Love sees no boundaries. I was just thrilled to read about the marriage between a Eunuch and a man. Both, the Eunuch, named Anarkali and the man, Pinu Patnaik, a government employee, used to meet everyday in a train.
Now, I don’t want to bestow upon them a gratuitous, patronizing halo because they just did what two lovers should do, I’m writing this simply to express my happiness. I hope the society doesn’t create legal and social problems for them evident by this:
The Superintendent of Police of Khurda Amitabh Thakur said that the police was aware of the marriage between a eunuch and a man in the city on Sunday.
“The marriage is certainly not legally acceptable. We are examining the matter”, said Thakur adding that the police may take action, if one of the partners lodges complaints.
and
Pinu, though not sure whether his “unusual” marriage would put him in trouble in his government job, claimed that he had not committed any crime. “I do not think I have done any blunder. I have married an eunuch. If this is not legal, I am ready to accept any punishment”, he said adding that he loved the person and was not worried about the gender.
Good wishes for the couple.
Not much. Well, the only difference is that Bal Thackeray doesn’t exhort his lampoons to kill authors: he only tells them to burn their books. Khomeini on the other hand asked for the head of Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses.
So what should the normal citizen do? Burn the copies of Shiv Sena’s mouthpiece Samna in which he has asked his “boys” to destroy the copies of Shivaji - The Hindu King in Muslim India, a book written by James Laine? I know this is not going to happen.
The best reply would be, read the book. The book should be read by as many people as possible. In fact, if possible, the book should be available for free for sometime. It should be gifted for all occasions: let it be a birthday gift, an anniversary gift, or just-for-the-heck-of-it gift.
And what is the government doing? I mean, you can just barge into any shop and pick up the copies and then burn them? A pathetic statement on our law and order situation.
It’s good that HC lifted the ban, but it reeks of dirty politics. If ban on this book can be lifted, then why not on The Satanic Verses too? It seems the government can antagonize the Hindus but not the Muslims. This is double standards.
Still, as a country, it’s shameful that people like Bal Thackeray exist amidst us and are considered respected figures. What moral ground do we have then to criticize the Taliban?
On one hand I feel that guns, or any other fire arm, shouldn’t be freely available, and on the other hand, I think one should be able to obtain a gun easily, given the kind of times we live in. The problem in India is, all the shady elements of the society can easily get country-made or imported guns (depends on the capability) but for a normal citizen it’s very difficult, almost impossible, to procure a gun even for urgent protection. Read the whole article.
Update (April 30, 2007): The Pioneer today has published an article titled America’s fetish for guns. The opposition to guns is backed by some strongly documented data:
Britain has one of the world’s lowest gun homicide rates - 0.04 slayings per 100,000 people, according to the Geneva-based Small Arms Survey for 2004. That puts it on par with Japan, where the rate is 0.03 per 100,000.
By contrast, the US has a rate roughly 100 times higher: 3.42 gun murders per 100,000 people, according to the Geneva group. The US ranked 13th highest out of 112 countries in a 2006 study by the Small Arms/Firearms Education and Research Network in Canada.
I think in America the problem is not with guns, but with society. There is no family bonding, there is lots alienation, there is lots of peer pressure, and consumerism there is maniacal. Students actually look down upon those who study. My niece, who lives in Canada, once told me that her friends think only those kids study hard who don’t have a life.
Crimes cannot be attributed to an easy availability of guns. The most heinous of crimes happen in India (Nithari, for instance) and we here have very strict gun laws. Crimes are a sociological problem, a mental problem. As a psychopath, if someone wants to kill say 20 people, he or she will kill them, gun or no gun. Yes, it’ll be difficult without a gun (the gun basically automates the exercise), but he or she will find a way. Remember Jack the Ripper? He never carried a gun.
The dust has finally settled over the event of the Abhishek-Aishwarya wedding and various thinkers and writers are giving the stocks of what went right and what went wrong. For instance, Shobha De rues over the fact that the journalists were manhandled at the wedding and she thinks the poor things didn’t deserve this ignominy. About the journalists she writes:
They are the ones who have contributed hugely to the creation of the highly profitable Amitabh Bachchan brand\myth. And clicked away when the going was good, or more importantly, even when it wasn’t. Ditto for the entire high profile parivaar involved in the wedding. It is largely thanks to our energetic, occasionally over-enthusiastic lensmen that all the Bachchans have received national\international coverage on a mega scale.
Then, about the icons she opines:
Icons are owned by the public. They are created by the public and belong to the public. In my book, they owe the public. A big one, at that. We, in India are sentimental and emotional about weddings (and funerals). We don’t understand the new fangled rules that govern celebrity events. We sincerely want to participate in the joys and sorrows of those we bestow such unconditional love on. Like Aishwarya and Abhishek.
