themes

"Jayanta Kumer: Murad takla jukti dia kata bal, faltu pic dicos kan! Lakapora koira kata bal. (Translation: If you had the courage, you would have explained why you used an awful picture, learn before you speak; during conversation in Facebook)."

"Ever since British author and columnist Martin Jacques proposed about a decade ago that China was a ‘civilisation-state’ which Europe could not relate to given the latter’s nation-state-based worldview, similar assertions have been made about Bharat being a civilisation-state. In 2014, Dr. Koenraad Elst wrote a piece on his blog titled ‘India as a civilisation-state’ wherein, citing Zhang Weiwei’s book The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State, he contended that Bharat too must make a similar case for itself. Dr. Elst’s position was based on his view that Bharat’s ‘self-understanding’ supported its case of being or becoming a civilisation-state. Subsequently, this position has been echoed by others, including the current National Security Advisor Shri Ajit Doval. In my opinion, such a position must be examined and made good from both a conceptual and practical perspective if the purpose is to give effect to that position at the level of law and policymaking, failing which, it would be reduced to just another fashionable buzzword or a mere talking point."

"That said, merely because Bharat is a living civilisation in the realm of society, it does not translate to Bharat being a civilisation-state. In other words, a State that presides over a civilisation is not a civilisation-state; instead, a State that is conscious of the civilisational character of its society and structures itself on civilisational lines is a civilisation-state. Therefore, one needs to go beyond the name Bharat to understand if the manner in which the Indian State has been structured and functions, is alive to the fact that the society it presides over is a federal civilisation, and not a nation in the European sense. Specifically, for the Indian State to be treated as an Indic civilisation-state, we would need to examine whether the State has been built on the fundamental building blocks of this civilisation, and whether its political and social infrastructure viewed through the prism of its Constitution is designed to replace the colonial consciousness with Indic consciousness."

"Sapekshata (the quality of sapeksha-dharma) itself... literally means engagement 'with reciprocity and mutual respect'. Such a framework is consistent with the principle of bandhuta in the sense of inter-subjectivity, solidarity and fraternity across paths and identities. It means unity in diversity to the extent of mutual cooperation, and even mutual dependency. This framework is the ethos of what might be called 'positive pluralism' rather than mere tolerance or indifference emanating from a position of assumed superiority. Sapekshata stems from a belief in integral unity, which is to say that in this view difference and underlying unity are not mutually contradictory."

"Now she is like the others."

"Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice."

"He has Down's syndrome, a genetic defect involving varying degrees of mental retardation and, sometimes, serious physical defects. When he was born we were bombarded with advice and information, much of it mistaken. Eve 13 years ago there was more certitude than certainty in the prognoses, most of which were too pessimistic."

"Children born with Down Syndrome are not vegetables, nor are their lives demonstrably not worth living."

"'the sense of fatigue is often a very fallacious index of the working capacity of the body … there is not necessarily any correspondence between the subjective feelings of fatigue and the capacity of the muscles to perform work'"

"'People who don't see you every day have a hard time understanding how on some days‒good days‒you can run three miles, but can barely walk across the parking lot on other days,' [my mom] said quietly."

"She can be 21 with an attitude or 22, kind of snotty, acting real rude."

"Adapt to this, but you need no adapter, this is just the first chapter."

"Beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear."

"For the stone will cry out from the wall, ... "Woe to him who builds a town with blood and founds a city on iniquity!""

"Americans reflexively believe that 'Had Germany occupied the United States, nearly all of us would have joined an armed resistance to the Nazis. That's what I thought, too, when I was 16. But that reflects a hopelessly naive view, both of what the world looked like to most people after the Nazis had conquered Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway and France, and of what it actually meant to take up arms against an occupying power'."

"There are four types among those who sit before the sages: the sponge, the funnel, the strainer and the sieve. [...] The sieve rejects the coarse flour and retains the fine flour."

"If the sieve is not shaken, his flour will not drop from it."

"I'm a trend; I set one every time I'm in. I go out and just come back full circle again. You're a fad; that means you're something that we've already had. But once you're gone, you don't come back."

"The man who invented the red carpet needed his head examined."

"Now, dearest husband, come, step from your chariot. But do not set to earth, my lord, the conquering foot That trod down Troy. Servants, do as you have been bidden; Make haste, carpet his way with crimson tapestries, Spread silk before your master’s feet; Justice herself Shall lead him to a home he never hoped to see."

