kriticulture

Sunday 16th February 2014     1. How How did you get to write these essays? What motivated you? I believe I am also responsible for the world in which we find ourselves. I have tried to respond to this world from time to time. As a person who teaches – and who can read and write – I think I have an obligation to make some sense of it and to share the resulting attempts with others, and so contribute to the dialogues that are the motors of civilization. 2. Rajesh, why in/disciplines for a title? Though the title is explained in the Introduction towards the end, let me add (and repeat) that education, culture and politics are ‘in/disciplines’. That they nevertheless require a disciplined effort to study them. That they demand that the disciplinary boundaries between them be challenged in order to reveal how none of them is self-constituted and self-limited/limiting. The ...

By Rajesh Sharma 'Complete Mukti' - Prime Minister Singh's hybrid phrase delivered from the Red Fort today, on 15 August 2013.  Is it a symptom of neoliberal pathologies of exclusive developmentalism transplanted on the Indian soil from abroad?  Does it say, despite 'their' silence, that we must now pick up a redesigned outfit of freedom - of freedom defined in and qualified by Western(ized) corporate terms?  At the same time, the brand new Manmohanism validates the operations of the native religious-corporate complex - by reimagining 'Mukti' in terms of the entertainment and fashion ideology of completism.  Recall Raymond's ad campaign: T he Complete Man.

Badri Raina Bradley Snowden Assange, I say, for You are one—born to protect What was once proudly American; Selfless beyond our tutored   Incomprehension. Even as all around us, the “best” hoard Their lives and open their abuse On behalf of the “patriotic” gun, The corporate board, and the politics That “god-fearing” red-necks use To trample the world beneath The ordained boot, romping from One massacre to the other Like proverbial bandicoot, Snooping among “unalienable” Privacies not just of those without “manifest destiny,” but of those That inhabit the “land of the free,” You fling your soul like streak Of light across the Satanic gloom, thinking nothing Of losing your life if, courting death, You may illume to common sight And knowledge the perfidies of those That, pretending to maim and disfigure On our behalf, fatten on the ruse. Bradl...

By Badri Raina badri.raina@gmail.com They had great faith in the gods Dotting the hills and dales— Those men and women who Are now corpses. Yet, not one among those that Survived was heard to say “The gods govern our conditions; Not the government, not the builders, Not the hoteliers, not the miners— None of these are responsible, since God willed it so.” All of their moaning suggested How unstuck they were with the gods They believed in. Of all the tangled flesh and bone That lay mangled among the rubble, One corpse stood out: Bang in the sanctum sanctorum, This young man, dead and askew, Had open eyes full of consternation Fixed searingly upon the god-in-chief. It was as though in his moment Of dying, his amazement at the deity’s Uncaring repose was too much to hide. He might have been thinking, “H...

Dear Kriticulture Reader, Please read the following text and lend your voice to an urgent cause by signing the petition after clicking the link here: http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Protect_the_teachers_right_to_full_salary/ Introduction A majority of teachers in India, at various levels, are today paid only a fraction of the salaries they should be getting under the rules. It is injustice at a huge scale, and it is perpetrated with the complicity of the executive organ of the both the central and the state governments. The teachers' right to the lawfully deserved wages must be protected not only because they too have rights like all other persons but also because exploited,distressed and tormented teachers cannot give their best to those young human beings whose care has been entrusted to them. Petition The minimum salaries notified by the government are not paid to most teachers, notwithstanding the fact that they have embraced the vocation of teaching after...

By M. L. Raina Time was when being a dissident meant being someone who does not swallow myths and shibboleths wholesale. My gospel then was not Marx but a slim volume by the American philosopher Barry Denham whose book Man Against Myth I read with  religious zeal. For me the time of dissidence is no more. I have reached a state of dissonance when everything sounds out of tune, out of rhythm for me.I have given up on hope, that overarching something that Ernst Bloch the  Marxist philosopher regarded as the mainstay of human endeavour.That hope is now overtaken by  the new mushroom cloud of despair hanging over all of us. A maverick East German poet Wolf Bierman,beset like me with the feelings of disconnectedness,wrote 'dreams that are still red/and not to be buried with our dead'. That was when he hoped that communism would survive. But when his hopes crumbled with the collapse of communism, he came out with: 'well, who preaches hope is a l...

By Rajesh Sharma Lawlessness is coming to be the destiny of India.  And it goes masked under lawfulness and propriety.  As we fathom greater depths of venality and deceit, experts, specialists, technocrats, managers and ‘intellectuals’ are working overtime to produce effects of oh-so-much happening. A reactive hyperactivity, whose fountainhead is the media, is radiating from tv screens.  Has not the media, whatever the intentions of those who are motivated nobly, come to function as a machine of distraction, consolation, vicarious rage? In short, the Bad Conscience of the Indian people?

-           By  Rajesh Sharma   The Coalgate is getting murkier by the hour.  After what reportedly transpired in the Supreme Court today on 8th May, the media is all aflutter with speculation. Will the Law Minister go? Should he? Will the deities up there ask him to exit? And the Railway Minister? The PM is said to be supporting the continuation of the ministers. Is he doing it on his own or under someone’s directions? It matters little. What matters is what his conduct means for India and its people. And for whatever is still left of democracy here.  This is not a display of amazing political nerve by an I-am-no-politician. This is not a demonstration of loyalty towards party and colleagues. This is not some ascetic indifference to little storms in a tea cup. This is not courage of conviction. This is a systematic destruction of the institutions on whose strength post-independence India ...