Skip to main content

Politics without aesthetics




Haryana’s Chief Minister Khattar once asked why women didn’t walk around naked if they wanted to prove their freedom.  You and I, like other rational creatures, will naturally wonder what the connection is between freedom and nudity.  Do the menfolk of Khattar’s state, who have all kinds of bizarre systems of justice like khap panchayats, walk around naked in order to prove their freedom?  Or, are they not free?

Well, logic does not play any significant role in Haryana, it seems.  Or for that matter, logic seems to have little to do with Khattar’s party in general.  It is a party which harps on the string of women empowerment through enthralling slogans such beti bachao, beti padhao and so on.  In actual practice, however, the party men want women to play the age-old conventional roles and sit at home with their faces buried behind veils.  The men won’t even hesitate to stalk those women who dare to be out especially after dark as it happened the other day in Chandigarh, the state’s capital.  

Source: NDTV
Haryana’s BJP leaders have spoken against women’s liberties time and again.  But asking them to walk about naked in the name of freedom or whatever indicates the rot that is afflicting the attitudes of the men.  When they keep their women packaged neatly behind traditional attires including the face veil, their deepest desires spring out of their dark Freudian recesses through the kind of statements made by none other than the Chief Minister.

Khattar and others of his kind must come to terms with that inner darkness.  As light begins to dissipate that darkness, they will begin to see certain realities a little more clearly.  For example, that women have their own rights.  They don’t need the men to dictate terms to them.  That age is past.  We live in a time when women have proved undoubtedly that they can do all the works that men do, perhaps even better.  Just because RSS, BJP’s grandmother, does not like women, it does not mean that women continue to be the kind of household goods and chattels that ancient patriarchs like Manu viewed them as. 

At any rate, asking them walk around naked displays a tremendous dearth of aesthetic sense, to say the least.  Well, no sane person would expect our politicians to possess aesthetics.  We don’t expect charcoal to transmute into diamonds despite the chemical connections between them. 

Khattar ji, one of the reasons for inventing clothes was to add beauty (as well as dignity) to the human body.  You see, we humans don’t have the grace of the naked swans or the gazelles, nor the majesty of the naked lions and elephants, not even the symmetry of Blake’s tiger.  Just imagine a world of naked men and women.  I’m sure you won’t really like it.  Otherwise stand naked in front of your bedroom mirror and look at yourself for a moment.

Please stop selling crap to us though we know you people are in love with the dung and urine of certain animals.  Okay, we tolerate quite a bit of excreta.  How much do you really want us to swallow?


Comments

  1. There is another one where someone said that being virgin means being unmarried. I didn't find any logic there as well. They seem to have cow dung for some gray cells.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have stopped expecting any sense from the right wing in India.

      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

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell [1903-1950] We had an anthology of classical essays as part of our undergrad English course. Shooting an Elephant by George Orwell was one of the essays. The horror of political hegemony is the core theme of the essay. Orwell was a subdivisional police officer of the British Empire in Burma (today Myanmar) when he was forced to shoot an elephant. The elephant had gone musth (an Urdu term for the temporary insanity of male elephants when they are in need of a female) and Orwell was asked to control the commotion created by the giant creature. By the time Orwell reached with his gun, the elephant had become normal. Yet Orwell shot it. The first bullet stunned the animal, the second made him waver, and Orwell had to empty the entire magazine into the elephant’s body in order to put an end to its mammoth suffering. “He was dying,” writes Orwell, “very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further…. It seeme...

Urban Naxal

Fiction “We have to guard against the urban Naxals who are the biggest threat to the nation’s unity today,” the Prime Minister was saying on the TV. He was addressing an audience that stood a hundred metres away for security reasons. It was the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel which the Prime Minister had sanctified as National Unity Day. “In order to usurp the Sardar from the Congress,” Mathew said. The clarification was meant for Alice, his niece who had landed from London a couple of days back.    Mathew had retired a few months back as a lecturer in sociology from the University of Kerala. He was known for his radical leftist views. He would be what the PM calls an urban Naxal. Alice knew that. Her mother, Mathew’s sister, had told her all about her learned uncle’s “leftist perversions.” “Your uncle thinks that he is a Messiah of the masses,” Alice’s mother had warned her before she left for India on a short holiday. “Don’t let him infiltrate your brai...

Bihar Election

Satish Acharya's Cartoon on how votes were bought in Bihar My wife has been stripped of her voting rights in the revised electoral roll. She has always been a conscientious voter unlike me. I refused to vote in the last Lok Sabha election though I stood outside the polling booth for Maggie to perform what she claimed was her duty as a citizen. The irony now is that she, the dutiful citizen, has been stripped of the right, while I, the ostensible renegade gets the right that I don’t care for. Since the Booth Level Officer [BLO] was my neighbour, he went out of his way to ring up some higher officer, sitting in my house, to enquire about Maggie’s exclusion. As a result, I was given the assurance that he, the BLO, would do whatever was in his power to get my wife her voting right. More than the voting right, what really bothered me was whether the Modi government was going to strip my wife of her Indian citizenship. Anything is possible in Modi’s India: Modi hai to Mumkin hai .   ...

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...