibit discrimination against them in employment, for instance—then they must be willing to tolerate whatever insults or ridicule people who oppose such legislation wish to offer to their fellow voters, because only a community that permits such insult as part of public debate may legitimately adopt such laws. If we expect bigots to accept the verdict of the majority once the majority has spoken, then we must permit them to express their bigotry in the process whose verdict we ask them to accept. Whatever multiculturalism means—whatever it means to call for increased “respect” for all citizens and groups—these virtues would be self-defeating if they were thought to justify official censorship.Muslims who are outraged by the Danish cartoons note that in several European countries it is a crime publicly to deny, as the president of Iran has denied, that the Holocaust ever took place. They say that Western concern for free speech is therefore only self-serving hypocrisy, and they have a point. But of course the remedy is not to make the compromise of democratic legitimacy even greater than it already is but to work toward a new understanding of the European Convention on Human Rights that would strike down the Holocaust-denial law and similar laws across Europe for what they are: violations of the freedom of speech that that convention demands.
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Thinkfest 2015
It is my honor to have been invited to speak at Thinkfest 2015 in Chennai on January 26. “Thinkfest is the annual programme organized by Chennai Freethinkers, a regional group of Nirmukta, during which science popularizers, humanists, and freethought activists are invited to share their ideas with the general public.” Read more about the event and the schedule. The event is open to all but requires registration.
The topic I’ve chosen is “What do we deserve?” For our learning, natural talents, and labor, what rewards and entitlements can we fairly claim? This is a question of particular relevance in market-based societies in which people tend to think they deserve both their success and their failure. I’ll explore the fraught concepts of “merit” and “success”, and what outcomes we can take credit for or not. I’ll present three leading models of economic justice by which a society might allocate its rewards—libertarian, meritocratic, egalitarian—and consider the pros and cons of each using examples from both India and abroad.
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Delhi: the City of Rape?
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
On how caste patriarchy in urban India hijacks and distorts the reality of gender violence.
Delhi now lives in infamy as India’s ‘rape capital’. In December 2012, the gruesome and fatal gang rape of a young woman, named Nirbhaya (‘fearless’) by the media, unleashed intense media and public outrage across India. Angry middle-class men and women, breaking some of their taboos and silences around sexual crimes, marched in Delhi shouting ‘Death to Rapists!’ The parliament scrambled to enact tough new anti-rape laws. -
Sheena Iyengar on Choice
Sheena Iyengar’s excellent anthropological survey of “choice” across cultures, with special focus on its meaning in the U.S. She “studies how we make choices—and how we feel about the choices we make”, including “both trivial choices (Coke v. Pepsi) and profound ones” (18 mins).
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Soldier Girl
Here is a powerful and insightful piece by a former Tamil Tiger woman who was recruited at 13 in the Sri Lankan civil war and served for 15 years. Also coming soon: my review of Samanth Subramanian’s new book: “This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War”.
Increasing state persecution of Tamils in the seventies inspired the formation of a few small insurgent groups, including the LTTE in 1976. They impatiently challenged the elderly political leadership, but had few recruits. After the July 1983 riots, however, hundreds of enraged young people became radicalized. By the time Mugil was a teenager, the LTTE had emerged as the strongest and most ruthless of the militant groups.The Tigers were not just real-life heroes to Mugil; they were also the only ones who seemed to be in control. Even Mugil’s father, after coming to PTK, started to print pamphlets and run other mysterious errands for them. “Be loyal to Prabhakaran,” he said. “He will take our people far.”
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The Quantum Indians
A film on the life and work of three Indian scientists: Satyendra Nath Bose, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, and Meghnad Saha, “the significance of whose contributions are of vital importance even today in quantum physics, fibre optics, nuclear science or astrophysics.” The film’s biographical sketches are celebratory and tinged with patriotic pride, but it still furnishes an engaging overview of their life and work.
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Advice to a Young Artist
By Namit Arora
I first thought of writing this after watching an interview in which an author was reverentially asked, ‘Sir, what would be your advice to a young artist?’ The author turned his nose up and gave a pat, patronizing answer but the question stayed with me. How would I answer it? I didn’t have an audience of young artists in mind. I began with little notes and they grew organically. I considered naming this, more aptly, Notes to Myself, but then opted in favor of honoring the inspiration. I wrote and abandoned the first draft in 1997. Such writing is best thought of as ‘under construction’; still, with some reluctance, I publish here an updated version accrued over a few years. I trust it’ll serve as a quiet record of a personal history. ( —Dec 2001)
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Provincializing Academic Philosophy in the West
Academic philosophy in the West, especially in the U.S., suffers from a sickness that’s increasingly evident—the sickness of parochialism. A few have raised their voices against it but a new salvo to confront the sickness was fired by a grad student called Eugene Sun Park, who quit his philosophy program and wrote an essay titled Why I Left Academia: Philosophy’s Homogeneity Needs Rethinking. An excerpt below.
