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Developing sustainable Cities: Major initiatives and experiments in Urban India
Full text linkUrbanization is generally seen as a symbol of development and progress. But, the unplanned and unregulated expansions of urban areas in India have proved disastrous to both man and nature. Keeping in mind the severity of the problem policy-makers from time to time have formulated and experimented a numbers of measures to control environmental pollution. Delhi has been one of the biggest victims of environmental pollution. The Government of Delhi has tried to protect the environment of the city by implementing measures like, closures of polluted industries, introduction of CNG as a clean fuel, ban on crackers, and experiment of odd-even scheme to control vehicular pollution. This paper will primarily highlight such actions and initiatives undertaken by the Government of Delhi to combat the menace of pollution in Delhi.
DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00019.
Semiotics of Love in Suhrawardis Allegorical Philosophy
Full text linkIn his allegorical fictions, Shaykh al-Ishraq Suhrawardi conveys multiple mystical issues one most important of which is love. Also included in his theory of love is the concept of rationality. Fairly surprisingly, for Suhrawardi love in the mystical dimension goes to the heart of rationality. The guiding idea is that the hero of Suhrawardi’s allegorical treatises is a wayfarer who loves God, looking for the right way to the Divine. This love is to be some sort of spiritual emotion rather than a passionate love. Our claim would be proved by analyzing Suhrawardi’s fictions, decoding the allegories. On his way to God, the wayfarer may become waylaid by his own perceptions, i.e., five internal and five external senses. The wayfarer, however, must overcome these senses, that is, he should not be overwhelmed by his perceptions. These ten senses are symbolized in “On the Reality of Love” by five chambers and five gates, in “Treatise on Towers” by ten towers, in “A Tale of Occidental Exile” by ten graves, in “The Simurgh’s Shrill Cry” by ten flyers, and in “The Red Intellect” by ten wardens. And finally, the wayfarer conquers all of them.
DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00013.
A New Critical Notice of Robin Cook’s Medical Thriller ‘Coma’
Full text linkThis paper is an exploration of the medical thriller Coma often categorized as popular fiction through a grotesque lens. This study enables to delineate how grotesquery sustains and reinforces the relevance of fiction. Giving space to anxious imaginations about medicine and technology, these texts cannot be dismissed altogether as ‘wrong sort of fiction’ as suggested by Catherine Belling in her critique of Coma. Therefore, the paper argues that the creative audacity of grotesque equips it doubly as a reflection of an anxious society and also as a ‘boundary creature’ as opined by Frances S Connelly. Using the idea of grotesque as hybrid creature, that is as one entity which has several incompatible components jumbled together to construe meaning and sense, its emotional effects on the readers are justified. This paper takes Coma as an instance of medical thrillers and examines the various ways grotesque is embedded in the narrative. The paper concludes by suggesting the genre by extension is grotesque. Thus medical thriller becomes a space for new imaginations and inclusivity that can bring possible progress to humanity while still keeping a control over human experimentation ethics that powerful institutions may or may not employ. The idea that pervades this study is that grotesquery is employed as a template to translate meanings and interpretations of medical thrillers. Through multiple responses as elicited by the grotesque, these thrillers engage with readers differently and hence produce varied responses. This enables us to project the importance and usefulness of the medical thriller genre.
DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00012.
Public-Private Partnership in School Education in India: An Analysis
Full text linkIn India, Public-Private Partnership (PPP) practice has been adopted in all the major sectors, i.e., social and commercial infrastructure, energy, communication, transport and water sanitation. It is no longer confined to the development of roads, airports and railways and so on but has also been expanded to the human development sectors particularly education and health. In the educational sector, it is a method of delivering quality educational services through the government with the greater involvement of the private sector including non-governmental organisations, business corporations and communities in the finance and management of services. The expansion of PPP Model in education sector will be a step forward towards the achievement of improved learning outcomes. Since the implementation of Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE), Act 2009 in India which provides for free and compulsory education to every child till the completion of elementary education, the quality of education has been decreased. Though, the Act was enacted to provide equitable education of good quality but teaching and learning have fallen further. This paper presents the concept of Public-Private Partnership and also evaluates its progress in school education in India.
DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00020.
Sarah Kane’s Blasted Through A Psychoanalytic Lens
Full text linkPsychoanalytic concepts which pervade our daily lives help us better understand human behaviors depicted, for instance, in literary texts; in fact, a psychological approach is an excellent tool for critical analysis and for solving a work’s thematic and symbolic mysteries. Sarah Kane\u27s Blasted, a good deal of the narrative progression deals with Ian and Cate’s psychological behavior and their romantic relationship which has important implications for psychoanalytic criticism. The characters’ behavior, narrative events, and images could be explained in terms of psychoanalytic concepts and different unconscious motives consisting of repressed wounds, fears, unresolved conflicts and guilty desires that operate in the main characters throughout this play. Applying Lacan and Freud’s psychoanalytic techniques and psychological theories one can arrive at an interpretation of the play and of the motives behind the individual behavior.
DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00007.
