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.

Sunday 21 February 2016

DEMOCRACY IS NOT FOR THIS

The ugly face of social upheavals are on obscene display again. In the season of #JNURow (raging national Vs anti-national debate after a pro Afzal Guru event was held in Jawaharlal Nehru University on February 9).

Social upheavals are for good if they are society driven but not when they are managed (or rather mismanaged for the overall health of the society).

That is what is happening in Jat reservation case.

The trend of influential and prosperous communities like Jat, Patels in Gujarat, Kapus in Andhra Pradesh or Marathas in Maharashtra is ominous to undo the whatever little good that social affirmative action or caste-based Reservation has achieved in India.

Today again, after days of continued violence, the government had to bow down to 'public pressure' (or appeasement politics or votebank politics) and offer the 'demand' the Jat leaders had put forward. They stopped trains, burned vehicles, created chaos, engaged in arson and armed protests and what not.

Democracy gives us avenues to raise our voice for anything and everything but within constitutional framework only - the framework that says that Reservation cannot exceed the 50% cap.

And in spite of that, when we engage into violence to coerce state to act on our whims and fancies, based on our numerical strength and history of our influential place in the society, it sends out the clear message that democratic norms are being subverted.

The affirmative action that was rightly intended to the weaker sections of society - is being diverted to them who don't need really it.

To continue..

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/