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Eid thoughts...2017

The Holy month of Ramadaan is just ending and friends of Muslim faith will be celebrating their Eid tonight with much festivity. It is a beautiful festival that emphasises voluntary sharing of wealth and brotherhood, underlying values of equity and equality surface through human action during these festivals. 

Equity and equality that are embedded through ritualistic and religious practices which are also emphasized as ‘goals’ in the modern ‘development’ praxis that however doesn’t utilize or engage with religious idioms and expression in expressing the same. 

In India almost with all faith systems, the idea of sharing or establishing equity is practiced through community specific rules and deeply set into the identity of the community (emphasizing the local component) and the equality component is established as a pre-requisite for a spiritual life (individual discipline is emphasized here). Economies get contained through equity dialogue and Inequality contained through individual life. If we see, these are the delimiters in the life of the individual and collective that have been destroyed in the name of freedom of expression and rights which have stymied diverse ways of life and unified our ways of living and aspiring towards that of an unipolar consumerist life and its underlying philosophy of consumerism as a community culture and greed as an individual trait. 

We cannot address these through the same ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘rights’ approach and instead need to bring about other ways of knowing and being.

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