kriticulture

Reference: The report in The Tribune titled " PPSC Scam : HC reinstates 31 sacked judicial officers" dated 28/5/2008 The Punjab and Haryana High Court's orders reinstating the 31 judicial officers are surprising, particularly in view of the context elaborated in the news report. It is hoped that the Court will not allow any question mark to be raised over the appropriateness of the orders and will let the people learn, through the media, the logic and the details that have guided the reversal of its own committee's recommendations. This would reinforce the people's trust in the judiciary and also reaffirm the supremacy of the people in the democratic republic that is India. Rajesh Kumar Sharma

By L. GORDON CROVITZ Link

Articles include: Voices Carry THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN STORYTELLING TRADITION IS ON VIVID DISPLAY IN AN ANTHOLOGY FEATURING INTERVIEWS WITH FORMER SLAVES, AND THEIR DIARIES, LETTERS, AND MEMOIRS. Link

The video embedded below is produced under the Public Knowledge Project. It is available at: http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/1517

On Refresher Courses for Teachers Digging into the foundational rationale of academic refresher courses, one may run into layers. There is the advertised layer, and then there are others. The advertised layer can be sighted in statements of objectives: acquaintance with the latest developments in one's area of teaching; review of one's teaching practices; an opportunity to think laterally; re-motivation; etc. Corrupted beyond recovery by excessive academic abuse, the word “refresh” has finally given up the ghost. The spirit has departed, and the letters hang dank and withered like leaves. The primary specific implication that as a teacher I need refreshing is simply too painful. It hurts vanity. Not that modesty is absent, but it sure isn't spilling over either. Often, then, a refresher course is received as a paid holiday in a sanatorium, a time to doze and booze, with its compulsory regimen of indoctrination--the forced ingestion of a handful of ill-digested intellectual ...

A baby hand, grubby and dusty, popped from the left the moment I opened the lunch box. The train was pulling out of the Ludhiana railway station after a five-minute halt. The sun, a mildewed orange peel, was going down behind the dust and smoke of the industrial city. The train had been late, and I had not eaten anything since breakfast. All around me people were eating, and their sight had quietly disturbed my hunger. Without turning my head, I rolled my eyes to the left. The little boy took two steps and stood before me. He was four or five years old, and was wearing the oversized rags of charity, the pants held up with a cord. His palm was stretched for begging in an easy, accustomed gesture. Red and green streaks ran across the grimy face: someone had obviously tried to paint colorful mustache and whiskers to make that face fascinating and, perhaps, adult. But the colors had got overwritten and almost lost under the grime. He wants a portion of my meal, I thought, for in his other ...

Comment on Gurbhagat Singh’s “Love, Divine Love, Love Infinite” (Published in the Punjabi Tribune of May 18) Gurbhagat Singh’s article ends with strong words for “the so-called intellectuals of Punjab ”. They are mute witnesses, he says, to the erosion of love which has been the defining and life-sustaining ideal of their culture. He obviously feels deeply for Punjabi culture that he thinks has been let down by its “intellectuals”. That he desires them to play a more interventionist role is more than evident. What is not so evident, however, is that he takes the possibility and efficacy of intellectual intervention rather unproblematically at a time when, for various reasons, no serious thinker is inclined to take such intervention for granted. We are no longer in the kind of world that Sartre inhabited; intervention today often risks sliding into a political-cultural commodity. Another thing that is not evident in his castigation, because it is implied, is that he has a certain f...

from Democracy Now 1. “Everybody in the World Except US Citizens Should Be Allowed to Vote and Elect the American Government” - World Renowned Philosopher Slavoj Žižek Read/listen/view Part 1 here 2. Zizek on the Iraq War, the Bush Presidency, the War on Terror & More Part two of a ranging discussion with Slavoj Zizek, the philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural theorist. He has been called the “Elvis of cultural theory” and is widely considered to be one of Europe’s leading intellectuals. He has written more than fifty books and speaks to sold-out audiences around the world. Read/listen/view Part 2 here

Another issue of Reconstruction is out. "What is the opposite of bullshit?" Possibilities of intellectual engagement, since Sartre: An interview with Bill Martin / Joseph G. Ramsey Read the interview here: Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)

