Are we facing an INDIA-cide? The unity of the opposition and its appropriation of INDIA as an acronym seems to have led to the nervous BJP to pronounce a death sentence on India. It appears INDIA has amassed a critical force that seems to have snuffed the ground under the feet of the ruling BJP. To understand what is...
The Politics of Face
Several contemporary thinkers exhibit interest in Jesus Christ. Slavoj Zizek for instance, claims that he is a Christian atheist. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari show a strange fascination for the paintings of Christ. These philosophers do not seem to be believers. They view the portraits of Christ as deploying faciality that marks the predominance of a regime of signs...
Moral Imagination and The Intervention of the Intellectual
The intellectual has a special call when the horizon of society appears dark. He/she has the challenge to ignite a spark of light that would illumine the steps of humans in such a society. This task reaches an acute dimension when society seems to have lost its moral calculus. When violence becomes a way of building justice, self-respect and...
The new Body Politic and India-cide
India is sacred to us all. We share the land of India as well as its diverse cultures and the traditions that we built from time immemorial. All Indians form one body of our nation. We invoke India as a mother. This invocation among other things is a body politic. It makes our country a human macrocosm. The fact...
Is Hindutva a Death Drive?
Is Hindutva a Death Drive? It is a map that provides symbolic efficiency to us Indians. It somehow gives us a magical feeling that everything will fall into its place if it is given to run its full course. It seems to have given buoyancy to a narrow self-righteous nationalism that is not national enough. It seems that we...
Politic of Mimetic Resonance and our Ecstasies
The great Buddha taught us that desire is the root of all suffering. Desire never seems to leave us. We all experience it all the time. It animates our world. Do the Buddha. Banish desire. Without desire, we may not have a reason to live or a reason to die. But excessive desires and their lack of fulfilment push...
Populism and its Haunting Fantasies
The mobilization of religion for political ends is not new. The politicization of religion to generate political capital has been an age-old strategy. It seems that it is becoming a winning strategy in our country where Hindutva populism is growing by leaps and bounds. Scholars teach that Populism is born as a result of the crisis of representation. But...
Between Mythic and Divine Violence.
In recent days our country is hit by violence. The flames of violence in Manipur have not yet been extinguished, we have Haryana burning to ashes. The question is how are we to understand these waves of violence and hate that are afflicting our society? The issues are complex and there are curling spirals of violence. Unfortunately, violence has...
The wheels of Dialectics and the Relation of Negation
‘Every determination is a negation’ says G.W. Hegel. He borrowed this insight from Spinoza. Hegel credits the discovery of it to Spinoza but laments that Spinoza did not fully appreciate the importance of his own discovery. ‘Determination is negation’ is linked to the idealism that views finite as unreal. This view thinks that only real is the infinite and...
Coffee without cream and Indian-ness without Hinduness
The famous joke of Slavoj Zizek about coffee without cream tells us that coffee without cream and coffee with milk is the same yet are regarded as different because of what the said coffee lacks. Zizek tells us about an incident where a person went to a coffee shop and ordered coffee without cream. The waiter told him that...
