Tag: empathy

‘Don’t Do This Exhibition’: Martyred Army Officer’s Mother Sobs as BJP Leader Thrusts Cheque Into Her Hand

‘Don’t do this exhibition, bring my son back, I don’t want anything else,’ martyred Captain Shubham Gupta’s sobbing mother said in the video, but the minister was seen persisting as camera shutters clicked.

New Delhi: A video of martyred Captain Shubham Gupta’s mother pleading to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders, urging them not to engage in an “exhibition” as they thrust cheques into her hand, went viral on social media on November 25 (Saturday). Reacting to the video, opposition parties criticised the BJP for their insensitive “photo op”.

Later, minister Yogendra Upadhyay claimed that a mother’s “natural grief” at the loss of her son was being politicised.

Captain Gupta was among the five soldiers who were killed in an encounter in Rajouri in Jammu and Kashmir on November 23.

‘Don’t do this exhibition’

Captain Gupta joined the Army in 2015 and was commissioned into the ninth battalion of the Army’s Parachute regiment, the 9 Para SF (Special Forces) in 2018, reported India Today.

Uttar Pradesh’s minister of higher education, Yogendra Upadhyay, visited his parents’ house in Agra on November 24 and he and a government official tried to thrust two cheques amounting to a total of Rs 50 lakh on behalf of the UP government into her hand.

“Don’t do this exhibition, bring my son back, I don’t want anything else,” Gupta’s sobbing mother said in the video, but the Minister was seen persisting as camera shutters clicked.

The video went viral on X, formerly Twitter, as social media users took to the platform to point on the lack of empathy in politics.

Opposition parties came down on the BJP for the “photo op”.

“The B in BJP should stand for Besharam [shameless] and P for publicity. Captain Shubham Gupta made the ultimate sacrifice in the line of duty during an encounter in the Rajouri sector. His mother is grieving and eagerly awaiting her son’s mortal remains. In the midst of her inconsolable sorrow, UP government’s BJP minister Yogendra Upadhyay shamelessly persists on having a photograph taken for his PR – this, despite the mother’s plea to refrain from turning her grief into a spectacle. Shame,” tweeted member of parliament and Aam Aadmi Party’s national spokesperson, Raghav Chadha.

The Indian National Congress tweeted the video with the word “vultures”.

The Samajwadi Party also came down heavily on the BJP.

Mother’s natural grief being ‘politicised’: minister

Minister Yogendra Upadhyay took to X (formerly Twitter) to clarify the situation on the night of November 24, and said that the incident was being ‘unnecessarily politicised’. He said that even though he did not want it, the grieving mother was brought to take the cheques that the UP government was endowing in her and her husband’s name.

Naturally, as any grieving mother would, she said that her son be brought back to her and that she did not want anything else.

“Shubham was a son of the party whom we saw growing up,” he claimed, adding that his mother’s natural response in grief was being politicised.

Has Classic Psychology Warped Our View of Human Nature?

Recent research challenges classic psychology experiments, revealing humanity’s innate capacity for heroism and altruism. Positive psychology and anthropological consensus support a more positive view of human nature, embracing kindness and compassion.

There are a number of classic experiments and theories that every psychology student learns about, but more recent research has questioned their findings so that psychologists today are reevaluating human nature.

One example is Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford prison experiment, in which 24 participants were randomly separated into groups of would-be prisoners and guards. Within days, the research recorded that the guards were mistreating the prisoners, who began to display signs of distress. The abuse and distress became seemed so acute the experiment had to be curtailed after six days.

Another classic psychological theory is the “bystander effect,” which suggests that people are reluctant to help out in emergency situations if others are nearby. This theory dates back to 1964, when a woman was raped and murdered in the early morning in New York.

It was reported that 38 people witnessed the attack, without intervening. According to the bystander effect, the more people that witness an event, the less likely a person is to intervene, since responsibility becomes more diffused.

Such theories and studies from the 1960s and 1970s implied that the “evil” sides of our character lie just below our civilised surface, while the moral and altruistic side is a thin veneer. They encouraged a view that human beings are essentially callous and selfish. The problem is that the findings of these experiments have now been contested and even discredited by other researchers.

Recent research found the cruelty of Zimbardo’s prison guards didn’t emerge spontaneously; some behaviour was encouraged. Some of the “prisoners” later admitted that they were pretending to be distressed.

Similarly, a study published in 2007 found that the 1964 incident that inspired the theory of the
bystander effect was distorted. According to the paper, archive material shows far fewer people witnessed the incident than was reported at the time, and some people could only hear screams, without seeing the location of the incident. At least one person did try to intervene.

Recent research indicates that bystanders are much more likely to intervene than the theory suggests. A 2019 study of 219 violent situations from cities around the world caught on CCTV showed that bystanders – not just one, usually several – intervened to help victims 90% of the time.

The study also found that the more people were present, the more likely passers-by were to intervene. In the words of the study’s lead researcher, Richard Philpot: “It shows that people have a natural inclination to help when they see someone in need.”

Heroism and altruism

The burgeoning field of “heroism studies” also questions the bystander effect. In a recent article for The Conversation, I described how acts of heroic altruism are common during terrorist attacks, when people often risk their own lives to help others.

Consider the following situation: you’re standing on a train platform. The person next to you suddenly faints and falls on to the track, unconscious. In the distance, you can see a train approaching. What would you do?

