A golden rule in all religions that very few follow

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Bull Fighting Should Be Banned

Update: A tradition being hundreds of years old doesn’t mean that it doesn’t suck, but this is the reason that has been used to revoke the ban on jallikattu. Although the traditional bull fight took place at various places it was held under “supervision” but we all know in India what supervision really means. While revoking the ban the court has instructed that no cruelty should be meted out to the bulls for instance chili powder should not be blown into their eyes and nobody should pull their tails. Even if these instructions are strictly adhered to we can never be too sure; they might find some new ways to torment the poor animals. I hope this tradition fades away in the coming years.

The original post: What’s so martial about scores of men taming a bull blinded by throwing chilly powder into its eyes? If you are feeling so valorous then go out and fight with the goons and the corrupt who are constantly harassing the society. Join the army. Why torment an animal just to disguise your physical and mental impotency? This is not only barbaric it is pathetically shameful and it is good that the Supreme Court has decided to ban the fight in Tamil Nadu where this dark-age cruelty has continued for the past 400 years and in the last 10 years 200 people have been gored to death by the raging bulls. But I have no sad feeling for the dead people because they died doing what they wanted to do. I definitely feel sad for the bulls who have no say in all this.

Tradition is hard to contain; people protested even when evils like Sati and child marriage were banned. Mass protest against the ruling doesn’t mean the fight should be allowed to happen.

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Random Thoughts

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.

The Ugly Side Of Consumerism

Obsessive consumerism is the bane of our times. An article titled 19 Ugly Things You Didn’t Know About Materialism aptly asks these questions:

• Are you a wage-slave, working at a job you hate so you can afford things you don’t need?
• Are you more focused on remodeling your kitchen than developing relationships?
• Are you more interested in how you’ll look in a bathing suit than in your actual health?

It’s hard to believe people actually run behind material gains rather than developing themselves as human beings and achieving their optimal physical and intellectual potential. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts, you should only have sufficient money and above that it is merely a nihilistic pursuit. You should live to earn, you should earn to live. So does that make Bill Gates bad, as he has billions of dollars. No I don’t mean that.

Bill Gates, or people like him, earn money from what they do, because of what they do. Money in that case is an outcome, a consequence. The problem arises when money no longer remains a consequence, it becomes a pursuit, an obsession. It becomes a problem when it’s not the functionality of the car that matters, but how rich it makes you look.

Excessive materialism is a sign of low self-esteem. You are always seeking acknowledgement from the others, and you always fear their scorn for not having certain things.

There is a strong positive correlation between materialism and several mental and physical maladies. In other words, people who pursue money and things at the expense of relationships and other meaningful endeavors are more likely to suffer from these 19 problems:

Read about these 19 problems.

Technorati Tags: materialism

How To Control Hooligans

Alka was narrating a sad incident from our Hindi newspaper (therefore I don’t have a link to the actual news). In a train a few boys were harassing a half a dozen school or college girls. When the co-travelers protested, the boys — they were local I guess and were traveling just for fun — called their friends on cell phones and the ensuing mob not only thrashed the passengers but also tore the girls’ clothes. No wonder people think twice before speaking against bullies and eve teasers in buses, trains, on the roads and in the market. But isn’t it so humiliating to keep mum? Doesn’t something die inside you when you mutely observe someone’s modesty being publicly outraged while you seethe inside? What can you do?

A good lesson from this incident is never protest half-heartedly. An unfortunate thing is in India people never unite against evil but always do so when they themselves are being evil, as it happened in this case. Initially, how many boys could there have been? 6, 7, even 10? A rail bogey on an average has 50-60 passengers. These boys should have been thrashed badly and their cell phones should have been thrown out collectively by all the passengers. I know this is wishful thinking.

I wonder what you can do as a single person. There is no use depending on police, and there is no use depending on people around you? Got any ideas? Can something be done that helps the distressed person and doesn’t cause you harm?

Technorati Tags: crimes in india, eve teasers, hooligans

Is Doubt An Anathema To Religious Faith?

Should religious faith be unshakeable? Faith should never be blind, and this implies you cannot have faith without having true knowledge, as Gautam Buddha urged his followers to always ask questions and only believe when you really understand.

In a recent book (consisting of private letters) on Mother Teresa it’s been revealed that she suffered from doubts for long periods and she shared these doubts in her letters to her friends and as confessions. They are termed as periods of darkness where her faith shook and she doubted the existence of God. Of course she was tormented by her thoughts.

In a letter to a spiritual confidant, the Rev. Michael van der Peet, that is only now being made public, she wrote with weary familiarity of a different Christ, an absent one. “Jesus has a very special love for you,” she assured Van der Peet. “[But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak … I want you to pray for me — that I let Him have [a] free hand.” [ the TIME link ]

But I think these thoughts are normal. She saw so much misery around her and for how long can one see Jesus among people ridden with wounds of leprosy? For how long can you embrace appalling misery to experience God, especially when you love those miserable people? For how long can you condone God? How do you make sense of all this? And sometimes when you cannot make sense of all this, doubts are natural.

