Although I’m not given to formulating New Year resolutions there are some things that I would like to accomplish in the coming year. They are not resolutions per se because I’ve seen many few people, in fact none, sticking to their resolutions and consequently achieving something, and anyway, personally too I am not very great with them. Besides, I don’t think one has to wait for the new year to begin something good or productive. The list of things that I want to do is nothing like the 43 Things thing (I’ve got an account there but never used it so it shows how keen I am to formulating and then following resolutions) but here they are:
Reduce my weight and become healthier
This is something I urgently need to do not because I look quite bloated but it is affecting me physically. A long time back I wrote a post on my knee pain: I have figured out that the pain is a gift from my weight. Aside from that it feels great to have less weight and so I have noticed during the past month when I have been, very slowly, shedding weight. I am not on diet and am not doing excessive exercise; I have simply reduced the amount of food I take. This doesn’t mean that I’m giving less nutrition to myself. I’m trying to eat healthy food like dry fruits, regular fruits, things with no sugar or less sugar, and things with no oil or less oil. This means I can keep eating what I like and don’t have to deprive myself and in the process increase the craving for more food. I’m also trying to drink lots of water but in winter I don’t feel like having much. It’s working but unlike my previous attempts I would like to continue this throughout the year.
I also plan to create a healthier family. In fact presently too we are trying to invest more on health. As a family we’ll keep on exploring new ways of improving our overall health.
Organize my work and earn more
Both these things are interrelated. This year I couldn’t help it because of the nature of my work but in 2008 I will make sure that I do my work in such a manner that I can organize it better; less or more work is not my problem, my problem is organizing the work that I have. Yes I do need to increase the number of leads I generate every month but that too is a part of the organization process.
Do things that I need to do
The shocking assassination of Benazir Bhutto has reminded me that life is too unpredictable (yes, even for the lesser mortals like yours truly) and one should focus on doing what he or she wants to do. For instance, I have been neglecting my writing and my singing for years now and I can blame nobody — it’s simple procrastination. As long as you’re alive you should make use of every moment you have because every living moment is precious and you never know when the clutches of destiny will snatch these moments away from you: you realize this when you go through something like a near-death experience. There is another thing that I want to do in the coming year and keep on doing it for as long as possible: spend more time with family. I have already initiated this process. In the end the only thing that matters is how much time you have spent with your loved ones and what has been the quality of that time. No matter what you achieve and how famous you become if you cannot be with your family on a regular basis nothing really matters.
Read more
I don’t believe that in order to become a better writer you must read a lot but reading does influence you and feeds you with more ideas. There was a time when I was quite well read compared to the resources (access to books and money to get more books) I had. Now I have more resources but no time/inclination to read. One can always squeeze out time if one really wants to do something.
Be more social
It seems I have lost all my friends and I don’t have a social circle. Not that it really matters but sometimes it is healthy to talk to people who are not living with you 24 x 7. I was never great with friendships and even during my college days I had very few friends although I knew many people because of my involvement with the fine arts association. But still, a few years ago I had some friends. Some grew old, some grew rich, some are too happy and some are too sad, and some simply drifted away and I too played my part amply by not making enough effort to keep in touch with old friends and approach new friends. In fact these days it’s easier to make friends due to scores of social networking websites but I feel too lazy to make the gargantuan effort of interacting over there. I still don’t plan to use those websites but I will be more receptive when people approach me.
Well, I guess that’s it for the time being.
Technorati Tags: new year resolutions
A few days ago I had written that the BJP should dump Narendra Modi for greater national interests. Even at that time I knew that if anybody could win elections for BJP in Gujarat it would be Modi, knowing the communal passions that move the social machinery in the state. Narendra Modi is again going to be Gujarat’s CM. It’s surely a triumph for the BJP but it is a sad commentary on the state of democracy. Sad because considering the kind of political situation we have in the country Modi is the best choice and sad because Modi gets to be the best choice.
