hyphenated twentysomething

Here's a great essay in Slate Magazine by Amartya Sen. This essay is from his new book: Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny. It an interesting essay commenting on the problem when one tries to evaluates someone's identity simply by their religion or from any singular point of view.

"The insistence, if only implicitly, on a choiceless singularity of human identity not only diminishes us all, it also makes the world much more flammable. The alternative to the divisiveness of one pre-eminent categorization is not any unreal claim that we are all much the same. Rather, the main hope of harmony in our troubled world lies in the plurality of our identities, which cut across each other and work against sharp divisions around one single hardened line of vehement division that allegedly cannot be resisted. Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when our differences are narrowed into one devised system of uniquely powerful categorization."

This goes well with the whole hyphenated (well in this case, multi-hyphenated) theme of the blog:)

Also, here's a great post (much better than this one) by blogger Jai Singh who discusses Sen's new book and has some very interesting observations on it.

posted by payal @ 1:21 PM