The SGPC (Sikh Gurudwara Parbandhak Committe) finally got Jo Bole So Nihal banned in Punjab. They are opposed to the way a Sikh has been portrayed in the movie and the way the holy Gurubani parts are recited in it. I haven’t seen the film and I don’t even plan to see it (despite my recent inclination for weekend DVD rentals), but I wonder what they mean by an inappropriate manner of portraying a Sikh in the movie. I would like to ask the SGPC, doesn’t an average Sikh:
- Indulge in sex?
- Consume liquor?
- Engage in fraudulent activities?
- Interpret the Gurubani wrongly?
- Illtreat his wife, children and parents?
- Visit brothels?
Being from a Sikh family, I have seen the so-called Sikhs doing all such things. Be it philandering, fornicating, excessive drinking, wife-beating, cheating other people, uttering profanities, I have seen the “respected” Sikhs doing all these.
The SGPC should remember that they don’t have the real Sikhs even amongst its own organization. The President of the SGPC, Bibi Jagir Kaur, is herself accused of killing her own daughter. Incidentally, honour killings are on the rise amidst the Sikh community. So many girl-child abortions take place in Punjab that the Akaal Takht had to issue a hukumnama (a religious dictate) banning it. Nowhere our gurus said that murdering your own children is tantamount to honouring your religion.
Switch on any Punjabi mainstream channel and you’ll encounter the epitomes of obscenity. Most of the popular Punjabi songs show scantily clad, supposedly village lasses (the ‘mutiars’), gyrating to nightmarish computer modified sonic inflections. They not only show repulsive graphics they are also throttling the intrinsic soul of folk music. Nobody in Punjab seems to be minding that. So if this is Punjabiat, then they should have no problem with such a film. It should be taken a positive sign that our mainstream Hindi movies are encouraging turban-wearing heroes.
I agree with the Sikh sentiments that the phrase Jo Bole So Nihal (one of my favorite phrases among the Sikh sayings) should only be chanted either in the religious gathering or the battle field, and should not be used as the title of a Bollywood masaala flick.
Sikhism is a philosophy that has been twisted into a mindless cult by the misguided masses and the manipulative “protectors of the faith”. Sikhism is all about the way you live your life. You don’t deserve to be called a Sikh by just growing a beard and adorning a turban (in Africa, women wear turbans).
An NGO, People for Animals, has decided to go to court for action against jail superintendent Rajesh Kesharwani and the jailer RC Singh of the Ghaziabad district prison for the macabre killing of more than 100 white pigeons. They will be charged under Section 428 and 429 of the IPC (Indian Panel Code) and if proven guilty, they can get up to 5 years of imprisonment for cruelly treating and killing the birds.
This Kesharwani is in trouble for the death of a jail inmate, and he wanted to put the blame on another inmate, Chandraveer, who used to feed these birds daily, and was deeply attached to them. To force a confession out of him, Kesharwani wrecked the necks of the white pigeons in front of Chandraveer in order to psychologically torture him.
People for Animals is directly filing the case in the court because it couldn’t elicit a positive response from the jail authorities and the district magistrate.
Kudos to such NGOs! And shame on the society that tolerates such officials or turns a blind eye to their heinous antics. Our fatalistic indifference bestows on them a sense of impunity. I’m not saying punishing them would instil a sense of guilt in them — they are beyond that — it just might discourage such future devilries at least amongst the public servants.
Another thing is, such acts, however trite they might seem to people who don’t care much for animals, lead to incidents such as the one in which a Bombay cop raped a 16-yeard-old girl in broad daylight thinking that he couldn’t be punished because he was in Bombay police. A cop who kills 100 pigeons in cold blood can easily commit crimes against the citizens too.
The Indian bloggers are going to get accreditation from the government so that it gets proper representation on the rapidly evolving medium. Well, there can be many aspects to it. I read it a few days ago and thought about how this will affect the bloggers.
