Kant and Kant

In Defeat, Let Us Reclaim Our Selves - Tehelka:: Free. Fair. Fearless - Jan 12, 2008 - TRIDIP SUHRUD

My emotional and intellectual core was built in and through Gujarati. It was the language of home and also of school and college. Gijubhai Badheka, Kakasaheb Kalelkar and Jhaverchand Meghani filled my childhood. Govardhanram Tripathi’s Sarasvatichandra was my sole companion during the hot, dusty afternoons of my adolescence. And there was KM Munshi too. I read his racy prose breathlessly. His trilogy excited the imagination, delighted the heart. But, then as now, I remained partial to the world of love, valour and sacrifice that Meghani created. His characters loved deeply, waited till the end of time and fought righteous battles to the death. Swami Anand, Kakasaheb, Prabhudas Gandhi, KG Mashruwala and Ramanlal V. Desai opened for me the world of Gandhi. 

Poet Sundaram brought to us the sublime beauty of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother of Pondicherry through the journal Dakshina. Umashankar Joshi was our poet laureate. Nagindas Parekh made not only Tagore and Bankim available in Gujarati, but also the Bible, which sounds more true to me in Gujarati even today. Later, under the watchful eye of Achyut Yagnik and Ashis Nandy, I entered the 19th-century world of Narmad, Karsandas Mulji and Manibhai Nabhubhai more academically but without the joy of doing so diminished in any way.

My understanding of Gujarati society as also its critique was framed by Gujarati writing. I understood the nature of intense spiritual longing through the painful conversion to Christianity by my favourite Gujarati poet Manishankar Bhatt, “Kant”.

Larval Subjects . - Beauty - Increasingly, as I turn to questions of ethics, I find myself wondering about things we could describe as “absolute values”. These are things we esteem an...

Footnotes 2 Plato - Towards an Aesthetic Ontology: Beauty, Sublimity, and Infinity - “Two things fill the mind with ever-renewing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind is drawn to think of them: the starry heavens a...

Networkologies - What is Philosophy? A Networkological Spin On the Age Old Question “Why”?- What is philosophy, and why should we care? Many people tend to think of philosophy as something done by professors or experts, such that it’s just out of ...

Integral Musings | Towards a Holistic Vision - The Aesthetic Alchemy – M.S. Srinivasan - The preoccupation with universal beauty even in its aesthetic forms has an intense power for refining and subtilising the nature, and at its highest it is ... at 2:58 PM

Sri Aurobindo Studies - The Divine Force Transforms the Working of Nature - At a certain stage, the Witness consciousness goes beyond the status of being solely a witness, moves beyond the role of giver of the sanction of Nature’s ...

The Founding of Aesthetics in the German Enlightenment: The Art of Invention and the I... by Dr Stefanie Buchenau http://t.co/fjJ6svBgUC