Does this mitigate Mother Teresa’s aura as a spiritual, saintly person? I don’t think so. She could have easily kept her “darkness” wrapped inside her but she didn’t. She shared it with people. She sought answers, and I think that’s what real religion means: to seek answers. Religion doesn’t mean parroting hymns and prayers without understanding them. When you have doubts it means you actively think about your faith and you take it seriously, you respect it and you are concerned about it. Well-meaning doubt makes you a greater person, not a lesser person. In fact most of the religious fanaticism and fundamentalism surfaces when you cease to have religious doubts.

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Happy Independence Day

A very happy independence day to all my readers. I know this post comes a bit late but I purposely didn’t write the day-before-yesterday because first, I thought everybody would be writing about it and second, after a long time I took a day off (this means, I didn’t open my laptop or check my email or respond to queries, etc.). Third, I’m suffering with a bad bout of tonsillitis. But I read a lot.

Our newspaper was filled with articles written by various columnists talking about what’s been achieved and what’s been lost in the past 60 years of India’s, some even called it illusory, independence. With so much misery, poverty, backwardness, corruption, fall of ethos, rampant hatred and intolerance, are we really free? Does freedom merely mean kicking out the foreign rulers? Look out in the street: doesn’t the common man look like a loser, totally defeated and devoid of dignity? Does a free nation look like this?

I agree with the thought but we are a lot better off than we were during the British, or even the Mughal rule. Whatever mess we create here, it is our own mess. We are always free to clear this mess, whether ideological, economic or social, whenever we feel like it (it’s another thing we don’t feel like it). Despite our politicians and destructive policy makers some of us have made things better. Whether one agrees or not, the working conditions are far better than what they used to be. The progress is in certain, limited quarters, but this is how progress starts — it gradually spreads.

The past always seems romantic and quixotic, but every age has its dark side. Chandan Mitra of the Pioneer in a recent article evoked the 60-year journey of the Hindi film music. We’re seeing the worst phase these days, but the golden phase of the Hindi film music survived with the backdrop of the Chinese invasion, political uncertainty, abysmal poverty, industrial strife and a slew of natural calamities. Poetic and all is fine, but if you don’t have food to eat or clothes to wear, you cannot simply survive on melodies (some did actually).

I think the present is the best time to live, whether in India (I’m talking about the functioning, civilized world, and not about communities that are still living in the 700 AD world) or anywhere else. We are at the threshold of a civilizational shift. Technology and new thinking is helping us do things better, faster, and it is also wrecking havoc on our environment, which needs to be tackled with the greatest urgency. The poverty is galling, but we have the means, but not enough will, to eradicate it. We have conquered most of the diseases and ailments (at least those who can afford) and the natural disasters become untenable only because as a society, as a nation, we don’t prepare for them, or we create ripe ground for them by exploiting the ecology and the environment indiscriminately. For example, the floods in Bihar are being caused due to large-scale deforestation.

I don’t prefer the past because the reins of our destiny were not in our hands. Today they are. We can steer our own paths and the opportunities allude only those who don’t seek them sincerely. All around me I see people wallowing in miseries but in 99.99% of the cases it’s their own doing. The India of today is in the driving seat. If we don’t have the roads, we have the ability to lay them. This is the greatest difference between the past and the present.

Technorati Tags: india, independence days, indian independence day

Monica Bedi is released

And, as the TV news channels want us to believe, Monica Bedi is a celebrity; the fact that she is the former girlfriend of a dreaded mafia don has been conveniently skirted aside. It somehow seems they’re being paid to do so.

I woke up in the morning (one of those rare mornings when I slept at night and woke up in the morning). Alka switched on the TV to quickly catch up on some news and every channel was broadcasting the Monica Bedi release live.

She has been in the news ever since her association with Abu Salem surfaced, but what’s with all this frenzy? Are we having a Paris Hilton syndrome here? There are cameras in front of the jail, there are cameras in front of her house, and according to the latest updates from Alka (I’m in another room, working) they’ve got cameras even in her village in Punjab. I’m sure they’ve got people glued to their TV sets and it’s all a game about the TRPs.

Anyway, I think the real danger for Monica Bedi starts post-jail. She spilled some beans and that’s going to cost her. Although she wants to act in films, one really has to be a daring adventurer to cast her. There are many who bay for the blood of the don and his near and dear ones, and Monica Bedi was (is?) his near and dear one lock stock and barrel. Even Salem himself would try to knock her off as that’s how criminals work. It’s a quagmire and coming out of it is not as easy as it is being shown on the news channels.

So more than her film career, she should worry for her life, and should go somewhere she cannot be traced. She shouldn’t be swayed by all the attention being given to her. For the TV channels she’s merely a sensational news and for the average viewer she is merely a voyeuristic pleasure (and of course an eye-candy — even I find her attractive to look at). Everybody wants to see a pretty girl, a former actress who used to sleep with a dreaded don. People look at her father and feel good about the fact that they are not in his position.

Her family will be in great peril too, because even if she goes into hiding, the family members will be hounded for her whereabouts.

She was safer in the jail. The real troubles for Monica Bedi will start now.

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Tu Hindu Banega Na Musalman Banega

Insaan ki aulaad hai insaan banega.

Do the hate-mongers ever listen to this song? Long ago I translated this song but right now I cannot find that old post — I’ll link to it as soon as I find it.

Lion Attacks a Hunter But Misses

I wish he hadn’t.

Technorati Tags: lion attack, wildlife, hunters, poachers