You might doubt whether you would act heroically. But don’t
underestimate yourself. There is a strong possibility that, before you knew it, you would find yourself on down on the track, helping the person to safety. There is a growing awareness amongst researchers that heroism is natural and spontaneous, and by no means exceptional.

Google “person jumps down on to train track to save life” and you’ll find dozens of cases from around the world, including some moving video footage. There is a recent video of the New York City subway, when a wheelchair-bound man fell on to the track. A bystander jumps down, pushes the wheelchair to one side, and hauls the man up, with the help of others on the platform. A train arrived ten seconds later.

Another dramatic video
shows an incident in 2015, when a cyclist was trapped under the wheel of a doubledecker bus in London. A crowd of around 100 people gathered, and lifted the bus. According to a paramedic who treated the man, this was a “miracle” which may have saved his life.

As I point out in my book DisConnected, these acts of impulsive altruism suggest an empathic connection between human beings.

A new view of human nature

In my view, early psychologists may have been unconsciously tailoring their experiments to confirm a view of human nature as innately cruel. These studies were carried out less than 20 years after the second world war and the Holocaust, when the horrors of WWII were still fresh in people’s minds.

Around the same time, genetic theories were published that suggested that human beings are biological engines, caring for nothing but replication and survival.

For example, in 1976, Richard Dawkins’ book The Selfish Gene was published, which portrayed human beings as “survival machines” who treat other survival machines as “something that gets in the way, or something that can be exploited”. He wrote: “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.”

Now, research from a variety of areas points to a more positive view of humanity. Along with the study of heroism, the field of positive psychology (established during the early 2000s) studies human wellbeing and researches traits such as wisdom, courage, gratitude and resilience. Positive psychologists like Martin Seligman argue conventional psychology had for too long been essentially “the study of unhappiness” and that a new field was needed to study what “is good or virtuous in human nature”.

The consensus from anthropologists is that, for the vast majority of the time that we’ve inhabited this planet, human societies have been egalitarian and peaceful. This challenges the neo-Darwinist idea that human life has always been a competitive struggle for survival, conditioning us to be selfish and individualistic.

As the forerunner of positive psychology, Abraham Maslow, said in 1968: human nature has been “sold short” by psychology. Human beings can be brutal and selfish. But we can be heroically kindhearted too.The Conversation

Steve Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Leeds Beckett University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

‘Summer With the Enemy’ by Syrian Novelist Shahla Ujayli Is a Searing Summer Read

Three generations in a Syrian town: The English-to-Arabic translator of the novel that was a finalist for the prestigious International Prize for Arab Fiction discusses the sweeping historical novel.

Wherever you spend your summer, allow yourself to be transported to Syria and immerse yourself in the world of Shahla Ujayli’s sweeping historical novel Summer with the Enemy.

The ongoing devastation of the war that began in 2011 has brought Syria to the world’s attention. Reading a Syrian novel is a way to experience its deep and rich culture, history and literature beyond the headlines.

Summer with the Enemy was a finalist for the prestigious the International Prize for Arab Fiction, sometimes known as the “Arab Booker Prize.” It was written in Arabic by Ujayli, one of the country’s most prominent women writers; I translated it into English one year later.

City of Raqqa

Ujayli’s evocative storytelling conjures up the city of Raqqa, from its past as a dusty provincial town beginning in the 1920s, through the 20th century, and its subsequent occupation and 2017 siege by Islamic State militants (ISIS). In Summer with the Enemy, the main characters eventually must leave Raqqa behind for a new life in Germany.

A detailed and intricate portrait of three generations of one family in this northern Syrian town, Summer with the Enemy combines historical fiction with a romance and a coming-of-age story complete with an tale of first love. The characters challenge western stereotypes about Arab Muslim women — that they need to be “saved” from oppressive realities — through depictions of their active, diverse and complex lives.

The town of Raqqa is so important to the story that one critic claims it is actually a character in the novel.

Family drama, first love

A sunset is seen against a building in a village

Summer with the Enemy by Shahla Ujayli, translated by Michelle Hartman (Interlink Publishing)

 

It’s hard not to feel compelled by the Raqqa of the past, with its tightly knit, multi-ethnic community, full of local conflicts and family drama.

Each story the grandmother tells has the younger generations on the edge of their seats, waiting to hear about a scandal, an illicit affair, a failed love match or an exotic trip abroad. She always leaves her audience wanting more when she rises mid-sentence to stir the coffee on the stove, tension building.

During the summer of the title, some time in the ‘80s, the protagonist, Lamees, rides horses along the Euphrates, an expansive desert surrounding her, and dreams of an equestrian future.

Horses means she can avoid her mother. Their relationship had become tense, after Lamees’s father left Syria, never to return. Lamees resents her mother’s incipient love affair with a visiting German professor, Nicolas, the enemy of the book’s title. The daughter acts as a local guide to Nicolas, who leaves when his research is done. The women call upon Nicolas later to find passage to Germany after the fall of their beloved city.

Revisiting memories of Raqqa

About 10 years after the fictional Lamees was living in Raqqa, experiencing the Assad government’s belt-tightening policies, I embarked upon the long trip there from Damascus with a university friend. In summer 1995, my visit revealed a Raqqa much like the one Lamees showed to her German enemy.

