THE INDIAN COMMENTATOR

Statutory warning: Those who can’t afford to risk their temperaments with hardcore cultural satire, please close this tab by clicking at the ‘X’ button on your right.  Image Courtesy: Google Cultural differences are interesting to watch and study. Sometimes, they are as excruciating an experience as watching news in any Malayalam TV channel. At the same time, occasionally, these differences are humorous to observe as well. For example, the social science text book I studied for my eighth standard, says that Kerala is the America in India in the standard of living, and later in my Masters programme, I learnt that it is not just in standard of living, but in many aspects, such as cultural diversity and the way every culture is assimilated into its mother culture, this state is just like the melting pot, America. Well, this can be said about the general Indian cultural context as well. Whoever you are, whichever religion you belong to, you have to rub the sandal past...

Image Courtesy: Telegraph.co.uk What I intend to talk about is the chasm between what one believes and one talks about in a teacher’s life. What inspired me to think in this stream is the post I made in my blog lately. It was about how a poem by Rabindranath Tagore has been taught in colleges and universities and how I see it. The poem is never given its spiritual significance and is never placed against the realities of the formless world one is constantly in contact with, the world of spirituality, or the worlds of psychic realities. Spirituality gives us glimpses of what lies beyond what we know and see in form around us, in the so-called physical world. Another route to reach to those non-formal realities or non-physical realities is psychic reality—the unique world of the mind. Teaching this poem or any other book, the teacher is forced to tell the students about the ideas and ideological backgrounds that supposedly played crucial roles in writing of a particular ...

I  never had much guest posts in my blog. From what I recall, it was only once, and it was from Fernando Pessoa , the well-known and Portuguese poet. It was a passage written by him that I included, years back. At this moment, I think about guest posts again. The reason is very extraordinary and simple at the same time. For the past few days I have been thinking a line from a poem by an Indian poet. This is the line “ Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high .” This line is from Rabindranath Tagore’s Githanjali, a collection of spiritual songs, for which he won the Nobel Prize for literature. He was the first and last Indian to bring the Nobel here. But that doesn’t count as much as how deep his verses are. None of the other poets in the tradition of Indian English literature have been able to bring such a depth within such a concise verse format.    I taught this poem at the university and studied it myself as a young graduate. In all these yea...

Image Courtesy: Google Without any impersonal, undramatic statements, or any negations of any of my previous blog descriptions, I change my existing blog description, “My Freedom is your Beauty” to “is an act of finding an extension for existence.” I subsequently changed my background image as well, along with some of the colours of the titles. The question, if these changes can carry any significant difference in the contents of the blog or in the furthering of the different dimensions of existence, can only be answered by time. But if one looks at the current Description, “…is an act of finding an extension for existence,” one can get a glimpse of the truth that lay hidden before us in time. This fragment of sentence, with its hidden subject acts as a reminder of all human present, the idea we all understand as ‘now’. In our ephemeral, yet eternal moments of the present, the now, the beginning and the results are unknown to us, kept away from us, sometimes buried in our m...

Image Courtesy: Facebook Procrastination is one of the dramatic catalysts that work its way through to the development of plot in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The postponement of action drew Hamlet from normal struggles to madness. Of course, it adds to the drama. However, procrastination is no good a prop in a writer’s arsenal. His characters, of course can exhibit this as a favourable character flaw. But he himself should be kept away from this character trait. Image Courtesy: Google Procrastination, evidently, is not a character trait at all; however, for the use of a better word, we can use the phrase--‘character trait’. Whatever the reason is, when someone decides today’s job to be done tomorrow, he or she is procrastinating the work. It mainly results from the blind confidence of a tomorrow that is at the same time favourable and secured, as imagined by the writer. Here, it is good to remember John 9:4, “One must work the works of him that sent me while it is day; the ...