Such things are bound to happen. As blogging evolves into various avatars, there’ll be many faces of it. Journalistic blogs I think are already being run by journalists. There’s going to be hardly any impact on the rest of the bloggers (as long you don’t have to take permission from the government to run a blog) because what matters is the content and the requirement of the particular content. Merely getting accreditation from the government won’t make a blogger reputable or trustworthy. We already have bloggers who sound more like the mouthpieces of various political parties
Constantly trying to accumulate credits for inflicting barbarities the Indian police has a new feather in its hat. They got bored of tormenting the human beings. According to this report the Ghaziabad jailers twisted and broke the necks of almost 100 pigeons to apply third-degree on an inmate whom they wanted to confess a fellow inmate’s murder inside the jail. This inmate had been feeding the birds for two years and the policemen knew their killings would cause him unbearable agony.
Our society is becoming scarier by the day. Just think: how must these policemen be in their normal lives? How can you face your child after inflicting such cruelty? They must have looked like demons when they were twisting the necks of the mute pigeons. Simply put, I think they are sick and they need some psychiatric treatment.
The death sentence of the murderer of the Staines has been revoked and he has been awarded the life sentence instead. I think this is good. A death sentence would have turned this heinous villain into a hero among the fanatics. Relegated to the oblivion of the prison, he’ll receive the ignominy he very well deserves.
I just received a “certificate” from my bank that I’ve been pre-approved for a personal loan of Rs.2,68,000/- that I’ll have to return with a monthly instalment of Rs.7,452/- in 48 months. They’ll also be charging me a 1% upfront processing fee. After 30 June, 2005, they say, the prevailing rates will apply.
Now if I go for this loan, I’ll end up paying them roughly Rs.3,57,696/-, a whopping extra of Rs.89,696/-. This doesn’t make sense, or does it? 48 months means 4 years. Now this loan should give me a return much more than Rs.89,696/- in order to make it viable. For instance, getting some hardware that makes me lots of money during these 4 years.
Currently I have no need for this loan but I wonder how many people go for it after receiving such promotional gimmicks.
Amit Verma has an interesting post on whether to enable comments or not. As he quotes a few established bloggers, comments are a quintessential part of a blog. Like him, I agree only partially. It depends from blogger to blogger, and it also depends on the general direction of the blog theme. If it is a blog aimed at merely releasing the creative flow without a need to receive a feedback, there is no need to enable comments because in such cases, most comments prove to be gratuitously judgemental. I remember a few bloggers shutting down their blogs because they couldn’t emotionally grapple with the onslaught of truculent comments.
I prefer to keep my comments enabled. Most of my posts rarely generate comment manias, but still, it feels like I keep my doors open. I have observed that there is a certain section amongst the bloggers where comments based communication happens a lot. All names are familiar and most comments are basically two-liners. Even the most mundane posts attract 20 or so comments. I post a comment if I really have to say something and may be that’s why there are only few people who visit my blog.
Another problem that plagues the bloggers is the comment-spam. Many bloggers keep their comment-posting disabled due to this relentless and ridiculously stupid menace. On an average I get 15 comment spams daily but fortunately they don’t appear on the website because of useful feature in WordPress that needs a comment to be cleared by the admin before it is posted (if the comment contains some links or words like poker, etc.).
Again, it depends on personal preference. As of now my only problem is comment-spam. I have never had a problem with general comment posters (there aren’t many, in fact).
On Sunday we spent the entire evening trying to locate a radio. We don’t have a single radio or a transistor in the house! BBC World was going to broadcast a program — Talk Time — on the worldwide problem of child labor and slavery, and my sister-in-law, Mridula, had been invited by the BBC London to ask a question by telephone. Somehow she had the notion that the program would be broadcast on radio and not on TV. She lives in Gurgaon and we live in New Delhi, so Alka came up with the idea that we’d call her and she would place the phone near the radio. So this is how we listened to a part of the program.
To Alka’s great chagrin, when we switched on the TV, the same program was being telecast too, but now it was too late because Mridula’s question had already been asked and discussed. Anyway, this whole thing set in motion a chain of thought regarding the whole issue of child labor.
