Skip to main content

Citizens of the world



I live in a village in Kerala. When I chose to settle down here over four years ago, my house was constructed by Bengali labourers. Kerala has more than 30 lakh labourers from other states. Quite a lot of them are Bengalis. If you ask them where they are from, they will invariably answer “Kolkata”. Perhaps they are from Bangladesh.
In an excellent article in today’s Time of India, Aakar Patel says that you will find Bangladeshis all over the world. “You can go all the way across Italy from Palermo to Venice speaking only Bangla,” he says. Bangladeshis dominate ‘Indian’ restaurants in England, he goes on. The article titled ‘Akhand Bharat enthusiasts should rewind to Partition’ deserves to be read by every Indian, especially those who support the new Citizenship Act.
The Citizenship Act seeks to divide India further along religious lines. Anyone can easily see that it is particularly anti-Muslim. The BJP and its allies have always hated the Muslims. Their ideology seems to be nothing positive in finer analysis; it’s nothing more than hatred of non-Hindus.
It is true that India was divided along religious lines in 1947. But the great visionaries who created this side of the divided landmass did not seek to establish a theocratic nation. They sought to keep religion separate from politics. Religion and politics mingled in the past and the results were seldom good for anyone. One need not go beyond the brutalities of the medieval period for examples.
Mahatma Gandhi was a devout Hindu. But he would not create a Hindu India at any cost. India belongs to anyone who lives there irrespective of religious, linguistic, cultural differences. Unity is not uniformity. Today’s leaders, those who are quick to defend their gods at the cost of human beings, are taking the nation backward to the medieval darkness.
We live in a world where people migrate and miscegenate more than ever. There are millions of Indians living in other countries. Even the Islamic countries are not asking Indians to leave in spite of what India today is doing to Muslims. It is tragic that Indians in India suffer so much discrimination than Indians in any other country.
National borders are just man-made constructs. They don’t really exist – or are not desirable – except for political and administrative purposes.  We should be citizens of the globe. We belong to humanity more than to imaginary boundaries.
What you do with the power you have reveals your mettle. The present leaders of India are likely to go down in history as people with puny minds and hearts.


Comments

  1. Rajeev MoothedathDecember 15, 2019 at 9:46 PM

    Interesting prophetic last line...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Amit KumarDecember 19, 2019 at 9:19 AM

    I can relate to your thoughts, I had written a similar article back in April 2010: https://www.candidopinions.in/2010/04/whom-do-i-belong-to.html

    Where are we heading to? It is indeed scary thinking about that

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 19, 2019 at 7:50 PM

      Chaos is where we have arrived at. This is how revolutions begin. India's rot will get a cure soon.

      Delete
  3. wingsDecember 21, 2019 at 9:33 PM

    1947 Rewind:(

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...
39 comments
Read more

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...
30 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...
16 comments
Read more

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...
47 comments
Read more

Dharma and Destiny

  Illustration by Copilot Designer Unwavering adherence to dharma causes much suffering in the Ramayana . Dharma can mean duty, righteousness, and moral order. There are many characters in the Ramayana who stick to their dharma as best as they can and cause much pain to themselves as well as others. Dasharatha sees it as his duty as a ruler (raja-dharma) to uphold truth and justice and hence has to fulfil the promise he made to Kaikeyi and send Rama into exile in spite of the anguish it causes him and many others. Rama accepts the order following his dharma as an obedient son. Sita follows her dharma as a wife and enters the forest along with her husband. The brotherly dharma of Lakshmana makes him leave his own wife and escort Rama and Sita. It’s all not that simple, however. Which dharma makes Rama suspect Sita’s purity, later in Lanka? Which dharma makes him succumb to a societal expectation instead of upholding his personal integrity, still later in Ayodhya? “You were car...
25 comments
Read more