It was shocking to read in the newspaper that “eminent” historians like Romila Thapar have left no stone unturned to prove how saintly the actually-psychpathic ruler Aurangzeb was. No wonder we have the Aurangzeb Road at the heart of Delhi! I always used to wonder why on earth we have a road named after this sick maniac.
During his rein of terror he targeted the Sikhs most severely and in fact I think he was the main reason why Sikhism consolidated itself as the primary opponent of the Mughal rule. He not only mercilessly executed Guru Tegh Bahadur (the 9th Sikh Guru) because the Guru stood by the Kashmiri Pandits, later on he was also instrumental in the killings of the 4 sons of Guru Gobind Singh, the 10th Guru.
He was most bigot of all the rulers. He brought back the laws of Shariya in all its severity and re-instated the Jizya — it was a tax you had to pay in order to live and earn a living as a non-Muslim. Aurengzeb wanted to purge India of all infidels (non-Muslims) and convert it into a land of Islam. He was repressive and, contrary to what our historians would have us believe, had no tolerance for other religions. He demolished famous Hindu temples to build mosques in there place. Hindu idols were placed in the steps of mosques so that Muslim pilgrims could tred upon them. He forced Brahmins to wear cow meat around their necks. So if he was tolerant and saintly, we must all be gods!
Even Jawaharlal Nehru considered Aurangzeb as a “bigot and an austere puritan” whose policies were instrumental in creating unease and dissent, and consequently, the dwonfall of the Mughal empire.
So why do our historians write all this bullshit about he being tolerant and secular? Romila Thapar, for instance, is known as a Marxist historian, and most Marxists are not interested in anything but their own agendas. They are not bothered about history, or even anthropological psychology. Interestingly, Stalin tried to annihilate the Muslims because communism and Muslims are totally opposite when it comes to religion: the communists abhore religion and the Muslims see nothing beyond religion. In the 1940’s, Stalin deported nearly all the 1.5-million Chechens to Siberian concentration camps, where 25% died. Two million other Soviet Muslims, including many Dagestanis, were also sent to Stalin’s death camps where they died of the Russian winter.
Anyway, coming back to India, why this twisting of history? As a scholar who spends years in research (and get paid for that), why would you present obscurantist facts and tarnish your image as a scholar? Are they being paid huge amounts of money? Are they politically motivated? Are they foreign-funded?
Last year I read this book by Arun Shourie titled Eminent Historians:Their Techniques, Their Line, Their Fraud in which he has tried to expose the nefarious nexus between the so-called secular-leftist historians who have been having a wild time distorting the historical facts. Although I believe historical facts should not be used to raise pointed fingers at different communities, the true knowledge is very important if you want to evolve as a mature civilization. It doesn’t pay to sweep everything under the carpet. History is an ideal tutor and if we don’t learn from it we keep on comitting the same mistakes again and again.
A suggestion to the Sikh community of Delhi: I think they should take the naming of a prominent road to Aurangzeb as an insult :-). How can the ruthless murderer of Guru Tegh Bahadur be revered in this humiliating manner? For all you know, in a few years you might even have an Osama Bin Laden road or a Maulana Masood Azhar University or Dawood Ibrahimabad.
It was a simple leg fracture but the patient, Sukhbir Singh Chauhan, died mysteriously in the elite hospital. Not only that, the expense, that was to be Rs. 40,000, swelled up to Rs. 6,50,000. A reason was given neither for the death, nor for the fee.
This is purely criminal neglect and such doctors and hospitals need to be taught a severe lesson. The problem here in India is that doctors treat their patients quite condescendingly, and there is no reason for such a treatment, especially in the private hospitals where they charge exorbitant fee.
Now and again there rises a debate on whether there should be a client/consultant relationship between doctors and patients, or whether there is something extremely holistic about the relationship.
Holistic my foot. Just go to a private hospital and they won’t even see you without a payment slip, so what sort of holistic feeling they talk about? They are just a bunch of hypocrites who want the best of both the worlds. They charge like consultants but when they screw up they say they shouldn’t be treated like the normal service providers and hence shouldn’t be made to bear the responsibility if something unfortunate happens to the patient.
