Skip to main content

Hatred as Love


One of the easiest things we can do is to masquerade hatred as love.  Most of the present day patriots (or nationalists, as they consider themselves) are motivated by hatred though they think that it is love of their nation that guides them.  It is the hatred of a particular section of people that really motivates these patriots. Hence the violence that underlies the patriotism.

If you genuinely love your country, you will find ways of promoting its welfare.  Love is not destructive.  Love does not kill.  Cruelty is cruelty even if you bring in gods and scriptures to justify it.  In the olden days religious people sacrificed animals to appease gods.  That was cruelty to animals though not perceived as such by worshippers.  Today’s religious people sacrifice human beings belonging to other creeds in order to appease gods. 

Whether gods are appeased or not, one can eliminate enemies with the contentment of a devout worshipper when religion is invoked to sanction cruelty.  Is that devotion love? 

A few years ago, scientists proved that the line between love and hate is indeed very thin.  The nervous circuits in the brain responsible for hate are the same as those that generate romantic love. Professor Semir Zeki of University College London showed experimentally that hate and romantic love could produce similar acts of extreme behaviour. 

There is much that is romantic about patriotism and nationalism in their passionately idealistic aspirations.  If only our contemporary patriots and nationalists realise this truth and subdue their passion with a little reason.  Maybe India will be a much greater, much better country then.  What’s required is not so much passion but a bit of reason.


Comments

  1. I really liked the way you concluded the post: "What’s required is not so much passion but a bit of reason". It's shameful how people commit injustice and cruelty to animals and people of other religions in the name of God.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Though we define ourselves as rational beings, it's very hard to find people who make use of the rational faculty.

      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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...