Starting out-calling to the apolitical
A hot summer afternoon; a stifling classroom; a pencil in the hands of a non-artist - doodles of inattention. What started off as wayward lines that crisscrossed on the margins of my books took the form of notes to myself and now I let them out into the internet cosmos. They are no longer doodles in the strict sense of the word - they are more like random thoughts but it seems somebody thought of that blog title before. Breaking no copyright laws, some of these blogs will be random indeed and some only seemingly so.
I've been a student of the politics for seven years now first as a major in journalism and then in political science. I would go as far as to say that I have been taught to be political - I have learnt to be so. I saw this as an occupational hazard - seeing the politics in and behind everything. I could not and I can not understand how anybody can be apathetic or indifferent or apolitical. We are what we are today because people before us realized the value of political mobilization. I wouldn't have the right to write this and some of us wouldn't have the right to read this, or diss this or discard it if that wasn't so.
It seems ludricuous to me that it takes a hindi movie of a "generation awakening" to realize that there are things that need to be done and that by default we are the ones who have to do it.
I find it disheartening that just about the time the Indian middle class started finding politics corrupt and dirty was the time the most marginalised sections of the Indian population started getting their voice heard through elections and otherwise.
I find it alarming that engineers and scientists and technocrats think that the political has nothing to offer and that there is such a wide gap between the social scientists and them that it seems unbridgeable that even when we do talk, we talk at rather than to each other.
End Note
I've been a student of the politics for seven years now first as a major in journalism and then in political science. I would go as far as to say that I have been taught to be political - I have learnt to be so. I saw this as an occupational hazard - seeing the politics in and behind everything. I could not and I can not understand how anybody can be apathetic or indifferent or apolitical. We are what we are today because people before us realized the value of political mobilization. I wouldn't have the right to write this and some of us wouldn't have the right to read this, or diss this or discard it if that wasn't so.
It seems ludricuous to me that it takes a hindi movie of a "generation awakening" to realize that there are things that need to be done and that by default we are the ones who have to do it.
I find it disheartening that just about the time the Indian middle class started finding politics corrupt and dirty was the time the most marginalised sections of the Indian population started getting their voice heard through elections and otherwise.
I find it alarming that engineers and scientists and technocrats think that the political has nothing to offer and that there is such a wide gap between the social scientists and them that it seems unbridgeable that even when we do talk, we talk at rather than to each other.
End Note
2 Comments:
which engineer says politics has nothing to offer ... that has offered us such a good friend :) ;)
You must have reached Champaign by now, and I have not yet gotten to TC yet... Do I smell glee from the faraway?
You should keep you blog updated. And I didn't know that you were a West Wing fan. We should sit for some lessons together.
In jest, we rest,
Time and life will test,
Who's the worst and who's best,
But yet, we rest.
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