The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Wednesday 8 February 2017

A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY IS BECAUSE OF ITS CHECKS AND BALANCES

Any democratic country is founded on the principal of multiple power centres who work as 'checks and balances' preventing thus any single power centre to emerge as the authoritarian force. It is the basic theme of power distribution in democratic societies, be it America or the US or any other country. 

By that parameter, we are a successful democracy barring few dark chapters, like the 1970's Emergency and President's Rule in many states many times, a trend that has significantly come down in last two decades, thanks to the 'checks and balances' in our Constitutional system. The courts have intervened and the Presidents, who happened to be decorative, titular systems of our country, have started showing increasing independence and rationale. 

And this holds true for the most powerful and undoubtedly the most successful democracy on Earth - the US - having over 200 years of democratic marvels that saw many epoch defining developments contributing to the advancement of the US society. 

We can blame the US society of being racist but then how we can forget that it fought a protracted bloody civil war to end that slavery and had a decades-long civil movement to abolish racial segregation. In fact, from counterculture to hip-hop to information technology to soft power projections to internet, everything that has fundamentally altered the human landscape globally has been given to the world by the US. 

 The US has been a progressive society for centuries, guiding the world, and the in-built 'checks and balances' in its Constitution has made that possible. European countries have also the same basic tenets but they are smaller nations who lost their relevance for the global outreach after the colonial period. Because, during the colonial period, these European countries very conveniently forgot their democratic weavings home while acting ruthlessly and authoritatively in their colonies. The US never did that. It, in fact, itself emerged from the clutches of the European colonialism. 

©SantoshChaubey