The larger issue:

 

The issues plaguing India today are.
1. Poverty
2. Casteism
3. Oppression of women
4. Dismal healthcare system
5. Dismal education system
6. Inept and corrupt political system

There are other equally important issues, however, let us consider the above problems and how they contribute to a vicious cycle of oppression, poverty and societal failure.

This is our legacy, and the vicious cycle is perpetuated by the anti-poor, and pro rich economic policies like tax incentives, lower interest rates to corporate sector and waiving of corporate debt on one hand and reducing amount for education, primary healthcare on the other.

The total bail out cost for this current year stands at 87 Billion Dollars, a whooping 4.4% of GDP of India, where as the budgetary allocation for healthcare stands at 0.25% of GDP.

The tax forgone from corporate houses this year stands at 62000 crore rupees, when the total allocation for education is not even half of that.

These are the economic policies that are truly anti national and anti-dalit, anti-poor.

They want to open up public education, healthcare and agriculture to WTO regulations and want to consider these as salable services.

What this means is, education will no longer be affordable for economically poorer sections of the society, the nightmare in this hellish situation is this, 90% of the economically oppressed and marginalised people belong to SC/ST communities.

Out of pocket spending by the poor on healthcare (more than 80% of healthcare is already privitised in India), is the leading cause of poverty and perpetuation of the poverty as per national statistics.

Now, about the social evils like oppression of women, dalits, and imposition of one idea of nation, culture, history, religion.

This effort by the right wing fundamentalists has been in place from even before the political independence of India.

The RSS has been re writing the history to project all muslim rulers are oppressive and have made great inroads in villages, educational institutes across the country. RSS (Hindu mahasabha) sided with the British during the freedom struggle, since it is shameful now, they are rewriting the history.

They killed Gandhi because Gandhi was fighting these very same people for dalits and oppressed castes.

The ugly untouchability is still very much in practice all over the country.

But the Brahmanical imperialists want caste system to continue because they don’t want dalits to get education, economic freedom, sexual freedom, they want uneducated slaves to work for them and make them rich.

So to achieve this, they have to make sure every voice of reason, every voice of the oppressed is shut down.

They can achieve this only when the universities that always have stood for the rights of the oppressed, marginalised and downtrodden, and have fought against the state oppression, to be defamed, vilified and finally shut down.

The effort against the universities has been a long one, and now since they are in power, they are taking the next step, actually try and shut them down.

This is the real issue behind what happened in JNU, HCU, FTII, IIT Madras, Lucknow Univerisity, Jadhavpur University, BHU, Ambedkar University.

We can not de-link what has been going on at other universities from JNU.

You may have other opinions, but after very careful study of events, the modus operandi of RSS over the years, it is very evident to me that I am not mistaken.

The RSS and BJP really want to end education of poor people and dalits, they truly want to make sure no voices of dissent are heard.

The roots and need for freedom of speech

This is an attempt to bring into discussions, currently underway, the arguments hitherto not considered or not voiced in the open because there is a general sense of fear of offending the masses, my aim is to discuss those issues that need better elucidation and to bring back the discussion to the basic premises when one is engaged in discussion/debate concerning freedom of speech and expression, and freedom of thought and conscience.

