En el lila despertar de una crisálida que sueña compartir contigo el milagro Infinito de la Viday que más allá de la oscuridad que todo lo penetra llena de soles su propia noche. En la profunda certeza de que el Amor es color a las alas de la mariposa y poesía al sueño del que espera.Hemos querido abrir este número de Polis con el texto que nos enviara Jhenieffer Weissenberg, ante nuestra invitación a escribir sobre la espiritualidad en el (...) contexto del mundo contemporáneo. Su envío representa.. (shrink)

Amartya Sen's teeming account of an ecumenical life lived across three continents and over nine decades, in the interstices of colonial encounter, takes the reader on an intimate journey through some of the most significant global, intellectual, and historical events of the second half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We learn of Sen's formative years at Rabindranath Tagore's Shantiniketan University (he was named by the sage himself), and of the lasting impact of the Bengal Famine of 1943 on (...) his oeuvre and outlook. At Cambridge (where Sen was a student and later master of Trinity College, becoming the first Asian head of an Oxbridge college), his interlocuters included Edward Morgan Forster and Piero Sraffa—the Italian economist who reputedly catalyzed Wittgenstein's later work by scratching his (own) chin with an upward sweep to communicate a non-verbal “form of life” expletive. Sraffa and the Marxian Maurice Dobb, among others, fueled Sen's interest in welfare economics at a time when the discipline was all about capital and growth. Several chapters also point to the little-known impact of the ancient Indic renunciatory tradition on Sen's dazzling, counterintuitive vision of economics as an ethical enterprise, more concerned with living well than with factors of capital growth or prosperity as such. “Even though economic growth is important,” Sen writes, “the single-minded pursuit of it... is terrible... for people's quality of life.” A good life gains more substantially from opportunities for the development of existential capabilities. This insight is at the heart of Sen's modified social choice theory. He tells us that it was fully anticipated and realized in ascetic outlooks that proliferated around the fifth century BCE across the Eastern Gangetic Plain, incorporating parts of modern Bihar, Nepal, and Bengal (proximate stomping grounds of Sen's childhood and early youth). It's worth lingering on this point.The German philosopher, Karl Jaspers—a winner of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, awarded to Sen as well in 2020—discerned early signs of non-Western modernity in these subcontinental ascetic philosophies, instigated by eccentric proponents, such as Kashyapa the elder, Makkali of the cowshed, Ajita of the hairshirt, and Vardhamana Mahavira and Siddhartha Gautama, the more reputable founders of Jainism and Buddhism, respectively. By modernity, Jaspers means individual self-sufficiency, in the Kantian sense: a dissociative freedom from the paraphernalia of law, custom, habitual observances, and the lives and examples of others. Sen agrees and disagrees. In his reading, the Indic enlightenment tradition pioneered by the Buddha and his contemporaries calls for critical yet compassionate coexistence, points of reentry into, rather than rupture from, the mainstay of human interaction. Buddhist asceticism (much like Sen's brand of economics) takes the suffering of the destitute as a conceptual springboard. Its proposal to end suffering—or capability-deprivation, in Sen's formulation—through the liberation of transformative resources for living well (agencies and choices) is revealed only in the company of others, on plural ground (to follow Sen's thinking about justice) and as a program of joint action. The program is thwarted by systemic inequality and interpersonal intolerance when, for example, interest groups (identified by gender, race, religion, caste, sexuality, and so on) insist on privileged distance or divergence from other groups.Sen's memoir tempts us to imagine the earliest Buddhist disciples in his own likeness: fearless, free, highly sociable, brimful of curiosity and clarity, a touch impatient, compassionate, tolerant, restless, immeasurably sane. (shrink)

Assembled with skill and sensitivity, this selection of brief and incisive quotations range from religion and theology, personal and social ethics, service, and international and political affairs, to the family, education, culture, Indian problems, and Gandhi's most original concept, satyagraha - group nonviolent direct action. Some quotes from this book: Ahimsa is the highest ideal. It is meant for the brave, never for the cowardly. Eating for the sake of pleasure is a sin like animal indulgence for the sake (...) of it. The real meaning of economic equality is 'to each according to his need'. Without prayer there is no inward peace. (shrink)

v. 1. The Jain philosophy, collected and edited by Bhagu F. Karbari.

All Men Are Brothers is a compelling and unique collection of Gandhi's most trenchant writings on nonviolence, especially in the context of a post-nuclear world. This compendium, which reads like a traditional book - "Gandhi without tears" - is drawn from a wide range of his reflections on world peace. "It is not that I am incapable of anger, but I succeed on almost all occasions to keep my feelings under control. Such a struggle leaves one stronger for (...) it. The more I work at this, the more I feel delight in my life, the delight in the scheme of the universe. It gives me a peace and a meaning of the mysteries of nature that I have no power to describe.">. (shrink)

Hind Swaraj is Mahatma Gandhi's fundamental work. Not only is it key to understanding his life and thoughts, but also the politics of South Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. Celebrating 100 years since Hind Swaraj was first published in a newspaper, this centenary edition includes a new Preface and Editor's Introduction, as well as a new chapter on 'Gandhi and the 'Four Canonical Aims of Life''. The volume presents a critical edition of the 1910 (...) text of Hind Swaraj, fully annotated and including Gandhi's own Preface and Foreword (not found in other editions). Anthony J. Parel sets the work in its historical and political contexts and analyses the significance of Gandhi's experiences in England and South Africa. The second part of the volume contains some of Gandhi's other writings, including his correspondence with Tolstoy and Nehru. (shrink)

