Skip to main content

Not in my name




The various demonstrations that took the country by surprise yesterday show that India is not lost yet.  People gathered in thousands in various places to show their protest against the attacks on people belonging to a particular religious community.  From the time Mr Modi came to power in Delhi, certain criminal groups emerged under the banner of right wing religious activism and attacked certain sections of people.  Unfortunately the Prime Minister never condemned any of those attacks.  It appeared that the attacks had his tacit blessings.  It also came to light that the BJP and its allies are spending huge sums of money on spreading malicious information on social networks.  Those states ruled by BJP are changing the history textbooks in order to present the new generation with distorted histories.  In short, falsehood and hatred were being foisted on the nation very liberally.  It was an alarming situation.

The latest protest in the form of #NotInMyName gives hope to the nation.  If the people refuse to accept falsehood and hatred, no one can foist it on them.  India deserves a far better government than one which insists on selling balderdash to the people. Let movements such as #NotInMyName rise and spread throughout the country so that the 2019 general elections will teach the right lessons to our politicians (most of whom are hard-core criminals). 

The BJP’s contribution to the nation has been a neurosis.  The party took the nation from one stereotype to another, one contradiction to the next, one paranoia to another, never achieving anything beautiful, elegant, vibrant and swinging.  So much rubbish was heaped on the collective psyche of the nation.  As a result, certain animals became more sacred than certain human beings.  Human minds became polluted with filth that was given religious colouring. 

Let that change.  Let the Prime Minister and his teams learn that Indians still value life and its beautiful forms such as harmony and creativity.

Comments

  1. Yes such movements are a need of the hour, when elections are not that far away. But, I am telling you now, two years from now we will see the biggest mockery of elections ever happened on this soil.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's something I fear too. The way things are going, it is more likely that the elections will be rigged heavily. But the people have so little choice. There is no viable alternative to the BJP and the party is really taking advantage of the situation. What a pathetic situation in a country of 1.3 billion people!

      Delete
  2. I still very much believe in the subversive potential of Soial Movements and critical Civil Societies, not of course, those constructed and stage-manged by the State and the Market. As David Harvey, the Marxist,Human Geographer envisioned, " There should evolve Little Pockets of Resistance."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No doubt movements like #NotInMyName have a tremendous subversive potential. But strong leadership is what's missing.

      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

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...

The Blind Lady’s Descendants

Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives.  We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives.  We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness.  Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma.  The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother.  When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive.  Dark humour spills out of every page of the book.  For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...

Ram, Anandhi, and Co

Book Review Title: Ram C/o Anandhi Author: Akhil P Dharmajan Translator: Haritha C K Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2025 Pages: 303 T he author tells us in his prefatory note that “this (is) a cinematic novel.” Don’t read it as literary work but imagine it as a movie. That is exactly how this novel feels like: an action-packed thriller. The story revolves around Ram, a young man who lands in Chennai for joining a diploma course in film making, and Anandhi, receptionist of Ram’s college. Then there are their friends: Vetri and his half-sister Reshma, and Malli who is a transgender. An old woman, who is called Paatti (grandmother) by everyone and is the owner of the house where three of the characters live, has an enviably thrilling role in the plot.   In one of the first chapters, Ram and Anandhi lock horns over a trifle. That leads to some farcical action which agitates Paatti’s bees which in turn fly around stinging everyone. Malli, the aruvani (transgender), s...

A Curious Case of Food

From CNN  whose headline is:  Holy cow! India is the world's largest beef exporter The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is perhaps the only novel I’ve read in which food plays a significant, though not central, role, particularly in deepening the reader’s understanding of Christopher Boone’s character. Christopher, the protagonist, is a 15-year-old autistic boy. [For my earlier posts on the novel, click here .] First of all, food is a symbol of order and control in the novel. Christopher’s relationship with food is governed by strict rules and routines. He likes certain foods and detests a few others. “I do not like yellow things or brown things and I do not eat yellow or brown things,” he tells us innocently. He has made up some of these likes and dislikes in order to bring some sort of order and predictability in a world that is very confusing for him. The boy’s food preferences are tied to his emotional state. If he is served a breakfast o...