Philosophy is predominantly white and predominantly male. This homogeneity exists in almost all aspects and at all levels of the discipline. The philosophical canon, especially in so-called “analytic” departments, consists almost exclusively of dead, white men. The majority of living philosophers—i.e., professors, graduate students, and undergraduate majors—are also white men. And the topics deemed important by the discipline almost always ignore race, ethnicity, and gender. Philosophy, it is often claimed, deals with universal truths and timeless questions. It follows, allegedly, that these matters by their very nature do not include the unique and idiosyncratic perspectives of women, minorities, or “people of culture.”“Astoundingly, many professional philosophers are perplexed as to why there aren’t more women and minorities in philosophy. While there may be no single reason why philosophy is so lacking in diversity, the fact that it is lacking is blatantly clear when we compare philosophy to other humanistic disciplines.
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Aftershocks: The Rough Guide to Democracy
Check out “Aftershocks: The Rough Guide to Democracy”, an engaging documentary film by Rakesh Sharma. Set in Kutch, Gujarat, it tells the story of people in two remote villages whose lives are plunged into upheaval by an earthquake, an apathetic state, corporate greed, religious myth, baseless optimism, and other human tragedies (64 mins, 2002). Sharma is better known for “The Final Solution”, a really good film on the 2002 Gujarat riots. You’ll find both films at his Vimeo channel.
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Workshop: Know Thyself – Styles of Thinking, Learning, and Being
Where: Adianta School for Leadership & Innovation, New Delhi.
When: Tuesday, 14 November, 2014; 10 am – 6 pm
Instructor: Namit Arora
_____________________‘Know Thyself’ was an inscription on the frieze of the temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. Self-knowledge is an honest and significant understanding of oneself and of what is perhaps the most profound question of all: ‘who am I?’ Knowledge of self helps us to embrace ourselves as we are, with all our flaws, and to see the world as it exists, in all its tainted splendor. ‘The man who is aware of himself’, wrote Virginia Woolf, ‘is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.’
Adequate self-knowledge is key to a fulfilling professional life and to the flourishing of our social and intimate relationships. In this workshop we’ll reflect on the many personal and social ingredients of self-knowledge and identify ways in which we can each augment it for ourselves. Through short videos, readings, and classroom discussion, we’ll also explore various styles of thinking, learning, and being—including our own—and how we can harness them to further our self-awareness and to find greater purpose and meaning in our professional, social, and personal lives.
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A Place Called Home
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments.)
Former changing rooms in the Birla Industries Club‘No man ever steps in the same river twice,’ wrote Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, ‘for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.’ One could also say this about ‘home’, making it less an enduring place, more a state of mind. Or as Basho, the haiku master, put it, ‘Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.’ Still, in an age of physical migration like ours, one of the most bittersweet experiences in a migrant’s life is revisiting, after a long gap, the hometown where he came of age. More so perhaps if, while he was away, his neighborhood turned to ruin, crumbling and overrun with weeds, as happened in my case.
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Mysteries of the Unseen World
“We live in a world of unseeable beauty, so subtle and delicate that it is imperceptible to the human eye. To bring this invisible world to light, filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg bends the boundaries of time and space with high-speed cameras, time lapses and microscopes. At TED2014, he shares highlights from his latest project, a 3D film titled Mysteries of the Unseen World, which slows down, speeds up, and magnifies the astonishing wonders of nature.” Must see.
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In a hospital. At the beach. Hamas, Israel tells us, is hiding among civilians
(See the first comment for an archive of articles and videos on the Israel-Palestine conflict — Namit)
They hid at the El-Wafa hospital.
They hid at the Al-Aqsa hospital.
They hid at the beach, where children played football.
They hid at the yard of 75-year-old Muhammad Hamad.
They hid among the residential quarters of Shujaya.
They hid in the neighbourhoods of Zaytoun and Toffah.
They hid in Rafah and Khan Younis.
They hid in the home of the Qassan family.
They hid in the home of the poet, Othman Hussein.
They hid in the village of Khuzaa.
They hid in the thousands of houses damaged or destroyed.
They hid in 84 schools and 23 medical facilities.
They hid in a cafe, where Gazans were watching the World Cup.
They hid in the ambulances trying to retrieve the injured.
They hid themselves in 24 corpses, buried under rubble.
They hid themselves in a young woman in pink household slippers, sprawled on the pavement, taken down while fleeing.
They hid themselves in two brothers, eight and four, lying in the intensive burn care unit in Al-Shifa.
They hid themselves in the little boy whose parts were carried away by his father in a plastic shopping bag.
They hid themselves in the “incomparable chaos of bodies” arriving at Gaza hospitals.
They hid themselves in an elderly woman, lying in a pool of blood on a stone floor.
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The Merchants of Death
Welcome to SOFEX (Special Operations Forces Exhibition) in Jordan, the premier international trade show of the global army industry, along with a training center sponsored by the U.S. and Jordan. “SOFEX is where the world’s leading generals come to buy everything from handguns to laser-guided missile systems.” Indeed, “just about anyone with enough money can buy the most powerful weapons in the world.”