"There are two words I hate and despise and don’t want to hear: red carpet and iconic."

"The world as it appears to common sense consists of an indefinite number of successive and presumably causally connected events, involving an indefinite number of separate, individual things, lives and thoughts, the whole constituting a presumably orderly cosmos. It is in order to describe, discuss and manage this common-sense universe that human languages have been developed. Whenever, for any reason, we wish to think of the world, not as it appears to common sense, but as a continuum, we find that our traditional syntax and vocabulary are quite inadequate. Mathematicians have therefore been compelled to inventradically new symbol-systems for this express purpose. But the divine Ground of all existence is not merely a continuum, it is also out of time, and different, not merely in degree, but in kind from the worlds to which traditional language and the languages of mathematics are adequate. Hence, in all expositions of the Perennial Philosophy, the frequency of paradox, of verbal extravagance, sometimes even of seeming blasphemy. Nobody has yet invented a Spiritual Calculus, in terms of which we may talk coherently about the divine Ground and of the world conceived as its manifestation. For the present, therefore, we must be patient with the linguistic eccentricities of those who are compelled to describe one order of experience in terms of a symbol-system, whose relevance is to the facts of another and quite different order. Ch 3"

"So far, then, as a fully adequate expression of the Perennial Philosophy is concerned, there exists a problem in semantics that is finally insoluble. The fact is one which must be steadily borne in mind by all who read its formulations. Only in this way shall we be able to understand even remotely what is being talked about. Ch 3"

"If thou shouldst say, 'It is enough, I have reached perfection,' all is lost. For it is the function of perfection to make one know one's imperfection."

"... the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical to, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this Highest Common Factor in all preceding and subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than twenty-five centuries ago, and since that time the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again, from the standpoint of every religious tradition and in all the principal languages of Asia and Europe."

"The more God is in all things, the more He is outside them. The more He is within, the more without."

"In studying the Perennial Philosophy we can begin either at the bottom, with practice and morality; or at the top, with a consideration of metaphysical truths; or, finally, in the middle, at the focal point where mind and matter, action and thought have their meeting place in human psychology. The lower gate is that preferred by strictly practical teachers men who, like Gautama Buddha, have no use for speculation and whose primary concern is to put out in men's hearts the hideous fires of greed, resentment and infatuation. Through the upper gate go those whose vocation it is to think and speculate the born philosophers and theologians. The middle gate gives entrance to the exponents of what has been called *spiritual religion* the devout contemplatives of India, the Sufis of Islam, the Catholic mystics of the later Middle Ages, and, in the Protestant tradition, such men as Denk and Franck and Castellio, as Everard and John Smith and the first Quakers and William Law."

"The Perennial Philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula, ‘tat tvam asi’ (that art thou); the Atman, or immanent eternal Self, is one with Brahman, the Absolute Principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself, to find out who he really is."

"... the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical to, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions."

"We have an easy time thinking of animals as animals in part because they smell like animals. But what are you supposed to think when you find a group of humans who smell no better than cows, even worse? It reminds you that humans are animals, with the ability to stink like pigs, and kill like the wolves."

"There is nothing like an odor to stir memories."

"If I told you to murder an infant girl, say, still at her mother's breast, would you do it, without question?" "Without question? No. I'd ask how much."

"Most of those fighting for the United States abroad aren’t even Americans. Private military companies are multinational corporations that recruit globally. When I worked in the industry, my colleagues came from almost every continent. According to a recent Pentagon report, just over 33 percent of private military contractors in Afghanistan are U.S. citizens."

"I guess a man's got to do what he's best at Ain't found nothin' better so far Been called mercenaries and men with no country Just soldiers in search of a war"

"Many of the larger private military companies also hire local “subs” or sub-contractors, often invisible to U.S. government officials and reporters. In 2010, during the height of the wars, a Senate investigation found evidence that these “subs” were linked to murder, kidnapping, bribery, and anti-Coalition activities. Similarly, in a 2010 report titled “Warlord, Inc.,” the House of Representatives found that the Department of Defense had hired warlords for security services. What happens to these subs when the big contractor goes home? In some notable, alarming cases, they go into business for themselves, breeding mercenary markets in the wake of a U.S. intervention."