In Gujarat you can clearly see the anti-blind-secular wave that has hit the country due to lopsided reporting done by channels like NDTV, CNN-IBN and news portals like Tehelka and all those rubbish newspapers. In fact some are claiming — correctly to a great extent — that Narendra Modi won this time because of the Tehelka exposé on Gujarat riots and Sonia Gandhi recently calling him “the merchant of death” and the so-called “secular” channels endorsing such views with copious coverage. This was so predictable. In fact these morons don’t know that their skewed attitude encourages fundamentalism even among the moderate communities. This election outcome should act as a lesson that unless you portray all the communities fairly you cannot subdue the extreme elements in the society. The verdict perhaps is less in favor of Modi and more against the divisive media propaganda.
I know there are many people — rightly — who detest Modi for his role in the 2002 anti-Muslim riots. But then, in India, there have been practically anti-every-community riots: for instance the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Every community, every religion has borne the brunt of communalism and racialism. 1000s of Hindus have been killed by Islamic terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir. 100s of Hindus were butchered by the Sikh terrorists in Punjab. Similarly, big or small, there have been numerous anti-Hindu riots in various Mulsim-majority areas in India. Then why leave other politicians and religious heads and demonize just Modi?
An anti-riots panel should be constituted and it should have members from all communities, religions and castes, and they should investigate the roles of various parties, politicians and religious heads and pursue the matters through law and politics. For instance politicians like HKL Bhagat and Tytles — both belonging to the Congress party — have been implicated but have never stood a complete trial (Bhagat is dead). Similarly, there are many Muslims, many Sikhs, even Christians, who have instigated riots and perpetrated mass killings; they should all be brought to book, and when they are all brought to book only then people like Modi can be stopped and curtailed. Until that happens, it would be highly hypocritical to go on accusing Modi perpetually.
Some people prefer to compare Narendra Modi with Adolf Hitler and our prime minister recently said that it was the Holocaust that happened in Gujarat in 2002 but I think these people have no sense of history. The blogger in the above-mentioned link says that the demonization of Muslims has been happening for a long time now. If this is happening, it is unfortunate and to a great extent Muslims are to be blamed for that because wherever they are and wherever they are not ruling they have a problem, whether in Asia, in Europe, or elsewhere. They always have one gripe or another, and they always have one reason or another to condone violence, bigotry and backwardness. Modi could be a modern-day Aurangzeb but he is a circumstantial Aurangzeb. Just as the Americans support Bush in his war against terrorism the people of Gujarat have supported Modi for his war against fundamentalism. Both the instances are fraught with ill bodings but people are left with no other choice.
Technorati Tags: narendra modi, modi, Gujarat elections
I haven’t written here for a long time; I want to write but have no idea what to write about so I’ll write about random things that have been happening in the world.
Taslima Nasreen
I’ve been reading the small news snippets for many days that the central government is making an all-out effort to make life hell for the author whose misfortune is that she has decided to take refuge in India. I wonder why she is still here when she can get shelter in some other, more liberal and democratic country. First she was thrown out by the West Bengal government and now the central government is putting pressure on her to keep a very low profile if she wants to remain in the country. She has been in a virtual house arrest — she cannot go anywhere, nobody can visit her, she cannot call anybody, and nobody can call her. Of course she has contacted every newspaper and TV news channel to pour out her heart and our external affairs minister was looking really upset when he talked to the reporters regarding how she is not heeding to the government’s advisory.
What stumps every freethinking person in the country is how the complete government machinery can be cowed down by a handful of fundamentalists? If nothing else then to just prove a point she should have been provided full security and she should have been allowed to move unrestricted. Why should the fundamentalists decide how a person should live in our country? It is utterly shameful for a country as big as India. We want to have the independence of possessing the nuclear warheads but we cannot ensure safety of a single person; isn’t it ironic?
IT people in Bangalore
A few months ago the people in Bangalore had a big problem with the poor street dogs and now they have a problem with the people working in the IT industry. The last week’s issue of the Outlook magazine talks about how the Bangaloreans hate the way the outsiders are sullying the original culture of the city. I think they should be left alone and all the other people and dogs should move out of the city. For all you know it could turn out to be a matter of life and death. Is it some city in India or Saudi Arabia/Iraq?
