Month: July 2020

Social Evolution, Revolutionary Change, Negotiated Settlement: What is Best When?

A very interesting question raised by my fellow 6/1 blogger Conrad.

In my not so humble opinion, the answer has been staring at our faces for decades. None of them work in the long term. All of them have been tried and found wanting. The human being is simply not willing to bring about a world that can live in harmony with all members like other species do.

The nearest society has come to some kind of a Utopia is when it engages in totally spiritual approaches to life. This simply means that we let what is innate in us to operate freely so that superimposed value systems of superior/inferior, good/bad, etc be replaced with what Frans de Waal calls our greater powers of abstraction, and involves “a move toward universal standards combined with an elaborate system of justification, monitoring, and punishment.”

At this point, for most people religion comes in as religion and morality has been inseparably enjoined since long. Oxford English Dictionary defines religion as the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods. This is not what will bring about morality in our lives but I strongly believe that spiritualism will certainly do. OED defines spirituality as “Relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.”

Quite how a spiritual life can be inculcated in us is something that I am not qualified to suggest. I however think that small beginnings made in our schools right from the childhood can and does bring about this as, I have personally seen happening in many of our schools that teach our children good values from the beginning. For those interested, here is one such school and I reiterate that, there are many thousands more in India and hopefully, in the next couple of generations, at least in India, we will see a society that will be harmonious with sound moral values.

This is my take on this week’s Friday 6 On 1 blog post topic. The other five bloggers who write on the same topic every Friday are Sanjana, Padmum,  Raju, Shackman and Conrad.  This week’s topic was suggested by Conrad. Please do go over to their respective blogs to see what they have to say on the topic. Thank you.

Woman.

As it happens so often in my life,  two different sources sent me two different links to two different you tube offerings but, on the same subject on the same day. The first one is about a mother and the second about a wife.

Both appealed to me and also affected me deeply and I want to share it with my readers. Though both are presented by Indians, their messages are universal and applicable to all mothers and wives. I hope that these two videos touch my readers as much as they touched me.

The first video is by Hari Sankar…a Grandmaster in Chess who has won a slew of awards…at one stage he was in the top 5 or 7 in the world..like Viswanathan Anand, it was his mother who was the motivating force to take up Chess. He is from Andhra Pradesh.  Despite trying to be funny, he manages to convey a profound statement about motherhood and women.

The next one is from an older man who while presenting the poem is quite affected.

Globalisation Versus Tribal Nationalism.


According to WHO, globalisation can be defined as “the increased interconnectedness and interdependence of peoples and countries. It is generally understood to include two inter-related elements: the opening of international borders to increasingly fast flows of goods, services, finance, people and ideas; and the changes in institutions and policies at national and international levels that facilitate or promote such flows.”

I am all for this provided, the spirit of the policy is implemented without any reservation but, in practise, that has not been the case as the next choice comes into play.


“Tribal nationalism more popularly called right-wing populism is a response to worries about immigration and national identity, coupled with genuine social injustices including economic hardship and unemployment.”

I live in India.  We have gone through a partition of the country that divided us into two and now that has become three with some elements of the division still troubling us.  Unlike the post world war II Europe, where full exchange of ethnic minorities took place, we did not due to what is now felt as stupidity of the then leadership of the country and we have an effective fifth column operating here.  We have a major problem of illegal migrants from our neighbouring countries encouraged by this fifth column and  some of our short term oriented politicians for vote bank politics.  There is also a sixth column which is the leftist  elite leftover from our experiments with socialism which, while on the retreat is also causing much damage to our youth.

Our Tribal Nationalism therefore is very appealing to people who are proud of our heritage and history who are unashamedly Indian and who are the cause for the despair of the English Speaking Left Intellectual Mafia as they are now called.  I have no hesitation whatsoever to confirm that I am a Tribal Nationalist who is willing to accept Globalisation which will treat us exactly as it would like us to treat it.  With respect.

I would therefore have preferred to call the title with an “And” instead of the “Versus” suggested by Shackman.

This is my take on this week’s Friday 6 On 1 blog post topic. The other five bloggers who write on the same topic every Friday are Sanjana, Padmum,  Raju, Shackman and Conrad.  This week’s topic was suggested by Shackman. Please do go over to their respective blogs to see what they have to say on the topic. Thank you.

Skyscape.

We had a heavy downpour of rain for almost five hours yesterday afternoon. Coming after a dry spell it was very welcome and I quite enjoyed watching it fall in our garden for some time.

Later after it cleared, Ranjan took Koko to the grounds for her evening exercise and took this photograph of the late evening sky.

After a little while, Manjiree went into the garden and found the skyscape attractive and took this snap.

I haven’t seen such skyscapes during the last many monsoons, possibly due to the pollution and one of the collateral benefits of the lockdowns has been such clear air over our city!

Annoyance Due To Covid 19.

I felt unusually hungry yesterday at tea time and had a few biscuits with my tea. This brought to my notice an annoyance that seems to be without any resolution in the near future.

India has been locked down now for 120 days with on and off easing of lockdown. Such a lockdown has its own problems for the youngsters in the family but, for me, that per se has not been a major annoyance bar one problem.

Just before the lockdown, I had given measurements for a set of dentures to replace my old ones which were giving me problems while chewing hard stuff. The mould was made and I was to go for trials with  trial dentures when the lockdown was declared and dentists particularly had to shut down being in a high risk occupations.

It has been four months now since I have been still using the old dentures and the adventure with the biscuits yesterday brought home to me the unfairness of it all.

Surprises!

Yesterday was a day of surprises. Yes, plural, not just one. Let me list them for you.

1. I received a phone call in the morning from a young friend who after the initial surprise was over asked me for directions to reach my home as he was coming after many years and the neighbourhood had changed a lot. I told him that I would rather not see him considering the Covid situation and he said that it would be okay as he just had to deliver some parcels to me. I guided him to my verandah from where I was unable to receive the parcels as they were simply too big. So, he had to come into the house after going through the security rigmarole of our society where visitors have to go through a sanitisation process.

2. The parcels turned out to be one gift, a very thoughtful one, from a mutual friend in Mumbai who my visitor had met last week. Along with the gift the visitor had also brought two Gujarathi dishes that were my favourite with a long lost story behind one of them. My Mumbai friend had heard my story about how I used to enjoy the dish during my stay in Ahmedabad over half a century ago. Since both my Mumbai friend and the visitor are Gujarathis, the latter was requested to prepare the dish as a surprise and deliver to me with a cryptic message reminding me about my Ahmedabad days.

The dish is called Handvo and I thoroughly enjoyed it for lunch.

3. Another friend, this time from Chennai telephoned me to inform me that he is sending me a gift parcel and he was calling to caution me to accept the parcel when the courier comes to deliver it. Quite what the gift is a mystery but, knowing my friend as I do, it is likely to be something that I will cherish and use regularly.

4. A TV serial that I had stopped watching after the imposition of the lockdown as only old episodes were being shown due to the producers not being able to produce episodes due to the lockdown, started showing new episodes from last evening and this 45 minutes every evening will now revert to my old pre-lockdown discipline. This is the only TV programme that I used to watch and I had missed it.

All in all a very pleasant day.