why fear psychological treatment?

Why fear psychological treatment




“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high”






So begins one of the immortal songs of Rabindra Nath Tagore’s Gitanjali. He here entreated almighty for converting his country into a kind of utopia where first and foremost, fearlessness of mind from all shackles would be ensured.Human mind is the most complex organism ever contrived by the creator. It is mind by dint of which man has become the supreme dictator of the earth with all its magnitude of flora and fauna. But when this complex organism gets disordered and starts malfunctioning, it paves the way for individual disaster. Here comes the need of a psychologist or psychiatrist or psychotherapist to restabilise a person’s mental mechanism.






Though the emergence of psychology and psychotherapy is not a new phenomenon, but its need is acutely felt in the current era, thanks to the increasing rate of stress and distress on human mind. From the inception of life man now-a-days is burdened by the heavy load of education or to be precise is “nipped from the bud”. In the cut-throat competitive world where Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” is the only rule, a man has to undergo a lot of troubles and hardships in order to ensure a secure life. In the young years, the effect of love and infatuation also spells doom for many so-called betrayed lovers. Therefore we find the newspaper everyday abounding in news relating to youth suicide owing to failure in love, academic debacle or incapability to satisfy parents’ expectations. Apart from these, many neurosis or psychological problems are congenital. Autistic or differently able children owe their malaise to abnormal birth or other such conditions. Usage of stimulants (nicotine, cocaine), depressants (opium, heroin, hooch, alcohol) and hallucinogens (hemp, bhang, hashish) etc are also responsible for disturbing normal course of action of mind. Due to all these reasons we find many psychological disorders among people around us like hallucinations, delusions, anxieties, flashbacks, tremors, delirium, insomnia, somnambulism and forgetfulness.






To cure all such maladies psychotherapeutic treatment is required. But the most alarming thing is that people don’t take recourse to such treatments for variety of reasons. Despite the sophistication in the field of psychotherapy in the forms of “group therapy”, “creative therapy”, “psychodrama and “hypnotism” etc, people’s cold attitude towards it is indigestible.






First of all people’s indifference towards it is due to their ignorance. In a country like India, psychological treatment has never been at the forefront. People frequent dispensaries for their physical ailment but mental illness are often underestimated. What’s worse, some even don’t regard psychological diseases like insomnia, delirium, forgetfulness to be diseases at all. Parents turn a deaf ear to their offspring’s incompatibilty in learning blithely unaware of the existence of Dyslexia (dread of letters) as a prominent factor among Asian students. So the unawareness of people aggravates the problem as the old adage runs “a spark neglected burns the house”






Apart from ignorance many rumors also vitiate the notion of psychotherapy. People in general believe that to be treated by psychiatrist validates one’s lunacy. So they show meretricious sound health while feeling the pangs of the diseases. This double dealing takes the better of the persons and ultimately adds more frustration to the existing sum. Some also avoid such treatment in fear of revealing their confidential personal details in front of a stranger. This tendency is to be found among grown ups as well as college students. They try to remain stoical but human endurance has a limit.






The expense of such treatment also aggrandizes people’s procrastination for it. Unlike physical ailments, the symptoms of these problems are hard to trace and elusive. So the treatment is also difficult for doctor which makes the price a little higher. Common people, who access its service, feel as if they waste their hard-earned money on some futile optimistic doctrines and genial talks of the psychologist. They feel this kind of oral interaction is not worth their money without conjecturing the difference it could bring.






In order to liquidate the reluctance among people, awareness is to be created. Print media and electronic media should highlight the pros and cons of psychotherapy. People should be made aware through books in the education system at an early age.






All the cobwebs of misconceptions are to be cleared first. People attending mental doctors should not be treated as mad or insane. The process should not be looked as a medical treatment at all. It must be made popular as counseling, assuring people of their mental well-being.






If middle class people can’t go to psychiatrist’s clinic, clinic has to come to them. Our government should take effort to curb the price of such treatment. Its a good news that the spa culture is gaining ground in India: now in metropolis like Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata etc. Spas can also be regarded as part of psychotherapy which provides their client with serene atmosphere with soft music in sublunary candle light.


But to our utter misfortune these spas are beyond the reach of common mass. They should suit the purse of common mass in order to be popular.






