Ubaidullah Pandit (عبيدالله پنڈت)

On January 13, 2021, Lisa Montgomery became the first woman to be executed in the United States since 1953. Among the many macabre and abusive things Lisa was subjected and exposed to in her childhood, perhaps none was more horrible than when her mother, in full view of Lisa, crushed the head of a dog with a shovel. This one incident lodged somewhere deep in the psyche of Lisa would also become a factor, howsoever small, of what she would do years later.   Many people don’t seem to understand how the exposure to violent and graphic content affects us. When little Ada was mauled to death by a leopard recently, the pictures of her mutilated body were carelessly and disrespectfully circulated all over the social media. Some people didn’t even realize what impact it might have on others, particularly on her parents.  Each one of us must know that constant exposure to graphic content degrades our emotional response. If it continues over a period of time, desensitization sets i...

Words have consequences. They are not just an intermediary between our thoughts and our actions. Sometimes they also have a performative and illocutionary function, which means they constitute an action in and of themselves. We advise through words, promise through words, marry through words and end it through words. Written words may have a lasting effect, but the spoken ones have immediate effects in our everyday social transactions. We humans interact with each other solely through language. Our cognitive and emotional states are conveyed to other people through words. So it’s through words that we’ll be weighed, understood or misunderstood. How the other person reacts will depend to a significant extent on the choice of our words by which we connect with them.  Both being empathetic and gaining empathy are functions of words. One may be sincerely and in earnest empathizing with some person, but one needs appropriate words to express this emotion. Similarly, when we seek to be u...