Broken Bangles: Putting Together Life and the World

Surviving For Centuries And Demolished In One Day Images of some ruins get imprinted in our minds as children. The most prominent among them could be the half-destroyed dome of Hiroshima. For me, this monument embodied the cruellest of all deaths, that is, by the fire mushroom that we see in a nuclear explosion.  This building skeleton also reminded me of the defeat of Hitler and the fall of Nazism. Strangely enough, this interplay of politics, history, and human emotions crafts one’s mental geography of this building.  As I grew up, this image also evolved to symbolise war, nuclear threat, and human tragedy. My mind had learnt to make the topic broader and more abstract. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze has theorised how the visual imagery of post-World War  I I   was impacted by the ruins of war – demolished and abandoned buildings and the scars on the civilisation. From the colossal library in Alexandria of ancient times to the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasak...

  Earth Has No Boundaries Earth has no borders except natural barriers, mountains and seas. There are no barriers at all, given the travel technologies we possess.  Surreal the concept of borders is, yet, borders are quite concrete too; they can start wars, prompt mass exodus, and provoke all kinds of tricky emotions like national pride, a sense of belonging, unjustified hostilities, and fear of the other. Many national borders have no physical properties. No one can tell where one country ends and another begins by merely looking at them. For that, one needs maps and soldiers, fences and fear.  They are mostly barren land, rivers and deserts, these national borders that we hold on to at huge prices, costing human lives, diplomacy, weapons, and real money. They deceive you if you look at them for long- so normal, one could even feel tempted to step across. The invisibility of such borders evokes many sociological and philosophical questions. Were There Borders Always? At ...