Somehow I can never understand this “icons are owned by the public” mentality. I think nobody owns nobody and the icons too have their personal lives and they too have rights to privacy. I don’t think we make them the icons, they become icons by doing what they do. I mean, why isn’t Deepak Prashar an icon, or why couldn’t Aruna Irani be the dream girl instead of Hema Malini or why doesn’t Johny Lever enjoy the same adoration as Rhitik Roshan? Icons become icons because of their inherent qualities (or characteristics).
We are highly selfish when it comes to our icons. Just look at the way our cricketers were recently treated. Dhoni’s house was demolished. Kaif’s family had to flee the town. The same guys become gods when they score runs and take wickets. As a highly self-serving society, we only bow to the rising sun, otherwise, given a chance we even make fun of or disregard Mahatma Gandhi, the biggest icon one can think of.
Amitabh Bachchan is a super star because the way he has catered to the emotions of the masses. His acting is at par with any international star you can name. He is highly erudite and he carries himself about with great élan. There are actors in the film industry who are far better looking (for instance, Dharmendra) than Amitabh but still could never match his charisma and dedication. So he has earned his iconic status all by himself and he owes his success neither to the media nor to the press. No icon does.
Recently a few terrorists were nabbed by the Delhi Police at Dilli Haat. The “secularists” and some Indian bloggers must be fuming over the aspersions being cast upon the poor terrorists. The point is, why are the terrorists always suspected of carrying out terror attacks? Couldn’t they just be there to have momos or do some ethnic shopping? They too have tastes you know?
Fine, they carried bombs and all, big deal huh! What other option did they have? Delhi is so unsafe that you cannot just leave your valuables unattended.
There might be some company called the Terrorists Tours and Travels Ltd. that was showing around tourist spots to these terrorists. The next stoppage on the itinerary might have been the Red Fort and then Qutub Minar. And even if they had dropped or left a few bombs here and there, it might had just been a prank, you know how the young lads are these days. Give them a break OK!
The politicians of the day seem to be at loggerheads with the judiciary right and left (recently here, a while ago there) and one can understand what’s their problem: they are not able to wreck havoc with the country as freely as they would like to.
Now, Mr. Somnath Chatterjee has rightly remarked
During the tumultuous period (the Congress-imposed emergency) of our history, the judiciary had left the citizens at the mercy of the executive.
and
It was only the Parliament that restored the basic rights of the people and put in place stronger defences for our democracy through the 44th Constitutional amendment.
He’s also in the right to say that with thousands of cases pending, the judges have no business poking their noses into the affairs of the legislative. The judges are certainly not the harbingers of the ultimate justice. Remember the Bhanwari Devi case where the judge acquitted the upper caste accused simply because “an upper caste man could not have defiled himself by raping a lower-caste woman.”? I don’t remember this moronic, criminally insane judge ever being taken to task by other judges. So no, the judiciary doesn’t have a high moral ground.
But it is the only option the country has. Take it like this: there is this deep sea, my boat is about to capsize and I don’t know how to swim and if I remain in the water I’m surely going to drown. There is an island full of cannibals and I can reach it with my boat, before it capsizes. I’ll certainly go to the island. In our country, the politicians are the sea, and the judiciary is the island with the cannibals. OK, not a palatable analogy.
Here’s another reason why people have more faith in the judiciary. No matter how screwed up some of the judges are, they certainly are not like the politicians. To become a judge, you have to go through proper educational and scholastic channels. There should be no case pending against you. You should have a clean public record. But you can easily become a politician even if you are a criminal, a terrorist, a mafia don, a bahubali, a dacoit, a murderer, or even a rapist. Our good old Shibu became the koyala mantri (the coal minister) even after committing a murder. Modi is a much hated figure in India for obvious reasons and he is still superciliously flaunted as a successful chief minister, without an iota of compunction. Almost all the Congress I ministers that lead and incited the mobs during the 1984 anti-Sikh riots either died without being punished or are still politically active. We all know what the communists recently did in Nandigram. The list can go on and on.
Interestingly, Mr. Chatterjee shows no scruples regarding the fact that 80% ministers in UP have criminal cases against them. Has he ever protested against criminals joining the politics? Or would this threaten our fabric of “democracy”?
So given a choice between the deep sea and the cannibals-ridden island, I think the public is intelligent enough to decide what to choose.
People who support quotas for the OBCs and the backward classes do nothing but perpetuate the old, sick mentality of “superior than thou”. It’s like, first our ancestors oppressed your ancestors, and now we are going to be benevolent to you. So we are either the oppressors or the providers. We are never on equal terms.