People should also be made aware of the ill effects of neglecting psychotherapy despite ill mental health. In fear of revealing personal matters, they are causing more threat to their mental equilibrium. This fact is to be indoctrinated to them. They should be cited examples of famous men falling victim to psychological stress. Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway succumbed to suicide due to bipolar disorder, Sylvia Plath’s suicidal tendency is quite well known and we have obvious reasons to assume that world literature would have gained more had she taken recourse to any psychological treatment. Anne sexton, a famous American poet, was also a victim of the same problem. Their misfortunes are to be shown to public to acquaint them with the destructive power of the ominous silence.






Lastly many religious preachers like Ramdev, Ravi shankar are also teaching the world at large the “art of living”. Their preaching also to a great extent falls in category of uni-dimensional psychological counseling. They can also help people overcome many disorders and depressions of their lives. In the volatile world now-a-days accidents and blasts have become common occurrences but they have wide range uncommon repercussions. The victims die but the semi-victims can’t forget the nightmarish experience till their last breadth. Psychotherapy has to reach to them and cure their traumatic stress. Our education system should ensure frequent stress released campaigns and institutions for curing youngsters of drug addiction and dipsomania and smoking are to be made popular among people. In a perfectly aware atmosphere only, people can avail this facility with no hesitation what so ever and thereby secure peace of the nation which is fully dependent on the mental peace of its citizens.


umesh patra
m-9208411847
umesh.mla@gmail.com

ME AND MY GOLDBERG

A Goldberg lurks within me
Making me sweat and shiver in fear
Lest he snatches my Marigold...my brain child
My spectacles betrays to look
His cigar makes them smoky
Someone told him, he
Screwed up christ, but
I was not among them
Then why me?
My Goldberg cries out
I was unborn when Christ was undone
Then why me?
I gave him my handkerchief
He sobbed, and even did I
And kept thinking
Why we, God?




Tuhin Mazumdar
M.A. Final
Department of English
Banaras Hindu University
Varanasi

SCHIZOPHRENIC MININOVA: a reverie reviewed

SCHIZOPHRENIC MININOVA: a reverie reviewed

_Do you believe in Spontaneous Human Combustion?


_Yes.


_Can you bear the dazzle of the sizzling light –hours?


_Perhaps yes.


_Do you fear black consumption?


_Not at all.


_Are you willing to run the risk of being nullified?


_Hunnhh....I’m dying for a chance.


..................,...............................


_Then?......am I getting stringed?


......You are......
..................................................
And then came the cloud with a tail that could touch the earth; and it blew over things and me; and I was still as it was ordained...


Fear not; it was only an interview on my views in prospect in a reverie that I lived with one afternoon. And I am to clarify that I am not here to edit a psychological documentary on the Freudian texture. I intent only to incant some of the words of my personal paranormal reverie and corresponding existential strategy (taking you into my confidence).


It’s me, a born effete existence, who eventually got attached to a star. It burnt me all the while and yet I somehow manage to exist but recently it died and I got all the more fascinated with its deathly hallows. A shrinking star, as it was, it caused a mininova; and then got transferred into a blue-hole with all its gravity and mass and energy concentrated upon a convex focus.


And now it is sucking me up. I am not a star, but I am an immagician, a new kind of asteroid in that galaxy; and that dead gravity could not but suck me. In fact it was born to be conceived by me, an alien pollen in this optical galaxy. And now, that I am also going into the same elemental mortality (or centricity!) there would be another bang shortly, though a very trifling one.


I damned god thrice; and thrice there were flashes and, this is true. God granted me. Perhaps, he, too is bored with his satanic existence and evil blessings, and he, quit like me, is desperate to get damned. God had blessed my smuggling my last comfort. The last chance is lost. And now he has cursed me by conferring his crown upon me; and now I am virtually an ape of god, your personal Jesus. Hail me!!!


She caused a mininova, and now I will forge one, and together we will effect a Supernova that you have ever fancied of. And then, we will extract all aesthetics and all love in our blue-hole...

Here we stand---WITH ARMS WIDE OPEN!!

...So be aware

....HA Ha hA !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Ha!HaHa Ha!!!

...Fear not, fair! It’s only a reverie reviewed...

...Take care dear. WORLD IS STILL WORLDLY
...ALL IS WELL!!