But when I was in Raqqa in the ’90s, I had no idea that more than 20 years later I would be video-chatting with a famous Syrian author from the town. Ujayli was giving me a sort of interview before I translated her novel. Among other questions, she asked me: “Have you ever been to Raqqa?”

I was pleased to be able to answer yes — I had visited long before most people outside of Syria had ever heard of Raqqa. I prepared to translate this novel by revisiting that journey through talking to Ujayli and by looking back over old photographs, revisiting memories of the place.

Translating Arabic into English

In an interview about my translation process, an interviewer asked me the same question.

Translating Arab women writers from Arabic into English has a difficult history: Many translations have been so changed as to be unrecognisable.

As scholars have shown, the entire thrust of a book can change with translations creating new titles, sections edited and censored, narrative voices voices altered and entire characterisations changed.

Also read: The Winter of No WiFi – ‘Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War’

I worked with Ujayli to convey the details of the text accurately, while also finding words to give the new English text as much life as the Arabic original.

In the summer of 2019, I translated the novel in a Lebanese mountain village. Just across the border, Syria was visible on a clear day. That summer we could hear the echoes of bombs being dropped across the valley.

Focused on conveying the details and complexities of of the book, I felt the tension between the book’s beautiful depiction of the past and Ujayli’s searing depiction of life under ISIS occupation, fierce battles in Raqqa and Lamees’s subsequent escape to Germany.

Lessons in empathy

The utter destruction of Raqqa between 2013 and 2017 and any semblance of the previous lives lived there felt so real.

Lebanon is a country still bearing the scars of its own long civil war (1975-90). The reverberations of the bombs we heard that summer in Lebanon had an unmistakable impact on the translation. The words a translator chooses to translate are always impacted by their surroundings.

Ujayli’s novels offer “lessons in empathy,” as noted by Marcia Lynx Qualey, founding editor of the website ArabLit.

Packed with humour, drama, romance and 100 years of history, Summer with the Enemy puts women centre stage, will take readers to the heart of one woman’s coming of age in Syria — and offer insights into its past and present.

Michelle Hartman, Professor and Director, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

On Personal Politics and Growing Out of Intellectual Snobbery

We must go beyond our textbooks and back into our living spaces.

Fresh out of a university held in high regard – and famous for its protests – I craved a certain standard in an individual’s politics. I wanted to know their position on this or that Marxist thinker, or what Ambedkarite feminist zine they were reading. I wanted friends who were edgy, intersectional and radical, even as they went about earning their livelihoods in the utterly corporatised urban market.

But even my artist friends fell short of my “revolutionary” ideals. The frequent debates – okay, shouting matches – I had had with my parents over the patriarchal, Brahminical order once rang as earnest as a coming-of-age novel, but I was now of “adulting” age. I had to coexist with people outside my newfound circle of artists. The horror!

I needed to shed the logocentrism of academic thought and become someone that does not differentiate – in an assembly-line like manner – thought from action.

At first, I resisted. I cringed when fellow teachers said, “Boys are always so distracted!”, or “What did Mummy cook for you today?”

Their politics is non-existent, I would think, and work myself into a tizzy. Are we ever going to raise a generation that is truly gender-inclusive and egalitarian? I was too embroiled in the seriousness-of-revolution to see that what I really wanted was a world where everyone thought and acted like I did.

Slowly divesting myself of the impulse to “correct” the adults around me, I became privy to everyday wonders. The preschool where I worked revealed an intimacy that eludes most male-dominated workspaces: coworkers talked freely of their pregnancies and difficult teenagers.

Meanwhile, I recalled how conversations at university had turned dour – how I rolled my eyes at those whose politics was not as crisp, whose aesthetics not as refined, as the slick-yet-grounded public intellectual I had hoped to become.

Also read: An Epidemic of Unconscious Art

Now I reconsider this wordy model of collective action – intellectual snobbery only makes people feel guilty and ashamed, and not supported in larger politics. A friend shared this brilliant essay in which the late Mark Fisher reminds us of

“this grim and demoralising pass, where class has disappeared, but moralism is everywhere, where solidarity is impossible, but guilt and fear are omnipresent.”

Given the scourge of police violence rocking the front pages today, I can’t help but extrapolate “class” to mean race, religion, caste… As a non-black non-American, how much can I say about race? As a cis woman, how can I envision the feminist world I want without echoing my childhood hero, whose tweets over the last few months have, sadly, clarified that she is a TERF?

As an English-speaking, savarna woman, how can I speak to the casteist reality that I most certainly continue to propagate? If I must educate anyone, it has to be my own self: I need to read and read and listen and listen, because only then I will be able to amplify without a show of intellectual muscle (or a spectacle of self-victimisation).

Recently, something pricked my resolve to listen. Someone asked me why Zoom’s reaction emojis have so many colours. “For some racial diversity,” I said, trying to hide the volcanic surge of #BlackLivesMatter babble threatening to erupt out of my skull.

“So someone from Africa can say ‘thumbs-up’,” laughed another person, making my skin crawl. They didn’t say that “flesh tint” (remember your oil pastels?) represents the spectrum of human skin colours; they also didn’t mean that all dark-skinned people are African, or that Indians are all the same shade of brown. And yet, had they considered racism and colourism – both of which are rampant in India – they might have measured their words.

