अनन्त का छंद - 6

REVISITING NATIONALISM - 1

REVISITING NATIONALISM – 1

REVISITING NATIONALISM  – 1      

Prasanna K Choudhary

NATION, NATION-STATES AND NATIONALISM

1648.The Thirty Years’ (1618-1648) European War ended in the Treaty of Westphalia. In this devaststing war, fought in the background of the Reformation, the…

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Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it. And so their past is cluttered with countless photographic negatives, which continue to be useless because their intellect has never 'developed' them. Our lives; and the lives of other people, too; because style for a writer, like colour for a painter, is a question not of technique but of vision. It is the revelation, which would be impossible by direct or conscious means, of the qualitative difference in the ways we perceive the world, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain the eternal secret of each individual. It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing only a single world, our own, we see it multiplied, and have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, all more different one from another than those which revolve in infinity and which, centuries after the fire from which their rays emanated has gone out, whether it was called Rembrandt or Vermeer, still send us their special light. This labour of the artist, this attempt to see something different beneath the material, beneath experience, beneath words, is the exact inverse of that which is accomplished within us from minute to minute, as we live our lives heedless of ourselves, by vanity, passion, intellect and habit, when they overlay our true impressions, so as to hide them from us completely, with the repertoire of words, and the practical aims, which we wrongly call life. To put it briefly, this art, complicated though it be, is actually the only art that is alive. .... The work carried out by our vanity, our passion, our imitative faculties, our abstract intelligence, our habits, is the work that art undoes, making us follow a contrary path, in a return to the depths where whatever has really existed lies unrecognized within us. And of course it was very tempting to recreate real life and rejuvenate one's impressions in this way. But it called for all kinds of courage, including emotional courage.

Marcel Proust, 'Finding Time Again'. Translated by Ian Patterson.

When you step away from the prepackaged structure of traditional education, you’ll discover that there are many more ways to learn outside school than within.

Don’t Go Back to School (via explore-blog)

Martin Luther Kings last day on earth.

“Two centuries ago, a former European colony took it into its head to catch up with Europe. It has been so successful that the United States of America has become a monster where the flaws, sickness, and inhumanity of Europe have reached frightening proportions.”

— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Emily Roebling, the female engineer secretly behind the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge – one of the greatest engineering feats of all time – which began on December 3, 1870.

It’s hard to know where to start in tallying up the explosive revelations in the Panama Papers, an analysis of leaked documents from global law firm Mossack Fonseca revealed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

This is the one and only original manuscript of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. The Morgan Library and Museum displays Charles Dickens’s original manuscript of A Christmas Carol in Pierpont Morgan’s historic Library until January 13, 2013. Dickens wrote his iconic tale in a six-week flurry of activity, beginning in October 1843 and ending in time for Christmas publication. He had the manuscript bound in red morocco as a gift for his solicitor, Thomas Mitton. The manuscript then passed through several owners before Pierpont Morgan acquired it in the 1890s. 

It reveals Dickens’s method of composition, allowing us to glimpse the author at work. he began writing the story in October 1843, completing it in only six weeks. His apparently contiguous pace of writing and revision was urgent but moldly confident. The interlinear revisions increase the story’s vividness: text is struck out with a continuous looping movement of the pen and replaced with more active verbs and fewer words to achieve greater concision. Dickens sent this manuscript to the printer in early December, and the book was published in time for the Christmas market. [The Morgan, 2012] (photo: yyz2nyc)

Dr B R Ambedkar (14.04.1891 - 06.12.1956)

Great social reformer, philosopher, jurist, political leader, historian and economist. Independent India's first Law Minister and Chairperson of the Constitution's Drafting Committee (29.08.1947 - 24.01.1950).

A few quotes from his writings:

"Every act of independent thinking puts some portion of apparently stable world in peril."

"For a successful revolution, it is not enough that there is discontent. What is required is a profound and thorough conviction of justice, necessity and importance of political and social rights."

"What are we having this liberty for? We are having this liberty in order to reform our social system, which is full of inequality, discrimination and other things, which conflict with our fundamental rights."

"Political tyranny is nothing compared to the social tyranny and a reformer who defies society is a more courageous man than a politician who defies government."

"I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved."

"Cultivation of mind should be the ultimate aim of human existence."

Today is his 123rd birth anniversary.