10 highlights
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The ‘top….’ charts and rating stars are now a well entrenched fetish. A fetish which has colonized your perceptions of who stands where and what is below or above what. So from the animate to the not-so-animate and inanimate. From personalities to institutions to commodities, you have the caste system ready for everything under the sun
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Before very briefly looking at the post industrial revolution narrative, it is relevant to remember the cultural milieu of renaissance in Western Europe which shaped the industrial revolution. Despite all its achievements, renaissance witnessed a very cosmetic progress in abandoning the narrative of hierarchy. The reverence for divinity and religious figures was replaced by adulation for superlatives.
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Clearly, in-spite of its spirit of liberal values, renaissance engaged with the narrative of superlatives and lacked the deeper humanist sympathy for the ordinary. The industrial revolution, which began in the eighteenth century, inherited this as it sought to make competitive ranking a way of selling the massive scale of commodities being produced.
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Ranking of institutions, which is an unfortunate practice borrowed from the west, has grown insidiously in recent years. The unfortunate precedent for this was set in 1997 by India Today, which published a ranking of coveted colleges in the country as its cover story.
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Indian media has adopted the ‘pecking order’ device for its own dumbing down agenda and possibly allied commercial interests.
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NDTV, has gone a step further and asked viewers to give their top 5 headlines for the evening time slot. The results are disastrous
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The question to be asked is: are they coveted institutions or you have made them coveted by ranking them?
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Another set of rankings, that the youth of the country are hooked to seeks to influence the pattern of movie viewership, and it comes in forms of stars.
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A more basic reason for aversion to superlatives is that nature does not deal in superlatives. At most nature guides us to recognize the good or beautiful but it does not tell us about the best or the most beautiful.
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Unlike the varna system, this caste system has traveled from the West to India, and from times that takes us back at least three centuries