Pujit Aggarwal

    When words are overused or flogged to death in conversation or script, they lose their meaning and degenerate into tokens that we exchange on social or ceremonial occasions.   "Could norning" utters a warm voice on the telephone. "Good morning," you mutter drowsily. It is rather early in the day to pull a friend out of bed just because you shared with him a course in Creative Writing at Yale a quarter of a century before.   He did not open the conversation with ‘good morning’ but that is what you heard on account of years of conditioning. If he further adds that he recently took his children to the zoo and they had a lot of fun marvelling at the liars and tigers, you automatically hear ‘lions and tigers’.   Each of us is touted as original and unique. In most cases, this gift lapses over the years as you fit into the slot designed by society. Heredity and environment interact to varying degrees to process you into a finished product. Words like fortune, chan...

    It is a handy book of poems, so exiguous you can fold the paperback edition and insert it in your pocket. You can slow-read it in a couple of hours while reverting and re-reading parts of it. Poetry, by its very nature, resists perfunctory or fast reading.   It comprises about 100 verses or songs that celebrate the ineffable glory of divinity that permeates the entire cosmos. Cast in prose, each verse illustrates how God manifests his power and majesty through phenomena and objects far too obvious and unadorned to draw our attention to themselves. It is a collection, a liturgy, which you can open anywhere and pray without the mandatory accessory of a church or temple. Invoke Nature in its infinite variety and hear it in your inner ear,—the Lord chanting mantras with your lips.   Rabi—short for Rabindranath Tagore—was a little over 50 when his name swept across the world for becoming the first non-European Nobel Laureate for his modest book of poems, Gitanjali. Tr...

     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 ...

     ‘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 ...

      This is a somewhat peculiar title for one of the most anthologized poems by the celebrated poet, Rudyard Kipling: ‘If, followed closely by an elongated hyphen or dash. He chose this punctuation to foreshadow several conditional clauses across the four stanzas, which the last line of the poem clinches with the main clause. The concatenation of precepts washes over you like a cascade of crystalline water.       The teacher who introduced the poem to the class for elocution practise was a man with a baritone voice to boot. He took enormous pains to underscore the subtle shades of nuance in the subtext so that we could project them in our performance. When he delivered the finished product, he virtually swayed in a trance.       It was not part of his duty to probe and explore the essence of the poem and what it communicated to the reader by way of its message or lesson. All the same, he would conclude the module with a set o...

      Silence should ideally be the mother of sound. Without this prerequisite, it would be difficult to differentiate one sound from another. Speech in any context is punctuated with short pauses of silence, which ensure its audibility and, above all, intelligibility. When audibility begins to predominate, it not only mars comprehension but also drowns it in a cacophony of decibels.     The Gospel according to St. John proclaims that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. There is no indication in the scriptures that this auspicious Gospel was announced by the Creator. The Word itself is construed as God Himself as well as Jesus, who inhered in the Creator. Some exegetes attribute the dualism or the ambiguity to the Greek prototype ‘logos, which was translated as the ‘word.’     The Greek word is used more than 300 times in the Bible to signify its primary meaning, ‘the Word’. It also connotes message, revelation, kno...

      Before the invention of the script, there was nothing to read in the current sense of the word.  Speech precedes script. In the beginning, was the Word. It stood not only for God but also represented the sacred infinity of Creation. Since all communication was by voice, listening enjoyed the primacy over reading which came much later.     To ‘read’ is a polysemous verb.  It means to survey, scan, sense, infer, detect, and decipher in addition to its prevalent meaning i.e. to decode text with a view to understanding the message. The Spread of literacy has made the technology of reading and writing accessible to large swathes of the population all over the world.      But there is a discordant note of irony in the ubiquitous progress. The supremacy of hardware not only overrides software but also enfeebles it. George Steiner was amongst the most prescient of critics to forewarn us against the downside of a media revolu...

        Most professors are conformists. They play it safe, walking the tightrope of normative rubrics. But this tutor was different. He converted his once-a-week tutorial class into a seminar that required each student to read critically a nontechnical book of his choice, write a short review, and introduce the book to the class from the podium. It would be followed by a Q&A with comments, queries, and a critique of the presentation.            The professor did not intervene unless the session stalled or stagnated on account of the difficulty or the irrelevance of the query. He exemplified the vital role of the facilitator.       This arbitrary adaptation of the stereotype had three distinct advantages. It initiated inquiry and research on your own hook. It necessitated due attention to writing skills---grammar, lexis, idiom, and punctuation. Last but not least, it posed the challenge of overcomin...

    As a student, I often came across ads that marketed speed reading. Quite a few institutions offered short courses in this highly touted skill. They would support their claims and underpin the advantages by adducing the names of eminent celebrities who could speedread dozens of books in a couple of weeks.    If you can read more books within the time at your disposal, you can garner more information and knowledge to upgrade your status as a student, a professional, or a paladin. The premise underlying the proposition, though untenable under clinical scrutiny, seems to be quite specious.         Some of the front-bench classmates bragged about the number of books they had been speedreading over the weekends. There was no way of verifying what books those were or how much the speed-readers retained of what they claimed to have read.    I was a backbencher beset with all sorts of self-doubt. I was a reader, as and when I chose ...

    Philosophers are often misunderstood on account of their individualism, eccentricity, or studied divergence of views. When Alexander the Great traveled to meet the philosopher Diogenes and offered to grant any request he made, Diogenes snapped nonchalantly: “Stand out of my light!”     The King was neither amused nor miffed by the gaucherie. He knew the stature of the threadbare Diogenes who preferred to live in a tub rather than a palace. Alexander is reported to have said to some of his courtiers later, “… had I not been Alexander, I would have loved to be Diogenes.”      Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most misunderstood philosophers of the nineteenth century. He has been held responsible for the death of God. He has been charged with racism and antisemitism. He is believed to have sown the seeds of fascism and the final solution in the last book published after his death.     His notion of the ubermensch is cons...

      I scanned through the internet to ascertain whether there were any helplines or experts who could guide me as to how one can mitigate boredom. Not that I myself have any personal problem with this malaise. I have been fortunate enough to ward off boredom and its sibling sleeplessness most of the time. What baffles me is the frequent coverage and confession of boredom in the media including Sunday supplements of newspapers.      Boredom is rife in all walks of life, except in religion and voluntary adherence of rites it entails. A built-in component of confession, expiation, and hope infuses the prayers with a sincerity of interest that does not always inhere in social and personal transactions. An orison for boons of health and wealth presupposes utmost authenticity.      I have often found myself stifling a yawn or two against the unctuous patter of formal introductions. Come to think of it, are the perpetrators of such patter the...

      It was an extremely busy and tiring day with half a dozen meetings back to back. I took a very light meal and retired to crash out for the night. I requested the inmates of the house not to disturb me if there was a call from anyone.     I fell asleep within minutes. It was one of those ideal periods of sleep that would block even pleasant dreams just in case they tickled my fancy or imagination and interrupted the repose induced by a deep slumber. I heard the mobile tinkle on my right. I declined the call. I decided not to check who it was from. I went back to sleep.     I don’t how much time had elapsed but the phone tinkled again. Declining the call or the notification or the message, I picked up the device and switched it off. I had deported the spectra of cyberia and digitalia for the night. I closed my eyes and snuggled up into the cosy bosom of Morpheus, the patron god of restorative sleep and dreams.     I wa...