Shooting in Gurgaon
Recently two teenagers shot dead their classmate in a Gudgaon school. They were both I think 14-year-old and the main culprit had stolen his father’s revolver who in turn had been given the revolver by a neighbor who in turn, I think, had obtained the weapon illegally. I’m sure a lot has been written about the gun culture arriving in India and the teenagers emulating their American counterparts. Just like in America, the problem is not with the guns, it is with the society, the screwed up societal fabric that we are weaving. The father of the boy had himself taught him how to use the firearm. Violence is constantly glamorized and justified in the media especially in films and on television. I recently realized how immune we have grown to violence around us when they showed a Sri Lankan woman entering an office and blowing herself up. I wasn’t shocked for even a second. Perhaps I have seen too much blood and gore on TV. But yes in many cases the availability of the weapon makes a big difference; the unfortunate boy would have been alive had the other boy had no access to the gun.
In this particular case the other problem was the bully culture; it is said that the dead boy used to bully the boys who shot him. I think bullying should be taken very seriously both by the school authorities and the parents and the children should be taught how to handle bullies without resorting to catastrophic means because by the end of the day you want a reformed bully and not a dead bully.
The recent movie we watched
A couple of weeks ago we watched “Om Shanti Om”. It is a movie you wouldn’t want to spend your money on, I mean it is not dull but it is not a well-made movie considering who all have acted in it. Deepika Padukone is a stunner as long as she doesn’t act and Shahrukh Khan looks stupid throughout the movie. They have tried to make fun of the stars of the 70s era but they have only succeeded in making a pathetic show of themselves. The script is drab, the acting is boring, and even the direction is immature.
This reminds me — a few days ago I was watching a Rajendra Kumar song and was just wondering how old those actors used to look: he always looked like a hero in his 30s and he often acted like one and that made him look graceful. Watch “Sangam” to know what I mean; the two male heroes and the heroine all look so mature. These days our heroes cross their 40s and still act like demented teenagers. But I would quickly like to add here that actors nowadays are far better than their older counterparts as far as the acting skills go.
My reading
For many months — yes, now it takes not days, not weeks, but months — I have been reading “The Count of Monte Cristo” by Alexandre Dumas, an exceptional 19th-century French author. It is a big book, I mean, you can easily fit three novels in the amount of paper and text the book has used. In fact, while reading it I switched to another book “The Inheritance of Loss” by Anita Desai, and for a change I read the book almost in a single day. I wonder why “The Inheritance of Loss” got the Booker — it is nowhere near the other Booker books that I have read for instance, “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy and “The Midnight’s Children” by Salam Rushdie. Maybe they didn’t have a better writer this time.
Coming back to “The Count of Monte Cristo”: it’s basically a revenge saga, and I’m not reading it because I’m in love with the protagonist and the plot. I’m simply reading it because the author has written it exceptionally well and with lots of detail. He has turned his protagonist, the Count of Monte Cristo into a preternatural genius who falls into a mammoth fortune by chance. Okay, not completely by chance but still it sounds quite tedious sometimes. The plot moves very fast and the person who has written the introduction has rightly called Dumas the John Grisham of that time.
I haven’t been reading much newspaper these days because after getting up I’m always in a hurry to do my vocal music practice and after that I start working.
If the BJP is blamed for being communal then Narendra Modi justifies all the disapprobation. He’s a man the party should have gotten rid of after the Gujarat riots. Just as Sonia Gandhi and her cohorts represent whatever is wrong with the country, he represents whatever is wrong with the BJP; in one way or the other he will cause the party’s downfall.
In his recent speech he doesn’t even pretend to be representing a civilized democracy, and he is rightly being compared to Idi Amin and “Baby doc”. The BJP moronically blames Sonia Gandhi for Modi’s utterances at the rally where he justifies the encounter killing of Sohrabuddin who was blamed for having weapons with him. Later on two police officers were sacked and arrested for organizing the fake encounter. This is what makes it sound like a rogue state of affairs:
“Sonia Gandhi spoke of terrorism. But she has no right to talk of this. Till today, those who attacked Parliament haven’t been sent to the gallows. Congress in Gujarat is raising its voice on the Sohrabuddin issue. But, it should explain to the people what should be done to a man who stored illegal arms and ammunition. You tell me, what should have been done to Sohrabuddin?”