Maybe a teacher who is invested in a gender-equitable home will not ask what your mummy cooked, but who cooks your lunch. But would they even be invested in dismantling a power structure, especially if they work in a “good” school that pays well, finally making teaching a viable career?

When I came back home after Jawaharlal Nehru University, I sought people with progressive politics. Four years later, I scratch my head at the very possibility of an individual politics: retweets? Participatory action? Union strikes?

Also read: The Lure of the Subculture of ‘Dark Academia’

But like most millennial Indians born roughly around the 1991 economic reforms, I trundled into the workforce when private organisations already had a firm grip on our economy and lifestyles. The market is open; the world is your oyster – but trade unions are undoubtedly on their way out, and employers do not want them around. You don’t do “politics” as an employee because the corporate structure simply doesn’t allow you to belong to a collective.

Instead, it furthers the myth of the private individual – think “confidential” agreements rather than union-approved salaries; think insulated offices where you can only speak about the management in whispers, and not in a legitimised forum that looks out for your collective interests.

If you stand to gain, why bother about anyone else? Isn’t this what we have borrowed from the American dream – work hard, earn your material wealth, and shake your head at those who don’t? If someone gets sacked, it’s a pity; no more. And so it becomes immensely desirable, this exclusive-access travelator, which takes you noiselessly from private school to university to job, while those with heavier bags are left to lug them the same distance.

No need to participate in politics, which is for gundas and wayward students anyway. You emerge squeaky-clean and “apolitical”, proud of an illusive state of neutrality that masks your underlying complicity in a system that literally places your net worth in your productive capacity.

In the hope for a breakthrough, I return to Mark Fisher, who reminds us that

“[w]e need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other.”

The virtual “public” space of social media allows several of us to believe that we have become activists, enabling us to level moralising accusations against our “silent” friends. But ours is the harder work of recognising that political praxis is polymorphous.

We must go beyond our textbooks and back into our living spaces; we must free ourselves of the guilt and superiority of language; and we must certainly laugh at our failures in order to look ourselves – and our aspirations – in the eye.

Anishaa Tavag is an independent dancer and editor based in Bangalore.

Featured image credit: author provided

Opportunism in Celebrity Death

Hours after the news of Sushant Singh Rajput’s demise broke, things devolved into a cheap circus.

Hours after the news of Sushant Singh Rajput’s demise broke, the internet was flooded with remembrances about the actor and search engine-optimised clickbait about his manager, his family and movies as online “publications” trawled for easy traffic.

Things devolved quickly enough into a cheap circus.

The initial wall of people adding nothing to the collective mourning except the sound of their own voices by saying nothing more than “RIP” or “Sushant Singh Rajput is dead” was especially grating. Brand managers made thinly veiled attempts to plug products while “grieving this loss”.

Perhaps the most annoying of all were those who laced their grievances on Twitter and Instagram with advice on maintaining mental health. Apparently armchair activists and the uber privileged weren’t given the memo that unless you’re a mental health expert, your opinions on depression-driven suicides are unnecessary.

The truly horrifying part was yet to come. Soon after, gory pictures of his body started making the rounds on social media, moving from WhatsApp groups to Twitter feeds. It felt like watching a macabre catastrophe in slow motion.

While a Zee News headline screamed, “Filmon ka Dhoni asal zindagi mein out kaise”, an Aaj Tak headline flashed a picture of his body accompanied with, “Sushant zindagi ki pitch par hit-wicket kaise ho gaye”.

The coverage on Zee News.

His family was then harassed at their Patna home by reporters for bytes and the minutiae of his suicide down to the colour of the noose was reported upon. While the outrage over such insensitive reporting is more than justified,  journalists across the board were largely just pandering to their target audiences.

Aaj Tak, and more talk of the colour of the cloth used as a noose.

The talk of his suicide was the flavour of the hour with neighbourhood aunties and uncles, who tsk-tsked in casual conversations laced with a “so sad-so young-he had everything-why would anybody do this?” while slurping their evening chai.

B-list Bollywood celebrities dug out old pictures with him and posted meaningless captions and managed to make it about themselves as per usual. Influencers baited people with their brand of toxic positivity.

But TRP-grabbing shenanigans aside, this whole incident has made us introspect about ideas of success. We were all predictably shocked – as we always are. Not because a human life is lost but because this particular life had attained all that the rest of us aspired for. Financial success, fame, beauty and the love of the masses for genuine talent.

Also read: Rishi Kapoor and Irrfan: A Tale of Two Thespians

Maybe that’s why the collective reaction to Sushant Singh Rajput’s death has been so vapid. Because we haven’t separated the star from the human. Our ability to empathise is severely hampered by our obsession with celebrity culture and maybe that’s the only way we can justify being as inhuman as we are in 2020.

Because the truth is that we are all equally complicit in this culture, the content maker and the content clicker. The events that transpired were never really about the actor or mental health; it is all about grabbing eyeballs. It is about creating content.

Probably the least edifying aspect of the death of a much-loved star is all the little dollar signs appearing in the eyes of editors the world over. Right now, there’s an intern at every content platform who has been tasked with compiling a nostalgia-driven listicle about Rajput’s greatest career highs and lows and/or rankings of his best and worst movies. Not because that’s what he’d like to write but because that’s what’ll pull in the numbers right now.

