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

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

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...