The rally echoed with shouts of “Kill him, kill him.” Modi responded with: “Well, that is it. Do I have to take Sonia Gandhi’s permission to do this?”
Doesn’t this sound like some place in Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan?
I have no sympathy for the likes of Sohrabuddin but you cannot flaunt a state-sponsored murder, justified or not justified. You don’t openly encourage expressions like “Kill him, kill him”.
People like Modi thrive on fear psychosis. It is somewhat same as the way George W. Bush exploits the fear of the Americans of Islamic terrorists to carry out his political and mercantile agendas. Terrorism is a criminal problem, it is a law and order problem, but it is certainly not a communal problem as Modi makes out to be. You attach unnecessary importance to terrorism by painting it in a communal color. To counter terrorism if you have to resort to unlawful tactics such as killing people in fake encounters and instigating riots against the suspected communities, it means your ability to carry out the law has deteriorated. Everybody who lives in our country is an Indian and deserves all the protection an Indian is provided by the Constitution. It doesn’t matter to which community or religion you belong. Similarly protecting people of the state is the fundamental duty of the Chief Minister no matter what community he or she has to protect; he or she cannot just go on mouthing excuses.
As I wrote in one of my previous posts, in order to become a responsible and respected political party the BJP will have to get rid of Narendra Modi before he causes an irreversible damage to the party and to the country.
OK, it was a traumatic incident — the Babri masjid demolition — and it left indelible scars all over the world, but some people are reacting as if the entire world crumbled on that day. Damn it, it was just a monument. Thousands, even hundreds of thousands of monuments have been razed all over the world, and still being razed in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Malaysia and there are just token protests: nobody is traumatized and no hearts bleed. Does the Babri masjid demolition become an earth-shattering phenomenon because it was a Muslim monument and Hindus want a temple there?
I’m not saying it was something we should feel proud of as a society; the demolition shouldn’t have happened and the law and order, and even the intelligence machinery miserably failed to prevent the unfortunate incident from happening. So big deal, again, after all it was just a monument. Aren’t people trying to demolish the Ram setu because it’s a myth?
Shedding crocodile tears for Muslims and berating other religions for all Muslim woes has become a fashion and people just don’t seem to be able to shake themselves out of it. In fact they are perpetually competing with each other to prove who is a greater secular. Excoriate and look down upon everything Hindu and admire and condone everything Muslim and lo and behold! You are a true secular. It has become a Kafkaesque world.
Here is a touching recollection of the fateful day, 15 years ago. In fact this post articulates my real feelings towards the demolition; that it’s not about the monument, it’s about our beliefs, it’s about political favoritism that is going to prove fatal for our country someday, and it is about all pervasive religious confusion. Asad’s thoughts make me clarify my stand: I don’t mean to downplay the incident but it surely is overhyped just because it is a Muslim issue. In the comment section of my previous post Mai said that a movie made on 1984 anti-Sikh riots has been censored by the government and I see no reactions forthcoming from the general intelligentsia. On the other hand, another movie — Parzania — made on Gujarat riots won some official awards (although it surely deserved all the praise that it got but that is another issue). This is where lies the main, the most dangerous problem. When a community is mollycoddled in this way, when all its negative sides are ignored then no intellectual introspection takes place in that community and it both resists change and ceases to grow. Such attitudes are causing the Muslim community irreversible harm.
Just watched Arundhati Roy’s interview in the Devil’s Advocate and she makes Karan Thapar look like a clueless teenager. It’s amazing to see the man giving silly arguments in defense of Buddhadeb for orchestrating the ouster of the Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen from Kolkata. How does he sustain his job? Karan’s point of view is that the poor chief minister had no choice left, that in order to prevent many people from losing their lives he had to send her away and withdraw the security given to her.
Arundhati rightly says that it doesn’t require rocket science to understand that the West Bengal government raked up the entire Taslima Nasreen issue just to divert attention from the Nandigram atrocities; the controversial book for which the alleged protests happened has been in the bestsellers list for the past four years in Kolkata and there have been no large-scale protests in the state. Then why all of a sudden there is so much chest beating against the book or whatever she has been writing?