We saw it happen with Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade. Every time a celebrity suicide is reported, the whole cycle repeats itself. Once again, celebrity friends tweet their remembrances. Once again, endless think pieces will be published. And once again, the dark spectre of depression will be reconsidered.

But after a few days, when our vapid social media posts bellowing tone-deaf takes like “please reach out” and “it’s ok to not be okay” stop getting traction, will we move on to the next trend?

Perhaps that’s already happened with Kangana Ranaut managing to put the spotlight on herself yet again. Say what you will, but it’s astounding that Ranaut managed to slip in a quip about her directorial debut being a blockbuster while addressing a fellow actor’s death and eventually shifting the whole narrative to her favourite topic: nepotism.

The hypocrisy of this piece isn’t lost on me. Am I pointing out a flaw from a moral high pedestal while indirectly doing exactly what I am accusing the system of doing wrong?

Maybe I can sleep better knowing that my intention was to talk about the vapid and inhumane way we as a society deal with celebrity deaths, and not to profit off it. Perhaps there is a lot more to be said about the intricacies of celebrity culture and capitalism.

Perhaps there is a lot more nuance to this than what I’ve explored. But then again, old news wouldn’t get any clicks would it?

Fuelled by bhel and her imposter syndrome, Swarnim Jain likes to spend her time escaping from any form of meaningful conversation. Follow @swarnimjain on IG for infrequent updates about her life.

Featured image credit: Reuters

The Sufferings of Others: What the Present Crisis Tells Us About Capacity for Empathy

Stories of workers walking absurd distances back to their homes may fill one with compassion, but that does not quite make you a compassionate person.

What does it take to be sensitive to the plight of another? “Nothing,” says an imaginary interlocutor, “one naturally feels the pain of another.” She pauses, then adds: “Or doesn’t.” The addendum strikes this author as a chilling rebuke, a reminder of all the times that one failed to feel something when one ought to have. Then come the pragmatic arguments. “There’s so much suffering! There isn’t much you can do about it all.” “You would go mad if you felt sorry for each person that suffers. You’ve got to preserve your sanity.”

These pragmatic arguments are wrong. The question is not one about feeling sorry for every unfortunate person all of the time; it is about one’s capacity for empathy. It is about having a trait of character, from which might flow conduct aimed at alleviating suffering. Now, traits of character are not easy to come by. Stories about workers walking absurd distances back to their homes may fill one with compassion, but those few times that you felt compassion does not quite make you a compassionate person.

It is said that Siddhartha clapped eyes on one sick man, a single corpse, and a yogi, and knew right away what he needed to do. But that is only part of the story. The remaining bit is carefully worked out in the Jataka stories, which can, of course, all be ignored if one doesn’t believe in rebirth. So let us treat Buddha, that most sensitive of souls, as an exception to the present account.

In The Religion of Man, Rabindranath Tagore writes:

To be able to take a considerable amount of trouble in order to supply water to a passing stranger and yet never claim merit or reward for it seems absurdly and negligibly simple compared with a capacity to produce an amazing number of things per minute. Yet, it is simple, as simple as it is for a gentleman to be a gentleman; but that simplicity is the product of centuries of culture. Simplicity takes no account of its own value, claims no wages, and therefore those who are enamoured of power do not realise that simplicity of spiritual expression is the highest product of civilization.

Locals providing water for the walking migrants. Photo: Ismat Ara

Tagore wrote these words against the backdrop of a story about the erosion of human values in the city compared to the villages, where life was much harder, and yet the people more generous. But his remarks can be generalised beyond that particular case.

Any community of people develops certain values to live by. Efforts are made to preserve them in the life of the community through the conduct of the individuals that constitute it. If this is done wrong, you get sati, ‘honour killing’ and other practices that distort the idea of what is valuable, and perpetuate the vested interests of a few who crave power over others.

However, a community that does it right exercises “eternal vigilance” of a certain kind. It takes cognizance of failures to uphold the chosen value, e.g., empathy or non-violence, and encourages its young to engage with it in a spirit of enquiry, making available numerous examples of empathetic (or: non-violent) conduct to ease their transition into the moral life of the community.

Thus it takes not a village, but the selfless work of generations to weave the moral fibre of a single human being, and by extension, that of the community. Only then does a “gentleman” (or, if you prefer, a samurai) enact gentlemanliness “simply”, as Rabindranath puts it; only then does non-violence, or empathy, or compassion seem a natural responses to the other.

The preserving of values in the second way demands constant reflection on one’s own conduct, and upon the nature of the values themselves. The latter is portrayed in the Mahabharata as an inter-generational dialogue, with Yudhishthira (among others) inquiring about the nature of dharma of every significant elder in the story. The possibility of such work on the self presupposes an enquiring mind, and the intention to act morally. Those things do not come “naturally” to our species. Serious educational effort goes into producing human beings who are reflective and morally vigilant.

Also Read: Feel a Little Shame for the Lost Soul of the Nation

What Tagore means by “the simplicity of spiritual expression” is the expression of one’s self to another that comes across as “simple” or artless, but is undergirded by layers of refinement over generations. In Bengali, he often uses the term aatmiiya, literally, “of the self” for the other, in contexts where he speaks of drawing the other to oneself in an acknowledgement of their humanity. Each time we are receptive to the need or suffering of the other, we simultaneously express our humanity and value that of another. “Spiritual expression” is simple also in the sense that aatmiiyataa is really not so hard to come by—we love our pets as “simply” as children talk to inanimate objects as if they were people—but as we grow older, it is eclipsed by consistently self-interested conduct and the subsequent tendency to treat the other as a mere instrument.

