I found your entry interesting thus I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog …

I shall ram pebbles in my mouth
Demosthenes
Not to choke, but half dolphin, half
Shark hammerhead from fathoms deep
Ride the waves to charge the breakers
They erect,
Crush impediments of power and inundate
Their tainted towers –
I shall ram pebbles in my mouth.

I shall place nettles on my tongue
Demosthenes
Then thwart its stung retraction. Oh,
Let it burn at root and roof
Let rashes break from every pore
Just so it sear the tyrant´s power
With one discharge
I shall place nettles on my tongue.

But have you heard of werepe
Demosthenes?
Not all your Stoics´ calm can douse
The fiery hairs of that infernal pod.
It makes a queen run naked to the world
An itch that tells the world its flesh
Is whorish sick –
I shall place werepe on every tongue.

I´ll drop some ratsbane on my tongue
Demosthenes
To bait the rodents with a kiss of death
I´ll seal their fate in tunnels dark and dank
As habitations of their hostages
Denied of air, denied of that same light
Their hands had cupped to immerse their world
I´ll drop some ratsbane on my tongue.

I´ll thrust all fingers down the throat
Demosthenes
To raise a spout of bile to drown the world.
It´s petrified, Demosthenes, mere forms,
Usurp the heaters we knew, mere rasps.
This stuttering does not become the world,
This tongue of millions fugitive from truth –

I´ll let the hemlock pass
Demosthenes
Oh, not between my lip – I´ve shared
Its thin dissolve in myriad throats
At one with that agnostic sage.
They did not stutter like the world they left –
And I know why –
Their lives were spent with heated pebbles
On their tongues, Demosthenes!

But she forgot to mention many of the national programs and educational projects which are based on one major political family which is ruling India since its creation. Jawahar Navoday Vidyalayas, IGNOU, JNU, and Rajiv Gandhi Prodyogiki Vishwavidyalaya. and list goes to infinity.

Not only educational sector but also other sectors have been infected with this nomenclature/nomination mentality of human being. Many of the livelihood development projects like NRGA and other projects.

However, this virtuality, as with Beaudrillard, is couched in the language of materiality, the language of commodified exchange. But Aravamudan sees finer nuances within this commodification than the obvious reduction to philistine style. Where all is commodified, all that meets us is an overchoice of styles, surfaces. Yet these choices hold latent ontologies, which the author points out, need careful parsing through philosophical critique or cultural interrogation to avoid the pitfalls of New Age corporatism and rabid identitiy politics.

While I wholeheartedly affirm his text, there are elements in its complexity which need nuancing. For example, when he writes, “Religious matter is one of the vast areas of standing reserve ripe for commodification, precisely because of its not being a natural object,” he is no doubt right about the first part of the assertion, but the idea of “natural object” here stands in danger of smacking of essentialism. There is nothing absolutely “natural,” even materiality is nothing if not cultural materiality and the “cooked” or “uncooked” categories of “culture” and “nature” are structuralist mythologies embedded in historicity.

Also, while the meditation on the Bhagavad Gita he encourages is certainly brilliant and original, opening up alternate practices resistant to violent literalist identifications, I see his practice of the deferred moment not as exclusive to action but an accompaniment tio action. Ignorance still must act, ignorantly and carry its burden of deferred judgement as part of it dynamic karma yoga. The Gandhian non-violent interpretation of the Gita was discussed recently in Peter Heehs article on Violence and Non-Violence in Politics where he brings in Nelson Mandela, who understood so well the values of both these attiitudes, at the end. Human ignorance suffers its doubts in the thick of oppression but to ask the oppressed to defer action because of the inevitability of the extinguishment of the multitudes is not the lesson of the Gita. There is indeed some fatalism here, since Krishna shows to Arjuna his devouring form not as a scare of what can be avoided but as the outcome which has already occurred and the part which Arjuna is compelled to play, whether by ego or by yoga. The difference only is that in the latter the act of violence or non-violence as the case may be, is accompanied with the loss of ontological imprisonment.