Apraasangik अप्रासंगिक

  Dec 14, 2022 The UGC lands in controversy by directing universities to hold Art of Living meditation sessions. The University Grants Commission (UGC) wants higher educational institutions to organise meditation sessions for students and teachers. In a circular dated November 24, the UGC makes it clear that the method of meditation developed by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s agency, The Art of Living Foundation, has to be followed. One wonders whether the UGC has become an advertising agency for the foundation. In older times such a diktat would have raised eyebrows. People would have asked if this was the job of the UGC. It is not for the commission to give instructions on what kind of programmes and seminars should be held in a university. Its mandate is to promote higher education, coordinate the field of higher education, and ensure and maintain the quality and standards of higher education. What to teach, how to design courses, how to admit students, how to recruit teachers, what ext...

  15 Sep 2023 It’s happening in schools and homes. And while Modi’s BJP might gain, generations of India’s Hindus will lose. A Muslim friend from a town in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh recently called, seeking counsel. His young daughter had told him the previous day that her friends refused to play with her any more – after they were warned by other children to stay away from her because of her religion. This is an experience most Muslims have gone through while growing up in India. They are familiar with anti-Muslim slurs and cuss words used against them. But something new is happening which is radically different from earlier times. While the Indian media and politicians have long harped on the supposed dangers of radicalisation among Muslim youth, or of the threat of far-left propaganda, we are now witnessing the turbocharged expression of a reality the country has never confronted: the radicalisation of Hindu youth. It is an everyday radicalisation of you...

  Jul 04, 2023  What happened to Professor Tejaswini Desai of Kolhapur can happen to anyone in the teaching community. It tells you of the perils of being a teacher in India of our times. Teachers can no longer assume that the class is over after the stipulated period of 55 or 60 minutes. Whatever transpired in the class can continue to be played out on social media for days on end, often without the teacher even being aware of it. The teacher can then be held accountable by those who have never been part of their class, people they have never known, and whose opinions they will now have to face. Tejaswini Desai, an Associate Professor of Physics at Kolhapur Institute of Technology’s College of Engineering in Maharashtra, has been put on leave pending the completion of an inquiry against her. What wrong did she commit? Professor Desai was conducting a class on human values. This was not her regular class; she was taking over after the previous lecturer’s resignation. The stude...

  Jul 18, 2023 “This country is crazy about rebel heroes, but not about protest.” These words by Hindi poet and litterateur Raghuvir Sahay came to mind when one saw how many Indians reacted to the outrage and violence that erupted recently in France after the Nahel M. police killing. India’s big media houses, except for some English platforms, either ignored the violence or reported it with horror. Social media saw a flood of comments that strongly condemned the protests. People posted to say that they regretted that France did not have a head like the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh who would have taught the protesters a lesson by bulldozing their homes or shooting them dead. These comments reveal the nature of social consciousness that exists among a certain group of Indians. It is not a new phenomenon, but social media allows us to see constant proof of it every day. On 27 June, when the police shot dead Nahel M., a black teenager of Algerian descent, in a Parisian suburb, peopl...

  Aug 22, 2023 With Prof. Sabyasachi Das resigning from Ashoka University and Karan Sangwan being dismissed from UnAcademy, the debate has reached a boiling point. Can a teacher tell students whom to vote for and whom not to? Can she express personal opinions in class, especially political opinions? Moreover, can personal or political opinions have no relation to one’s scholarship? People have different thoughts on this question. But before that, let us keep in mind that we are asking this question in India, where teachers are under attack. They are being arrested, forced to resign, or fired for their opinions. In the first half of August, Ashoka University’s professor Dr. Sabyasachi Das felt compelled to resign after he shared some findings of his research paper on social media that were critical of the Bharatiya Janata Party. The university not only publicly distanced itself from the findings but announced that it did not like social media activism from its faculty. It went ...

  14/OCT/2023 What Hamas has done is inexcusable, but a pertinent question for the civilised world is whether it will ever condemn Israel for daily humiliation of Palestinians for seven decades. Children are being bombed out of life. Women and old are being killed. Residential buildings, mosques, churches, and hospitals are being reduced to rubble. Ambulances carrying the dead and injured have been targeted. Electricity and water supply have been cut off. Gaza is living and dying in darkness. Israel has laid a total seize on Gaza and using all its firepower to turn it into dust. More than 1,500 Palestinians have been killed, many of them are children. There is a fear that those surviving the Israeli murderous campaign will die of hunger. The World Food Program (WFP) has called the situation in Gaza devastating: “We’re seeing shortages of fuel, of water [and] electricity. We are seeing our shelters that are overcrowded. We don’t have capacity.” WFP’s Palestine country director, Same...

  25/OCT/2023 The increasing support for Israel in the country is in consonance with the rise of anti-Muslim, anti-minority politics represented by the BJP “It is sad to see how Indians have changed,” Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa  told  Rajdeep Sardesai. She said that she was surprised that Indians, who have experienced the cruelty of colonialism, fail to connect with the plight of the people of Gaza, which has faced the brunt of settler colonialism at the hands of Israel. How can Indians wish for the extermination of the occupied people of Gaza and wish victory for the occupier Israel? There are many reasons for the change that India has gone through in the recent past. One reason for this change is the fading memory of English colonialism, with the Mughals/Muslims being increasingly seen as the real colonisers. The world, yet to come to terms with the change in the imagination of the Hindu majority, was surprised to see massive support for the Israeli war against t...