On May 20, West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee exclaimed that cyclone Amphan had spelt disaster for her state (sarbanaash hoye gelo). The “top comment” under an article about the aftermath of the cyclone in a national daily read: ‘Didi, why don’t you give your state to Modi-ji and take a rest?’ This throwaway remark captures the failure of the community of free, democratic Indians to preserve the values that it lays claim to: its children are “enamoured of power”: they prefer it to “womanly” expressions of a sense of loss. They have so trained their vision that it glides smoothly off the suffering of their fellow-beings and comes to rest on something evanescent and of far inferior value. Such effort to divorce themselves from their humanity would perhaps be laughable if it were not so tragic –both for ourselves and for future generations of Indians.

Indrani Bhattacharjee teaches philosophy at Azim Premji University, Bangalore.

The Great Rat Race: Takeaways From the Pandemic

These are undeniably ‘hard times’, but they are also crucial times where we can recuperate from the clutches of rugged materialism.

COVID-19 is spreading rapidly and indiscriminately, truncating all human-constructed boundaries. At times, the pandemic seems to hurl toward an apocalypse — something that we used to watch only in Hollywood movies and read in science fiction books.

However, unlike the films, we are neither sure about the timely emergence of a mighty hero nor about the intervention of a benevolent divine power. But should we only wait or can we vanquish this pandemic? Can we, the ordinary people, lead a battle against it?

Living in the times of neo-liberal capitalism, we have been ensconced in the habits of consumption and achievement, and have unwittingly forgotten to appraise the ideals of learning and seeking. We have mistaken pleasure for happiness and information for knowledge. Needless to say, we swim in the whirlpool of fake news, cyber fraud and hoaxes every day. We live in an era of many choices and abundant possibilities that though offer us ample career opportunities, yet leave us with little space to sit a back and ponder the deeper mysteries of the human experience. We are endlessly in pursuit, though not actually well aware of what.

Also read: Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Lessons to be Learned

A few days ago, I was watching a short film titled Happiness by Steve Cutts, black humour film which exposes the hollowness of modern times by depicting the great rat race. The four-minute animated film is alarming in its dark comic representation of the urban void through a class of people for whom Friday nights are meant just for hangouts with friends, Saturdays for shopping for sales, and Sundays for sleeping lazily to gear up for the coming week’s race. Nobody bothers about why they are doing what they are doing.


Cutts’ film reflects on the deterioration of human selfhood, offering a warning on capitalist excesses. And, the pandemic seems to bear intriguing links with such a dark cautionary portrayal in giving a jolt to the human kind—unfolding the bareness of its existence. The pandemic has grimly reminded us about the invincibility of nature and perhaps also offered us a chance to act responsibly. Pertinently, it is stripping the illusions of capitalist glory and making us confront the banalities of human existence.

The pandemic is unleashing a tough but an apt-needed learning for all. If we have to survive, we have to think collectively. We have to introspect perspicaciously on our roles and re-engage with the experientiality of our lives. The need of this hour demands physical isolation from each other but not psychological. We need to visualise the pandemic as a crisis on the entire humanity in which each one has a deeper role to play.

Also read: Who Will Survive This Pandemic?

These are undeniably ‘hard times’, but they are also crucial times where we can recuperate from the clutches of rugged materialism. Quite surreptitiously, it is teaching us that if we aspire to survive, we have to accept and acknowledge the fundamentals of collectivism. If we have to sustain, we have to shed off ruthless hedonism and individualism, and participate in the world around us in meaningful ways. We have to come out of the shell of anthropocentricism and respect the profound vitality of this planet.

While we shut ourselves in homes, we have to put a pause on ‘othering’. We have to come to aid to the social world around us in all possible ways such as spreading awareness, reducing panic, mitigating worries of the disadvantaged, boosting strength of the infected ones, and more decisively recognising the value of life at its deep core.

It’s the time we make our ordinariness heroic and usher it in the cause of a holistic well-being. We need not wait for the right moment to appropriate the right role but can employ ourselves in the best possible ways at any given time. Because heroism lies in our ability to appreciate our humdrum existence in the large cosmos and our livingness is evidenced when we contemplate, engage, and enact with and for others.

We have to emerge as fighters in our own ordinary ways — as film heroes do not come as saviours in real life.

Payel Pal is assistant professor in english at LNMIIT Jaipur

Featured image credit: YouTube/Steve Cutts

Quarantined: Five Ways Parents Can Motivate Children at Home

Here’s what a psychologist specialising in parenting has to say.

Parents have always helped with homework and made sure their children fulfill responsibilities like chores, but the extended and often unstructured time families are spending together during the current crisis creates new challenges.

After a disaster like a hurricane or fire, establishing structure is important to keep consistency and maintain a sense of control for both parents and children. This includes creating a schedule and communicating clear expectations and guidelines on things such as screen time.

But how do parents get children to follow the schedule and fulfill responsibilities without nagging and in a way that prevents blowups and tantrums?

