WAR

They can deploy the army to suppress peasant movement but never sent a single soldier to punish guilty landlords.
They can send hundreds of policemen to brutalize protesting women but can’t employ ten guards for the safety of students.
They can spend crores to take credit of surgical strike but can’t give pension to veterans.
They can afford to bomb aboriginal villages from helicopters but don’t have money to provide them compensation for their lands.
They have money for nuclear programmes and space missions but they can’t abolish manual scavenging.
They can give billions to corporations to make dams but can’t afford to spend a penny to rehabilitate displaced people.
They can bail out industrialists but they can’t absolve the debts of the farmers.
They can spend 1K crores to buy one bullet train but can’t spend the same amount to heal the ailing railway system of the country.
They can spend millions to give you the illusion of development but can’t afford to carry out vaccination programmes in a mere twenty districts?

Sorry but I refuse to believe things a so fucked up because of mismanagement or because we don’t have enough money.
As these are clear indications of a war.
War of rich against the poor.
War of patriarchy against women.
War of a privileged minority against the majority.

Sun Tzu in modern times.

Sun Tzu in his book, The Art of War, says one must always fight in the enemy territory. In that way even when you lose you’re least affected.

Now let’s apply that concept in today’s India where right now a war is being fought between those who know how to hate and those who know how to think.

When they say Muslims are foreign invaders you try to convince them that they very much belong to India but rarely remind them that Indo Aryans were too foreign invaders.

When they accuse you of being anti-National you try to explain them your idea of nationalism but rarely talk about their history of treasons and treacheries.

When they say abolish reservation you start explaining them about justice and fairness forgetting to tell them to return everything they gained from three thousand years of usurpation.

It’s something like the right starts the fire and the left does the work of firefighting. But the damage is done by the time the fire is put out cause they attack us in our own territory but we forget to return the favour.

Ideas for poor in the hands of the rich.

Saw a lecture of Prof. Michael Sandel where he was explaining the privileged scholars of Harvard about the principles of justice and morality and the right thing to do and simultaneously making them aware about that they were there not because of their merits but because of their privileges i.e being born at the right place at the right time. So I guess the question should be what will those privileged guys do even if they are made aware of the right thing to do? They are privileged only because the society is unjust and unfair at the first place right?

So I guess the question should be what will those privileged guys do even if they are made aware of the right thing to do? They are privileged only because the society is unjust and unfair at the first place right?

Maybe no change is possible as long as those revolutionary ideas remain locked in the privileged and costly campuses of Cambridge, Harvard, and DU. Maybe they must be made readily available to the poor and oppressed sections for whom they were meant at the first place.

Goddesses and Men

Apparently, these goddesses are set of benchmarks laid out for what an ideal woman should be like and since what is ideal can never be practical religion can keep 50% of its population at ransom over the eternal threat of being deemed whores and witches.
Furthermore, it provides a philosophical solace to a misogynist society where those benefiting from sexism can say look we how can we oppress women when we worship stone goddesses? Plus it might provide easy atonement for eve teasers and misogynists??
After all turning women into motherly figures, claiming it’s your duty to protect them are signs of deep misogyny.
Else why it is that more a culture says it respects women more the women are actually oppressed.
Why the west rarely has to say that they respect their women.

Largest democracy & practicing democracy.

Two separate incidents:

USA: Trump urges owners to fire or suspend players who protest by not standing for the national anthem.
NFL Responds by kneeling during the national anthem.

India: People brutalized by mobs for not standing during the national anthem.
Rich celebrity athletes say nothing.

It’s the people of America proving once again to the world why they are the greatest nation.

Must give it to them that they are at least not fascist for their own kind… at least for now.

Protests and state character

Guess in a democracy what kind of protests take place and what kind of people take part in them are a critical source of information to know the character of the state.
In the last few years, we have seen public protests demanding: *justice for a raped woman
*justice for murdered Dalit scholar
*qualified VCs in the campus
*law against lynchings
*abolishment of AFSPA
*justice for Dalits subjected to flogging
*abolishment of hire and fire policies of industries
*fair compensation for people displaced
*24X7 library in the campus
raise in seats and govt funding in universities
And the latest demonstration that we are witnessing is women demanding freedom from sexual harassment on campuses.
And even a blind can see every time the state was standing against the protesters.

So I guess these incidents might help us to assert that Indian state is primarily anti-minority, anti-Muslim, anti-Dalits, anti-women, colonial, anti-education, anti-poor and pro-rich?

Objective and Subjective.

Violence, as Zizek says, is of two types: Objective and Subjective.
While objective violence is inherent in the structure and necessary to make sure things remain as they always were subjective violence is aimed at countering the objective violence and bringing about change in the present order.
While Objective violence is so obvious and so frequent that it goes unnoticed and considered a part of life but subjective violence is rare blatant and hence easily stigmatized.
The problem lies largely in the turning of violence into a taboo. And hereby violence we mean the one that can be noticed i.e the Subjective violence.
That largely explains why the elitist ideology of liberalism has convinced us to equate fascism with communism, feudal/military atrocities with Naxalism and state oppression with rebellion or keep Hitler and Stalin, Trump and Kim Jong or Churchill and Mao, on the same plane.