This personal essay walks a lane inwards with three great educationists. The vision of the three men provokes an understanding of what is wrong with prevailing schooling practices. Education involves a search within. In this exploratory quest the three educational philosophers Jiddu Krishnamurti, Rabindranath Tagore and Avijit Pathak have walked the road less traveled. Walking…
What we witnessed in 2019 was the rise of another constitutional jurisprudence and Kashmir was not the first or the last time it happened.
They saw the tender leaves
Fluttering in the cosy wind.
So pleasant so pretty and
So pure was the posy
There was a documentary film that used to be shown on Doordarshan in my school days. It was about unity in diversity, and had a catchy song “Ek, anek…Hind desh ke niwasi sabhi jane k hai. That was the time when this sentiment was entrenched in all our hearts. Our country has for ages, had…
But nobody comforts a crying man,
Or holds his worn out heart again.
His calls are ignored in front of family,
Be it a crime against women,
He is the one you deplore.
We can never be free from ideology, as it is the ideology that is dependent on us and feeds on our belief systems. But we have to be free from ideological hegemony to start moving into the direction of freedom.
It all started when I was 8, a happy childhood, and I was still at the dunce level of understanding the real world. I was a teeny kid, happy in my own LaLa Land. The small toy that comes with every KinderJoy had me excited and jumpy.
Women before independence faced many evils that existed in the society such as Sati Pratha, Child Marriage, Prohibition of widow remarriage, Purdah system, dowry system, no education to girls, polygamy, female infanticide, domestic violence, sexual harassment and so on.
A few years back, I had a student of mine writing an email to me, asking for a relaxation in the assignment deadline. He wrote to me Dear Mam, my return ticket was cancelled because my grandmother fell seek…’ In the class, I asked him to re-read this and he did not find any problem…
In 1947, India had a population of 345 million. It was split. The high and lower castes, as well as the dominant Hindu population and other religious Indians, were divided. A wide diversity of languages, fashions, cuisines, and occupations were spoken in this large territory. How could they be forced to live in harmony inside one nation?
Freda Bedi, an Oxford scholar and an ‘Outsider’ has fought for Indian ideas of Satyagraha, Kashmir and Buddhism
Ram Ke Naam illustrates how the others are excluded from the public discourse, and they became a part of ‘counter public.’
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