Indian Sociology-Land

'Enlightnement is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere Aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!' - that is the motto of the enlightenment. - Immanuel Kant in 'What is the enlightenment'  Kant, who Rudolf  Steiner described as 'the guardian of the threshold', is not one among the philosophers of ancient thought, and reducing him to the same is a grievous error. While we might analyse a number of philosophers up to Descartes, and perhaps even Leibniz as corollaries for ancient wisdom, for a Nyaya-type or a Madhyamika-type philosopher, Kant, and all of Kant, and not just the COPR, are in my reading of modern times the last stand against the darkness of human thought.  But we have forgotten Ka...

  As Gautam Bhan documents, while the general notion of the word ‘sarkar’ which means ‘government’ but literally, according to Bhan’s work translates to ‘executive’ obfuscates the fact that people living in irregular colonies and ‘pavement-dwellers’ though officially part of the vision of Delhi's three Master Plans that have looked to acquire land for the construction of government owned housing, are marginalized repeatedly by Court judgements that evict them from settled or semi-settled sites of dwelling. Courts, according to Bhan, also produce, amongst residents of irregular colonies in Delhi, a drive to produce documentation to verify their ownership of land. He argues that such ‘irregularities’ do not lie outside the domain of planning, but are the products of planning. The Delhi Development Authority, charged with constructing government-owned housing, has never really catered to low-income housing, although this is a clearly marked part of repeated plans.  What happens t...