Open Letter to Mr Modi

Dear Mr Narendra Modi,

At the outset I ask your pardon for addressing you as Mister rather that something like “Worshipful” because in case you become the Prime Minister of India that’s what you would demand from the citizens.  You like to be worshipped.  You’ve already got (or bought) many of your chelas to sing hymns and display posters projecting you as a god.  However, even if you become the PM I won’t address you as “Worshipful”, let alone imagine you as a god.  I’d rather die.

That’s not the issue which prompted me write this letter, however.  It is the report in the front page of today’s Hindu titled Modi fears a ‘pink revolution’.

You fear for the lives of cows in the country.  I have no problem about anyone choosing to worship anything.  Once I attended a meditation course in which the participants were told that we could meditate even on a potato.  Keep a potato in front of you and concentrate on it.  Focus.  Slowly the potato will assume larger-than-potato dimensions.  It will metamorphose into a spiritual shape.  It will enter the depths of your consciousness.  It will eventually become a god, if that’s what you want.  Anything can become a god.

If I choose to make potato a god, should I go around banning the cooking of potatoes?   Is it necessary that all the people in the world or even my country should worship what I conjure up as sacred?

Worse, you made the statement in a place where it can divide the Yadavs against the Muslims.  This divisiveness that you have been preaching all your active life is what rankles my blood.  Why do you want to divide the people of the country into castes and creeds and whatever else?  Why don’t you encourage them to rise above such divisions and live as human beings?  We, you and I as well as the 7-odd billion other people in the world, belong to the same species called human beings.  Will you ever understand that?  The United (alas!) States of America may extend an invitation to you now that you are poised to become the PM of the largest democracy (ha!) in the world because they know they can use you easily for their corporate vested interests.  I hope you have studied enough history to know that the white man entered the different continents armed with various viruses in their bodies and minds and then conquered.  Have you heard of the smallpox that killed the Red Indians in America when the white men entered that continent?  Have you heard of rinderpest that killed of the cattle (livelihood) of the Africans when the white men entered that continent with their infected cows?  

Masks, is that what we should all wear?

Cows, I mentioned by chance.  And yet that is the core issue here.  You are fighting for cattle when you had no qualms about people being killed brutally under your very nose in your own state 12 years ago.  Are the cattle more sacred than human beings, Mr Modi?  Well, if you ask me, everything is sacred.  All that is, is holy, I would say.  Can you rise to that level of consciousness?

I don’t expect that much.  But can you at least stop dividing people in the name of caste and creed?

Let me give you some suggestions.  Stop perpetrating hatred.  Start your development.  You are acclaimed to be the best living genius of development in India now.  Give us development.  Give it to all of us.  Deliver your mesmerising speeches about how you can make a better India, an India in which every citizen, irrespective of caste or creed, language or culture, race or tribe, can live in harmony and joy.  Have you ever thought of such an India, Mr Modi?  Don’t you think that that kind of an India would be a wonderful a country?  A country with a very interesting variety!  Infinite variety!  Why do you want an India where every one of the 1.237 billion people would wear a Modi mask?  How boring, utterly boring, a place would that be?

Let me conclude this letter hoping that you would give it at least a little thought.  You know you may become a better leader though I wouldn’t demand any gratitude.