I think we can all agree that child labor is an evil problem. A few days ago I saw a photograph in the newspaper showing a 3-year-old child working somewhere in India. It was heart-wrenching as well as shameful because given the socio-economic conditions in the country, nothing much can be done. We as a society are responsible for this. Both at personal and at government level, child labor is taken as the done thing. Consider for example the dhobi (people who wash and iron clothes as a profession are known as ‘dhobis’ in India) that works in our block. His small children all day long fetch the unironed or dirty laundry from various houses and deliver the clean clothes. Come summer or winter, hot or cold, they are busy doing their work, and nobody seems to mind it. There was a small girl of the dhobi who used to attend school last year. Now she too helps the family. It’d be hypocritical to criticize the family for engaging the children in work, but what else can they do? It is better than wondering in the streets aimlessly and getting into one mischief or another. I know this would be considered as viewing the problem with escapist pessimism but frankly, this is much more preferable compared to children who have to forage for food in the garbage dumps..
The dhobi’s example is milder compared to all those unfortunate children hired by the biri factories and other hazardous industries where children are exposed to deadly chemicals and endless hours of hard labor. In some factories small children work for 18 hours a day for less than $10 a month. They work under inhuman conditions, without protection, without rest. Most children either don’t survive, or grow up to be weak, diseased adults, to again start the same cycle with their children.
The root cause of this problem is the overwhelming poverty that ails the country, and all other countries where child labor exists. Poverty, coupled with illiteracy, forces people to throw their small children into the clutches of life-threatening vocations. In fact, some extremely poor families produce a greater number of children so that there are more hands in the family to earn money
I don’t think child labor is a law-and-order problem. Banning the industries that engage child laborors will only exacerbate the problem because child labor is same as prostitution: you stymie it in the open then it thrives in secrecy. Banning the industries is like taking a pain-killer without tackling the ailment. If these children don’t work, what do they do? Beg? Die of starvation? Become criminals? There is not enough social support in the country to discourage child labor, and the effort has to come from all the sides. If there is an overall improvement in the living standards of the families, child labor will vanish on its own. To be frank, no sane parent wants his or her child to grow up in a stifling environment.
The government has started various incentive schemes such as free food and clothes for children who attend schools but these schemes don’t seem to be working even in the affluent states such as Punjab. The incentives never reach the needy ones, and sometimes the teachers are so incompetent (if at all there is a school and there is a teacher in the school) that children prefer to sweat in a kiln rather than sit in a class. So we can see that everything is inter-connected, at least in India.
Child labor persists because of the rampant corruption, a gut-wrenching poverty, all-pervading illiteracy, over-population and our general indifference. We need to find solutions to all these problems and only then we can seriously talk about abolishing child labor. Ignore a lose end and the entire effort fails.
A new website has been launched to archive the Bollywood movies that have been “inspired” by famous international movies. I had read about this website at Sepia Mutiny but today I again came across it through this post that laments the racial attacks on its Pakistani creator.
I’m not in favor of the racial slur in the reactions but if a Pakistani creates a website to berate an Indian industry, I’m sure the reaction is not going to be a spate of overwhelming kudos. In our attempt to be too “secular” we sometimes sound ridiculous. I’m not saying such a website is not welcome, but it shouldn’t take a Pakistani to create it. What if tomorrow an Indian creates a website on the sloppy dramas created in Pakistan? I’m sure a few fatwas will be in order :-).
If the creator is so awestruck by the Indian film industry, he or she, or them, could have created a website dedicated in general to the industry, and then there could have been a section dedicated to this theme. Then it wouldn’t have seemed like a biased attack.
A woman official’s hands were literally chopped off in Madhya Pradesh for trying to stop child marriages. She had warned the tribal villagers against performing child marriages during a particular festive season.
Thousands of people like her a quietly making changes in the far flung areas of the country and they are never heard of. Thousands of kilometers away from the limelight these crusaders risk theirs and their families’ lives in order to save the society from its own evils.
On the other hand, good-for-nothing people like the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, Babu Lal Gaur has categorically stated that his government would go soft on child marriages. Such a contrast! What is he going to say to the official who got her hands injured: that it was a stupid act on her part and she deserved the treatment for meddling with the social norms? He should be ashamed of himself.
Thankfully, one of her hands has been re-attached and the doctors are trying to save the other hand too.
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