There have been attempts made by lawyers and judiciary to address this issue, progress has been made, albeit slowly and painfully, I am not discounting this fact.
With regards to freedom of thought and speech one must begin the discussion with the sound understanding of the human history, evolution, our place in the cosmos.
The fundamental flaw in understanding freedom is a failure to acknowledge where we come from and how we come about. The discussion always starts without taking into account the natural process of birth, and evolutionary history.
To illustrate my point, I would like to quote Professor Richard Dawkins from “Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder”. “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.” I would highly recommend you to watch this beautiful 4-minute video of the same on Youtube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=B94EtOOaoOM
Contemplate this sentence for a few days to understand the gravity of the matter and the extremely unlikely fact of our lives, now that we are here, let us for a moment reflect on that fact, did we choose to be born, importantly, did we choose to be born in a particular geography, di we choose who our parents should be, did we choose what language our mothers and fathers spoke? The simple answer to all these questions is a resounding no.
Now let us consider the history and evolution briefly, human beings have been around since 2,00,000 years in this planet, for much of our existence we did not have a coherent language and we did not have the know how to record what we experienced, the process of civilization is predicated on scientific breakthroughs of one kind or the other, humanity made great leaps because of cooking their food, cooked food meant we had to spend less energy in digesting what we ate that resulted in a surplus of energy which was utilised by the brains for thinking, this is why we are intelligent. The next ground-breaking advances were primarily because of agriculture, domestication, and then group formations, the social structures that slowly emerged had a powerful evolutionary advantage in the form of safety of young, distribution of labour, strengthening of altruism, also increased in group – out group distinction and rivalry among different groups. Somewhere along the line we also stupidly started believing in supernatural entities because we could not explain thunder, flowing water, volcanos, rain, lightening etc., This however is a significant step because that was the first attempt by human beings at understanding the surrounding which we found ourselves in.
Because of the advantage large groups provided, we gradually built civilisations and developed scripts for our languages, the advent of the scripts meant an explosion of transmission of ideas from one generation to the next and also from one civilisation to the other. Large civilisations also brought in the necessity to form social structures and need for keeping, the ones that took unfair advantage of the society, in check, so that society as a whole can be peaceful and prosper.
That is where we must start our question of individual, because till this point, individual had no restrictions, it is because of the social structures that we imposed restrictions on some of our freedoms for greater good, the people make a compromise with their freedoms so as to be happy and lead a life of considerable comfort afforded by being a part of the society.
However, with such social structure, the inherent problem of power vested by the people in few individuals to safeguard the society at large started to erode those freedoms not forgone too, the freedom of speech is one such freedom which was never willingly compromised by the individuals but the rulers gradually eroded that and we have the recorded history as a testament to the atrocities committed because of this erosion.
With this background, one must understand the importance of freedom of speech as a guardian against fascism, oligarchy, and dictatorship.
We had no choice in where we were born, nor did we choose our parents or the language, so it becomes imperative to question our loyalties to narrowly defined notions of states and nations particularly blind following of the people who espouse those narrow definitions of nations, language, ideology etc., At the same time, since we find ourselves in a social structure that should enable us to grow to our full potential but fails miserably primarily because of the greed and fascistic thugs that try to erode our freedoms, we must constantly make efforts to better the society we live in, that is our social and moral responsibility.
Recall the opening lines of “Unweaving the Rainbow”, this is the only chance we get to live a life, we must live a meaningful life, a considered life, a person who is not reflective is no better than a tree that stands for a thousand years without much change.
It is you and me in our ordinariness that need to fight the forces that try to divide us, it is our responsibility to bear the burden of protecting freedom of speech and expression against all those that try to take it away from us. Without that fundamental freedom, our societies will not be conducive to humanity.
So it is up to you and me to fight the current attack by the BJP/RSS and Narendra Modi and his thugs.

Rise India and fight for your the most basic and fundamental right, the right to be able to think, the right to be able to speak without the fear of oppression and persecution.

I am Dr Yogesh D, currently a postgraduate in Anatomy, I studied medicine to help the society, and eventually realised the larger social evils that are at the root of the misery of millions, hence decided to pursue a field where I can educate many young people so that the roots of misery, particularly religion and superstition can be eradicated slowly but permanently.  I also intend to pursue a PhD in genetics and neurosciences so that I can do research that will help us understand ourselves better.

Banchod India

Bastards hoodwinked the gullible masses of India in the name of development..

The masses didn’t ask, development for who?

No sir, we are happy to be led by religious bigots and extremists, knowingly or unknowingly, because,

We don’t give a fuck about women in our country, we love to treat them as sex slaves and baby breeding machines, but we love to hear the word development.

We are so fucking idiotic that we will believe any crap that is uttered by our esteemed Prime Minister, because we are a bunch of fools who worship rocks and dicks and love to hear the word development.

We so fucking love to bask in the non-existent past glories and will believe that mythology is history, we don’t want to be shown the reality, we call ourselves the most richly cultured people on the face of the earth and will tell the women that get raped that it was their fault… because, we sir, are Indians, we love hearing the word development.

We will riot and burn someone else’s property because we are offended by books and movies and words and jokes… oh don’t you get it, we are fucking offended by every damned thing on earth. But, we like to tell the world that we are a country of great people and history and we love peace and we are also very proud to be a very tolerant society… but, hey don’t you dare write a book that exposes us, and don’t you dare use expletives, those words make us think of sex because we don’t know that expletives have nothing to do with having sex… it’s not that we don’t fuck, oh, we fuck all right.. we do that with unwilling strangers, we do it in groups and make videos of them and circulate them as mms, because we love watching someone getting raped… wait wait.. but we are a very cultured people and our country has rich heritage and we idolise Rama. Oh yes, we love to vote for people who give lengthy speeches about development.

