The world today is abuzz with the news of Saddam Hussein’s sudden hanging. I haven’t been following much news for more than two months but this caught me too by surprise so I went to the bedroom (where we have the TV) and watched the recording of the hanging. They just showed till they were putting the noose around his neck. He looked like he was being aided by people to get dressed up for some event. I’m sure some channel or website will broadcast the complete execution in a few hours or in a few days. No, I’m not interested in watching it.
On the lighter side:
He was carrying a Quran and said: ‘I want this Quran to be given to this person,’ a man he called Bander,” he said. Al-Rubaie said he did not know who Bander was.
Bander in a Farsi, or Persian (surely not Hindi because there it is Vanar) means a monkey. I know, I know, stupid sense of humor.
Whereas the New York Times has called him a “Defiant Despot” (and I totally agree), the Indian media, as was expected, has been lopsided, as this piece from NDTV says:
There have been protests in India as well against Saddam’s execution.
“This would deepen the anti-Americanism in the Arab world. It will widen the Shia-Sunni divide. The civil war will continue and lets hope it does not spill out to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia,” said G Parthasarthy, former Indian diplomat.
“I think the Arab league will be divided. It was unfair. There will be a reaction as the execution has been done on the wrong day. It is bad timing and a politically motivated move,” added Dr WSH Awwad, Senior journalist.
The CPI(M) has called for a strike in Kerala in protest against Saddam’s execution.
Various “secular” parties like the Congress have expressed “sadness” at the sudden hanging. No wonder the world is so screwed up.
In a shocking development, several skeletons of small children were unearthed in NOIDA. So far the remains of 15 children have been dug out. The place where the skeletons were found, is at a walking distance from where we live. The psychopathic killer had been abducting, raping and killing small children for years. He has been arrested now, along with his servant who was also an accomplice.
Why I’ve included this incident with the Saddam news is because all psychopaths look so normal. Saddam looked valiant, and there was so much dignity on his face that if you weren’t sure of what’s right and what’s wrong, you’d end up sympathizing with him. Widespread street protests are taking place in India, and all over the world, in protests of his execution. The political parties in India are competing with each other to woo the Muslim vote bank. There has even been a blast in Madrid. As I said, the world is screwed up.
I’m sure the psychopath who raped and killed small children will have his share of sympathizers too. Some human-rights organizations will say: he needs treatment and counseling, not punishment.
A few days ago I had written about the intrepid Iranian bloggers who are trying to reach out to the world from within their lugubriously authoritative society. Now an Egyptian student has been arrested for criticizing his government on his blog. The link also narrates another grim fact:
In Tunisia, a Web publisher, Zouhair Yahyaoui, was dragged from an Internet café by security forces and tortured into revealing his site’s password after he posted a quiz mocking President Zine Abidine ben Ali.
If such things happened in India I think many bloggers, including yours truly, would be in jail right now. The author of the article rightly says:
For decades, the region’s dictators maintained a monopoly on public information. Newspapers, radio stations and television broadcasts were nearly all state owned. These regime- controlled media outlets toed the government line, maligned political opponents and blocked critical voices. By inverting the watchdog role of the press — in which journalists question, investigate and expose — what should be a critical independent institution was instead transformed into a mouthpiece for regime propaganda.
The advent of blogs in the past few years, however, has altered the playing field. While some regimes — like the Algerian leaders — may still own the main printing presses and control the national supply of ink, any citizen can access free blogging services. Now an individual’s voice — even that of a random student at Al-Azhar University, like Kareem Amer — can reach audiences around the globe.
Most totalitarian governments thrive on information blackout. They feel threatened when people can exchange ideas and share political or social ideologies. Such governments will certainly go out of their ways to throttle blogging and cut short the voice it renders to the millions reeling under the scourge of barbaric and backward rulers.
