Skip to main content

Winners and Losers




The world belongs to winners.  Losers have no place in it.  If you are a loser, learn to pretend at least, pretend to be a winner; otherwise you will be an outcast, part of the debris.

America became a winner in the 20th century by bossing over other countries.  There was no morality or ethics in the way they achieved the victory.  Not in the way they treated the natives of that land.  Not with respect to the Blacks.  Today the typical American is ready to kill their perceived enemies – the Asians, for example.  But the plaque at the base of  the Statue of Liberty will go on to proclaim with the magnanimity of a typical American televangelist who is also a close friend of President Trump: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Israel is a winner today.  Having bombarded thousands of people and their homes.  Having seized their lands.  After all the massacres.  The Israeli Declaration of Independence will go on to read sanctimoniously: “The state of Israel will be ... based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions...”

Our Prime Minister, Mr Narendra Modi, will visit Israel soon and learn from them more about winning.  Not that Mr Modi really needs any lessons.  His four visits to the US during two years of his reign were also redundant as far as learning is concerned.  He knows more than all those leaders out there.  His past is still vivid in our memories.  Who can forget Gujarat 2002?

Such is the world.  As long as you are a winner what you did and what you do are beyond moral and ethical considerations.  Innocent people can end up as traitors or antinational or Maoists or whatever. 

A great leader can change this situation.  A great leader can bring about a paradigm shift.  A system which is founded on morality and ethics at least to some extent.  Until such a leader emerges, you can’t afford not to be a winner. 

Comments

  1. जितेन्द्र माथुरMarch 9, 2017 at 4:57 AM

    You said it Sir. Winning is everything whether by fair means or by foul. Hypocrisy prevails everywhere. That's why the world listens to (and adores) the winners and not the men of morals. Immoral ones preach morality to others when they become winners because their winner status entitles them to preach those good things to the (real or supposed) losers which they seldom follow themselves. By winning only, the thieves are able to capture the police stations and the courts to enforce the 'Rule of Law'.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 9, 2017 at 7:00 AM

      Yesterday a group of Shiv Sena people turned moral police in Kochi beating young people with canes. Religious leaders of all hues including Christianity are found to be highly immoral in Kerala, caught with various misdeeds and crimes including raping of children. But the real tragedy is that all these leaders will come out unscathed and the victims will continue to suffer because such is our system.

      Delete

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