36 Billionaires in India, what does it mean? 36 of the 946 billionaires featuring on the Forbes' list of richest are Indian citizens. This is being posed as India's march forward. But is this so?

They are stinking rich. Their richness, wealth stinks. Is this a complement? But still identity-hungry Indians toiling in global sweatshops - academic, industrial etc, are asked to rejoice in the growing capacity of a few to stink. This world is really a PORCILE - with the number of Indians stinkers being only next to Russians (another group of gangster capitalists, who emerged during the post 1989 loot of public property), with the US and Germans, being front-runners.

"I killed my father. I ate human flesh and I quiver with joy." Farmer suicides are increasing with a growing number of underemployeds being ravished in the panopticon world of new industries, call centres and peripheral informal sector units, while we are asked to quiver with joy.
Absolute Poverty (not just relative poverty with growing divide between rich and poor, which is generally recognised) is increasing, as people are more and more dispossessed, alienated from their means of production, losing control over their conditions of production. Even if we find consumerism rising - with new gadgets cropping up in the home of the new poor, it only increases her material and mental destitution and dependence - this is not a sign of enrichment. The secret of the billionaires' wealth too is not more gadgets and things at home, but their ability to control over the majority's means and conditions of production. Then why more gadgets and things at home be the parameters of judging the poor's poverty?

  ¶ 10:47 AM 0 Comments

  Of Gods and Godmen One might trace the conception of god and divine beings to the history of religions and beliefs, and view that as a result of habituation - or upbringing - people believe in god and have particular conceptions of divinity or god. But in my opinion, this is one-sided historicism that cannot explain the perpetual reproduction of such conceptions and their varieties (which also entail ruptures in the habituated or "passed on" concepts). In order to explain the existence of particular conceptions we need to trace their genesis or the necessity of their existence in the subject's being and its relationship with other 'beings', i.e., in the process of its own objectification. The history or even story of ideas/conceptions can broadly guide us through the possible markets of variations, but it cannot explain their reproduction and choice.

Within this framework, along with all the commonsensical accusations on components or history of a particular belief system for 'its' modern/post-modern character - violent or otherwise, any defense of the 'belief community' by drawing alternative components or history is nonsensical. What suffices is to expose the character in terms of the necessities of the conjuncture. This is what Marx did, when he said:

"Religion is, in fact, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who either has not yet gained himself or has lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, which is an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human being because the human being has attained no true actuality. Thus, the struggle against religion is indirectly the struggle against that world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.

"The wretchedness of religion is at once an expression of and a protest against real wretchedness. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."  ¶ 2:59 PM 0 Comments

  The Hindu's editorial: "One party, two visions" (Jan 21, 2006) Letter to the editor

Your editorial, One party, two visions (January 21), is indulgence in appearances, characteristic of much of mainstream journalism today. It ignores the inherent unity that apparent “oppositions” entail in the political market and competition. The ideal of a two-party (or even multi-party) system is nurtured to structure and limit political choices in a bourgeois system, transforming the electorate from a referee in the match to a football. Political parties, irrespective of their political ideologies, come to nurture the same within themselves, too. Like a firm in a commodity economy, their success depends on how many incarnations (choices) they themselves can take, even if it means to change just the colour of the packaging. BJP has been remarkably successful in this regard – earlier, if it was Vajpayee vs Advani, today it is Advani vs Singh. The extent of its success is evident from the fact that even The Hindu’s sensible journalism has been mesmerised.

The published version: Changing the packaging (January 23 2006)

An early comment on ADVANI'S JINNAH DRAMA (June 2005)  ¶ 2:35 PM 0 Comments

  BBC asked - Should the world trust Iran? Recently, BBC posted a question for readers’ comments – Should the world trust Iran?

As an answer, I posted the following alternative questions for the BBC readers’ to ponder upon (I don’t know whether they will publish it or not):

“Why is it that we never ask such questions in 'reverse' whenever it comes to the 'Orient' - in this case, for example, should Iran trust the world? The 'oriental', 'southern' countries, who represent the majority world population too can have their own interests to preserve, considering that they have more responsibilities. Why do we limit "the world" to a few 'hegemonies' and dub their psychotic fear of "others" or their "obsessional neurosis", as Freud would say, as the concern for 'international security'?”

However, many of us do know the answers, don’t we? This is the way hegemonic ideologies rationalise the hegemonies. Questions determine the way we answer them, and the function of mass media, and all other educational ‘institutions’, is to school us in this mode of problem solving – don’t go beyond what is asked, as anything “beyond” is irrelevant, incoherent, and hence unpublishable.  ¶ 9:52 AM 0 Comments