Contempt (outside) of the court

Hypersensitivity resembles the public, not the institutions. Public trust serves a purpose; it is not idle concrete on idle land, unindustrious, but is placed where it can most efficiently serve the purpose of both parties. Like for example, a Banking institution. Banks usually keep a reserve of certain amount of cash with them in the branches, on the assumption that not more 5 or 6 or 10% of customers will come on a certain day demanding all their deposits back.

Banks assume this because there is level of public trust it enjoys over the safety of their deposits. The trust shakes when banks run dry, and the hypersensitivity of public, with regards to their assets is as much as regards to the justice, and justice is not running dry anytime soon.

When institutions however get hypersensitive, the public panics, the trust dwindles and contempt, outside the court sets in. What really serve the purpose of judiciary is delivery of justice and not a blind trust that justice ought to never run dry.

Even on the assumption that justice ought to never run dry, the judiciary should keep a minimal stock of justice with them to deliver to the public, so that not all the public arrive on a certain day and demand justice, only to face contempt for their just demands. That would be embarrassing for both parties.

Neat transactions    

             

Working in the shadows mean that you do not grow taller than the men you work for, stay in their shadows, follow the light they walk to, shut the one’s that put them in bad light. If this is the policy that Facebook adopts in India and abroad, their policy director is well within her professional obligations to suggest not punishing politicians from the ruling party for volitions.

Transactions must be looked from the perspective of values they generate and not from principals governing them. For both Facebook and the ruling party, transaction generated much value, and it was almost neat. Almost.

Yet the fault lines in the principles governing the transactions are not clear enough to suggest that who is at real loss. The congress and other parties claim that they are in the loss, since the principle of level playing field has been violated, while also checking their Facebook timeline to see if they are not in volition themselves. The media is depressed on the informational hegemony of America and that they do not have any ‘unnamed insider’ in Facebook to interview and break the news. For them, the principle of information parity is violated.

The public, who report these volitions and expects the government and Facebook to take actions against them, is at real loss. It is discouraging to realize that both insiders and outsiders have been lying to them. This shakes the trust of public in the institutions and its stabilization demands inquiry and Justice. The courts should get this opportunity to rebuild the trust that Prashant Bhushan’s tweet cost them and hold the parties and principles in contempt.

Non-political actors

A friend few days ago claimed that he is not interested in politics but in social issues including roads, schools, drainage and the environment, social equality and justice. This erects an image of a responsible citizen who believes what he sees, what is of value to him and the community is essential to governance, from his own perspective.

Today however, my online activity led me to his and I was surprised to find a ‘Hindustani Bhau’, in the front seat of his car trying to explain that stand-up comics do not respect authority and religion, and they make jokes. The public must stand up to stand-up comics and defend the religion from becoming funny.

Karl Marx only dared to call (organized) religion opium with the view that it eases the pain of human inequality, and the suffering it subjects the society to. Stand-up comics infuse some of the opiate in jokes to create laughter, which also eases pain and suffering.

Between Karl Marx and stand up comics, a lot of thing transpires that range from significant to funny, commentary to jokes. In this spectrum ‘Hindustanti Bhau’ lacks the substance of Marx, and the presentation of stand-up comics, yet to some he has both the substance and the presentation, the character and the image, in a altogether different spectrum, the spectrum of Hindu and non-Hindu thought, in us vs. them, in religion vs. jokes.

This online spectrum, through which my friend judges what he sees, is indeed different from his offline spectrum of material world, where he believes what he sees. He now appears to me possessing a new form of intelligence, one which surfs through the vastness of digital space, with long endless discourses about any and everything, and also navigates through the offline needs of individual and community.

We know from Karl Marx and some stand-up comedians that one world can sustain two different world in itself, if we have organized religion opiating the masses. These two spaces then, online and offline can also be sustained under one sphere of sensible human discourses, sustainable only by this newfound intelligence.