My Too (Many) Cents

(done as part of literature and the ethics of telling a story term paper 2) Introduction "Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor." — Alexis Carrel The word ethics derives from the ancient Greek word ἦθος (êthos) which originally meant something close to "character", "custom" or "habit". In this term paper we first show how ethics is a continuous process, a dialogue between interacting individuals and communities. Utilising this understanding, we critically analyse the movie Ek Ruka Hua Faisla and Atin Bandyopadhyay's Kafir as media pieces that exhibit this "practice" of ethics in varying circumstances, viz. the community and justice for Ek Ruka Hua Faisla , and the individual and religion for Kafir . This paper is organized to shape this idea of ethics and trace its genealogy in the first section, and then analyse some specific aspects of the given works and how they interact with t...

Ajay Navaria's Unclaimed Terrain is a harrowing account of the juxtaposition of financial mobility and social stratification. But I'll probably analyse that in a term paper sometime soon. Today, I want to talk about the conversation I had with my ethics professor after the class. There's a prisoner dilemma at play when you are part of the hegemonic class in a social structure. How do I trust those pitted against me to not misuse the power they wrest? I suppose it is emblematic of understanding your own apathy.  As a political being, there is a dilemma at play in pledging your solidarity to a political movement. What if the consequences roll out of your hands? Is it precisely your demands that it's trying to meet? What is the cosine similarity between what you want and what the movement wants?  There are of course a substantial number of people in any movement who want the ruckus and the chaos. They thrive in the rioting, because there is no existential depth to their gr...

This was done as part of a term paper asking me to differentiate and make claims about the specific differences between the given holocaust media we engaged with in class. Introduction To understand how these stories are different, the method I seek to utilize is to generalize how any two stories may be differentiated and then adapt that understanding to the specific particularities of the stories under consideration. In its most general form, any semantically coherent unit of utterances can be likened to a story; We choose to focus our intentionality on a specific subset of the infinity of qualia in Human Experience. In that choice of recounting an experience one way instead of the other, we are telling a story - how we as narrators and humans choose to define and communicate ourselves to others given that they can never understand the full particularity of our being. But this definition is too general, and it needs to be honed in further to actually be of substance. To demonstrate th...