"And we're bound for the border We're soldiers of fortune And we'll fight for no country but we'll die for good pay Under the flag of the greenback dollar Or the peso down Mexico way"

"Giving birth to such markets is just one of the many ways that contractors encourage dangerous policymaking. Unlike the Pentagon or CIA, private military companies do not report to Congress, circumventing democratic accountability of the armed forces."

"Thousands of young people are admitted each year to the U.S. as cultural exchange participants through the J-1 visa program, often to work as live-in childcare providers known as au pairs. Now, a lawsuit lodged on behalf of 90,000 current and former au pairs alleges sponsor agencies are exploiting the program as a source for cheap migrant labor."

"Au pair companies set au pair wages at $195.75 per week for 45 hours of work, or $4.35 an hour—a number that comes from subtracting 40 percent from federal minimum wage for room and board. Labor rights organizations call this a legally dubious arrangement for several reasons, including because deducting housing costs in programs where providing housing primarily benefits the employer (like the au pair program) isn’t allowed by law."

"No international laws exist to regulate the mercenary industry. What we’re left with: If anyone with enough money can wage war for any reason they want to, then new superpowers will emerge: the ultra-rich and multinational corporations. Oil companies and oligarchs should not have armies."

"Today, 75 percent of U.S. forces in Afghanistan are contracted. Only about 10 percent of these contractors are armed, but this matters not. The greater point is that America is waging a war largely via contractors, and U.S. combat forces would be impotent without them. If this trend continues, we might see 80 or 90 percent of the force contracted in future wars."

"Your friend is quite a mercenary. I wonder if he really cares about anything. Or anybody."

"Many of the roughly 17,500 au pairs who live and work in the United States every year have positive experiences. But according to a dozen current and former au pairs as well as former au pair company employees, ordeals like Juliana’s aren’t unusual, either. They relay horror stories of au pairs who are overworked, humiliated, refused meals, threatened with arrest and deportation—even victims of theft. Worst of all, they say, complaining about exploitative, unsafe working conditions rarely makes any difference. Sometimes, reporting abuse makes the situation worse."

"Contractors, then, allow policymakers to wage war outside of the public eye. Their deaths rarely attract headlines the way those of fallen American soldiers do."

"Families and the child-care workers they hire share a complex relationship that merges the personal with the professional. Around transitions, parents, children and nannies alike may experience a range of emotions including competition, guilt, abandonment, relief, resentment and love. An open and reflective dialogue including all parties — parents, nannies and children — can make saying goodbye a little easier."

"The influence of nannies and other significant caregivers on a child's psychological and emotional development may be profound and if unrecognized may contribute to psychopathology in adulthood. However, the significance of the nanny has been relatively neglected within the psychoanalytic literature."

"He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages and totally unworthy of the Head of a civilized nation."

"As they walk out the door each morning, working parents are grateful for the nannies who care for their children in their absence. And yet, those same parents often struggle with the knowledge that their young children spend more waking hours with their nannies than with their mothers and fathers. So when the time comes for the nanny to move on, parents may underestimate how profound the loss can be. As one mother in my women’s mental health psychiatry practice said, “I didn’t realize that she had become part of our family until she told us she had to leave.”"

"Cameron Lynne Macdonald, a former nanny and medical sociologist, found in research for her 2010 book, “Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs and the Micropolitics of Mothering,” that some families expect nannies to play a paradoxical role she called the “shadow mother.” (Yes, nannies can be men, and serve as shadow fathers, but research tends to focus on women.) In such cases, parents expect a nanny to form a strong bond with a child but also appear invisible in the family, “to be simultaneously present and absent in the children’s lives,” she wrote. By asking a nanny to work in the shadows, parents may avoid their own feelings about how psychologically important the nanny has become, and so may be less sensitive to their children’s needs around the separation. Some parents do this because they are afraid that a deeper bond with a nanny will interfere with their child’s healthy attachment to them. In fact, studies show the opposite. When a child has a high-quality bond with a caregiver, this can actually help complement and reinforce parental attachment. Therefore, children who are more securely attached to both their nannies and parents feel more secure over all."

"Mercenaries?" I ventured. "Agh! Mercenaries!" Bob exclaimed, like I had stabbed him. "Now that's the worst thing you can be. Worse than a prostitute. Your life is the most valuable thing you got. Die for your own freedom, that's great, but kill and die for a buck? He looked at me again, shooting more wisdom out of his violently pointing finger. "Never do anything just for money!"