While the tsunamis lashed south-east Asia, bombs still exploded in some parts of the world, as if to drive in the point that it is ?business as usual.? It is as if some diehard enthusiasts want to compete with nature on how much destruction some of them are capable of causing. What a glaring contrast! Thousands of volunteers are busy saving lives, and thousands of terrorists are busy taking lives.
I wonder when we will learn that in the larger scheme of things it hardly matters what religion outperforms or outlasts what religion. The earthquakes and the tsunamis didn’t differentiate between Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Buddhists…they killed without prejudice and there is a lesson in it: life should be cherished.
More than 80,000 people have died in the region, and now the governments have stopped even counting the dead because many villages have been buried under the sea sand along with the inhabitants and their toll will never be counted. There are many bodies that have been buried under the debris forever. The count is definitely going to go beyond 100,000. And animals…is anybody counting how many domestic and wild animals must have been killed?
Natural calamities, especially of such scale, are great equalizers. They also tell us that as far as Nature is concerned, there is never a tomorrow. It is a scary thought, to be frank. No matter where you are, if Nature wants, it can get you. Its wrath can visit you in the form of an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, an atmospheric disturbance, an animal attack, a flood, or for that matter even an obscure meteor or comet from the depths of the universe. When I think of terrorists causing destructions in the name of religion, it all sounds like philosophical comedy.
I was sad to see the TV images of tsunami and earthquake victims. The unpredictability of life looms large all the time but we don’t value the precious moments we have. All this while when I’ve been sick, I’ve been missing those days when I’m healthy. Every healthy and safe day is invaluably precious…we should use it in the best possible way.
The stopping of the play Behzti (Dishonour) by a Sikh mob in Birmingham was a deplorable act. I haven’t read the play so I cannot comment on it, but I think no expression should be curtailed even if it shakes the roots of our faith and religion. According to what I’ve read till now, the play talks about the sleaze that goes on in the Sikh religious places. It’s not only Sikhs, every religion in the world hides things that can be termed as sleazy. So much sex goes on in the Hindu maths (monasteries) and Christian churches. So much rape and plunder happens in Islam in the name of religion. Before Operation Bluestar the Sikh extremists used to rape women well within the sanctum sanctorum of the Golden Temple. Wasn’t the faith being dishonoured then? Where were all these mobs, the defenders of the religion?
Religion doesn’t teach us intolerance and I don’t know why people are so insecure about their respective religions anyway. Why religion needs to be protected all the time? What makes my god bigger than yours?
Do all these people, whether they are Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims or Christians really respect their faiths? I doubt that. They have nothing to do with faith. In fact they don’t even know the true meaning of faith. Being a Sikh, I personally know many individuals who visit the Gurudwara in the morning and then in the evening get drunk or visit prostitutes. They misbehave with their kids, they lie as a habit, they cheat other people, they beat up their wives but they call themselves true Sikhs. I’m filled with disgust when they talk of religion or recite the Gurubani.
It’s heartening that other theaters are offering to stage the play but I think the play should be staged at the same place so as the fundamentalists don’t think that their writ runs large if they can gather in big numbers.
The arrest of Avnish Bajaj, the CEO of Baazee.com is the silliest thing the Delhi police could have done in this case. I agree he has some responsibility and the portal should have some mechanism of avoiding such transactions but if there are thousands of products listed, it can happen that some products escape notice until mentioned by some alert person.
A few years ago I started getting messages from a YahooGroups group. They used to exchange child pornography. I immediately forwarded the messages to Yahoo! and they removed the group.
It’s a clean case of harassing someone who can be harassed. This is a typical trait of Delhi police.
The biggest culprit, although “minor”, is the guy who created the flick and then started distributing it. When he was arrested, they showed the arrest on TV but his face was properly covered. He is the last person who deserves privacy and secrecy. His face should be displayed everywhere, just as he displayed the face of the girl but not his own. Mentally, in no way he is a minor. He had a lucid idea of what he was doing. He was not recording an intimate act. He was recording something for pure exploitation.
This song has a very profound meaning:
तोरा मन दर्पन कहलाए
भले बुरे सारे करमों को
देखे और दिखाए
तोरा मन दर्पन कहलाए
It says:
Your heart is called a mirror
Whatever are your actions,
whether they’re good
or bad
It sees them
And makes you see them.
How true it is!.
