Pujit Aggarwal

     Schadenfreude is a loanword in English borrowed from German. It means feeling joy, satisfaction, or an instantaneous ego boost in the misfortune of the other with whom you have a nominal equation: he may be your competitor, rival, condescending, holier-than-thou patron, or neighbor you are not particularly fond of You cannot experience this unashamedly negative feeling if the sufferer of misfortune is a total stranger or someone you have had no contact with.    Anthropologists say that schadenfreude is quite natural and common amongst all cultures, despite the strictures imposed by priests, pundits, rabbis, and mullahs. Rejoicing in the fall of someone is patently immoral unless the sufferer has been a very nefarious, depraved, and malignant person. He has already been covertly feared, cursed, and despised by most of his actual and potential victims. Consequently, what he has suffered, after causing undeserved injury and damage, is a justifiably legitimate punishment. It is the de

     ‘No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.’  (Thomas Carlyle)      Carlyle was an eminent Victorian philosopher whose influence on history, art, culture, and literature has been remarkably pervasive. Every great man exerts a centrifugal force that affects the meteorology of his immediate and outermost environment. Sometimes the impact is so deep on the political and cultural climate that it gradually turns into a permanent one. Till another great man emerges from the ever-spinning whirligig of time to introduce a new order or reverse the entrenched, otiose order to vacate the space for a better alternative,      Ashoka has been memorialised in TV serials, Hindi films, and regional films. Strangely enough, there is hardly any documentary evidence, reliable vestiges, or relics to substantiate whatever we know about this mighty king. Only some stupas with inscriptions and sculptural motifs give us some hints about his profile and contribu