The Brave Pedestrian

Again, I think I’m setting myself up as a target for much anger and derision, though that is not the effect I wish to have on people. What I state here is an honest opinion… please believe that much at least! I grew up studying in a convent school, and I have no saffron agenda. I am not a Shiv Sena or BJP supporter. Our current situation — a sort of unbridled quest of modernity, never mind the past and the experiences of the past — is brought about by  a system of education that was largely evolved by Christian missionaries living in the colonies.   While the stated objective was to bring the “ignorant savages” to the light of reason by teaching them “reading writing and arithmetic.”, the underlying objective was to distance them from their own culture, and render their minds ripe for proselytizing.  Even if unproselytised, they deeply embraced the white Christian worldview, which was nine tenths of their faith.  Our children continued to be bred in the care o...

OK, I expect to draw some serious flak for this post… but here goes, anyway. Our relationship with entities is as complex as it is with other human beings and other species. We exploit and are exploited by, derive sustenance from and give sustenance to, large numbers of entities all the time. But they, not we, are the prime movers of our relationship. For millennia, they have shaped our future by selectively breeding us, whispering (so to speak) ideas into our little heads, nudging  homo erectus  to become man-the-toolmaker, and then man-the-wordsmith and finally man-who-inhabits-the-world-of-ideas. Humans today live and swim in ideas the way fish live in water. Ideas are their home, their natural habitat and the means of their continued existence. Rabbits cannot live without their intestinal flora, and humans cannot live without their ‘cranial fauna’. Rabbits are rodents whose lives depend so heavily on harbouring the right sort of intestinal bacteria, that at the time of we...

We suffer from a collective grand delusion  that while we feed on, use and exploit other creatures, nothing feeds on us and exploits us.  We fondly believe that we are at the top of the food chain on Planet Earth, and that this planet is a self-contained kingdom, more or less isolated and insulated from the rest of the cosmos. We believe that except for an asteroid striking this planet, or some such cataclysmic event, we are safe from the universe because except for sunlight and starlight, nothing much comes and goes between here and the rest of the cosmos. We believe especially that while there are all sorts of natural phenomena influencing the course of our lives, there is nothing out there with a  will to exploit us,  use us and prey on us. In other words, we believe that humans are their own worst enemies, and that they have no natural enemies that cannot be dealt with a shot of vaccine or antibiotics. We try collectively to maintain this illusion by thinking ...