It is very dangerous for bloggers in these countries to express themselves openly and I think they should know it better. The best thing would be, either publish with some other identity, or publish by taking help from friends who live in free societies. It’s no use being tortured to death without making an impact, especially when you know you can make one.
In one way or the other, we all strive for self-actualization. The difference is, some do it sincerely and some insincerely. Abraham Maslow, better known for his theory on “Hierarchy of Needs”, placed self-actualization at the top of the pyramid he used to explain the needs-hierarchy. I don’t want to go into the details of the pyramid right now; I want to talk more about self-actualization.
I don’t know why this expression came to my mind, but it just popped up when I was thinking about writing. My work and other pressing responsibilities keep me away from the kind of writing I’d like to indulge in. So I just thought, “I’d achieve self-actualization when I can write what I actually want to write.”
I Googled the term and found this definition: A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. This is the need we may call self-actualization. Of course, this comes from Maslow. Alka often talks about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but we had never talked about self-actualization. Or may be we have, it’s just that, at 3:45 AM I cannot recollect the occasion or the occasions.
Further, self-actualization means, achieving your true spiritual, artistic, or even intellectual potential. It makes me wonder though: many writers die poor. Even painters, take for instance van Gogh, lived and died in abject poverty (his paintings are worth millions now). There are many great artists that create art without having a place to live or food to eat. They simply survive for the sake of their art. They seek self-actualization even at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid, and in fact Maslow was a bit screwed up when he said, “The study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy.” He chose great minds like Einstein and Roosevelt as subjects. In that sense he would never consider Stephen Hawkins a worthy specimen. Anyway, I’m digressing here, because the topic is self-actualization (I have used the term “self-actualization” so many times that it’ll most likely appear on the first page of Google very soon if someone searches for it 
).
Contrary to what Maslow hypothesized, you can attain self-actualization even at the bottom of your needs, provided you have the required drive and inclination. van Gogh may have blown his brains out hungry, but there are very few painters who can equal his genius. Similarly, Keats died young and remained unhealthy most of his days, but the world has yet to see another poet like him. The Schizophrenic Dr. John Forbes Nash won the Nobel prize for game theory. I’m not trying to dispute Maslow’s theory (I haven’t even read two pages on him or on his field), but I think, when it comes to self-actualization, there is no particular time, there is no particular stage in life when you achieve it. It just happens when you are receptive, when you are ready to embrace it.
When recently a train was set on fire as an aftermath of the desecration of Ambedkar’s statue, my first reaction was, “I’m sure they’re not Dalits.”
It’s not that I said it in their defense. I said it because I knew they didn’t have the guts to protest on such a large-scale. After all, so many atrocities on Dalits keep taking place and they do nothing. No upper-caste house is burned, no upper-caste woman is paraded naked as a retaliation to such barbaric acts. I’m not saying people should take law and order in their own hands, but if so much anger erupts for a dead man’s statue, just imagine what social change can be ushered in if even a tiny part of that anger is used constructively.
Another case — a 10-year-old girl’s fingers were chopped off just because she had stolen a few leaves of spinach from an upper-caste land-owner’s farm. This is indicative of two things: the upper-caste people are not scared of the law and they know the lower-caste people, the Dalits, aren’t capable of doing much. Even the Dalit leaders and scholars are busy filling their own coffers. Most Dalit atrocities take place in UP and Bihar (in Haryana too) and both these states are considered Dalit bastions in terms of politics.
This is a big reason why people who really care for the future of the country protest against regressive measures like reservations. Self-respect doesn’t come with such acts, it is nurtured, it is built from the ground up. I’m not an expert in demography, but I’m sure for every single upper-caste person there are thousands of Dalits in our country. They don’t realize what strength they can wield. But they don’t have the self-respect required to bring about a social change. They can burn a train if one statue is tarnished, but let the fingers of 20 girls be chopped, and let 100s of Dalit women be paraded naked, they don’t even burn a straw.
