How to
plug Mauritius tax-dodge hole – and get their islands too by Venky Vembu Jul
6, 2012 Firstpost
In
the Yoga Vasistha, a spiritual text attributed to Valmiki, the story is told of
a ripe palm fruit that falls from a palm tree at the precise moment that a crow
alights on the tree. It may have only been a coincidence, but, the verse notes,
observers frequently make the mistake of establishing a cause-and-effect relationship
between the two events. And surmise that the fruit fell because the
crow sat on the tree.
In
the mythological narrative, the churning of the ocean to extract the elixir of
immortality yielded both nectar and poison. Likewise, every major enterprise
that makes bold to change the status quo releases both beneficial and malefic
influences.
The
American linguist George Lakoff would test his cognitive science students by
telling them not to think of “pink elephants.” But of course, once the idea was
planted in their minds, his students could think only of pink elephants. It’s a
theme Lakoff explores in greater detail in his book Don’t Think of an
Elephant, on the subject of framing in
politics.
Anna-Ramdev:
beyond the ‘rift’ lies a powerful alignment Jun 4, 2012 84
Comments Firstpost
By
its very nature, ‘news’ represents something out of the ordinary… In that
sense, the news media thrive on ‘drama’, on the one thing out of the ordinary
that provides a ‘news peg’. Which is why virtually every news outlet was turned
on by the drama surrounding the perception of a ‘rift’, a ‘spat’, some
‘friction’ between Arvind Kerjriwal and Baba Ramdev at yesterday’s fast at
Jantar Mantar.
But
beneath the outer crust of being a democracy in its most elemental form, the
Indian model is, truth to tell, rotting at the core, and is far less of an
inspiration to democratising countries even in our neighbourhood. While a
certain feisty rivalry perhaps marks the essence of any vibrant democracy,
political parties in India
The
most striking thing about Indian parliamentary democracy is, of course, that it
has lasted this long, given the numerous intimations of its mortality over the
years.
Governments
should not behave like goondas. That, in short, is the substance of
today's Calcutta High Court verdict declaring as unconstitutional the
Mamata Banerjee government's forcible re-acquisition of land from Tata Motors.
For
those with the wisdom to learn their lessons, a discreet word is all it takes
to induce course correction. For the cussed fool who persists in his folly,
even a lengthy tome is insufficient to impart wisdom.
In
an early episode of the teleseries Yes, Minister, a Whitehall
It
isn’t often that we see a clash of ideas in the economic policymaking space in
the public domain. Given the populist instincts of most politicians, we don’t
always hear coherent articulations of the role of government in facilitating
economic growth.
“When
everyone is dead,” the writer Rudyard Kipling observed in his immortal Kim,
“the Great Game is finished. Not before.”
In
his satirical war novel Catch-22, Joseph Heller uses his fictional character,
Capt Yossarian, to bring home the absurdity of war and the utter cussedness of
military bureaucracy. In the novel, which drips with black humour in every
syllable, Yossarian tries desperately to avoid going on combat flying missions by
pleading lunacy – but the very act of asking to be let off from combat duty
certifies him – in the convoluted logic of war — as sane, and so he is required
to fly.
For BJP,
blocking Sonia’s bid for PM has proved a blunder Jul 1, 2012 59
Comments In war, a good tactical move that nets short-term gains may prove
strategically flawed from a longer-term perspective.
Old
soldiers, to take liberties with the lyrics of the army barracks ballad, never
retire; they just fade away.
It
takes a soldier to know the true horrors of war. As soldiers who have put their
lives on the line, seen up-close the bestiality of conflict, and ordered young
men into mindless battle, Generals don’t talk lightly of war in the way that
armchair analysts do.
In
chess, it is said that when you are in a position to win against your opponent,
it’s advisable to sit on your hands – so as to avoid making a wrong move that
fritters away your tactical advantage. Far too many defeats have been snatched
from the jaws of victory by overenthusiastic but precipitate action in
anticipation of imminent triumph.
In
Ayn Rand’s gripping morality play Night of January 16th, the Objectivist
philosopher-writer gets viewers to sit in judgement—literally—at a murder
trial. One of the theatrical devices that the play invokes at each performance
is to invite members from the audience to sit in as jury at the trial. The
play, therefore has two alternative endings – one in which the jury finds the
defendant “guilty” and the other not. The verdict varies at each performance,
depending on the composition of the jury on a given day, and their bent of mind
on the central philosophical exploration of the play: moral decay in society…
The
novelist Truman Capote noted that “more tears are shed over answered prayers
than unanswered ones”. Anyone who prays for an Army coup as the surgery that
will excise the moral decay in our society ought to be careful what they wish
for.
In
any case, the cynicism that underlies that sentiment is far more ruinous to the
aspiration to shape India
Comedian
Groucho Marx once said in jest that he wouldn’t want to be a member of a club
that was willing to have a guy like him as a member. That circular
self-deprecatory logic applies in an unfunny way in the ongoing effort to build
a consensus on the contours of a Lokpal Bill to set up an anti-corruption
agency…
The
immutable law of politics dictates that the greater the degree of consensus
among self-seeking political parties, the weaker and the more pitiful the
outcome will be. In catering to the lowest common denominator of the political
establishment, the Lokpal Bill has been – and will continue to be – defanged
and debased progressively.
Sonia-as-PM
in 2004: Has Kalam backtracked or is Swamy wrong? Jun 30, 2012 157
Comments History has a nasty habit of being rewritten to suit expedient
ends.
