UjaLa la land

I do not endorse the 16th century Mira Bai but she is an interesting character I keep trying to understand from various dimensions, a responsibility that comes with borrowing her name. This article dissects her life from a clinical and psychological perspective, something that has never been done before! However, I am not the first one to use the word 'maniac' for Mira Bai, she had been called 'anoothi', 'banwari' and many other synonyms of maniac in her time too. Mira herself, in her poetries, accepts that she is mad in love of her lord. Today, she has acquired respect and status of almost a goddess for many and that makes her madness an ornament to her character. Does that make Mira like behavior acceptable in today's society? How would modern psychoanalysts diagnose someone's obsession for a fictional/mythical character which starts affecting their personal and social lives like it did for Mira Bai? The central theme of Mira's life is single minde...

Ujala (four months before Meera was born)  I must first address a practical question, "What's in a name?". Something Shakespeare's Juliet asks too, while declaring her love for the person wearing 'Montague' name and not her love for the name itself. She says that a name is just a name, a convention with no meaning behind it. Today names are used as homage, tribute; tools to weaponize history, rewrite stories, reinvent glory, respect heritage and give meaning to an otherwise culturally-neutral act. They are now symbols of resistance, an act of decolonization, claim of identity and emotional investments in things which are close to our hearts. Had Juliet, the naïve teenager, been alive and not killed herself tragically for Romeo, she would have certainly said, "Why so serious?!" to all this! Well, I agree, there is nothing in a name except the idea it reminds us of. Despite the aura and shadow of figures based on whom people would baptize themselves or...