Wendy Grolnick, a psychologist and parenting expert who has worked with parents in disaster situations, has studied how parents can help children become more self-motivated and decrease conflict in the family. In this piece she shares some strategies to make the house run more smoothly during the coronavirus crisis.

1. Involve children in setting schedules

When children participate in creating guidelines and schedules, they are more likely to believe the guidelines are important, accept them and follow them.

To involve children, parents can set up a family meeting. At the meeting, parents can discuss the schedule and ask children for their input on decisions like what time everyone should be out of bed and dressed, when breaks from schoolwork would work best and where each family member should be during study time.

Also read: Who Will Survive This Pandemic?

Not every idea will be feasible – children may feel being dressed by noon is fine! But when parents listen to a child’s ideas, it helps them own their behavior and be more engaged in what they are doing.

There may well be differences in opinion. Parents can negotiate with their children so that at least some of the children’s ideas are adopted. Resolving conflicts is an important skill for children to learn, and they learn it best from their parents.

2. Allow children some choice

Schoolwork has to be done and chores need to be completed, but having some choice about how they are accomplished can help children feel less pressured and coerced, which undermines their motivation.

Parents can present some chores around the house, and children can choose which they prefer. They can also pick when or how they complete them – do they want to do the dishes before or after watching their TV show?

Parents can also give children choice about what fun activity they would like to do at the end of the day or for a study break.

3. Listen and provide empathy

Children will be more open to hearing about what they need to do if they feel that their own perspectives are understood. Parents can let children know that they understand, for example, that it is not fun to be in the house and that they miss being with their friends.

Parents can begin requests with an empathetic statement. For example, “I know it seems like getting dressed is silly because we’re in the house. But getting dressed is part of the routine we have all decided upon.” Even if they might not agree with their child’s perspective, when parents show that they understand, cooperation is enhanced, as is the parent-child relationship.

4. Provide reasons for rules

When parents provide reasons for why they are asking for something, children can better understand the importance of acting in particular ways. Reasons will be most effective when they are meaningful to the children in terms of the children’s own goals. For example, a parent can say that dividing up family chores will help everyone have more time for fun activities after dinner.

5. Problem-solve together

Not everything will go according to plan – there will be times of frustration, nagging and yelling. When things aren’t working out, parents can try engaging in joint problem-solving with their children, which means employing empathy, identifying the issue and finding ways to resolve it.

For example, a parent might state, “You know how I’ve been nagging you to get up in the morning? It’s probably really annoying to hear that first thing in the morning. The problem is that even though we decided we’d all get up at 8 a.m., you are not getting out of bed. Let’s put our heads together to see what we can do to make morning time go more smoothly. What are your ideas?” I have seen this take the stress out of mornings for working parents who need to take their children to school before going to work, and I believe it could help during the pandemic, too.

All of these practices can help children to feel more ownership of their behavior. That will make them more likely to cooperate.

However, these strategies require time and patience – something that is hard to come by at times of stress. Research studies show that parents are more likely to yell, demand and threaten when time is limited, they are stressed or they feel worried about how their children are performing. That’s why its important for parents to find time for their own self-care and rejuvenation – whether it be by taking a walk, exercising, meditating or writing in a journal. A pandemic or other disaster presents challenges for parents, but using motivational strategies can help parents provide a calmer and more effective environment that also facilitates a positive parent-child relationship.

Wendy Grolnick is professor of psychology at Clark University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured image credit: Sven Brandsman/Unsplash

The Conversation

Pervasive Pandemic

A poem about the various kinds of lives in a city that can be affected by the coronavirus.

Long Italian vacation,
Deliberately tanned skin,
Taste of delectable polenta
And tiramisu still persists on tongue.
First-class airplane seat and service.
But pungent smell of garbage invades
Nose as feet touch homeland.
Ordinary Ola taxi.
A cough not covered.

Grooving to nineties hits,
Steering wheel, car AC,
Broken English with an accent
Greets foreign faces every day.
Impatient honks and road rage,
Naps on a slanted seat,
Aching back and apathy
Towards the youth in the backseat.
A lethal sneeze.

Group of friends ready to party,
Sequin dresses and Old Monk breath,
Striving to melt worries greater than
A failed test and heartbreak
With loud music and strangers’ lips.
Adulterated shots of vodka
And neon disco ball shades,
Attractive boy with messy hair.
A meaningless kiss.

Sunday morning mass,
A reaffirmation of faith
After a regrettable night.
Unending supply of hugs
For family and friends,
Sunday school students’ storyteller,
Biblical parables made interesting
For curious little ears to listen.
An incorrupt high five.

‘Chota Bheem’ lunchbox
With cold, pasty Maggi,
EVS classes and English notebooks,
‘Uma Joshi, hey hey hey’,
Strict Maths ma’am,
Red pen strikes and stains,
Stuffed in a tiny Omni,
Back to apartment, friendly watchman,
An affectionate handshake.

In a city that is now home,
Small town boy with big dreams,
Now a man in a blue uniform,
Watching over apartment entrances.
An instrumental component of
The Anthropological Ecosystem.
Two kids to feed with minimal income
Despite a wife with two jobs.
Sinful intimacy.

The tale of a forlorn woman,
Stitching clothes and crocheting,
Also scrubbing toilets while
Changing adult diapers.
The former, a passion; the latter, a compulsion.
Sleepless nights, growling stomach.
Hearing stories of old women’s heydays
And laments about ungrateful children.
A clean touch turned malignant.