Rahul Gandhi is doing a
good job of undoing the dynasty - Rahul Gandhi's political exertions thus far have only eroded
goodwill for the dynasty. Leave him to it, and he could finish it off for good.
by Venky Vembu Jul
11, 2012
The
political cycle is an unforgiving beast… But in politics, you are only as good
as your last victory – or, more appropriately, as bad as your last defeat... The
metaphor of politics as theatre isn’t entirely misplaced, of course. The
grandstanding that we often see from political leaders shows them up as
performers who are playing their bit roles and marking their fretful hour on
the stage.
The
18th century poet-saint Tyagaraja, in one of his soulful compositions (Nagumomu
Ganaleni), points out that a king’s retinue would be failing in its duty if it
did not offer good counsel to the ruler-in-chief.
When
one's beard is on fire, it is folly to ask for a matchstick to light one's bidi.
Sometimes
a switched-off cellphone can be more eloquent than the most garrulous
motormouth exertions of party spokespersons.
Nothing
concentrates the mind so wonderfully as the prospect of a hanging in the
morning.
Always
the bridesmaid, never the bride: that sort of sums up Pranab Mukherjee’s
political progression over the decades.
In
his epochal film Rashomon, the legendary Akira Kurosawa uses a
crime thriller narrative to introduce us to the concept of “multiple realities”
and the futility of reconciling them – even in an open-and-shut case.
In
the film, set in a forest, a woman is either seduced or raped by a bandit and
her samurai husband is murdered. The narratives offered by four of the
protagonists – the bandit, the wife, the dead samurai (whose spirit is invoked
through a ‘medium’), and a woodcutter who claims to have been an eyewitness to the
crimes – are all equally plausible as stand-alone strands, even if they are all
self-serving. When we hear each of their testimonies, we’re convinced of the
certainty of each of them. Yet, seen together, the various accounts are so
fantastically at odds as to be mutually irreconcilable.
During
the shooting of the film, the somewhat befuddled actors themselves were known
to have repeatedly approached Kurosawa asking for clarity on what the “truth”
was. Kurosawa, however, wanted the film to be seen as an allegorical
exploration of “multiple realities”, not as the revelation of The Truth.
Sociologists
have since coined the term ‘Rashomon Effect’ to refer to the effect of the subjectivity
of perception on recollection: on how our biases shape our memories and/or
recollections of past events. It goes some way to explain why many observers of
an event may offer vastly different (yet equally plausible) accounts of it. The
same Rashomon Effect now haunts the many strands of the investigations into the
Gujarat 2002 riots.
In
one of his satsang discourses, which he typically infuses with levity to
sustain 'devotees' interest, self-styled spiritual guru Swami Nityananda
narrates a joke about God and Adam. God approaches Adam and tells him, “I have
good news and I have bad news for you.” Adam asks to be told the good news
first, upon which God says that He has endowed Adam with a brain—with unbounded
capacity to think and reason—and a sexual organ, which would open the gateway
to limitless pleasures.
Adam
is, of course, overjoyed at being the recipient of the best of both worlds, and
wonders what the bad news might be. To which, God responds: “At any given time,
only one those faculties will work.” …
And
in his sermons, he even makes references to a “time when bad people were around
me and there was too much abuse” that almost sound confessional… Yet, the
karmic deeds of a past when kundalini forces—and the hormonal
urges to which all men are susceptible—played havoc with a spiritual practice
aren’t proving so easy to bury.
Lacan, Anarchy, Masculinity, and Psychosis from Larval Subjects (Levi Bryant)
The
key question for anarchist politics/ontology is whether it leads necessarily to
psychosis (my orientation here is anarcho-communist). Putting the issue
in more positive terms, is it possible to form a social relation that isn’t
premised on masculine sexuality or Oedipus/Sovereignty/Theism and the discourse
of the master? … I insisted that they’re Real, but historically variant.
I based my argument on first on Lacan’s Family Complexes, where he
analyzes a shift from totemic cultures where the symbolic and imaginary
name-of-the-father are different to our current bourgeois cultures. There
he argues that neurosis is a unique and new historical configuration that
arises when the name-of-the-father is no longer the totem served by the
maternal uncle, but where the biological/imaginary father stands in the place
of the name-in-the-father (my ancient article on this issue is forthcoming in
the next issue of Speculations). This, Lacan argues,
generates a new topology of subjectivity…
Finally,
the very fact that the feminine side of the graph sexuation exists– and is
presumably neither phallocentric nor psychotic –suggests the possibility of an
anarchic alternative not organized around patriarchy, the phallus, or the
name-of-the-father. The feminine side of the graph of sexuation is an
ontology without transcendent deity or sovereign, nor without masters.
This is the option I’m trying to take: can we form a society without masters?
In this connection, I argued in The Democracy of Objects that
it’s actually the masculine side of the graph of sexuation that’s semblance,
masquerade, and fiction (which Lacan himself clearly suggests in placing the
barred subject beneath the S1 of the discourse of the master). So my
ultimate question, perhaps, is what a queer society/politics would look like;
or a society without masters/fathers/sovereigns… Even human sovereigns.
Thinking the Absolute Conference: Absolute Mysticism Audio from An und für sich by Anthony Paul Smith
It
was also an absolutely surreal experience to watch François Laruelle
participate in a black mass. When a friend, Jessie Hock, explained to him in
French that what was happening was “a sin”, he leapt up to receive the unholy
host. Words fail to capture this event!
This
in us laughs and weeps, suffers the stroke,
Exults
in victory, struggles for the crown,
Identified
with the mind and body and life,
It
takes on itself their anguish and defeat,
Bleeds
with Fate’s whips and hangs upon the cross,
Yet
is the unwounded and immortal self
Supporting
the actor on the human scene.
No comments:
Post a Comment