Skip to main content

Moralists


One of the fifteen persons facing corruption charges related to coal mining in Jharkhand is a young man who displayed his nationalism and idealism by wearing the Indian national flag on his sleeves.  He took to the Supreme Court his right to display his patriotism by flying the national flag in places he thought appropriate. His patriotism won him a seat in the Parliament too. 

Good old humour
Superior to New Morality
His uncle is a great moralist apart from being an industrialist.  This great uncle recently handed over his school in Delhi to a godman because of reasons related to morality.  A few years earlier the biography of this great uncle was written by his daughter in which the uncle was quoted raising charges of immorality on the staff of the school in question.  The uncle is renowned for enforcing morality – his version of it, of course – using methods which are not often moral by conventional standards.

The school was eventually shut down by the godman.  Interestingly, the godman’s cult was in news for grabbing land belonging to the forest department.

The fifteen acres on which the school stood is today wasteland used as parking space for the VIPs who visit the godman who preaches morality to devotees. 


These are common things in India.  Nothing new.  But I’m amused by the morality of it all.   
Indian Bloggers


Labels:

Comments

  1. Amit AgarwalApril 30, 2016 at 12:05 PM

    The so called morality in India..the lesser said is better:(
    And look who are defining it:)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 30, 2016 at 12:08 PM

      Power defines it, I think. Even religion today is about power. And there are so many moths that fly into the flame to kill themselves foolishly.

      Delete
  2. Bushra MuzaffarApril 30, 2016 at 2:50 PM

    The morality here seems is inversely proportion to profitability. Corruption is rampant as evident from the scams after scams that have been unearthed.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 30, 2016 at 7:28 PM

      I put up Amul's cartoon of Chandraswami purposely to show that the godmen of India were corrupt from the time they were born. Read about Chandraswami here, for example:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandraswami

      There's something radically wrong with these godmen and other religious people. There's not even one RSS member who can be put in the history textbooks because they never fought for India's independence. Once the real war is over, like the wellfed Brahmins of Manu's days, they come claiming the booty. The only consolation is that a Shudra is doing the job of the Brahmin today :)

      Delete
  3. KalpanaApril 30, 2016 at 10:37 PM

    Glad you wrote this post Tomichan. People do evil things based on their greed and love of power but then to make matters worse they pretend to be holier than thou. Unbearable!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 1, 2016 at 6:19 AM

      I met quite a few holier-than-thou people in the last phase of my life in Delhi (when the school above was being killed). One of the godman's women was a delight for any novelist. She pretended to be the most moral person on the earth. She found fault with everyone, advised, scolded, punished, terminated people's services, brought in innovative ideas, revolutionised the academic system... and finally killed the school. Killed people's trust in systems, and in other people. She did the greatest disservice to the society and yet she is still one of the moral religious leader of the cult. Swindling other people.

      Delete
  4. EmilSincliarMay 1, 2016 at 11:52 AM

    Brilliant post! But sadly, if you look at the number of people who blindly follow and support these so called 'Godmen', you'll realize how we've miserably failed Darwin!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 1, 2016 at 8:47 PM

      Indeed. Evolution was one-sided as I wrote earlier in a post on Arthur Koestler. Only the brain evolved; the heart remains savage.

      http://matheikal.blogspot.in/2016/04/the-error-called-man.html

      Delete
  5. CifarMay 1, 2016 at 1:15 PM

    you won't believe but all moral people are in Indian politics, great nation great people

    ReplyDelete
  6. Murthy K v v sMay 1, 2016 at 1:37 PM

    Swami Vivekananda once said, now the Brahmins,Kshatriyas and Vyashyas are western people and we are only Shudras by nature.It seems correct to me sometimes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 1, 2016 at 8:50 PM

      There has been no progress in our thinking though we developed considerably in terms of economy, industry and literacy. We still think like our forefathers who taught us caste discriminations, oppression of certain sections, and so on.

      Delete
  7. UnknownMay 26, 2016 at 6:33 PM

    yes sir, therefore using your blog i would request all the people in your list to show the government and the ever hungry politicians what is real morality by joining me fight for justice and corruption free india as i love my india

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 26, 2016 at 10:33 PM

      You'll have to give the details of your fight and how people can support you. Otherwise how will the readers know what they can do?

      Delete
  8. UnknownMay 26, 2016 at 6:33 PM

    yes sir, therefore using your blog i would request all the people in your list to show the government and the ever hungry politicians what is real morality by joining me fight for justice and corruption free india as i love my india

    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
44 comments
Read more

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
6 comments
Read more

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
4 comments
Read more

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
10 comments
Read more

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some
8 comments
Read more