Sunday Posts

The ability to fall in love makes us human. It is a complex feeling, the interplay of hormones and the perfect poise of rationality and the irrational, sitting just beyond our understanding - only just! And, therefore, it's hard to explain. We try poor explanations too often: Something to be, something to possess. And, yet, at the core, this is to give, give away, care for something, or someone, other than ourselves - making us greater than we really are. This feeling sustains our most intimate bonds, nations, humanity, but we neither understand nor control it. And that's perhaps for the better: If we knew where the kill switch was, we would have killed it a long time ago. Contra Darwin, falling in love perhaps serves no evolutionary purpose. At its core, it is about giving away, working against the selfish gene, just enough to keep it in check. However, this gives us poetry, art and all what is beautiful and non-essential in our language. The creative impulse wouldn't exis...

1 How would it sound, if many years hence, a novelist starts his novel with It was a time of uncertainty, it was a time of prediction, it was the age of realisation, it was the age of illusions, it was an epoch of science, it was an epoch of leaping in the dark, it was the season of end of the world, it was the season of new beginnings, it was a spring of staying home, it was a summer of giving up, we had everything behind us, we had nothing before us, we were all together in saving the civilisation, while we were tearing each other apart to save ourselves - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. Would we recognise the time - or, is it indeed like any other time? 2 Would we miss the lock-down once it's over? Once the busy life starts again, if it does. Do we miss the packed trains, hurried lunches, noisy evenings, attachment-fr...

A particular tension defines how I think.  Growing up in a poor country that lacked self-confidence in the aftermath of a devastating colonial rule, I learnt to distrust the wise White men who claimed to know better.   But, having lived a life, at least most of it, surrounded by people who would keep their heads buried in the sand and reject any new ideas outright for being foreign, I have also aspired to openness. In fact, over time, I came to see the two as linked phenomena: Being closed to new ideas, I came to believe, was the weakness that created the condition of foreign domination. I accepted that human ideas are global and they can arise anywhere in the world; either you embrace it and thrive with it, or it's forced on you by those who get their power from these new ideas. Yet the tension looms over everything I do, and especially on my work in international education. In the initial years of my career, I had great success and joy in promoting a...

Reading history is one of my favourite pastimes. In fact, more correctly, reading history is my key professional development activity, if I take the view that writing this blog and talking about ideas are the most important things I do, and treat my day job as what really is - an instrument to pay my bills! Though my reading list may seem haphazard to some who only read on purpose, those lists - as I am becoming conscious of them recently - are around the big questions I labour with at the time, and most of these big questions, for me, have a historical nature. For example, consider the question that dominates my conversations, and readings, at this very moment. It is - how does a society fall under the spell of an autocrat? I know why this question troubles me. In India, my origin country, democracy is taken for granted - various television talk shows proclaim that democracy in India is irreversible because it is so chaotic - and various democratic institutions, both at the Unio...

Can one be born at the wrong end of time? If it's a matter of opinion poll, it would certainly seem likely, because most of us will possibly want to be born at our parents' era, when things were more certain, opportunities were more forthcoming and in general, life seemed to be simpler. And, surely, some among us would want to be born in the future, when the advances in medicine are complete, and, as we hope, advances in digital communication would allow us to achieve perfect democracies. But, like other matters of reality, opinion polls can not tell us whether we are really at the wrong end of time. The omnipotent fact that we are all products of our own time, the past is our past and the future is our future, and such thinking only represents a denial of the present; may be a defeat. So, instead of being at the wrong end of time, we can indeed be misfits. This may be shameful, and that's why we flip it when we blame the time around us and retreat to a time we haven...

I can never get used to the concept of wasted time. I know the common way of thinking that one has a sort of fixed lifetime, and if a period, however brief, was spent not pursuing something meaningful, it is a waste. However, if one looks beyond the obvious, there are couple of questions to ask: How do you know how much time you have to live? And, how do you know you have not pursued a meaningful goal unless you tried? If these questions sounded silly, let me try harder. I spent a few minutes this afternoon sitting in Tavistock Square. I did nothing: It was a beautiful afternoon, warm and sunny, the very best British summer could be. Olympics have scared away the tourists, in fact pretty much everyone, from London, so it was quieter and emptier than usual. I did not read, or think of anything. There was the statue of Gandhi, sitting as if in meditation, to look at, but I did not particularly notice him today. I was waiting, indeed, for a phone call, which was to tell me what to do...

These days, time is a bit heavy as it is full of reflection, every moment seems to stop before it is over, with a pause almost and a throwback into time I can see but can't get back. My movements, which must follow a routine and crucially, the railway time-table, are laden and almost slow-motion, burdened with the ever-present question of what I could have done. In a way, I am reminded of Katherine Mansfield, like her fly stuck in the ink, forever trying to dry itself and fly again and forever dragged down. But I also feel light, as if in a train. Time is such a carrier, as if I don't have to move on myself but I am being moved into. As days pass and suddenly I know that January, which turned out to be the cruelest month of my life, is almost over, it seems a different age and time that I was thinking of: Suddenly, with a flick of a calendar, what was my day-to-day reality seems like a movie, where I was an observer and which I mistook for reality. I play silly games: Like sayi...

I am having loads of fun being subversive. I am a bit of a non-conformist. That bit did not change since my school days. What changed is that I usually kept quiet, kept my head down and accepted the way of the world over mine. No longer: I have lately become aware of my mortality - that I am old and don't have much time left to let the world go by - and now refuse to give up and go quietly. Being a non-conformist has its own problems. You become sensitive to the fact that everyone may have an opinion - a different opinion. Since you expect your opinions to be heard, respected, you start respecting everyone's points of view too. This makes you an indefatigable learner. This opens your mind, stop you from being a bore, forever. However, at the same time, this may drown you down, and crowd you out. I must admit that this has happened in my life quite a few times, particularly in my life in England: It is a masculine world where you must push your views around to be heard. I paid ...