Category: Long View

Zohran Mamdani and Pinarayi Vijayan: Two Poles, Two Aspirations- The Story of Kerala’s Poverty Eradication Program Where Ideology Matters- Not charity, not bounty; but justice

Kerala’s Extreme Poverty Eradication Programme (EPEP) exemplifies Jack Rothman’s locality development model, where community participation, consensus and social planning are foundational. It would not have been possible without the development architecture created since the late 1990s. But at the core of the programme is the attention given to the voiceless minority whose very disability is their silence.

While in the New York mayoral election campaign, Zohran Mamdani, a former foreclosure-prevention counsellor, lent voice to the homeless in New York, in Kerala, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan made the announcement of extreme poverty eradication as one of the rally points for his third term. Both echo what French Revolutionary era thinker Thomas Paine argued in his seminal treatise, Rights of Man: “It is not charity, but a right; not bounty, but justice.”

SWISS MILITARY, SWISS NEUTRALITY AND SWISS BANKS Connecting the Dots

  These two items are quite famous. Almost associated with the Swiss brand. But does Switzerland have a reasonable military of its own? The strength of Swiss military is about 100000, with another 100000 available as reservist. It does not have a commander-in-chief in the peace time. Then, how come the Swiss military brands has […]

IN THE CRADLE OF EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE

One of the things I was fascinated by during adolescence and early adulthood was the rapid rise of fortunes in the Western world which began in the 17th-18th centuries. We learn from our History and Civics textbooks that this rise to fortune was incidental to the development of science and technology and the subsequent European […]

CONSTANTINE’S SWITCH Yet Another Switch of the Western World

What lies underneath the marbles that covered  the Colosseum? But  you hardly see any marbles in the real Colosseum. It’s all bare stones!   The story of the marbles that once covered the Colosseum’s is the story of major ‘switch’ in the Western moral order.   Colosseum, as many would know, is giant stone-built ampitherater, […]

SLEEP ,DREAMS AND CONCOCTION OF ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHERS

  Recently I was on a panel discussion on neuroscience datasets at a premier engineering institute. The discussion was part of a symposium on Data-driven innovations. As the meeting was held when semester examinations were going on for the students of the institute, most of the audience were external students from neighboring state-run engineering colleges. […]

FASHIONABLE NONSENSE Misuse of Language in the Name of Postmodernism

Fashionable nonsense is a sequel  of the ‘Sokal’s hoax’ on the manner in which ‘postmodern’ writers abuse language and scientific concepts. It describes a community of people who encourages obfuscation in their communications. Sokal and Bricmont give detailed excerpts of authors who tried to freely interpret concepts in mathematics and physics into unrelated terrains like literary and cultural studies. The authors discuss in length writers like psychoanalyst-feminist Julia Kristeva, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, feminist-psycholinguist-cultural theorist Luce  Irigaray, philosopher-anthropologist-sociologist Bruno Latour, sociologist-philosopher-cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, philosopher-cultural theorist Paul Virilio, philosopher Gilles Deleuze and  philosopher-psychotherapist Felix Guattari.

While Sokal and Bricmonts’s critique was limited to the abuse of concepts of science by postmodern writers, the larger issue the authors’ documented is the issue of intellectual ‘porosity’ of common place language that allow inconsistent and incredulous ideas to populate a variety of scholarly fields in humanities. It demonstrates the slackness of rational guard of audience in these fields. As mentioned before, I would consider this as a general problem with language itself. While grammatical errors are immediately detected by readers, logical flaws are seamlessly incorporated in the narratives in languages of common use. This blog highlights this as serious issue that perpetuate nonsensical thinking and flawed reasoning in social circles. In more than one ways, Fashionable Nonsense is a must-to-be referenced book for those who are concerned of irrationality in public spaces.