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.

Monday 15 February 2016

HAPPENING THIS TO JNU ROW IS UNCALLED FOR..

The JNU row has taken a disturbing trend. It stirs your soul with negative energy now. Politicking has become worse but the worst part is - the issue, the JNU row and JNU, all have become a hotbed for conspiracy theories - going as far as Hafiz Saeed involvement or Intelligence Bureau input or so-called foreign designs.

Someone is busy labelling someone as anti-national. Someone is busy proving his nationalist credentials. Someone is crying hoarse over a Constitutional hara-kiri.

And everyone is busy settling in political scores and seeking political mileage.

Yes, anti-India protests and sloganeering are unacceptable but there is nothing that makes case for #CleanUpJNU, the hashtag that was trending at top throughout the day. And in fact, even at this hour, a Twitter hashtag - #StopAntiIndiaCampaign - is trending at top on Twitter's India interface.

Yes, there are some misled JNU students but then society is first about counselling the misled - trying to take them in the social flow - especially when there are first time offenders.  It has to give them the chance to undo some wrong first.

By simply saying put those students behind bars, we cannot rid the society of this malaise. It goes much beyond. And in fact, as the situation has become now, and as it is rapidly spreading, the anti-social and anti-national elements may exploit the sentiments to perpetrate some anti-society, anti-national plot.

You cannot say the counselling and mainstreaming are going to happen in an impulse. Counselling takes time. You cannot use force everywhere, especially on students.

Even the Supreme Court says mere sloganeering cannot be the ground for imposing the charge of sedition on someone unless the sloganeering incites some action. The top court had declared in 1962 - "Words and speech can be criminalised and punished only in situations where it is being used to incite mobs or crowds to violent action. Mere words and phrases by themselves, no matter how distasteful, do not amount to a criminal offence unless this condition is met."

Let JNU be JNU, an academic institution. Let's not make it a place to settle political scores and seek political mileage. The intense level of politicking, senior political leaders holding briefing sessions and consistent marches and rallies - these leave us in bad taste and are totally uncalled for.

That takes us to this natural question  - has politics failed us?

It both ways.

Politics has failed us. But politics also makes us the world's largest democracy. Decision is for us to make.

There cannot be utopia, the ideal situation for a country, a society and the system that prevails there. It's always a mixed bag - with negatives and positives. Yes, negatives are looking to prevail in our country but one cannot dismiss positives.

There are disparities and they are growing. But that is the case even with the US. The fact that we can openly discuss JNU row tells us a lot.

Europe had its Westphalian and renaissance moments. The US had its civil war and abolition moments. But they go back to centuries in making while sovereign, independent India is just 68 years old. Europe and US reformation took some 300 years or even more.

And if it has not happened in 68 years, the reform in our political system, then we need to accept that it is not enough time yet, even if we are at a cusp of technology revolution. We need to remember that technology revolution also brings information chaos and 'access chaos'.

And there is no option but to struggle, persist and fight as long as what has been a practical universal norm for a good society is reached - as Vivekananda says - arise, awake, and stop not till the goal is reached.

Arvind Kejriwal's coming to power in Delhi is indicative of that, even if he is failing us now. That experiment by people tells people are ready to speak, even if symbolically.

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