Books; People; Ideas : These are few of my favourite things. As I live between day-to-day compromises and change-the-world aspirations, this is the chronicle of my journey, full of moments of occasional despair and opportune discoveries, of connections and creations, and, most of all, my quest of knowledge as conversations.
Indian Election 2014: Seven Fragmented Thoughts
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1.
Rahul Gandhi must have read Lincoln, "I will study and get ready, and perhaps my chances will come".
Instead, he should have followed,
"Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle."
Lincoln, again!
2.
There are three kinds of people in politics, Self-Made, Never-Made and Self-Destroyed.
Good that there is never a category called 'Born Into" in democratic politics.
3.
Larry Summers had a brilliant idea in the 1980s. He suggested all the polluting industries should be relocated from the First World to the Third World because the life costs less in the latter.
They just did that with Organised Political Marketing.
4.
I was reading about the world's luckiest man, Frano Selak. Prakash Karat will somewhat come near him if he still survives this election being at the helm of the Communist Party of India (Marxist).
Perhaps he knows how to do what this man in video is doing.
5.
India will have a Great Leap Forward under Narendra Modi. It will surely turn out to be like the last one. (Read Tombstone)
6.
There are no contradictions in Mamta Banerjee's attitude towards Bangladeshis.
She does not want to give them water, so that their farming dies and they starve; that way, they ultimately have to become destitute, come to India illegally and vote for her against a ration card she would give because she is so humane.
7.
May 16th 2014 is not like 15th August 1947. It feels like 30th January 1948 already.
A friend has recently forwarded me a quote from Lord Macaulay's speech in the British Parliament on 2nd February 1835. I reproduce the quote below: "I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation." The email requested me to forward me to every indian I know. I was tempted, but there were two oddities about this quote. First, the language, which ...
There is no other city like Kolkata for me: It is Home. The only city where I don't have to find a reason to go to, or to love. It is one city hardwired into my identity, and despite being away for a decade, that refuses to go away. People stay away from their homeland for a variety of reasons. But, as I have come to feel, no one can be completely happy to be away. One may find fame or fortune, love and learning, in another land, but they always live an incomplete life. They bring home broken bits of their homeland into their awkward daily existence, a cushion somewhere, a broken conversation in mother tongue some other time, always rediscovering the land they left behind for that brief moment of wanting to be themselves. The cruelest punishment, therefore, for a man who lives abroad is when his love for his land is denied. It is indeed often denied, because the pursuit of work, knowledge or love seemed to have gotten priority over the attraction of the land. This is particularly t...
The story of British influence on Indian Education, to which Macaulay's Minutes of 1835 belong, has been told in six distinct phases. Syed Nurullah and J P Naik's very popular and influential History of Indian Education calls these 'six acts' of the drama: From the beginning of Eighteenth Century to 1813 The British East India Company received its charter in 1600 but its activities did not include any Educational engagement till the Charter Act of 1698, which required the Company to maintain priests and schools, for its own staff and their children. And, so it was until the renewal of its charter in 1813, when the evangelical influence led to insistence of expansion of educational activities and allowing priests back into company territory. From 1813 to Wood's Education Despatch of 1854 The renewal of Charter in 1813 re-opened the debate, which seemed to have been settled in the early years of the company administration, between the Orientalis...
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