The Brave Pedestrian

We of the modern mechanistic civilization seek to define all things and phenomena as ‘it’, as against he or she. We objectify (as against personify) the world when we refer to it as ‘it’, and not he or she. By contrast, we personify our country as ‘she’, ‘Bharat Mata’ etc. Some decades earlier, when people referred to India as  Bharat Mata , they meant it literally. Those who participated in the freedom struggle were inspired by the feeling that they were risking their lives for an entity that mattered a lot more than ordinary mortals, and yet was intimately connected to them and their families. Today, we don’t think that way. We think of India as ‘it’. India is beautiful as long as the the GDP, forex reserves and Sensex look sexy, and as long as the world is cheering it lustily as the new, rising BRIC nation. We don’t love India the way we loved  Bharat Mata. I think objectifying impoverishes us. Objectifying is fine when you’re dealing with micro-realities a...

A certain prophet who existed 1500 years ago is said to have decreed that women should completely cover their bodies and faces in a largely shapeless, dull-coloured garment and veil. Why? To render them unattractive to males… To prevent males from getting the slightest glimpse of their femininity… To sanitize their interaction with males and to render their communication sexless, genderless. I wonder what the good prophet (peace be upon him) would have to say if he could see that 1500 years later, some men and women wouldn't even see one another, and communicate facelessly, voicelessly and even namelessly with only alphabets on a glass or plastic screen. "Wonderful! The faces and voices of both men and women are completely veiled! Praise the Lord!" he might have said in an ecstacy. And then some worldly soul would have gently and painstakingly introduced the immortal prophet to the ways of the blogosphere, chatspace, email, Facebook... "Well, I sense t...