4th Dimension

In amidst of political turmoil in state, at the pick time of election season where all and everyone is in indulge in blame game. I stuck up at year old issue of Jihad. Jihad, most misunderstood, most used and most abused word. Jihad in Islamic sense is word claiming for internal or spiritual purification. It is always considered as ‘Pak’ (holy) in Islamic writings. It is struggle for avoiding, rejecting and destroying internal evils, sins, lust, greed etc. It’s a very powerful word, it fundamentally meant to abide the followers (bande) to the moral codes of Islam and seek eternal peace for soul. Since centuries in Muslim world, people use to keep names of their kids as Jihad, as Christians used to keep it as Grace and Hindu used to keep it as Bhakti. But in recent times, conception of Jihad got diluted. There exists a group of minorities which believes that, Jihad is not only internal struggle but it also an external fight against the forces which threatens the faith and faithf...

            I am a designer, a blogger, a research scholar, a friend, a son, a brother, aaaaaaa many things. Many things, many identities, many roles are being adopted (even assigned) by this entity called “I”. Every role has its own nature of demand. Performing these roles at its best is most challenging, most complex and most desirable thing.                       Today every human being is “burdened” with such roles and identities, to navigate between these roles and identities he has adopted strategy what we called multitasking. At single point of time we are doing so many things, for instance updating facebook status while sitting in class, writing assignments with listening music and what not. I feel height of multitasking when people take picture while kissing !!!  The first word which comes up in my mind after looking such snaps is undoubtedly F word…. Kissing is meant for exclusi...

Life of social science researcher now a day resemble me to life of postman whose bag is full of variety of letters but he is untouched to the content of letters. Letters of love, hate, marriage, death etc. makes no difference to his life or job. His duty does not allow him to share any emotional bonding with things he delivers. He is never responsible for what he delivered, whether its hate or love, sadness or happiness. Professionally he works round the year, does his duty without any complain. This thought served as kind of commiseration to me when I decided to spend festive time at university for some the sake of work, deadlines and in long terms for duty :)     At same time I got some turbulent thoughts over the word “despo” (meant for guys who are desperately looking for girls) in conversation with intellectual person on Facebook, however conversation was friendly and specific, this word was used in response of specific kind of interaction called flirting. ...

Again, while studying society, I got stuck up with word which is frequently used and abused, LOVE.  After month long observations and interactions of/with people I was able to frame out the 4 th DIMENSION of what people calls love. This is all about my interpretation of people views and behavior when they are/aren’t in any relationship. These interpretations are open of exceptions because it very difficult to understand human nature thoroughly. I attempted to understand elements of notion called love. I would quickly and briefly like share my dissection of love. Interaction is base of any relationship, we can’t relate to person or thing with whom we don’t interact. These interactions are responsible to generating feeling of belongingness (friendship stage). For instance, we generate belongingness with our bikes, cares, watches, phone etc. because of frequent usage of it (that’s why say that we love our things too). I same manner we generates belongingness with another...

It becomes very nostalgic movement in class which makes me to think body as device for understanding society and social relationships. Every class and chapter on body and self recalls my childhood memory where my parents, teachers, friends and society at large taught me certain body techniques , like washing hands, table etiquettes and all that stuff which is considered as manners in  our society. Our body many times fails to express our true self. Try to recall your childhood movements where your parents have restricted you do certain things you liked to do, just for sake of manners and etiquettes. This manners and etiquettes play very crucial in shaping our bodily behavior.  Our behaviors in public places are entirely different than behavior in private place. It is obvious that one can’t behave like home in train or bus. That means we are not free from the context in which play our role. For example while traveling I have to behave like passenger, while clubbing...

Every human on this globe, being a part of culture and civilization faces some events in his/her life where ‘things don’t work out’.   I came across many situation where things don’t happen as I wished and once I looked at society I felt that I am not alone… there are also other people !!! Almost all people I know have complained about this. Situation of life don’t go as per our desire. So the question comes why it happens so? Why our lives act as per our wish? I came across people who has complains about life and when I meet this people I feel my life is better than theirs, this happens because their complaints about unaligned life is more intense than mine. Everyone has their own answer to these questions, some complain, some cry, some become wise, some become nice and what not. During same time, I came across Peter Brook’s Mahabharata (1989) and M.K.Gandhi’s interpretation of Bhagwad Geeta. One is the movie and other one is book, though meant for religion and spiritual...

Week before, I had shrewd interactions with politicians, celebrities, artists, activists and hackers; this gave me new dimensions to understand society. In fact, my urge to understand social relationships got more intensified after these interactions. Amongst all, dimensions highlighted by people from film industry gives me astounding understanding social relations presented on screen through medium which we call cinema. Indian cinema has become great tool to understand Indian society. Bollywood has its own identity in world. As per my knowledge, it is world’s most, innovative, creative, experimenting and inclusive industry. By inclusion I mean social inclusion providing employment and projection to every element of society. Rather, it has turned itself into culture. Cinema in India was started by colonial rulers with films like the Poona race and Train Arriving at Mumbai around 1889. But real Indian cinema was started in 1913 by a Marathi painter called Dadasaheb Phalke wh...