A recent article in the The Spectator (I couldn’t give the link because it requires you to login and I don’t like giving such links. Anyway, this is the link) tickled the sleeping memories of an ancient era when I used to study in a special school (for those who haven’t read my previous writings, I’m cerebral palsied). Unlike the nun the author above has mentioned in her article, most of my teachers back then were pseudo nuns in the sense that they wanted us to be exactly the way they thought we should be. Anything here and there invited their wrath. Like the author above, I was expelled from the school too.
I was always the questioning type. This used to rattle them and in every parent-teachers meeting the subject of my insolence was brought up and my mother used to be barged with complains and reformative suggestions.
We had a human skull once on our class shelf and my class-mate was fiddling with it while the class teacher was not in the class. Suddenly she came in and saw my friend holding the skull.
“Never ever touch this skull again,” she grinded her teeth in her patent manner and took the skull from him with a force. “If you break it you’ll have to pay Rs. 3000 because it costs this much.”
Some queer bug got into me. When I went home, I put all my energies into finding out the cost of a human skull (this might sound gross to the uninitiated, but class-rooms and school labs have such stuff and it can be obtained from authorized suppliers). No matter how good the skull was, the price would not go beyond Rs. 400.
So the next day:
I: “Didi?” (we called our teachers didi may be because most of them were Bengalis and Bengali females prefer to be addressed as “didi”)
Teacher: “Yes Amrit?”
I: “The skull costs Rs. 400.”
Teacher: “What skull?”
I pointed to the skull and then to my friend.
I: “Yesterday you scolded him and said if he broke the skull he would have to pay Rs. 3000.”
Teacher: “So?”
I: “It doesn’t cost that much. A good skull costs Rs. 400 at the most.”
Teacher (grunting her teeth): “How do YOU know that?”
I: “I found it from a supplier.”
I spent the next hour standing outside the class and a note was made in the diary that I had intentionally tried to prove that my teacher was lying.
Did I really do that? I mean, tried to prove that she was lying? May be. May be not. There was no bad feeling, of course. Something inside me told me she needed to be corrected.
There was a time when people were crazy about those silly art movies that had pathetic characters. Our teachers wanted us to watch those movies and write down the thoughts. As 13 and 14-year-olds, those art movies were the last things we wanted to watch on television. So we rarely watched them. Our teachers said we didn’t like the movies because our comprehension skills were not good and we had very bad tastes when it came to watching quality programs.
One day.
Teacher: “Amrit, did you watch that movie yesterday?”
I: “Yes didi.”
Teacher: “What made you watch the whole movie?”
I: “Because you had said so.”
Teacher: “And did you like it?”
I: “Not a bit.”
Teacher (ready to launch her tirade): “Can you enlighten me why you didn’t like the movie?”
I: “Sure. I didn’t like the movie because my comprehension is not good and I have a bad taste when it comes to viewing television programs.”
I was sent to my principal’s office who said she’d pray for me so that I stopped being so nasty.
Later on, all these things added up and lead to me expulsion. I’ll write about this episode some other day.
In the morning I was watching the Hindi news channel of NDTV and they were flashing news regarding this train accident. This is a grim affair so I don’t want to make it sound light, but this was what the channel’s news flash displayed:
मृतकों को एक-एक लाख़ रुपैया हर्जाना
Which translates to: The dead shall be paid a compensation of Rs. 1,00,000 each.
Only the channel must know how the dead can be paid the compensation.
I’ve been regularly getting this congratulatory note from my bank:
Congratulations!
The regular usage of your credit card makes you qualified to get a loan from our bank that you can pay back in easy monthly instalments…
They almost sound as if it is a monumental achievement to qualify for their loan for which I’ll have to shell out a hefty EMI.
Writing requires tranquillity. The air should be larded with silence…not a deadly silence, but a peaceful silence. On the other hand, coding and designing can be done in the daily hubbub. After lots of reluctance I must admit (as a result of Alka’s persistent prodding) that I need quietude in order to focus and complete my work.
I write most of the time these days: less and less of web development and more and more of content writing. Content writing, as every other sort of writing, requires concentration. Even a slight disturbance can make words fly away as birds do. I had begun to feel no matter how much is the disturbance, I should be able to write: after all how do we display our concentration power if not like this? Many writers have written their books slogging in a cafeteria or a boisterous tavern.
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