Skip to main content

Prismatic Dispersions



Along with a few score of other bloggers, I’m accepting the A2Z Challenge of Blogchatter. This entails the writing of 26 blogposts in the month of April with each successive topic corresponding to a letter in the alphabet. This is the fourth time I’m accepting this challenge. I found it fun particularly in the last two years though quite exacting especially if you are hard up for time. But something productive emerges out of the exercise. What I wrote for this challenge in the last 2 years is available in book form in the public domain. Below are the links.

1. Great Books for Great Thoughts

2. Life: 24 Essays

This time my theme is Prismatic Dispersions.

A prism disperses light into its various components. We all learnt in junior school about the enchanting VIBGYOR. It was amazing to know as a little child that the ordinary white light that we took for granted consisted of so many sparkling colours. Later I thought of VIBGYOR as a metaphor for life itself. For life’s truths, more precisely.

Truth is never monochromatic. We are actually living now in what is called a post-truth world. Facts have ceased to matter anymore. Opinions matter. Perspectives matter. Whose opinion and whose perspective matters even more. Entire histories can be erased and whole new histories can be fabricated using the various state machineries and agencies. The media becomes the ruler’s lapdog. The judiciary becomes a mere scarecrow in the playfield of political hooligans who are ironically the legislators. Arthur Koestler’s Yogi and Commissar – opposite poles of the ascetic and the materialist – merge into a metamorphosed incarnation of Amrish Puri without facial expressions.

Prismatic Dispersions will present to you the multifarious colours of post-truth. No, it’s not going to be a political discourse. Not entirely, at least. It will be as apolitical as a metaphorical prism can be. It will start with A for Prayagraj and end with Zeitgeist. Prayagraj which killed one of the choicest celestial enemies of India’s history-lovers (or is it history-sheeters?) is our steppingstone to our ruling zeitgeist. In between there are even more interesting, possibly apolitical, things to look at like: Bhatti Mines as a symbol, Eclecticism, Loneliness can kill, Nationalism is a drug, Oceans are restless…


I assure the 500-odd readers who come to my blog every day that they will have much more in the month of April.

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    ...and each post will, of course, be written from your own position within the prism. Knowing that, bring it on! YAM xx
    (I only yesterday rememebred about A-Z and am frantically preparing to see if I can joing once more...)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for reminding me of the heavy personal hand I drop into my posts. Can't help it, I guess. What's writing if it's not personal, subjective... Post-truth?

      Delete
  2. Hope this prismatic dispersion has some bright shades too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. So, it's going to be colorful, looking forward.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "Post-truth" and versions of truth - sounds like A2Z will be an educative experience. Looking forward to your posts and all the best!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Country where humour died

Humour died a thousand deaths in India after May 2014. The reason – let me put it as someone put it on X.  The stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra called a politician some names like ‘traitor’ which made his audience laugh because they misunderstood it as a joke. Kunal Kamra has to explain the joke now in a court of justice. I hope his judge won’t be caught with crores of rupees of black money in his store room . India itself is the biggest joke now. Our courts of justice are huge jokes. Our universities are. Our temples, our textbooks, even our markets. Let alone our Parliament. I’m studying the Ramayana these days in detail because I’ve joined an A-to-Z blog challenge and my theme is Ramayana, as I wrote already in an earlier post . In order to understand the culture behind Ramayana, I even took the trouble to brush up my little knowledge of Sanskrit by attending a brief course. For proof, here’s part of a lesson in my handwriting.  The last day taught me some subhashit...

Sunita Williams and Narendra Modi

An Indian artist celebrating Sunita Williams' return Prime Minister Modi has extended a cordial invitation to Sunita Williams. In a Letter dated 1 Mar 2025, Modi expressed India’s pride in her achievements and extended the invitation. “After your return, we are looking forward to seeing you in India. It will be a pleasure for India to host one of its most illustrious daughters.” Will Ms Williams accept the invitation? I have serious reservations. She won’t, in all probability. Her cousin was allegedly murdered by Modi’s men during the investigation of the 2002 Gujarat riots. The young generation in India are probably not aware of the 2002 riots in Gujarat orchestrated by Modi and his party for political mileage. In the last few years, whenever I raised the question in my classes, hardly one or two students out of the 200-odd ones were faintly aware of the riots. Inhuman violence was unleashed in Gujarat against the Muslim community after some Hindu pilgrims were attacked on...

56-Inch Self-Image

The cover story of the latest issue of The Caravan [March 2025] is titled The Balakot Misdirection: How the Modi government drew political mileage out of military failure . The essay that runs to over 20 pages is a bold slap on the glowing cheek of India’s Prime Minister. The entire series of military actions taken by Narendra Modi against Pakistan, right from the surgical strike of 2016, turns out to be mere sham in this essay. War was used by all inefficient kings in the past in order to augment the patriotism of the citizens, particularly in times of trouble. For example, the Controller of the Exchequer taxed the citizens as much as he thought they could bear without violent protest and when he was wrong the King declared a war against a neighbouring country. Patriotism, nationalism, and religion – the best thing about these is that a king can use them all very effectively to control the citizens’ sentiments. Nowadays a lot of leaders emulate the ancient kings’ examples enviabl...

A goddess smiles at me

Before Nelliakkattu Bhagwati Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu rose in my mind before anyone else as I stood in front of the Goddess of Nelliakkattu. I seldom pray for myself. I get on somehow with my own idiosyncrasies which I think even gods can’t do much about. A lot of missionaries of many gods tried to ‘reform’ me and failed miserably. They made me a failure too most of the time in the process. That’s how I decided to keep gods far away from my personal life. But I sort of like them - gods, I mean, not their missionaries, apostles, priests, yogis, and ministers. Gods are fun if you have ever cared to engage them in conversations. Kerala has a lot of gods and goddesses. In fact, every Hindu family of some historical repute has its own god or goddess. One such goddess is Nelliakkattu Bhagwati. She belongs to the Nelliakkattu family of Ayurvedic physicians. I’m treating the nascent cataract in one of my eyes with their medicines – a few eyedrops only. “You don’t have enough cat...

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl