Whither is the Asylum?

 What is madness?Is madness a construct of society defined in the inability to seek the highest point of intelligence on a scientific scale? If Intelligence is perceived as a relative term, then what about the highest points of normality or for that matter abnormality? Different people transgress social norms but why is it that a mad man is necessarily the one enclosed within a mental institution? If abnormality is defined as transgression from socially accepted norms of normality, then what about revolutionaries, radical philosophers or to be more succinct the many attempts of artists to project a post-postmodern readings of the world. Is one who deviates from social norms mad or rebellious or simply disobedient?And  is it possible to understand abnormality and normality as exclusive concepts? Can reason be free of the presence of fancy?The human mind essentially visualizes and visualization involves a definite element of imagination.  Why is fear used both to discipline a child making its formal entry into society and to exercise the power of the medical gaze?What explains the relative limits within which the medical gaze may state the return to normality after the psychoanalytical couch?

Bureaucracy or Colonial legacy?

The bureaucracy as a system bears an uncanny resemblance to the colonial administrative structure. Hence it has not made a radical break with the past however the bureaucracy is being articulated into a democratic set up by the nation state.The democratic process demanded service to the masses but the bureaucracy paradoxically works through the Janus faced administration through a nation sate which has been largely modelled upon the colonial predecessor and other colonial structures. But the violence that followed freedom partition movements laid a necessity to make bureaucracy work through the colonial model since as a critic observes," Given the rising tide of communal violence, the government needed a system it could rely on-one that could enforce law and order". But perhaps as Shashi Tharoor Former UN diplomat, noted ,'Bureaucracy is [...] simultaneously the most crippling of Indian diseases and the highest of Indian art-forms'. Continuity was the watchword and the civil service continued in the tradition of the colonial governance. Perhaps among the many factors that ail the system one cannot dismiss the unbroken continuity between colonial structures of the past and their shadows upon the political/bureaucratic structures of the nation-state.