Skip to main content

From light to darkness

PM Modi paying homage to the Mahatma - perfunctory


Prime Minister Modi paid a perfunctory homage to Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of the Nation, on his 70th death anniversary today.  His tweet was conspicuous for what it did not say rather than what it did.  His visit to Raj Ghat was something he would have liked to avoid if he could. 

The Mahatma and PM Modi are the opposite poles of a continuum that holds a nation together in spite of differences.  Gandhi’s vision was wholly inclusive while Modi’s is wholly exclusive.  It is true that Modi has come quite a way from the days of his hate speeches in the initial years of the millennium.  Not only the hatred but also the sarcasm has mellowed. Apparently. 

PM Modi's tweet today
It is not mellowing really.  India is witnessing communal hatred like never before.  The Mahatma’s death anniversary used to be remembered in schools with a minute’s silence until Modi became the PM.  Slowly, surreptitiously, like the petrol price hikes, like the communal poison being injected, like Modi’s increasing narcissism, slowly, unnoticed, the Mahatma’s memory is being erased from the nation’s collective memory.

We are left with clashes. Misery. Terror. 

The worst is yet to come.

May all the gods of the PM save us.  But they won’t.  They belong to the wrong pole.  The right pole has been buried and forgotten.  We are moving from light to darkness.  From the Mahatma to a Narcissist.




Comments

  1. Right you are. Any word from his mouth showing his respect to the Father of the Nation is nothing but a demonstration of his now-well-known hypocrisy only.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's quite amazing that his acting skills surpass professional actors.

      Delete
    2. Agree again. Though almost all the successful politicians are skilled actors, our current prime minister has raised the bar too high in this context. His young opponents in the latest Gujarat election were openly acknowledging it in front of the masses. His electoral success and (so-called) high popularity is his award for this skill and let's admit that this award is no less than any Oscar.

      Delete

  2. This is one of the best blogs I have ever read. I m absolutely excited to get to read such a well blog.

    supersmashflash2s.com

    ReplyDelete

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...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

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...