I think it is a matter of shame for the State government to send a writer away just because it cannot control the rioting mobs. Don’t they feel embarrassed that they had to cite this reason in order to send her away? Precisely for this reason, no matter how much praise Narender Modi gets from the right wing writers and intellectuals, I strongly dislike him: that dude is a walking failure; instead of feeling proud of his “achievements” he should be totally depressed and he should be a liability for the BJP instead of an asset, no matter how many elections he can win for the party. If you cannot control riots then you have no business calling yourself the Chief Minister of the state. If you cannot control the law and order situation then why do you have the law and order machinery in your hand — give the control to someone who has the guts to control the mobs. The more excuses you give the sillier you sound. So it is highly moronic of the CPI(M) to say that they had to send Taslima away in order to contain the deteriorating law and order situation in the state. A capable government would both provide unbreakable security to the threatened person and contain the elements trying to incite violence.
As usual when Karan Thapar talked about all the artists and writers whose freedom of expression has been curtailed by the protesting mobs he only mentioned those artists and writers who have been targeted by the so-called “Hindu fundamentalists”; there was, intentionally of course, no mention of writers and artists who have been threatened by Muslim fundamentalists.
It doesn’t actually matter who is threatened and by whom but freedom of expression should be a fundamental right and it should be protected by the state by all means because when people are afraid to express themselves just because there could be retaliatory actions the society ceases to grow intellectually. If you don’t like something written or painted, well too bad, you can’t just go and bash up the person and destroy his or her creations and if you do you should get the maximum punishment available in the country. If you have a problem with the creation you can either create something contrary or take some legal action.
Sadly and tragically our successive governments always give in to the pressure of the mob whether it is the Gujarat riots, or the 1984 riots, or the banning of “The Satanic Verses” or the exile of M. F. Hussein or the violent protests in Vadodara. Our lazy governments, whether at the Centre or in the States, are always either going for the easier option or doing something that satisfies their political agendas.
I like what Arundhati says somewhere in the interview when Karan Thapar asks her whether it was right that Taslima removed the “objectionable” parts from what she had written, “What choice does she have? She is under the protection of the mafia, the mob.” By the mafia, the mob, she meant the government.
Technorati Tags: taslima nasreen, west bengal, arundhati roy, nandigram
For a few minutes today I saw the modern version of “Great Expectations” in the form of a movie that they were showing on TV. They had probably changed the names of the characters because Miss Havisham had some other name in the movie. but the names of Estella and Pip hadn’t been changed. When the character of Miss Havisham sees that Pip is attracted towards Estella she remarks something like, “You already love her and she will cause you great pain.”
That set me thinking, is love all about pain? There was a time when I used to think like that. I thought there was no true love without excruciating pain, without anguish, and without longing. Maybe these notions of love were a result of all the literature I was reading at that time. Whether it was Dostoyevsky, or Thomas Hardy, or Garcia, or Salman Rushdie; they all seemed to be obsessed with characters that burnt in the inferno of love; the more vehemently the fires burnt, the greater heights their loves attained. It almost sounded like the glory of martyrdom when you die for your country with a smile on your lips.
Some people believe that love should be about eternal happiness and joy: “you are at the top of the world when you are in love”, This may be true in the rarest of the rare cases, but I think that kind of love, the love that brings you eternal joy is of the spiritual kind — without physical attraction and the cutting desire to be close to the loved one.
Sure, the cosmic joy manifests during the budding times of love. You feel like dying of happiness when the sparkles of reciprocation spread all over the firmament of your love. But after the initial thrust things slow down and the law of diminishing returns gets operational and eventually every kind of great love boils down to juggling with the quotidian matters of life like earning money, cooking food, taking care of the children and paying the bills. After all Romeo and Juliet couldn’t have spent their lives rebelling against their feuding families and making love. If they hadn’t died and if they had gotten married they would have had children and all the associated problems with them; other problems take precedence over love and romance as you settle down and start a family. But I think am talking about the bookish love.