                                                                                                               --- e!iamnot Chatterjee

Tanmay Chatterjee
Department of English,

Banaras Hindu University,

Email Id. e!iamnot@gmail.com

Science And Literature : Some Critical Parameters

                        This parameters has a double aim : to draw a general outline of the critical reflection on the relationship between science and literature in the past, and to classify the possible modes of inquiry into this subject at present. Our aim here is to offer the widest of panoramic view.
                        In the field of literary theory and criticism, it is Plato who broaches in an explicit way the question of the relationship between literature and knowledge. As Bacon says 'knowledge is Power', Plato sees ideas at the higher platform and says ideas rule the world. Plato discusses whether " good poets really have sound knowledge of the things on which they are popularly supposed to speak well"(1962:46). The conclusion is emphatic- poets and all artists, are initators and " the imitator knows nothing worth mentioning of what he imitates, but his limitation is a sort of game and not serious".
The  Platonic position is challenged by Aristotle with a double arguments :


a) Poetry does not need to borrow technical knowledge from othe deisciplines, since it is relatively indifference to literal truth. It is the internal coherence, or the versimilitude of plot and characters which matters, and not their factual value.


b) Literature is understood as metaphor or as plot- making. Great literature provides "Catharsis". Prof. R.N. Rai compares Aristotle's Catharsis with Bharatmuni's 'theory of Rasa'.


                      The opposition between the arts and the sciences is now perceived as historical: the arts belong to the past, and the future belongs to the sciences. The eighteenth century Enlighenment is the crucial point where the opposition between the disciplines of knowledge becomes consciously historical.


                       The historical nature of the opposition between poetry and science is formulated more radically by Hegel. In the Hegelion system the physical or natural sciences belong to an early phase of this development , when the spirit is still alienated from itself: the sciences deal with finite knowledge, while the highest knowledge is the absolute knowledge of philosophy (Hegel, 1990:157). Hegel is among the first to proclaim the death of literature. Art, and poetry among all the arts, represents a higher degree of self-consciousness; the extreme instance is Romantic Poetry.


                     " A poet in on our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community."
                                                                                                  (Peacock 1987:209,211)
                        Peacock's "The four ages of Poetry" signs the triumphant march of science while poetry remains hopelessly superseded.


                         Charles Darwin, the famous biological researcher and the writer of " Origin of Species"; the propounder of "Theory of Evolution" and "Adaptation" recognized that he had become completely insensitive to literature and art- a far cry indeed from his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, who wrote epic poems on biology and botany using an incongrous mixture of scientific subject matter and Augustan Poetic diction; "Say Muse! how role from elemental strife/organic forms, and kindled into life..."


                         The opposite claim and the concomitant rejection of the scientific world-view, is voiced by many Romantics, like Blake who sees the advance of science and technology as the harbinger of bleak prospect of mankind. Poetic imagination is then seen as the counterpart of logical and scientific thought. The poet Goethe reinforces the links of man and nature.


                          The romantic defence of poetry against the imperialism of science continues into the victorian age with the figure of Matthew Arnold. Like Carlyle or Dickens of "Hard Times", Arnold reacted against the utalitarian ideology of industrial bourgeoise; and he diagnosed the central event of his age as the death of religion and growth of mechanical and material civilisation.


                           Arnold's view is more akin to poetry than science:"In thus making a sweetness and light to be characters of perfection, culture is of like spirit with poetry, follows one law with poetry". Science, which belongs to "machinery", can not occupy the empty place of life by the decay of religion.


                           For Wordsworth himself, "Poetry is the breadth and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the conuntenance of all scince."


                           Shelly is ready to go even further, claiming that poetry is at the root of all knoledge and of every deed; he is willing to put in the same bag poetry, science, philosophy and indeed inventive or heroic action. I.A. Richards regards literay studies as pre-scientific studies.


                             The relationship beetween science and literature is still widely discussed in twentieth  century criticism, but the focus has shifted to some extent. Instead of an almost exclusive concern with comparing the different merits of science and literature as models of cognition, now this common grounds and interpretations also become subject of inquiry.                              

Lethal Soul

She created me with her own image,

Bestowing the physicality but not the courage,

She took that with her,

I look upon those skies,
I cann't she her anymore.


She is gone and so are you,
Heaving one in the dark oceanic abyss,
I don't know what will arise from chaos,
My peaceful death or satanic destruction.


Those who left me have left me,
I need none else anymore,
Just like the first rays have the only goal,
To light the world and enlighten the soul,
I am left with the only hope,
To merge with death, giving rest to my painful soul.