I’m not saying treating a person is same as filing a tax return for your client. Of course it is a matter of life and death when it comes to the service of doctors but this makes it more important to hold them responsible if they are mercenary, callous and careless, as it happened in the Fortis case. Something bad kept on happening to the patient and they didn’t find it necessary important to tell the family while having no qualms about asking for money repeatedly. This is highly moronic on their part.
It’s very scary that you can die of even a smaller injury just because you are unlucky to have bumped into lousy doctors.
Great news for all of you who like creating user accounts on various websites. Now you can create a useless user account with an unlimited editing option. Isn’t it like a dream come true? Just imagine, you can create a user account just for the heck of it.
The website — UselessAccount — lets you create an online account to your heart’s content. It does nothing else. You create an account and that’s it. It is just there to pander to your fetish for creating innumerable accounts on the Internet. The innovator who created this revolutionary Web 2.0 service is even contemplating selling it to Yahoo! or Google in the future.
Almost 30 of Muslim organizations plan to protest before parliament next week against the setting up of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and the policy of liberalizing the retail sector and import of ready-made goods.
The next paragraph justifies the protest against globalization and and the setting up of SEZs:
“These Muslims are the most affected by the liberal economic policies of the government as most of them are artisans, small traders and retailers,” Ali Anwar, coordinator of the Pasmanda Mahapanchayat, an umbrella organization of dalits and Muslim organizations, told media persons Wednesday.
“SEZ and multinational companies are hurting us in a big way. The weavers of Benaras who were pioneers in making clothes are languishing. They are forced to sell their children,” he said.
Well, does this mean we should always remain un-industrialized? Ideally, we should because industries, such as the automobile industry (the TATA want to setup a car factory in West Bengal on the land currently used for farming) cause pollution.
But it’s a myth that liberalization and industrialization leave farmers and artisans unemployed. A majority of farmers in India are anyway under-utilizing their farm lands and they manage their crops inefficiently (hence the farmer suicides). Times change and we should upgrade our skills according to the time. Artisans who cannot find work due to industrialization should learn new things. After all this is the same thing we tell the Americans (that they should upgrade their skills or find alternative jobs) when their services are outsourced to India.
I know the poor cannot upgrade their skills on their own because they are neither aware nor equipped to handle change. The government should force the private sector to re-train the local population and the companies can be given tax benefits for doing that. For instance, if the TATAS are setting up their car factory in Singur (I’m purposely referring to another link that touches upon a fishy topic) then it is incumbent upon them to train the local farmers to use the available land efficiently and they should get experts from other cities or countries if need be.
And about globalization being anti-Muslim…is anything in this world pro-Muslim? Poverty, ignorance or backwardness, or the T-camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan? They find even anti-polio campaigns anti-Muslim.
When I was reading Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown there were some passages that I read with tinges of latent skepticism not because I found them mendacious but they were too disturbing. In one section he describes how the Indian army executes a vindictive, ruthless attack upon a peace-loving Kashmiri village of bhands. The jawans (Indian army soldiers) not only destroy the village, they also rape the protagonist’s mother and torture his father to death. Shalimar the Clown becomes a terrorist to extract revenge.
For a long time I kept thinking about what alienation does to you and what havoc these stray spurts of brutalities can orchestrate. I hate terrorism, I hate it from the greatest depths of my rationality and I can never condone acts of terrorism, but the focus of my rumination right now is not how insidious terrorism is but why some people become terrorists (and the counter-argument would be, why most don’t, but that’s another issue).
If a few days ago I had read about the fake killings in Kashmir I’d have said, “Well, these guys ask for such incidents because they give in too easily to violence and when so much bloodshed is happening such accidents are prone to take place.”
But the more I think about such “accidents”, the more I, in a bizarre fashion you may think, think about such things, the more I seem to understand the philosophy of violence. This is more so while I’m reading William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal in which he describes how the sepoys butchered European women and children and how like insects they ran helter-skelter when attacked by the British and how their acts ushered the complete ruination of Delhi. Given a chance, and accompanied by a mob, even an “ordinary” citizen turns into a demon and perpetrates acts that can make you retch.
Violence instigates violence and no matter how we argue about the goodness or the badness of certain religious communities and sects, the ground reality is, violence breeds violence. It’s not about whether violence is good or bad, the point is that it happens, and you water the buds of violence by shedding innocent blood.
