Ignorance is Bliss

This is the state from where Amartya Sen hails from. The governor of this state is the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. This was also the state where 22 poor peasants and farmers, including women and children were killed in police firing.

The farmers were protesting the forced land acquisition by the state-government to build a special economic zone (SEZ) for the chemical industry. They did not want to sell their lands, and the CPM government (with a strong Marxist ideology!) was not willing to listen.

I listned to a talk on non-violence on Wednesday, by three prominent experts in the field. Of course, Gandhi came up in the discussion. I went back home and started reading a book by Anthropologist and Doctor, Paul Farmer, titled Pathologies of Power. Farmer talks about structural violence against the poor, and also talks about how governments and people in power suppress ‘rebels’, who are usually people demanding their social and economic rights. Just like the poor in Nandigram. And yes, Amartya Sen wrote the foreword to this book. We discussed it in my class, on Thursday.

On Friday, I watched this video.

I feel my graduate program is too practical. I really don’t want it to be this realistic. I really believe Ignorance is Bliss.