Europeans and Americans tend to hold the opinion that democracy is a uniquely Western inheritance, but in _The Common Cause_, Leela Gandhi recovers stories of an alternate version, describing a transnational history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of ethics in the broad sense of disciplined self-fashioning. Gandhi identifies a shared culture of perfectionism across imperialism, fascism, and liberalism—an ethic that excluded the ordinary and unexceptional. But, she also illuminates an ethic (...) of moral imperfectionism, a set of anticolonial, antifascist practices devoted to ordinariness and abnegation that ranged from doomed mutinies in the Indian military to Mahatma Gandhi’s spiritual discipline. Reframing the way we think about some of the most consequential political events of the era, Gandhi presents moral imperfectionism as the lost tradition of global democratic thought and offers it to us as a key to democracy’s future. In doing so, she defends democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection and mounts a postcolonial appeal for an ethics of becoming common. (shrink)

Scarce resource allocation policies vary across the United States. Little is known about regional variation in resource allocation protocols and variation in their application. We sought to evaluat...

These are both critical as well as constructive, and thus inspire the reader to be a better Hindu and a better citizen of India and the world.

The drives of white nationalism in the US and Hindu nationalism in India are found to be significantly similar in aim and methods. Witnessed in two large nations that are alike too in diversity and in constitutions, the two drives violate statutory norms as also the norms of democracy and equality acknowledged by the world. Contrasting these drives with Gandhi’s vision of partnership and mutual respect among communities and races is illuminating. It may be seen, in addition, that both (...) white nationalism and Hindu nationalism rest on a falsification of history. Stirring up and employing a sentiment of majority victimhood, and another sentiment of dislike for the minority “other,” the two drives present a challenge to all who regard humanity as one and human beings as equal. (shrink)

Text, with extensive interpretive notes, of Maṅgala prabhāta, a treatise on ethics by Mahatma Gandhi, 1869-1948, Indian statesman.

'those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means' Mahatma Gandhi was a profound and original thinker as well as one of the most influential figures in the history of the twentieth century. A religious and social reformer, he became a notable leader in the Indian nationalist movement, made famous for his advocacy of non-violent civil resistance. His many and varied writings are essentially responses to the specific challenges he faced, and (...) they show his maturing ideas and political will, as well as his spirituality and humanity, over several decades. This new selection demonstrates how his thinking was truly radical, dealing with problems from the roots upwards: in the lives of individuals, of societies, and of political structures. It underlines the supreme importance of non-violence, and Gandhi's unique and unrealized vision of a new India after the departure of the British. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 182-184.

Hypnosis is associated with profound changes in conscious experience and is increasingly used as a cognitive tool to explore neuropsychological processes. Studies of this sort typically employ suggestions following a hypnotic induction to produce changes in perceptual experience and motor control. It is not clear, however, to what extent the induction procedure serves to facilitate suggested phenomena. This study investigated the effect on suggestibility of a hypnotic induction and labelling that procedure ‘hypnosis.’ Suggestibility of participants was tested before and after (...) an adapted hypnotic procedure, which was either labelled as ‘hypnosis’ or as ‘relaxation.’ The hypnotic procedure produced a modest increase in suggestibility when it was called ‘relaxation,’ but a very significant increase if it was labelled ‘hypnosis.’ The results are important for both clinical and experimental applications and indicate that labelling an induction procedure ‘hypnosis’ is an important determinant of subsequent responses to suggestion. (shrink)

Over time our understanding of the 'political' has been progressively shaped by the secular rational calculations of modern European political thought. This paper aims to critique these 'calculations' with reference to crucial moments of departure and flight within western philosophy itself. It concludes by reclaiming fin de siècle radicalism/philosophy as a forgotten instance of empirical-metaphysical hybridity: a form of politics or ethics capable of housing the imperatives of both desire and prayer.

This paper explores moments of democratising disorderliness that interrupt a vision of the sublime as a particular ordering of subjectivity. Situated within the context of the Narmada movement against the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam in India in the mid-1990s, it argues that sublime regimes and ‘counter-sublime’ insurgences draw their energies from the figures of the dam and the bund, respectively. Where the dam’s walls establish the horizons of visibility, of who counts as subject, the bund’s curved surfaces reveal (...) a pluralising depth that folds the visible with/in the invisible, constituting the possibility of novel modes of seeing/subjectification. Working through oral histories, films, images, archival materials and ethnographic studies alongside the work of Foucault and the later Merleau-Ponty, the paper argues that the Narmada movement enacts a counter-sublime that contests the invisibility imposed by the dam in favour of an imbrication of the human and non-human disclosing radically different constellations of visibility and subjectification. (shrink)

In the recent past, it was common to hear complaints about the paucity of biographies on South Asian historical subjects. During the last few years, the situati.

A couple and their five‐year‐old daughter are in a car accident. The parents are not expected to survive. The child is transported to a children's hospital, and urgent treatment decisions must be made. Whom should the attending physician approach to make decisions for the child? When such cases arise in, for example, the hospitals where we work, the social worker or chaplain is instructed to use the Illinois Health Care Surrogacy Act as a guidepost to identify a decision‐maker. But in (...) our state and the country overall, the limitations of such statutes leave hospital workers to make a judgment call among friends, family, and clergy who may come forward. While surrogate decision‐making statutes comprehensively address surrogate decision‐makers for adults, a patchwork of laws—permanency statutes, kinship provider statutes, standby guardianship statutes, and, in some cases, surrogate decision‐making statutes—provide variable decision‐making pathways for children. (shrink)