I think the video report below is both well made and depressing. As the narrator says, 16 of the 20 largest arms manufacturers selling at SOFEX are American. “America gives a lot of these countries foreign aid,” he notes, “so they can come here and buy weapon systems from American companies … more often than not, they’re [using these weapons] against their own citizens. And thanks to the number of governments who are afraid of their own people, business is booming.” Pax Americana, baby!
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On Wittgenstein and Rorty
Here are two wonderful essays I found in the archives of Prospect Magazine. The first essay, from 1999, is by Ray Monk, British philosopher and biographer of Wittgenstein, who Monk calls “the greatest philosopher of [the 20th] century”. In it, Monk explores why “At a time like this, when the humanities are institutionally obliged to pretend to be sciences, we need more than ever the lessons about understanding that Wittgenstein—and the arts—have to teach us.” (Also check out this excellent essay by Stuart Greenstreet on his two major works, personal life and beliefs, as well as Wittgenstein, a quirky, brilliant film by Derek Jarman.)
Nearly 50 years after his death, we can see, more clearly than ever, that the feeling that he was swimming against the tide was justified. If we wanted a label to describe this tide, we might call it “scientism,” the view that every intelligible question has either a scientific solution or no solution at all. It is against this view that Wittgenstein set his face. Scientism takes many forms. In the humanities, it takes the form of pretending that philosophy, literature, history, music and art can be studied as if they were sciences, with “researchers” compelled to spell out their “methodologies”—a pretence which has led to huge quantities of bad academic writing, characterised by bogus theorising, spurious specialisation and the development of pseudo-technical vocabularies. Wittgenstein would have looked upon these developments and wept.There are many questions to which we do not have scientific answers, not because they are deep, impenetrable mysteries, but simply because they are not scientific questions. These include questions about love, art, history, culture, music—all questions, in fact, that relate to the attempt to understand ourselves better … Wittgenstein himself described his work as a “synopsis of trivialities.” But when we are thinking philosophically we are apt to forget these trivialities and thus end up in confusion, imagining, for example, that we will understand ourselves better if we study the quantum behaviour of the sub-atomic particles inside our brains, a belief analogous to the conviction that a study of acoustics will help us understand Beethoven’s music. Why do we need reminding of trivialities? Because we are bewitched into thinking that if we lack a scientific theory of something, we lack any understanding of it.
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Three Musical Favorites
For a change of pace, I offer three of my many longtime musical favorites for your enjoyment. Click to listen to them on YouTube.
1. To Tragoudi Ton Gyfton by Greek singer, Eleni Vitali. “Eleni was born into music … Her father Takis was a gifted santur player and a composer who had given music for the most important singers of the time. Her mother Loucy Karageorgiou used to sing in festive events in the evenings, and in the mornings she cleaned houses. They were of gypsy origin, with the tradition of music full of sadness and joy”. The music is beautiful enough but see the following “interpretation of this song (with some liberty taken for the sake of rhyming)”.
“I’ve no place and nothing to look forward to
No homeland for me, what’s there to do
With a heavy heart and trembling hands
I dream of setting up my tent in distant lands -
Of Vaginal Creams and Gels
Remember that absurd ad for the vaginal whitening cream launched in India in April 2012? At first I thought the clip below was a parody. I soon realized, to my horror, that this was a bonafide ad for another product: a vaginal tightening gel called “18 Again”. The louts behind this insidious marketing campaign—including one Priti Nair in a leadership role at an outfit called Curry Nation—say this gel’s “product positioning from a brand perspective is that of women empowerment”. Surreal, no? The product, made by Ultratech India, was apparently launched in Aug 2012 (I only saw this today) and attracted a fair bit of bad press, twitter venting, and scientific debunking of its claims back then.
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Shillong Chamber Choir
Here is an extraordinary find, the Shillong Chamber Choir, founded in 2001 and based in Shillong, Meghalaya, India. If you like this, sample more of their music on their website. Such a talented bunch with a versatile repertoire, and a great example of cultural globalization.
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Chronicle of a Dolt Foretold
Many of us expected that the new BJP regime in Delhi will try to rewrite Indian history from a hardline Hindutva perspective (as opposed to the softline Hindutva of the Congress and of most leading Indian academies). But it still hurts to see it come so soon and in such a doltish package: the appointment of Yellapragada Sudershan Rao as chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research (a funding agency for historical reseach in India, ICHR is to history what the NSF is to science in the U.S.). Sample the excerpt below from Rao’s interview in Outlook and read historian Romila Thapar’s take on his appointment.
Outlook: You are the author of the Mahabharata project? What is the project about?YS Rao: There is a certain view that the Mahabharata or the Ramayana are myths. I don’t see them as myths because they were written at a certain point of time in history. They are important sources of information in the way we write history. What we write today may become an important source of information for the future in the future. When analysed, of course, they could be declared to be true or false. History is not static. It belongs to the people, it’s made by the people. Similarly, the Ramayana is true for people…it’s in the collective memory of generations of Indians. We can’t say the Ramayana or the Mahabharata are myths. Myths are from a western perspective.
