In these days of Covid-19, I keep getting WhatsApp forwards advising me to keep my mind busy by thinking and reflecting about the situation...
In these days of Covid-19, I keep getting WhatsApp forwards advising me to keep my mind busy by thinking and reflecting about the situation we’re in so that I can keep myself from sliding into depression. Following this advice, I realised that reflection is always an inward and mostly a private journey but that thoughts can be shared. So, in these days of frozen life but active hatred, I started conceptualising an article about our fundamental rights and whether they are indeed guaranteed to allow me to insulate myself from the potent hatred around us.
Endless discussions at home, on the phone and in the print and electronic media have convinced me that most of us neither remember our Constitution or our fundamental rights and obligations nor understand their importance in our everyday life. They are like our relatives. You think you know them but in fact you don’t. You have no idea about their insecurities, passions, ambitions or intimacies. Even our parents, siblings, our children are what we make them out to be: our images, our stereotypes, our construction of what we believe them to be. So, most communication, unfortunately, is not so much about them but smugly about ourselves.
At the outset,...
