Skip to main content

Rice bag




One of the new nicknames I’ve earned on social media is ‘Rice bag’.  The Sanghis use that name for any South Indian who questions the Sangh views and outlooks.  I think so.  But when it comes to Sanghis it is impossible to say what exactly they mean by anything.  The most fundamental characteristic of a Sanghi is utter lack of humour as well as imagination.

If you laugh when a Sanghi tells you that Ganesha’s trunk was the first case of plastic surgery in the history of medical science, the Sanghi will call you a Rice bag.  You can’t laugh when he thinks he is serious.  If you express an opinion that goes against the tenets and creeds of the Modified Sangh, the Sanghi will call you a Rice bag. 

You may wonder what rice or bag has got to do with all these?  Nothing. It is only the Sanghi way of telling you that they have no imagination to call you anything else other than by the place you belong to, or the food you eat, or the dress you wear.  I become a Rice bag in Sanghi lexicon, just because I belong to a region of the country where people eat rice more than wheat.  What has that got to do with my views on religion and politics?  Nothing.  But the Sanghi won’t understand that.

The Sanghi won’t won’t understand also that by their logic even the Sanghis in South India should be labelled Rice bags since they also eat more rice than wheat.  But don’t expect such logical thinking from Sanghis, of all people.

What I don’t understand at all is why Sanghis insist on making every Indian eat what the Sanghis eat, wear what Sanghis wear, think what Sanghis think, believe what Sanghis believe, and so son, ad nauseam, ad infinitum.  Why can’t India be a nation of diversity and plurality as it has always been until petty minds took charge in Delhi in 2014? 

Even if the Sanghis hold me against the barrel of a gun and tell me to accept their mythical heroes as the ultimate truths, I won’t accept that.  I respect my intellect, bhais.  Convince me logically and intelligently, if not scientifically, if you want me to take you seriously.  Otherwise you can call me whatever you like but I will reserve my right to laugh in your face.  Take away my laughter, if you can.  I challenge you.

Comments

  1. UnknownMay 22, 2018 at 4:35 PM

    no
    christian missonaries provide rice bags(a gift to poor) to hindus to convert to christianity. thats why a rice bag

    not just to south indian but overall of india

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownMay 22, 2018 at 4:39 PM

    also calling people as sanghi or bhakt shows your own standards

    anyway foolish human, why would it be God if there was logic to be there for an almighty? logic is for humans and not for Gods who created all

    ReplyDelete
  3. MargaretMay 7, 2025 at 5:53 PM

    hi

    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
47 comments
Read more

The Veiled Women

One of the controversies that has been raging in Kerala for quite some time now is about a girl student’s decision to wear the hijab to school. The school run by Christian nuns did not appreciate the girl’s choice of religious identity over the school uniform and punished her by making her stand outside the classroom. The matter was taken up immediately by a fundamentalist Muslim organisation (SDPI) which created the usual sound and fury on the campus as well as outside. Kerala is a liberal state in which Hindus (55%), Muslims (27%), and Christians (18%) have been living in fair though superficial harmony even after Modi’s BJP with its cantankerous exclusivism assumed power in Delhi. Maybe, Modi created much insecurity feeling among the Muslims in Kerala too resulting in some reactionary moves like the hijab mentioned above. The school could have handled it diplomatically given the general nature of Muslims which is not quite amenable to sense and sensibility. From the time I shi...
13 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...
13 comments
Read more

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...
19 comments
Read more