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 ...

     ‘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 ...