A just society needs justice, not charity. No matter how much people claim that it’s their right, we all know it’s not their right, it’s either politics or ideological obfuscation. When you give people benefits according to their caste you take away their dignity and their spirit to fight. You give winds to opportunism and crush the real striving before it can even blossom. The quotas are a sure-shot way of keeping a big part of the society either backward, or monumentally corrupt. I’ve heard children not studying properly because they know they’ll get admission through the quota system. People fear going to schedule-caste doctors because they might have achieved their education without even qualifying for it (I personally disagree with this as the rich pay their way into various medical colleges too). It’s utterly unfair.
I know this sounds overly cliched in this cynical world; instead of quotas, we desperately need social justice and social security. We need equal rights for all the sections of the society. We need a sense of fairness. Education should be accessible to all by default, not through quotas. In fact, if there is so much quota going on, there should be quota at the schooling level because it is there where a foundation is built, and it is there where so much discrimination takes place.
Oppressions have been committed by many sections of our society, by many religions, but it doesn’t mean we keep exhuming the rotten corpses for political gains. One of the worst human atrocities were committed by the Muslim invaders, but it doesn’t mean we hold the current Muslims responsible for that. The second wrong doesn’t often compensate the first wrong.
According to Shekhar Kapur there is not much difference between Cho Seung-Hui and an average suicide bomber in Iraq. If you don’t know who Cho Seung-Hui is, he is that mentally disturbed boy who recently gunned down 32 students at Virginia Tech. Shekhar in his brief post says:
If this young man (Cho Seung-Hui) was in Iraq or Palestine, he would have been a suicide bomber and labeled simply as a Muslim terrorist. So while the world tries to understand why young Cho would commit such a tragic last act, I would ask the world to look at the young suicide bomber with the same analysis.
I think the fundamental difference between a killer like Cho and a Muslim suicide bomber is that for Cho it might be the end of everything, and for a Muslim suicide bomber, it is the beginning. Both the personalities need thorough socio-psychological analysis but they conduct mass killings for totally different reasons and that’s why a suicide bomber is more viscous (I know, a politically incorrect expression) than Cho. I don’t mean to undermine the death of those 32 students but I think it is easier to treat people like Cho compared to a terrorist because for a terrorist destruction is not a statement, it’s a jihad, a religious war.
People like Cho at least know that the gates of heaven won’t be flung open for them once they die. An average terrorist thinks that. Ills of society create people like Cho, but the terrorists create ill societies. A terrorist wants to destroy every thing that doesn’t fit in the template of his fundamentalist ideology.
Frankly, we all have reasons to become a terrorist. Even our neighborhood dhobi has a good reason to turn terrorist, but he has chosen to work under the burning sun and improve the lot of his family. Despite the ill treatment he receives as a daily cultural dosage he aspires for a better future for his family.
People that resort to terrorism deserve no sympathy. To an extent, Cho does.
And this is the basic difference between the societies. Imagine a terrorist saying this:
In front of Burruss on the Drillfield is a mountain of flowers and in front of the breathtaking pile a ring of 33 individual piles of flowers, notes, and other materials.
No, I did not mistype. Each death is remembered, including Cho’s. I am glad, for despite his actions he is a casualty of this mess as well. We all have dark times in our lives; it is unfortunate his consumed others’ as well.
The Indian Space Research Organization today successfully put into the orbit an Italian satellite, finally entering the billion-dollar commercial launch market. According to the link
The India-made Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) put the Agile astronomical satellite into its intended orbit about 550 kilometers above the Earth 20 minutes after blast-off.
This thing had been going on for years because I remember reading about this effort since my college days. Some used to say that the Indian space launching facility could take up satellites merely for 20 million dollars (India was reportedly paid 11 million dollars). The other commercial launching countries have been trying to create hurdles because the market is very lucrative and India can provide an extremely low-cost but highly proficient alternative.
The 352kg Italian satellite will gather information about the origins of the universe.
Well, it’s a good day for the ISRO scientists and they have done India proud.
The Prime Minister was recently complaining that the judiciary is impinging upon the rights of the executive by continuously stepping in the way of populist policies. I think right now the Supreme Court is the only institution that provides some respite to the beleaguered citizens that become constant targets of venal political machinations.
Take for instance the quota mania of the present government. Left to its own devices it will quotafy even the sauchalayas of the country. It’ll also tell you how much you can pee and how much air you can breath in and how much is to be left for the OBC.
Today I read that the government is contemplating making it mandatory for the private companies to provide job quotas. Just imagine how you’ll feel if you find out that your project manager became a project manager (I think it is highly unlikely to happen) due to his or her caste and not due to his or her qualifications, experience and performance.
The Supreme Court today rightly rejected the Center’s plea to vacate the stay on the implementation of 27 per cent OBC reservation in elite central educational institutions. I don’t know how the these things work but I hope now the IIM’s can go ahead with their admission process without this quota system being implemented for the current year (or for that matter, any year).
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