Skip to main content

Bury the dead

Image from shubhzquotes


India is like a vehicle whose driver is always looking into the rear-view mirror. Our leaders and too many citizens are stuck in the past. They are always busy digging up gems from the past. It is nice to belong to a civilisation that has a great history. But to be buried in that history is quite insane.
Either we are stuck with the glories of the past or we are picking the errors from the same place. Glories belong to the ancient past and the errors belong to rather recent past: that’s the only difference. The recent past stretches from Nehru and his ‘dynasty’ to the Mughals. While the ancient India knew everything from nuclear physics to the Internet, Nehru and his dynasty were an ignorant and vicious lot that ruined the great civilisation of the past. The degeneration began with the Mughals, of course.
Whether the Mughals and his successors committed all the historical blunders is immaterial if progress is what we want. It’s no use looking back and grumbling about the ditches and potholes on the roads that we have already traversed. We should deal with the present if we wish to forge a great future. The present is all that we have right now. We can act only in the present. And action is what is required; not grumbling or nitpicking.
The past is dead; bury it. The future is yet to be; shape it. The present regime has wasted six years obsessed with the past. As a result India has become one of the worst nations in the world today. More poverty, more unemployment, more corruption, more violence, more hatred, an endless list of evils is what we now have because of our absurd obsession with the past. Too many of us are busy trying to correct the mistakes of the past. That’s a totally useless activity.
Liberate yourself from the past. Live here and now. Deal with the problems of today. There is no other way if you wish to create a bright future.

Comments

  1. जितेन्द्र माथुरJanuary 30, 2020 at 10:18 AM

    Right you are Sir. If not for the (selfish and manipulative) politicians, this lesson is meant for the commoners all over the nation. Let's learn it and keep ourselves reminding everyday so that we do not fall into the trap of the dirty (and complex) politics being relentlessly played with us by the shrewd ones.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 30, 2020 at 11:13 AM

      Thank you, Jitender, for the endorsement. If only all of us realised the importance of the here and now, India would be such a nice place.

      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
47 comments
Read more

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 .   ...
16 comments
Read more

Nehru’s Secularism

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, and Narendra Modi, the present one, are diametrically opposite to each other. Take any parameter, from boorishness to sophistication or religious views, and these two men would remain poles apart. Is it Nehru’s towering presence in history that intimidates Modi into hurling ceaseless allegations against him? Today, 14 Nov, is Nehru’s birth anniversary and Modi’s tweet was uncharacteristically terse. It said, “Tributes to former Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru Ji on the occasion of his birth anniversary.” Somebody posted a trenchant cartoon in the comments section.  Nehru had his flaws, no doubt. He was as human as Modi. But what made him a giant while Modi remains a dwarf – as in the cartoon above – is the way they viewed human beings. For Nehru, all human beings mattered, irrespective of their caste, creed, language, etc. His concept of secularism stands a billion notches above Modi’s Hindutva-nationalism. Nehru’s ide...
14 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

The Art of Subjugation: A Case Study

Two Pulaya women, 1926 [Courtesy Mathrubhumi ] The Pulaya and Paraya communities were the original landowners in Kerala until the Brahmins arrived from the North with their religion and gods. They did not own the land individually; the lands belonged to the tribes. Then in the 8 th – 10 th centuries CE, the Brahmins known as Namboothiris in Kerala arrived and deceived the Pulayas and Parayas lock, stock, and barrel. With the help of religion. The Namboothiris proclaimed themselves the custodians of all wealth by divine mandate. They possessed the Vedic and Sanskrit mantras and tantras to prove their claims. The aboriginal people of Kerala couldn’t make head or tail of concepts such as Brahmadeya (land donated to Brahmins becoming sacred land) or Manu’s injunctions such as: “Land given to a Brahmin should never be taken back” [8.410] or “A king who confiscates land from Brahmins incurs sin” [8.394]. The Brahmins came, claimed certain powers given by the gods, and started exploi...
14 comments
Read more