A few months ago Alka and I saw a documentary on the National Geographic Channel in which they showed a couple who has spent more than 35 years studying elephant behavior in various African geographical locations. They have grown old now but they are always working alone in the limitless world of humanlessness. Had there not been prodigal love between them they wouldn’t have managed so many years with each other without meeting other human beings. Of course their common passion must have acted as a binding force but still you need something more than passion to stay together for such a long time and accomplish so much, together. How many moments of love and hardship they must have shared together. Now here we can say that it is a love of eternal joy and happiness (at least it looked like that ). One of my cousins told me last year that she was thinking of getting a job because both she and her husband were getting fed up of seeing each other in the same room; they needed to get away from each other for at least some time (they both work from home I think). Theirs was a love marriage. Has the love withered, or the great love was never there and it was just an illusion or some sociological compulsion to love somebody?
The love-related pain is of two kinds: of separation and of treachery. For a few months I have been trying to read “The Count of Monte Cristo”; it is a very thick book but still, had I been able to extract enough time out of my daily routine I would have been able to finish the book, but anyway that is another subject. The protagonist of the book is framed falsely by the people who are jealous of him both for his financial success and his success in obtaining the love of his life. He is imprisoned, and no doubt he is very sad when he is taken away from his lover. But his agony breaks all bounds of reasoning when he learns that in his absence his lover doesn’t wait for him and marries the person who had falsely framed him for treason (she doesn’t know that her present husband was responsible for the sad turn of events, but it hardly matters). So she also gets included in the list of people he wants to take revenge from. The treachery of love incites both hatred and pride. Pride, for being the one who loved till his or her last breath. Hatred, for being left for another. To understand this feeling, you have to go through it. Treachery of love turns some into exceptional poets and some into psychopathic murderers.
In today’s world separation due to societal pressures, at least in educated classes, is not a great factor. Here I would quickly refer to the case of the Muslim boy who recently died in Kolkata because he was in love with a rich girl whose parents were opposed to the alliance: the boy was allegedly murdered by the city police. So such things still happen in the society but for the argument let us assume that they are not a norm and they don’t happen in the civilized world. Ranjha (the hero of a Punjabi folklore love epic written by the great Sufi poet Bulle Shah) turned into an ascetic when due to societal differences he couldn’t spend his life with Heer and eventually they both died of separation. This is where things get mixed up a bit; what causes greater agony in love? The separation due to third-party intervention or the separation due to treachery of a partner? For instance Heer and Ranjha could have spent their lives peacefully thinking that even though they were not physically close to each other they still loved each other. A great amount of strength can be derived from the fact that a person in a faraway place loves you from the bottom of his or her heart. So did Heer and Ranjha died because they couldn’t live with each other, that they couldn’t mate? Obviously they would have had sex had they gotten married because after all theirs was not a motherly, or a fatherly, or a sisterly, or a brotherly, or a friendly love and neither was it the kind of love we have for Almighty. Many people take a leaf out of these legendary love stories and take drastic steps when they fail in love. But a love that prompts you to kill yourself is not actually love; it is a craving, an obsession that drives you out of your mind and you end up killing yourself. This is a mental illness and not a romantic emotion.
So what would be true love? I think true love wouldn’t depend on getting to live with the person you love. True love is just there, irrespective of the kind of reciprocation it generates. True love lets you live a productive life even if you “fail” in love. The best example is the parental love. Okay here I am not going on a tangent; I am using the example of parental love just to drive in a point. Parental love is a love that does not depend on a return. Your parents love you just because they are your parents; they keep loving you even if you have abandoned them to the extent of calling someone else your mother or father (of course there are exceptions). As long as you are healthy and prosperous they will be satisfied (assuming the other problems don’t bother them like money or health). This you cannot say about a lover. A separation or a shift in loyalty is bound to cause lots of pain and anger. The happiness becomes a joint affair when you are in love. Your lover loses the right to be happy with another person; he or she should only be happy with you. This feeling lasts as long as you don’t get another partner who is even better than the previous one. Do you call it love? Rather it is a circumstantial feeling; it changes with the change of circumstances. True love, in its real essence, doesn’t get affected with the change of circumstances. It doesn’t matter to the true love whether the other person lives with you or with someone else, or is happy with you or with someone else. A love that doesn’t depend on togetherness can be the cause of eternal joy I think.
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