A documentary on hands . . . a visual poem

Shreya Bhattacharji recommends a wonderful essay, published in Granta , by Binyavanga Wainaina. Always use the word ' Africa ' or 'Darkness' or 'Safari' in your title. Subtitles may include the words 'Zanzibar', 'Masai', 'Zulu', 'Zambezi', 'Congo', 'Nile', 'Big', 'Sky', 'Shadow', 'Drum', 'Sun' or 'Bygone'. Also useful are words such as 'Guerrillas', 'Timeless', 'Primordial' and 'Tribal'. Note that 'People' means Africans who are not black, while 'The People' means black Africans. Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress. In your text, treat Africa as if it were . . . . Read the essay

Some Random Thoughts Prachya – Manisha – Gaveshana – Mandiram is the answer for the annoying and urgent question, ‘Is our culture dying?’ In the course of this talk it would be my endeavour to engage your attention on certain eternal verities relevant to man’s life and man’s conduct in real life. The expectations about Man and the ground realities, the contemporary actuality around, would naturally cause turbulence in those of us who believe that life is not mere pleasure, still less an opportunity to make money. The name of this association of thoughtful, benevolent intellectuals needs explanation for those who do not have ease in understanding the Devbhasha , Sanskrit. A number of inquiries can be instituted into the oriental wisdom down the ages in various fields and in diverse depths of detail. This is a temple of quest for the understanding of oriental wisdom, manas , heart-mind-intellect. Talking about and thinking about eternal verities will surely gives u...

Reason Retreats as Images Invade the Political Arena Democratic politics is essentially the politics of rational discourse in which language, thought and persuasion play key roles. At least that is what we have so far tended to believe. But the ongoing political battle for assembly elections in Punjab appears set to change our notions of democratic politics fundamentally and for ever. It is not that the theatre of politics has moved unprecedentedly and dangerously away from reason and towards emotion. That would be retelling an old story. Emotion has always been an indispensable appendage of democratic politics, whether for good or for bad. What is new is the rise to predominance of affect vis-à-vis reason and emotion, which can shift politics on to an entirely different ground. What is most disturbing is that on this ground the rules of democratic politics as a rational discourse do not seem to apply. When reason has to contend with emotion, it has at least a rival. Th...

The Hypertechnological Moment Having left the technological age behind, we have been in the hypertechnological moment for quite some time now. The need to characterize the present as a moment arises from the situation produced by the impact on temporality of recent developments in information and communication technologies. The instantaneity of communications today alters the experience of temporality in a way that renders obsolete the terminology of ages and periods. The sense of the passage of time wears away as the tempo of experience crosses the barrier beyond which the experience of time ceases to register as a passage. As Paul Virilio argues, the present becomes, in its global “amplification”, a time bomb that drains the past and the future of their temporalities, leaving us trapped in its own eternity as “the time of an endless perpetuation of the present” (133-34; 143). With the hypertechnological moment ...

1. By Frank Furedi Let’s turn a new page in the world of reading Teaching children that books are mere resources to be ‘consumed’ is having a baleful impact on reading, culture and the quality of public life. 2. By Nathalie Rothschild Exploding the myth of trafficking Controversial author Laura María Agustín tells spiked that those dedicated to combating the sex industry have criminalised migrant workers.

David Brooks article "The Neural Buddhists" ( click here ) suggests the return of the exiled metanarratives with a bang. Behind the Hegelian metanarrative, or undergirding it, might be lurking a real material, neural one on which the experience of the universal could be standing. It is new discoveries we are heading toward. New "recoveries", probably. For Buddhism has all along visualised the various "invisiblities" as different grades and kinds of materialities. Rajesh Kumar Sharma

The local government (zila parishad and panchayat samiti) elections in Punjab yesterday were scarred by widespread violence unusual in this part of the India. Media has reported, and obviously under-reported, organized acts of intimidation, booth capturing and physical assault (often with weapons), not to speak of mute witness-bearing by a spineless government machinery. How much worse will be the Panchayat elections scheduled to take place in the coming days is anybody guess. Are we watching a new phase of politics? A kind of postpolitical politics? Politics is supposed to be founded on the ethics of the 'polis', on debate, dialogue, public interest, civility of conduct, and so on. But what do we have here? It appears that the last thin veils of democracy on the ugly reality of this part of India's body politic have finally been torn to shreds and cast away. And what we are watching is the naked reality of money and muscle and other forms of 'legitimised' pow...