I just started reading Amrita Pritam’s Rasidi Ticket (The Revenue Stamp) — it’s her autobiography. I’m reading regional literature after years. The original was written in Punjabi and I know some of the intrinsic beauty was lost in translation. I haven’t read much yet, but I think it’s more poetry than prose, and it is understandable as Amrita Pritam was a renowned Punjabi poetess.
The last autobiography I read was two years ago and it was Gabríel Garcia Márquez’s Living To Tell The Tale and there is a big difference how both the writers have traversed through the lanes of their past lives. Garcia was more real, and then surreal and then again real. Amrita Pritam is philosophical in her book more often than not. She gets lost in her own thoughts and then somewhere she forgets that someone is reading the book. Garcia, on the other hand, as he is known to do, mixed magical surrealism with the actual events. He was more interesting, I must confess. But this could be because I’ve been more exposed to western literature (I’m not sure if Garcia is western, but his style, sort of, is). Indian writers bore me because one, they focus more on kismet and two, they relish in defeatism. I’m not saying all of them do it, but this is the style somehow I’ve been exposed too. But I plan to read the entire autobiography because even her prose sound like verses, though, logorrheic at some places.
Oh, I forgot. Living To Tell The Tale was not the last autobiography I read. Recently I read Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. If you can somehow get hold of this book, I insist you read it. You’ll love it. I’ll write more about Rasidi Ticket when I’m done reading it.
My baby daughter often eats food listening to or watching Punjabi bhangra telecast on one of the Punjabi channels. While working, my ear caught a line:
Dang mariya naagani banke
This line means, you stung me like a female snake.
Now, a snake never stings; a snake bites. Snakes don’t have stings. Hornets, wasps, scorpions, bees, etc. sting because they have a sting. A snake has fangs: big, long, pointed teeth. On the other hand, in Hindi there is a saying that goes like:
Iss saanp ka kaata paani nahi mangta
It means: when this snake bites someone, the person dies so fast that there isn’t even time to ask for water.
This is the correct usage. But, both Hindi and Punjabi have a common word that is totally assigned to the snake bite, and that word is dasna:
Saanp ne dass liya in Hindi and Sapp ne dass leya in Punjabi, which means, the snake has bitten. This usage is correct. In English there is no equivalent for dasna, as far as I know.
????? ?????? ?? ???? ????? ???? ??? ????
???? ??????? ??, ????????? ????? ??? ????
These lines are taken from Ghulam Ali’s song and they mean:
A brightly shining moon
Has been reduced to a fallen star
My wanderings have turned me
Into a vagabond
I don’t know why, sometimes I relate to these lines so much.
When the Indians want to do something, no barrier can stop them, not even the gender barrier. So when a man wanted to race with the women during the recent Asian games, he did so. The sad part is, he got caught. And India lost a medal. Well, at least we try to get some medals and this can be taken in that spirit. Making men run with women in International sports is no mean feat
According to this Financial Times article machines like your robots will be able to sue you if you mistreat them. The article begins with:
The next time you beat your keyboard in frustration, think of a day where it may be able to sue you for assault. Within 50 years we might even find ourselves standing next to the next generation of vacuum cleaners in the voting booth.
Far from being extracts from the extreme end of science fiction, the idea that we may one day give sentient machines the kind of rights traditionally reserved for humans is raised in a British government-commissioned report which claims to be an extensive look into the future.
Well, I have no problem with that. Any existence that is conscious of pain, sadness or anger, should have the same rights as we, humans have. Animals too should enjoy the same rights. They should be able to sue us if we mistreat them or if we eat them without their consent (sorry, it wasn’t meant to be funny).
I remember a Robin Williams movie we saw a few years ago called perhaps AI. In that movie Robin Williams was so advanced a robot that he was almost human. The period of the movie is set in such a manner that a robot could apply to become a human if it wished too. I believe such a time will come when either the machines will be too human, or the humans will be too mechanical.
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