Some of us call ourselves liberals, moderates, at times even non religious… who gives a shit what those words even mean… but we will jump in, join the mob in protest against corruption, you see, we are a democratic country.. because we love to hear the words development and anti-corruption.

We sir, are a nation of a billion morons, we ban books, we ban art, we ban clothes, we ban foods, we ban words, we ban love, because sir, we are a banchod nation.

We love to hear the word development, because we are the uneducated degree holder middle class masses of India who will pay all our savings to hear criminals tell us what colour stone I have to wear on which finger on which day and which coloured dress I should match up with that ring so that my daughter doesn’t get raped like that poor girl in the bus in Delhi… But.. why was she out with a male friend at 10 pm in the night? And she should have some shame, if she wears skimpy clothes, the men will only get aroused and they will attack… bastards… they should be castrated and should be hanged. But girls should not go out in the night… what is the need. Oh, we love lighting candles too..

Consciousness

 

Human brain

 

Consciousness is a loosely defined or ill defined term in most instances. Here I would like to make my contribution to that confusion.

 

In almost all cases, when we try to define consciousness, what we inadvertently do is to think only about the human beings and their capacity for consciousness. Till date most leading philosophers and biologists have mostly failed to apply that concept to organisms other than primates at the most.

 

For the purpose of encompassing the experiences of all living organisms I would define consciousness as “The awareness of any organism to its surroundings”. This definition does not include the quantitative measure of consciousness and the levels of consciousness in any particular species.

 

What use does this definition have? By defining this way, I would like to point out the basic physiologic processes of consciousness in any species and this will in turn lead to applying the concept not only to beings with a brain but to all living organisms and cells.

 

I will give you a few examples to illustrate my point. Take for example a bacterium, it is a prokaryotic single celled organism which, can we consider this as capable of having any consciousness? Not if you define consciousness as a product of neurons.

 

Now let us consider what this individual bacterium does and how it interacts with its surroundings. A bacterium needs to feed, so it needs to correctly identify which is food and which is not, it needs to identify what is there in its’ surroundings in order to survive and replicate, so how does it achieve this?

The answer to that is in the multitude of chemical interactions that occur on the surface of the bacterial cell wall as well as inside this bacteria. Bacteria have numerous cell surface proteins and other molecules which help the bacteria in identifying different types of other molecules, including other bacteria and viruses and even many eukaryotic cells which it comes in contact with, thus leading to chnages inside this single celled organism either to gulp in the molecule, or to replicate, or to secrete toxins and so on.

 

Now, the bacteria is reacting to the external factors in its surroundings, even though its capacity to identify the other molecules is limited by the space and it being a single celled organism, but it still does interact with a variety of other molecules, all that is happening inside and on the cell surface of this bacterium is plain chemical interactions, it does not think as we do, but it does not need to do the complex thinking because it is a simple single celled organism, on the other hand complex, multicellular organisms need better capabilities than that because of the difference in supplying the required nutrition to the cells which are arranged in differing variations. The cells in us differentiate during embryo genesis to form particular types of cells with set functions. The work of supplying nutrition and other things are taken care by a different type of cells.

 

Even in multicellular organisms, each individual cell is aware of its’ surroundings through intercellular and many other types of interactions such as hormonal, neuronal interactions. They are aware of their surroundings with the help of same molecules that help the bacteria, in some cases a slightly different type of molecule with differing modes of working , this can also be called as awareness of the cell. As demonstrated in the case of cancers, where in the cells lose these particular molecules or their functions due to mutations.

 

Consciousness applies to single cells and it applies to multicellular organisms with brains such as humans, but the capacity varies based on the requirements.

 

We humans have highly evolved brains, which is a collection of neurons which have a particular function. That is cognition, memory, homeostasis, language, integration of sensory inputs and so on, this evolution has made it necessary for human beings to develop a process of thinking to survive and adapt efficiently to varying environments. This also gives us the capacity to think abstract things such as mathematics, cosmology and the very process of evolution that lead to such beings, capable of reflection and theorization.

 

A human being develops from two half cells which unite to become one cell and go on multiplying and differentiating to finally produce a complete organism, and throughout this process and till the time we die, all that happens in our bodies is chemical interactions and reactions to different stimuli.

 

Each species has a different capacity for consciousness dependent on the constitution of the body, be it unicellular or multicellular, there is no need for mystifying the concept of consciousness for all practical purposes, be it philosophical or medical.