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Quote by Abhijit Naskar

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Martyr Meets World: To Solve The Hard Problem of Inhumanity

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Abhijit Naskar

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“That people choose friendships and alliances based on political, religious, moral convictions; instead of basing on a shared sense of humour and a shared sense of compassion, is testament to how backwards and senile we are as a collective society. Politics, religion, and morals, are naturally divisive because they are built on specific background types. A sense of humour and compassion: these are universal, and people from all backgrounds can be united by these. People are actively looking into the world for reasons to see what they believe to be wrong in others, and huddling together in their small groups; rather than actively looking to find what they can laugh at together. Or what they can help, together.”

“Doing God's work and doing God's propaganda are two different things. And the world has enough propaganda as it is - what the world needs is God's work - what this world needs is service - service not to the idea of God, but to the helpless and destitute - service to those who have nowhere to turn to. This, my friend, is called practical divinity.”

“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”