The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Thursday 30 July 2015

LATE NIGHT SUPREME COURT HEARING SHOULD BE SEEN IN THIS CONTEXT

India may mean many things to many but one thing is common - it has a robustly functional democracy - a 2:30 AM hearing on Yakub Memon in the Supreme Court shows it.

Yes, Yakub Memon's case is not going to be a beginning to undo the chasm and malaise that beset Indian democracy.

It is not going to address the problem of 'legal remedy getting costlier' and therefore being not available to the majority of the population.

India's top court, in an unprecedented move, in a first, opened after midnight to hear someone who was going to die in next few hours after being given death sentence.

And the development is indeed a positive factors, is an indicator of how strong are democratic values - irrespective of the reasons working behind it.

The point is - India's apex court worked on it - even after rejecting Yakub Memon's last legal options just few hours earlier.

Yes, India's democracy is 'robustly functional' because India is the world largest democracy and has been so for nearly 70 years in spite of multitudes of problems working overtime to drag it backward. Its future is rightly expected to keep positive promises to work for.

In fact, India is the only democracy in the world where large population groups of different religions coexist under a common Constructional administration. Yes, religion does give them some specific leverages but that is mostly individual in nature and doesn't intervene with the nation's governance.

Yes, it is daydreaming to expect that this unprecedented late night/early morning hearing by the Supreme Court is going to set a trend where people with such 'extreme grievance conditions' will be able to knock the apex court at any hour of the day.

Majority will simply not get the coordinates required - lawyers and round the clock coverage  - that Yakub Memon got and that made it possible - something that made the apex court take cognizance of a late night plea to conduct a hearing.

Debates like 'death penalty has no place in a civilized world' have their own validity but we need to be equally sensitive to the issue that it is an endless debate between 'being right' in abolishing death penalty and 'being justified' in demanding harshest punishment to the perpetrators (including capital punishment).

And our democracy gives space to both, or even to them who are still not clear what is their viewpoint.

And the late night hearing by the Supreme Court on plea of Yakub Memon's lawyers and by a battery of lawyers working to abolish the death penalty from Indian penal system should be seen in this context.

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/