Skip to main content

The heartlessness of Idealism

 


John Oswald was sent by the British to reform India in 1780s. India reformed him instead. Under the influence of certain Hindu ascetics, Oswald became a vegetarian and also a committed champion of animal rights. This same man, however, had no qualms about killing fellow human beings. In the very same year in which his pamphlet decrying meat eaters for their “callous insensibility” was published, Oswald was devising, as a member of the Jacobin Club in France, effective methods for largescale massacres of human beings. Vegetarianism and sensibility towards animals on the one hand and heartless brutality to humanity on the other. This is what India taught Oswald.

Do you find something similar happening in India nowadays? One of our chief ministers appointed by none other than our Prime Minister himself is a Hindu ascetic by profession and is a pure vegetarian who loves cows more than certain human beings. Before becoming the high priest of his state, he had founded a local army of his own in order to commit such ‘religious’ deeds as rape and murder of people belonging to a particular religion. This yogi was arrested in 2007 for his murderous exhortations to an excited mob and his worldly possessions at that time included a revolver, a rifle and two luxury cars. As soon as this religious ascetic was made the CM of his state he went on a rampage against the Muslims in his state. “Human beings are important,” he declared, “but cows are also important.”

India now has a lot of people like him: with idealism in heart and murder in deeds.

Religious idealism has often been brutally murderous. Who can forget the crusades and jihads of the medieval history? The West seems to have realised the futility of crusades and religion in general. The east is still in the heat of religious idealism with all its murderousness. India seems to be on the way to becoming the leader of such countries in religious heat.

The roots of religion lie in a sort of insanity, according to philosopher William James. Saints are insane people by ordinary standards of human psychology. But most saints don’t harm others. They harm themselves in the names of their gods and religions. There are some, however, whose insanity makes them imagine themselves as the saviours of whole nations and hence they choose to inflict the nations with their insanities. India is in the hands of some such saviours.

The people of India can still choose a better life by deciding to be more practical than idealistic. Practical people have hearts, you know.

Comments

  1. I hear you Tomichan, it is such a painful scenario to see idealism take over humanity and the real essence. I see fragments of it everywhere - clinging on to ideas of the past, whether it is religion, superstition or even the history - they all have happened in the past. Instead of focusing on the learning elements from them and understanding that each person is an individual and have their own space and right to be the way they want is an extremely important fabric and it really hurts to see that it is one which is often violated :(

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Learning from them - that's just what's required. But we repeat their errors instead. We are pathetically and pathologically incorrigible, I think.

      Delete
  2. Love for animals is inversely proportional to love for human beings.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I had absolutely no idea of Yogi's background. This was an eye opener. Not that I've been a fan but still...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Our idols are made entirely of clay. Not just the feet.

      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

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...