Painful joints and swollen feet,
Asthmatic lungs and hunched back,
The affliction of senility is endured.
Abandoned amma in a vridhashrama.
Fits of cough and fever attack,
An inglorious end to a legacy life,
As a minuscule, not-even-live entity
Takes over humanity.

Vismayi Lanka is an aspiring journalist who aims to make the world a better place.

Featured image credit: Pariplab Chakraborty

The Truth of JNU’s Dissenting Spirit: A Journey From Theory to Praxis

JNU does not dismiss difference callously under ‘unity in diversity’ but rather takes account of it to teach empathy to aspiring social scientists.

Several articles have noted the events of January 5 at Jawaharlal Nehru University, most of them being comment pieces written in a composed fashion. While these carefully worded articles are pivotal, the emotional distance in these writings is also capable of painting a picture of a distant land for those who still look the other way and say “all is well”, refusing to acknowledge the ‘here’ and ‘now’ of the state of affairs.

Return to Laughter is an ‘anthropological novel’ where the author calls it a novel because she felt a mere anthropological account trying to meet all criteria of science would compromise with the nuances of everyday reality of those she studied and consequently reduce them to mere data.

My choice today is somewhat similar when I have let go of a position that would only identify me as a sociologist and I rather insist that you acknowledge the emotional journey I make today as a student between fear, uncertainty, reason and hope.

JNU’s increased resistance in the #FeesMustFall movement began on October 28, 2019. We haven’t seen the insides of classrooms since then or the faces of examination sheets. By boycotting registrations, we have now put at stake the very presence of our names on the university rolls. The JNU community, in these times, has been resolute to unprecedented extents in the university’s famous history of politics. This famous history of politics unsettles many and as much as counter ideologues would like crediting it to JNU being the last bastion of the Left in India, the truth of its dissenting spirit lies in its emphasis on praxis.

Popular belief is of newly enrolled JNU students magically turning into leftists, however, the essence of a student’s newfound voice lies with JNU’s focus on praxis, teaching them that being apolitical is not keeping your hands clean from the dirt that politics is considered in popular notion, but it is in fact betraying your training as a social scientist.

Not many additions are made in the list of texts that one must read to complete a master’s degree in the same discipline. I still read Bourdieu but now when the forms of capital that extend beyond economic play out in my classroom, they are recognised by classmates and teachers who do not invisiblise them in the learning process of an individual but instead work around them. With its unique system of deprivation points, JNU does not dismiss difference callously under ‘unity in diversity’ but rather takes account of it to teach empathy to aspiring social scientists.

Also read: JNU Violence: My Home Is Getting Destroyed

Even today when JNU is witnessing an unbelievable amount of support pouring in from across the world, a JNU student is of course grateful but at the same time questions why similar coverage was denied to greater violence unleashed on two minority institutions just weeks before.

Max Weber held that the best way to do sociology was via ‘verstehen’, or the same empathy which seems to be the ethos of this questioning spirit. A departure from mere theoretical learning also means unlearning constitutes a larger part of the tendencies that shape your future actions. This unlearning seems to be absent in coursework of those that today have put even Faiz Ahmad Faiz under the communal lens and seek to verify whether or not he was antagonistic of a certain religion.

Treating all occurrences as abstracted and culturally isolated, their shortsighted allegations stem from a conceit which is never challenged in their theory ridden coursework. They don’t acknowledge the years Faiz spent in Pakistani jails, owing to the skepticism surrounding his ‘belief’, or his friendship with the atheist country of the Soviet Union.

Finally, returning to the long history of protests in JNU, some credit it to the abundance of time that students of a social science university have. Often compared with those paying heftily for their education at IITs and IIMs, a JNU student is accused of not knowing the value of education on account of our subsidised fees. Not only does such an attitude reiterate the belief in a rickety hierarchy of sciences but it also presents a classic case of what Hannah Arendt had called the ‘banality of evil’.

Also read: Who’s Afraid of the University?

Obsessed with towering structures and figures denoting currency, few forget that those are not synonymous with a nation. While the oppressor hides behind these structures, dissent focuses on preserving the social fabric which must be the essence of a nation. This social fabric is systematically attacked time and again but just because it bears dents of oppression-making the evil seem banal-it does not have to be the new normal for us. This new normal is what JNU fights to resist and it is precisely because we know the value of education which allows us to problematise this new normal.  Which is also why we insist that education must remain an accessible necessity and not a luxury.

JNU does not passively accept the hegemony of the oppressor that seeks to paint the whole country as ‘new,’ insisting we treat all as ahistorical. For those who imagine a binary between studentship and being forefronts of dissent, I urge you to reconsider what you see as nationalism and how right is it to exclude a demand for social justice and reform from your definition of it.

Sharing an intimate space of hostel accommodation or cheap dhaba meals with those whose everyday reality is what one reads indifferently as newspaper articles on marginalisation, is what makes one problematise an apolitical position.

This very learning of empathy is enabled by an inclusive education model, making JNU a thriving environment for social sciences and a threat to those who wish the imagination of a nation was limited to concrete structures, cash inflow-outflow and a convenient hegemony.

Srijana Sidharth is a second year Masters student at the Centre for Study of Social System, Jawaharlal Nehru University.