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In West Bengal, you just can’t be not affected by politics: the ‘politics of the poor’, as Prabhu describes it. ‘This, perhaps, is the only place in the world where people hate development,’ he tells me. ‘Yeh bhadralok ki rajneeti kabhi Hindustan ko amir nahi banne degi’ He was talking about ‘Leftist politics’ as intellectuals describe it, and how the politics of the elite would never let India become rich.
Why do we love making speed breakers? Maybe it’s a subliminal reflection of our system’s psyche that thrives on creating as many hurdles as possible on our way to success. More hurdles mean more corruption, more money for the law enforcers.
Our political parties are always in election mode and therefore they make promises to potential vote-bank communities without bothering to analyze their legal and financial implications.
Nehru judged history and filtered it to what should be told to an independent India and what should be hidden. He made sure that the history reinforced his ideology and made him look like a hero. His daughter Indira Gandhi and later her daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi tuned our history to further their political agendas. In independent India, only a certain kind of narrative is allowed; the one that suits the ruler's agenda.
The quickest way to learn technology is to just do it. If we are afraid of technology, it seems very complicated and scary but when we are not afraid and ready to explore, it becomes a very playful gadget.
Anything which makes us escape from the challenges of life is addictive. The awareness that you are living a mediocre life is worse than being mediocre.
Instinct is like a loving wife, who whispers her concerns in your ears but gives in to your logical arguments.
Very often we misread problems as crises. A crisis denotes a dangerous situation. A situation in which the probability of success and failure or survival and death is almost equal. More in favour of death and failure. A crisis happens when we can't solve problems. Problems seem scary. We are trained to be scared of problems. ‘Don't go there in the dark… a ghost lives there,’ parents tell their kids. We create ghosts in our children's minds and all our lives these ghosts do not let us see problems as just any other phenomenon of life.
Problems bring challenges. Challenges mean new experiments. Experiments bring learnings. Learning means discovery. Discovery means evolution. Evolution is the only purpose of life.
The foundations of the unprecedented corruption that we see today were laid by Nehru’s economics.
Like his hero, Majumdar also believed that war was nothing but politics with bloodshed. He was often found quoting Mao’s now famous statement: 'Revolution is not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly, and modestly. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.'
Alexis Zorba: Damn it, boss, I like you too much not to say it. You've got everything except one thing: madness! A man needs a little madness, or else... Basil: Or else? Alexis Zorba: ...he never dares cut the rope and be free.
I am affected by social evils. I want to topple the system. Plus, I have no future plans. The three main requisites for a student to be brainwashed and lured to turn a rebel.
They take up genuine issues with the aim not to solve it but to create unrest and anger against the system and make people believe in armed struggle. This is how the 'vulnerable group' unknowingly becomes their vanguard. Like I became, under the mentorship of my professors.
Jawaharlal Nehru University, Hyderabad Central University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Allahabad University, IIT Madras, Jadavpur University are the citadels of urban Naxalism.
In Zen, they say that a good teacup is the one that doesn't smell of its potter.
Truth is simple. Everything else is complex. Realization is simple. Logic is complicated. Continuous self-scrutiny, analysis of one’s own thoughts is a very lonely and cathartic process. It can take one towards wisdom and enlightenment or it can take you towards schizophrenia.
