By C M Paul

Darjeeling: Salesian College in Darjeeling organized a lecture series on “making sense of contemporary India,” as an indefinite strike for a separate Gorkhaland neared its 100th day.

“With one million billionaires and one billion hungry people in India what has gone wrong with Indian society, the world’s largest democracy?” asked Braj Ranjan Mani, independent scholar and author, was the main speaker for the eighth Verzotto Memorial Lecture.

The lectures were held September 19 and 20 at the college in Sonada, Darjeeling, and its campus in Siliguri, north Bengal.

In his effort to answer the question and make sense of contemporary India, Mani critiqued “existing knowledge, power, and social relationships, at the same time renewing the debate on fundamental issues to help audience ask the right questions and seek answers outside the old and failed frameworks.”

The audience at both the campuses consisted of faculty and senior students, as well as faculty from neighboring colleges and institutions.

During the course of his presentation Mani brought to light the hidden agenda and curriculum uncovering the dominant canons and constructs that distort the vision for a more humane and egalitarian India.

Mani has authored the best seller, “Debrahmanising History: Dominance and Resistance in India Society (2005)” that has gone into 11 revised editions.

He has also published “Knowledge and Power: A Discourse from Transformation” (2014).

One of India’s unconventional scholar-activists, Mani was a former journalist with The Times of India, a Fellow of the India Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. He also worked for a while as Dr Ambedkar Chair-Professor at NISWASS (National Institute of Social Work And Social Sciences), Bhubaneswar, before deciding to work autonomously.

The annual lecture is in honor of Father Joseph Verzotto, an Italian Salesian missionary who taught philosophy at the Salesian College, Sonada, for 26 years from 1963. He died in 2009 aged 82.

Besides teaching ethics, metaphysics, psychology, epistemology and Indian philosophy, he was the college’s librarian, counselor, postman, fund raiser, and philanthropist. He was also a biographer, literary essayist, film critique, a translator, religious instructor.