An Indecisive Indian

  ‘God is dead’, Nietzsche announced in the late nineteenth century, not as a boast but as a diagnosis, bracketing the question of whether God ever lived at all . He was not celebrating the demise of a deity; he was lamenting the collapse of a shared moral universe once sustained by belief. His warning was less theological than civilisational. A century and a half later, God has neither died nor decisively lived. He survives, stubbornly, inside arguments, television studios, debating halls, newspaper columns, and, most relentlessly, WhatsApp forwards. This shifts the issue away from existence itself, toward something more uncomfortable: not whether God exists, but whether debating His existence leads us anywhere at all. The recent television debate on Lallantop on the existence of God, the widely discussed face-off between Dr. Javed Akhtar , the celebrated poet, lyricist, screenwriter, and avowed atheist, and Mufti Shamail Nadwi , a religious cleric and scholar, illustrates ...

  At the outset, allow me to recap a key point from an earlier blog in which I discussed what, in my view, embodies the true spirit of Atmanirbhar Bharat. (The piece is referenced at the end.): Two tribes of opinion repeatedly torment me. First are the zealots who chant Vishwaguru while reality smoulders quietly behind them. For them, Indian Railways (IR) is racing ahead, facts and derailments notwithstanding, and hype substitutes for delivery. At the opposite pole sit those who view IR as a hopeless relic, incapable of tightening a nut without divine intervention and a five-year committee report. In their eyes, every success is a fluke and every reform a failure. Both camps are insufferable in their own ways. One worships the global to the point of paralysis, the other clings to a parochial fantasy world. The truth, as we see frequently, lies somewhere in between. We need to be sensibly local without being delusional, global without being derivative or imitative. For all w...

  The problem with us retired railwaymen, the same tribe that still thinks Indian Railways (IR) needs their counsel, is that we simply cannot see much good in IR today. People say we’re stuck in the past. The past which was pound-wise and penny-foolish. Yes, we’re traumatised by an era when we naively thought we did some jobs very efficiently with great accountability. In spite of this moronic sense of accountability, there were pinpricks galore. Like a certain tea-and-snacks grant whose monthly limit was guarded more fiercely than the Kohinoor. In those days, serving tea to visitors on official account was an exercise in administrative tightrope-walking. Offer one extra cup, and the grant evaporated. Offer too few, and your guest felt neglected. And heaven forbid you dared to serve biscuits —that was a luxury that required both courage and signed justification. We also lived under the constant threat of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) telephone, that innocent-lo...