Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Issues with Current Day Discussions/ Narratives

What follows is a mail exchange with a friend and i have reproduced it with his permission. The topic of discussion was on the issues with current day narratives and what we need to know to improve the quality of the discussions in general. 

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The issues that I find with the current narratives is that:

1. Issue of idiotic conflation: Just because one considers oneself good in something (may be it could be true also) - he/she thinks that she can transfer that perceived capability to other related or TOTALLY unrelated fields. No homework whatsoever.
2. Issue of non-scholarly, skimming studies: Between 1991 and 2011 I refused to write anything in public in tamil (I wrote a bit in english from 2006 to 9 I think, though) but read, took enormous notes and digested. So there was time for one to assimilate, revise, finehone, collect data, correlate, regress etc etc. Reason why am mentioning this is - I think I benefited a lot from this going-underground. But nowadays, what is happening is - I read a couple of pages on the browser and consider myself an expert on that. Oh the illusion.
3. Issue of authenticity: Many of the experiences that many people writing about (including JM) are from intermediated experiences or worse still secondhand ones - and not based on lived/experienced/reflected realities, therefore they are hollow and leave the reader wondering.
4. Issue of superficiality: Am a sincere believer in doing. Of course you also have practically experienced this - definitely in the case of farming; the attention to details and sticking-to-itiveness while course corrected by the vision; the doggedness of the pursuit. But, without this internalized model of excellence, all we have is sham.
5. Issue of polemics: When I am tired, I get into polemics and laboured humour, but this is my issue, I think. Things get lost. But at least one escapes getting stereotyped.
Unfortunately all of these work together. There could be more such issues. Societies and cultures lose out in the process. It is very difficult to be that mythical anna pakshi. But at least we can work towards that.

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