And this violence, however it manifests, reaches our towns and cities and haunts us for generations. Thousands sometimes have to pay for the reckless follies of a few.
To be frank I don’t have many sympathies for the Kashmiri people because their tears are only reserved for their dead, and not for the ones their sons, brothers and husbands kill with regularity. They never take a stand for the causes of other communities (for instance, the Kashmiri pandits). My only concern is, when the army kills and rapes the innocents, the justified anger turns into a fertile ground where various terrorist organizations sow the seeds of violence and reap the harvest gleefully. Why give them such fertile ground? And why should human-rights violations happen in our country whether it’s Nithari or Jammu and Kashmir?
It’s sad how the elderly parents are treated in India, and may be all over the world. After a long time I spent this weekend reading a book (I’ve been trying to complete The Last Mughal now for a long time), sleeping, and watching TV. On TV they show an ad where they show a retired person being treated rudely by the family of, probably, his son, just because he is not financially independent. Then they say if you buy their insurance policy this won’t happen.
Why do some of us treat our parents so badly, of all the people? I’m not giving a moral lecture here. I think our parents spend a big chunk of their lives trying to keep us comfortable, emotionally, physically and financially. This is truer in the hypocritical Indian society where the youngsters don’t take a second to declare their “independence” while still taking pocket money from “mummy” and “daddy”. In the western countries if people don’t treat their parents well or prefer to keep them in old-age homes it is understandable because their parents don’t make much effort while bringing up children, and the norms of the society are such that people move out at an early age. But in India people sometimes depend on their parents even after their marriages.
Even the parents live their lives for their children. Take for instance my parents. My father spent a big part of his life struggling in the foreign lands so that his family could live comfortably. Similarly, my mother zealously took charge of us and the house while our father was away. Now that I’m married, I can feel how terrible they must have felt living away from each other for so many years. Although I have had my share of ideological differences with my parents, I cannot even in my dream imagine treating them with contempt or talking to them rudely. I’ll be ashamed of myself if I ever do so.
Let me quickly add that I don’t think parents who maltreat their children (no matter what overbearing frustrations they have at those moments) deserve respect when they grow old. There was a relative of ours who was not only cruel to animals but also to his wife and children. His children still loved him when they grew up and took good care of him before he died. He not at all deserved that treatment, but strange are the notions of human feelings (sometimes children treat cruel parents well just to seem good to the society).
In 2005 the level of carbon dioxide was the highest in the past 65,000 6,50,000 (someone asked me to correct it) years, and like all the recent years, the world again saw a warmer February. The ice caps are melting and consequently the sea levels are rising and there have been so many climatic aberrations that only the dumb cannot see them.
In my previous post I had briefly touched upon a subject that how the oil lobby is trying to bribe some scientists into writing papers that debunk the report that highlights the human involvement in global warming. The report is out and it says that global warming is unequivocal and we, as callous citizens of the world, are responsible for it. Luckily, we’ve still got a chance. You can access the report on global warming on this website.
The effect of global warming is alarming but I don’t know why the governments and the scientists don’t want to scare people. They say despite all that is being done under the Kyoto Protocol the planet will look quite different that in does presently, in just 100 years.
I think people should be scared shit. Just think, what sort of environment our children will inherit from us. I worry about Vasudha and I worry about my nephews and nieces. Will they have to wear gas masks when they go out? Will the have to wear protective clothing to avoid the ultra violet rays? How will they survive the sudden increase in floods and storms? A pall of thick pollution will cover the sun forever and they might see trees, plants and other animals only in natural history museums.
We must do something, really. It’s not about poverty or development or industrialization. It’s not about jobs and money. It’s about fundamental survival. We should fight for our environment the way some among us fight for our religions. The environment should be the greatest religion, the pan-human religion because if we mess up with it, no Bhagvan, no Allah, and no God is going to come to save us. What are we going to do with money and affluence, or even health for that matter, if we don’t have air to breath, water to drink, and clean earth to grow food? For the sake of our children we must protect the environment from everything that pollutes it, with fanaticism; there is no other solution. The people that pollute our planet are more dangerous than the terrorists (all of a sudden I want to hug a terrorist). They should be dealt with severely, immediately, for the sake of our children, for the sake of our children’s children.
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