Amar Singh
M.A. (Previous)
Department of English
Banaras Hindu University
Varanasi

MY JOURNEY ON TRAIN TO PAKISTAN

Why I like "Train to Pakistan" ?Well, it is a perfect novel.The true magnum opus of such a celebrated authour.Khuswant Singh is famous for his stories of love, lust and sex, best represented in "The company of Women" and to a great extent in "Burial At Sea". But how can a reader imagine that the writers of the two novel were really same! This novel cantained everything in equal proportion.

The epicentre of the novel is Mano Majra, a small village devoid of the antipathy between Hindu and Muslim despite the opposite current in rest of the country.But the seeds of poison are sown and they start growing . It doesn't take much time for a man to turn a beast. During the troublesome time of partition , the country receives countless corpses of Hindu people across the border in the train from Pakistan.In the river Sutlej, the vilagers of Mano Majro find cadavers and are baffeled by the situation.Already Ramlal, a well-to-do hindu money-lender, was murderd by Malli and his gang.The suspicion falls on Juggut Singh, the son of a late dacoit, who is entrapped in the love of Nooran, the daughter of Immam Baksh, the mullah of the village mousque and a poor weaver by profession..A foreign-returned communist also reaches the venue to enlighten the people and fulfil his political ambition.Iqbal, the communist has deep hatred for the bourgeois administration . He wants revolution and thereby fame to construct a political career.People are misled and in a highly emotional phase they succumb to the proposal of killing the muslims who will board the train to Pakistan as a revenge for the attrocities perpetrated on the hindus in Pakistan. "What have the muslims here done to us for us to kill them in revenge for what muslims in Pakistan are doing?" was the question of meet Singh, bhai of the village gurudwara. The question remained unanswered. People are ready to kill the muslims and they fasten a rope above the surface of the train's roof so that the people on roof would fall in the lap of death.Hukum Chand , the magistrate and the sub-inspector are unable to do anything in this chaotic situation as "The bullet does not pause and consider.This is Hukum Chand.I must not touch him." Finally its Jugga, the former dacoit who sacrifices hislife and saves the life of many.

We must expect the typical Indian English from Khuswant Singh who took enormous pains to translate even obsceneties of some of the characters. The villagers and that too a sikh village dwellers can't but speak in the language of the soil. So we find the realistic and photografic representation on the part of the language.

This novel is not a work of fiction or imagination.Nothing but the proper names can be passed as untrue in the novel. Mano Majra is the microcosm of entire India where once existed a harmonious relationship between the two arch rival communities of the given era. Imam Baksh was right in quoting "Not forever lasts the spring." We can also say that Mano Majro is the symbol of anyplace where hatred poisons mutual love and affection existing between cohesive races. The depiction of the incident of lizard and the fly in the house of Hukum Chand symbolises the changing relation between the malefactor and the victim. Sometimes the hindus ane the victims in the hands of the muslims and sometimes vice verca.However the treatment of actions is euphemistic though not at the expense of realism.The negative capability is a great art of Khuswant Singh which he used magnificiently to make the characters lifelike. At the culminating point of the novel where the readers are on the zenith nof suspense and horror, the curiosity of Meet Singh for the air matress is super humourous by virtue of its incongruity.

Ultimately it was niether the civilised , fame seeking-communist who mioght have done sacrifice only if there had been vedeo coverage and afterlife like the protagonists of films, nor the circumspect prudential Hukum Chand, the magistrate but the man who came to the redemption of the innocent muslims was Jugga budmash who had the real love for humanity for all his failings. 

 

 

 

 

UMESH PATRA

M.A.(PREVIOUS)

BHU

A COMPANION

I never have slept alone

since I have been born

Many times it was my mother

Men with granny and sister

One day they all changed their tongue

And started calling me young

I got my separate bed and room

In one hand a pen and another a broom

One came for me in night

To sleep away from others sight

Held she me everywhere

Captured my arms together

Many moons passed the sky

Peeping us making shy

weeping hopes, laughing despair

Each second wre were in share

OPne day my moon waded away

To grandson a story to say

My mind laughed and heart wept

with many visitors then I slept

My  soul left me on pyre

To sleep with fierce fire

It was my last call

Again would with I sleep with all?

Again would I sleep with all?

______________________________________________________________________________ 

SEASONS

April is my love

Life is my May

Constrained are my lips

Heart is eager to say

Hot has gone the moon

Heart will feel combustion soon

Body is shivering with cold

Though it is scorching June

Balaram Kumar

M.A.(T.M.B.U. Bhagalpur)

B.Ed(BHU)