Skip to main content

Dreams

Dreams are free. Yet I have only two dreams for 2015.

1. A world without terrorism: both religious and political. A world in which religious people realise that religion is a purely private and personal affair to be practised by oneself in order to improve one's convictions, to hone one's values and principes. A world in which politics is seen as a means of service rather than one for self-aggrandisement. May politicians realise that they are the leaders who mould people's thinking and attitudes.  That they are the people who are ultimately responsible for the direction in which the country or state moves.

2.  A world in which business people don't make any country's policies.  Let business hanker after profit. Let policies be made by statesmen.

Wish you a Happy New Year. May your dreams come true.


Comments

  1. AMEN !!!

    For the first time in life, myself and husband discussed the possibility of moving out of India just to have a peaceful existence with our kids, where we can keep our faiths as a personal and private affair.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Unfortunately India is becoming a theocratic nation. There are reasons for many to feel uneasy.

      Wish you a happy new year.

      Delete
  2. Amen!

    Wish you a very happy new year too Sir :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hope your dreams come true and a very happy new year to you.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dreams beget reality...Pester in Hope..It is hope and striving to make dreams a reality that make life beautiful..exciting..and purposeful...Enjoy dreams...and hope for it...Happy 2015..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True. Without dreams there won't be a better reality. Happy new year to you too.

      Delete
  5. Hope your dreams come true and wish you a Happy new year too Sir...

    ReplyDelete
  6. Wish your dreams come true.. all we want is to live peacefully with no one telling us what to do.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I wish your dreams come true sir....!!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af