Previous post on mistakes , gave me turbulent feedback. I got stuck by a question asked by high school boy that if mistakes are failure to judge (or decide) than what is failure? And why we fail? Again, taken for granted phenomenon was in front of me. Searching for answer of this question gave me bulk of literary material, written by various people across the globe and I really failed to read all of them all ;)   Interesting thing I noted during search is that these works deals with success or minimizing failures, of course there are some exceptions who tried to analyses failures but these exceptional works are not much liked by people, as no one in modern world loves failures and why we don’t like failures or why we are so obsessed to success?   Achievements, is one of the value which modern world strives for and people ‘achieving’ some position or material resources are looked upon as ideal, we are directly or indirectly forced to follow the path which is defi...

Last week, I found very common, interesting and serious issue of entire human race, mistakes!!! I closely observed people regretting on their own judgments, choices and decisions. They have created painful situation by thinking that they made wrong choice about course, about person, about cloths and many other such things. A question was raised, WHAT IS MISTAKE? Asking same question on various people I got many responses, somewhere philosophical, somewhere emotional while some where funny. I am not disclosing those responses here but trying dissever idea of mistake. Mistakes, things which do every day, every time and think mistake is normal thing. Mistakes are not natural; it is created by society (not even by humans). Humans are creations of nature and nature is errorless. The story of mistakes and errors starts from the day humans became social being. They created civilizations. So the idea or mistakes are born with civilizations where every step of action (or behavior...

A girl seating at Darpan academy’s theater suddenly reminded me of Gujarati folk theatre and its initial traditions and it gave emancipatory insights when I found relevance of my studies in this died out fomat of theatre. I am talking about Bhavai, a folk theatre from Gujarat and Rajasthan region of India originated 1360 AD. Uniqueness of this theatre is embedded in its way of depicting and narrating caste ridden Indian society. Bhavai, was initiated by group of people who were actually excluded from the caste system, it was a kind of punishment given for not following caste norms this group was led by Asiat Thakar who wrote about 360 Vesha (plays, also known as swang ) among which 60 has survived till date. This group instead of protesting against social structure in violent manner took creative and sarcastic way of protesting. They started providing entertainment to people, but how entertainment can be way of protest?? Looking at format of Bhavai, it easy to find out th...

A girl seating at Darpan academy’s theater suddenly reminded me of Gujarati folk theatre and its initial traditions and it gave emancipatory insights when I found relevance of my studies in this died out fomat of theatre. I am talking about Bhavai, a folk theatre from Gujarat and Rajasthan region of India originated 1360 AD. Uniqueness of this theatre is embedded in its way of depicting and narrating caste ridden Indian society. Bhavai, was initiated by group of people who were actually excluded from the caste system, it was a kind of punishment given for not following caste norms this group was led by Asiat Thakar who wrote about 360 Vesha (plays, also known as swang ) among which 60 has survived till date. This group instead of protesting against social structure in violent manner took creative and sarcastic way of protesting. They started providing entertainment to people, but how entertainment can be way of protest?? Looking at format of Bhavai, it easy to find out that...

Coke studio, Great effort to create and preserve wonderful and soul enchanting music. On other side there came a series called satymev jayate as effort to make people aware social (and may be increasing) problems. Both the programs are crucial for television viewership transition faced by Indian broadcasters. For first time, comparing coke studio and satymev jayate seemed to be an insane effort to me but you can see the other side of coin when you give it a second thought. Coke studio and saymev jayate obviously technically different series, but for me they are doing great job of changing society.  Coke studio changing society? How? …. Through music!!! Yes, coke studio is making effort to bring in the songs which are highly philosophical and they fuse it with such stream of music that it directly touches to emotions. Lyrics are not, were not and will not be the constraint to understand those songs and music.   Such emotional realizations about self, god and ...

If we look at our daily life, from morning to evening, we all do that common activity called searching. As a human we are information driven creatures. We search for things which already exist or which are not known to us and thus, there exists an important relation between our desires, curiosity, laziness, abilities (or even inabilities) and information searching technologies, popularly known as the search engines. Search engines for me has become an accurate tool to measure desires and intentions of society at large for example“Kartina is most searched (desired) celebrity”, “how to kiss”, “how to get pregnant” etc.  Search engines are so iteratively developed piece of coding and that it has become reflection of human obsessiveness with information. They now not just limited to retrieval of information but also extended to “suggest” what you should retrieve. None of my friends in IT sector are answer accurately how much time they used Google, Bing or search engine i...