Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Dear Manjula,

Let me congratulate you on your report which you submitted recently on the Mangalore molestation case.

Your report was a landmark report in many ways. Let me tell you how.

Your report reconfirmed the absolute lack of faith of a common citizen in our system. It reconfirmed the fact that till there are people like you in position of power, our country will rapidly adopt the ideologies of the Taliban and celebrate it too. It reconfirmed the fact that you are a mere puppet dancing to appease your political masters.

The fact that you report did an unbelievable magic trick by making the molesters from HJV vanish from the scene of crime and put the blame squarely on the boys in the party does not come as a surprise. We were expecting nothing more than a moral preaching and cultural preservation bullshit but you took the episode to…

It is well known among philosophers that Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party and that this is an event that has to be taken into account in any interpretation of his work. For some people as Richard Polt points out in his excellent book on Heidegger, this means that Heidegger’s thought need not be bothered with. As he notes, this is a case of “bad man = bad philosopher” (attributed to Gilbert Ryle). For others, the opposite might be true; that Heidegger’s membership and active involvement needs to be nuanced, put in context, or perhaps divorced from the work.

A similar although lesser known case exists in geography around the person of Walter Christaller. A new and I believe, highly significant paper on Christaller is forthcoming from the Annals of the AAG by my colleagues Trevor Barnes and Claudio Minca. The paper is about the links between spatial theory and…