On the Intractable ontology of Species
Full text link‘Species’ is a tricky, but unavoidable term which makes biologists disagree with each other in their attempts to define it. The disagreement actually stems from the intractable ontological nature of species. Not only biologists but also philosophers are engaged in the endeavour to understand species. The former attempt to define species while the latter try to determine its ontology. As a result, antinomies such as monism/pluralism or realism/antirealism come into the picture. Our sense of ‘intractability’ grows along with the increasing debate between these antinomies. The present paper sketches out the intractable nature of species through a historical account of the species problem. Through this paper, we have tried to decipher a ‘common thread’ that, perhaps, binds all our ideas of species together. This has been arrived at after noticing that when we confront the term species we all know what it refers to but we are confused when it comes to answering the question ‘what it means’.
DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2017.00020.
What\u27s Art Got to Do with Happiness in Farabian Utopia
No full textFarabi has put the artists on the second level of his utopia seeing them as ‘the carrier of the task of religion’. The first level, of course, belongs to God’s prophet and his successors. This might seem, at first, as some sort of religious mumbo-jumbo but with some speculation on the age Farabi was living in, one could see that it is a rarity for artists to be such noteworthy entities in a philosopher’s utopia. This philosopher, of course, is deeply influenced by Greek philosophy, as it was the case for Islamic philosophy before Abu-Hamid Al-Ghazali shattered it into pieces. The level of importance that Farabi imagines for the artists is hardly traceable in Greek philosophy or any other philosophy before him. This importance, however, comes at a price. The artist has a task like that of the prophets. In the prophet’s case, the angel of revelation bestows the rational concepts to his rational faculty and then to his imaginative faculty. The majority of people are not able to obtain rational happiness through reasoning because they are not used to implement their rational faculty. So the prophet, who is well aware of the truth, conveys the truth to peoples’ imagination through allegories and examples. The artist too, in Farabi’s eyes, is a person who can transfer rational happiness to the minds of the masses through sensible and imaginative forms.
DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2018.00009.
Dis/Locating Power and Knowledge in Media Discourse
Full text linkThe construction of ‘otherness’ in media discourse is meant to legitimize and naturalize the reproduction of the ideology of opposition that widens the gap between the identification of “Self” and “Other”. This identification relies mostly on knowledge and its relation to power that could be detected in discourses where voices interact with one another to assert a fixed hegemonic conception of the Self in contrast to the Other. In this sense, the production of knowledge in media discourse remains subject to the interference of different authoritative institutions that represent the position of power through instilling and presenting the ideology of this regime as the taken-for-granted truth. Being annexed to power, truth is perceived as having the quality of credibility that lends credence to its producers’ claim. What strengthens and bridges more effectively the power and knowledge relation is the fact that these discourses are institutionalized by authoritative systems. This fact engenders the possibility that the intellectuals themselves are institutionalized and that their role in societies is restricted. This fact calls for the urgent need of giving space for the subaltern to speak for themselves and deconstruct the ideologies that are produced by the dominant groups.
DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2017.00017.
Time in the ontology of Cornelius Castoriadis
Full text linkWe can locate the problematic of time within three philosophical questions, which respectively designate three central areas of philosophical reflection and contemplation.
These are:
1) The ontological question, i.e. \u27what is being?\u27
2) The epistemological question, i.e. \u27what can we know with certainty?\u27
3) The existential question, i.e. \u27what is the meaning of existence?\u27
These three questions, which are philosophical, but also scientific and political, as they underline the political and moral question of truth and justice, arising from the phenomenon of time, the irreversible constant flow of phenomena that undermines every claim to absolute knowledge. The purpose of this essay is to illuminate the importance of time for philosophical thought and, more generally, for human social and psychical life, in the context of the ontology of Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis, who asserted that “being is time – and not in the horizon of time”, correlated history to society and being to temporality within the social-historical stratum, the ontological plane created by human existence, where “existence is signification”. Time is interpreted as the creation and destruction of forms in a magmatic, layered with a non-regular stratification, reality, where the social-historical manifests as the creation of collective human activity, in the manner of social imaginary significations. This notion of temporality is accompanied by a profound criticism of traditional rationalistic philosophy, to which Castoriadis assigns the name ‘ensemblistic/identitary’, that highlights the necessity of a new, magmatic ontology, based on the primacy of time.
DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2017.00023.
Conceptualization of Scientart: The interaction between the Worlds of Science and Art
Full text linkScientart might be defined as an interaction between the worlds of art and science. Three types of these interactions might be considered: artistically-inclined scientific activities, science-minded artistic activities, and intertwined artistic and scientific activities.
In this conceptualization different disciplines such as physics, metaphysics, economics, and medicine could be counted as science. Furthermore, we consider literature as art.
The artistically-inclined science can be seen in scientists leading an art program, such as what happened in the artists\u27 program to document NASA missions. Science-minded art could be regarded in the artworks include scientific themes. These artworks might be inspired by science or inspire scientists.
An instant of intertwined artistic and scientific activities could be seen in the occult treatises describe philosophical subjects and rational issues in fictions.
DOI: 10.5958/2347-6869.2017.00018.