Skip to main content

Patriotism

Fiction

Every scoundrel I come across these days preaches patriotism. Or nationalism. A few months back it used to be also called Hindutva or the great Indian Culture. I often wondered why only scoundrels preached patriotism while all gentlemen and ladies went to work to earn their living.

Nowadays more people think of becoming patriots.  Earning your living is almost impossible otherwise.  The scoundrels make the rules.  They decide who will have how much money with them. And they know how to look after themselves and their chelas.

And also to make us sing the national anthem in the theatre of the absurd.

Ignorance is patriotism, my boy.  It's a game.  You make rules.  More rules.  Bind people by rules.  After taking away their cash so that they have no means to fight anything.  Make people beggars.  Then they will lick your feet.  You become a god.  And you decide who are patriots.  And who are traitors.

Shoot the traitors.  Call it encounter killing.  You are an expert at it, aren't you?  You became a patriot through encounter killings, after all. 

Comments

  1. Arun KumarDecember 1, 2016 at 10:54 PM

    Perfectly articulated post sir!

    ReplyDelete
  2. जितेन्द्र माथुरDecember 2, 2016 at 12:25 AM

    That's the reality of today Sir. It's a pity that the apex court of the nation has also joined the league of such people.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 2, 2016 at 6:04 AM

      Yes, Mathur ji. It's indeed a great pity that even the Supreme Court has been politicised.

      Delete
  3. Purba chakrabortyDecember 2, 2016 at 1:25 AM

    Very well written, Sir

    ReplyDelete
  4. Jyotirmoy SarkarDecember 2, 2016 at 7:17 AM

    Out of irritation these sentences have come....am i right Sir?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 2, 2016 at 12:14 PM

      Dr Samuel Johnson was the first to arrogate patriotism to scoundrels. Not irritation, but indignation.

      Delete
  5. CifarDecember 2, 2016 at 1:05 PM

    these self declared patriotic people not even knows the basic values on which our nation is build and stands

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 2, 2016 at 3:02 PM

      I'm of the firm conviction that they don't know anything at all. Patriotism of their type thrives on ignorance.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
16 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...
9 comments
Read more