Molly Charles-Reflections

 Molly Charles (1) Margin, a term familiar from tender age; notebooks with clear cut margins to delineate the main body of text, define it. The margins give it definite shape, a practice that continues into the virtual world. Among humans, it is these margins that give identity to the large majority we term normal. The often, porous boundaries offer a chance for individuals to slip through and slip back into either ‘normal’ or ‘marginal’ spaces. The decision to identify with marginal groups or positions can be a conscious one as with (gender identity, drug use), enforced as in (mental health, racial and caste based discrimination) and accidental for (drug use, stigmatized diseases). In certain instances, as with mental health, some individuals may find their being part of marginal groups a permanent reality, in most other instances individuals do move in and out of marginal groups, as a survival strategy to deal with marginalization. Even when physical spaces merge, with an emphasis

Placing Social Distance (Us and Them) within Security Approach and Peace Approach        The Time for Art of War is Over, it is Time for Peace We guard our borders with intensity that can evoke envy in any species, the passion associated with a line of demarcation, largely hypothetical which few citizens would have seen or conceptualized beyond maps, is remarkable. Yet, we treat human beings within the borders as disposable ‘products’ whose aspirations need to be addressed as when their expression of dissatisfaction crosses the limit of  violence palatable to our 'sensitive souls'. India can blame its neighbors for acts of violence but can we as Indians state with a clear conscience that we asserted the rights of all our co-citizens, especially those who differed in their physical attributes from us or those whom we perceived to be of lower stature or those who we could never accept because of their historical desire to have more constitutional independence than us.