Making Sense for the first time
As simple as the site title, Making Sense, may seem, a lot of (probably unnecessary) thought went into choosing it. A little background: I started my first blog when I was 18 and about to leave for college. I named it Blogging Out Loud — an obvious and simple play on the expression ‘thinking out loud’. It was an apt name for what I was doing then- writing, infrequently (and inebriatedly), a bunch of minimally edited and frivolous blank verse, and stream of consciousness prose; trying, ostensibly, to experiment with writing styles and narrative voices to figure out what worked for me. A name like that would be juvenile and unserious for the new project I was, for quite some time, planning to undertake — a well-researched, and borderline academic, blog.
The name had to be broad — not only because I have a varied set of interests that includes politics, society, culture and international relations, but also because I wasn’t quite certain what I was actually going to write about. It is more the latter if I’m being perfectly honest. Another challenge was to not chose a name that was overly pretentious (or French) — say, Understanding Right-Wing Ressentiment. I have to frequently remind myself that needless sophisticate posturing helps neither the subject matter nor my writing style.
Why ‘Making Sense’?
The idea came to me in one of the only two places where ideas just come to you¹ — the shower. I would title my blog ‘Making Sense’. It could be a place where I make sense of contemporary political and cultural phenomena, such as the factors behind the rise of Hindutva Nationalism and the growing irrelevance of opposition parties, or the growing anti-intellectualism in Indian life that influences not just the news media but also popular entertainment.
It could also be a place where I look into how sense is made, where I deconstruct the discourses that determine what constitutes “good sense”, and identify the power structures that underpin them. This could include “common sense” notions that find near consensus in India, like the idea that reservations may be good in theory but they don’t actually benefit the people who really need them², or that the problem of rape can by solved through a higher deterrent, specifically capital punishment. Now, I must confess that I am not an expert on these subjects. Though I have more than a passing interest in political theory, I have little in the way of formal qualification in the field. So, my process would be to do copious amounts of research and make sense of contemporary issues for my own self, before I can package it into blog form for my (for now) imaginary audience.
My penchant for research, and my undiagnosed ADHD, will virtually guarantee that my projects will be a sprawling mess in the beginning, a mess that would need to be whittled down to a coherent blog. A modest (and perhaps more realistic) goal, as I start out, would be just to make some sense. I plan to write a blog post per week and I hope my imaginary audience will hold me to it.
[1]: The other place, of course, is in a dream, which is, incidentally, where the melody for Yesterday first came to Sir Paul McCartney.
[2]: It is implicit that need is determined solely by one’s economic class, ignoring all the effects of social capital. A common lament I have heard is “No one cares about the garib Brahmin”. Heeding this lament, the Parliament passed the 103rd Constitutional Amendment Act, 2019, extending reservations to Economically Weaker Sections.
