Skip to main content

Lessons in Secularism for India


Lesson No. 1

Firoze Mohomed Shakir (left)
Firoze Mohomed Shakir lives in Mumbai.  I have been haunting him like a ghost in some vague quest for quite a time in the virtual places I was permitted access.  His photographs, for example.  What drew me to him initially was his poetry which I used to read via indiblogger.in.  The poems were entirely different from the ones I had ever come across.  They looked initially like prose broken into arbitrary lines.  As I focused more I realized that secularism has as much hope in India as Sufism. Below is his latest poem that I have copy-pasted from his status update in Facebook.  The postscript also belongs to him.

[Dear Firoze, I hope you don’t mind my using you as a lesson. Personally, I’d rather be a Hindu (to use your words) than be religious!]

I Would Rather Be a Hindu Than Be a Wahhabi
yes 
i would rather be called a kafir 
than be a wahabbi 
i would rather be a hindu 
than be a wahhabi 
both options 
close to humanity 
one with 
my cultural inheritance 
of peace and brotherhood 
mutual tolerance sanity 
no i distance myself 
from your hate filled 
religiosity 
a shia pandit 
i am 
hussain 
is enough for me 
these are my thoughts 
you dont have to agree 
at least here in india 
my lord is not 
held in captivity

I say this with pride I am a good Muslim simply because my parentage , my country my friends made me so.. I distance myself from those adherents that allow one Muslim to kill another Muslim.. yes I am a Hindu Shia.. A kafir and proud of what I am.....
Labels:

Comments

  1. Roohi BhatnagarMay 23, 2015 at 6:38 PM

    Even I am fond of Shakir sir's photography, his prose and poems. He's off Indiblogger now and I tried catching up with his work on Flickr. Thanks for sharing this one. He is a gem as a human.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 23, 2015 at 7:07 PM

      Roohi, you are my lesson no.2 ...
      I don't know why Shakir Saab chose to leave indiblgger. But I have managed to extract a permit to visit him when i'm in Mumbai :)
      Cheers to Harmony

      Delete
    2. Firoze Shakir Photographer No1May 23, 2015 at 7:33 PM

      Thank you Tom you are our teacher too...we love you .. unconditionally .. thank you Roohi and all my Indiblogger friends ,, take care ,, thank you Ranvin Renie

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalMay 23, 2015 at 10:12 PM

      I learn from you all. And am grateful.

      Delete
  2. Ravish ManiMay 23, 2015 at 9:44 PM

    Thoughtful & courageous.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 23, 2015 at 10:14 PM

      You know, Ravish, I would love to have some of our politicians acquiring some of this thoughtfulness.

      Delete
  3. Amit AgarwalMay 24, 2015 at 12:43 PM

    I am a great admirer of Firoz bhai ever since I came to know him some five years back. And I'm not talking here of his photography alone, it's more about the grand person that he is! Wish there were more like him in India, on second thoughts why only India? People like him are a need of the hour the whole world over! My love, regards and gratitude...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Amit AgarwalMay 24, 2015 at 12:46 PM

    Thank you Tom sir, for presenting him here alongside that wonderful poem of his!
    A great tribute indeed!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Vinay NagarajuMay 28, 2015 at 4:21 PM

    A wonderful poem Matheikal and a very deep thought too ..

    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
47 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...
17 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

Ghost with a Cat

It was about midnight when Kuriako stopped his car near the roadside eatery known as thattukada in Kerala. He still had another 27 kilometres to go, according to Google Map. Since Google Map had taken him to nowhere lands many a time, Kuriako didn’t commit himself much to that technology. He would rather rely on wayside shopkeepers. Moreover, he needed a cup of lemon tea. ‘How far is Anakkad from here?’ Kuriako asked the tea-vendor. Anakkad is where his friend Varghese lived. The two friends would be meeting after many years now. Both had taken voluntary retirement five years ago from their tedious and rather absurd clerical jobs in a government industry and hadn’t met each other ever since. Varghese abandoned all connection with human civilisation, which he viewed as savagery of the most brutal sort, and went to live in a forest with only the hill tribe people in the neighbourhood. The tribal folk didn’t bother him at all; they had their own occupations. Varghese bought a plot ...
8 comments
Read more