Skip to main content

Leaders with castrated imaginations

From here


“Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion too / Imagine all the people / Living in peace.” The inimitable John Lennon sang that. I have imagined such a world a million times. I have written umpteen blog posts for promoting that sort of imagination knowing fully well that such a world is not going to materialise in my lifetime. But I’m imagining it for the times ahead. For a time when humankind evolves further. Evolves towards what dreamers like Teilhard de Chardin imagined long ago.

Russia’s Putin put a prodigious stumbling block in the course of that evolution. There are always some such people in history. Even the biblical God loved to put such blocks. Remember the Tower of Babel? Hitler was the most recent successor of Yahweh and predecessor of Putin. People like Hitler and Putin abound in history. Present day India has their counterparts and they won the recent elections too. They are popular and can lead a genocide at any time. It is only India’s diversity that keeps them subdued as of now. They are trying hard to pulverise that diversity using religion and language.

John Lennon’s dream will remain a dream as long as there are Hitlers and Putins and their counterparts with popular support.

Popular opinion is incapable of imagination.  

Popular leaders who were born with congenitally castrated imaginations created wars against humankind’s evolutionary dreams. Saddam Hussein killed 100,000 Kurds in one such war. 800,000 Rwandans were killed in 100 days by another such popular leader.

Before this post proceeds with castrated leaders, allow it to present a three-year-old Rwandan child to you. The Hutus were hunting down all the Tutsis in the country. There was a Hutu woman who had married a Tutsi. Such marriages were common since Hutus and Tutsis lived together for years and years. But the popular leader decided that the Hutus must have racial purity. Remember India’s Savarkar and Golwalkar and their present-day followers demanding that sort of purity in India? India is for Hindus. Yes, the popular Hutu leaders in Rwanda were of a similar view. They pulled out a Tutsi woman who was taking care of a group of little children. The children were hacked to death one after another. Remember what our popular leader’s followers did in Gujarat in 2002? Well, well. Back to Rwanda. The youngest child in that group, just three years old, pleaded for his life. “Please don’t kill me,” he said with terror trembling in his little eyes. “I’ll never be Tutsi again,” he said. But the killers, unblinking, struck him down. [You can read this and much more in Samantha Power’s Pulitzer winner book, A Problem From Hell.]

Popular leaders killed a lot more people in many other places. Remember Bosnia’s 200,000? Remember Khmer Rouge [2 to 3 million]? Srebrenica? Kosovo?

The US of America played big roles in many of these genocides directly or indirectly. America pretends to be the saint among all nations. It has a huge cemetery for burying its soldiers who die for protecting that saintly image. The Arlington National Cemetery which sprawls over 639 acres has 400,000 soldiers buried in it. It is the place where wars return home to rest.

This is Mary McHugh weeping at the grave of her fiancé Sergeant James Regan in Arlington National Cemetery

Wars have no victory. Wars are no solutions to any problem. Every war is a problem. A serious problem. Created by popular leaders with congenitally castrated imaginations.

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanMarch 11, 2022 at 9:09 PM

    Hari OM
    Hear! Hear! There are so many words one could say - yet one is rendered speechless at the happenings, too... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pooja MahimkarMarch 12, 2022 at 11:36 AM

    The world has become a scary place

    ReplyDelete
  3. Pandian RamaiahMarch 13, 2022 at 5:26 AM

    Whoever wins, the loss is for the individual families of both lands. Our mind is full of emotions while the babies there cry, mothers with blood stains being taken away in stretchers, elders rushing with their crutches to save their lives. Hope the humanity take over the war mongers' minds of both sides.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 13, 2022 at 7:42 AM

      It's always the ordinary people who suffer. The leaders have all safety measures.

      Delete
  4. GBMarch 13, 2022 at 3:45 PM

    If only there we many others who also imagined a world of equality where everybody coexisted peacefully. But alas! That is no longer the popular opinion. Just when the future looks too bleak, you come across blog posts like this one, which assures you that " okay! Maybe there is some hope after all'

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 13, 2022 at 4:00 PM

      I'm sure there are many dreamers... But they are helpless!

      Delete
  5. G.PMarch 14, 2022 at 4:33 PM

    I cannot say I enjoyed reading that sir. It is as sad as it could be. USA is the key culprit in this war of domination. Russia is right up in the run; possibly ahead but there has always been causality because of which Russia has faced problems. Americans can sell anything from a dead body to a soul. As far as their 'counterparts' are concerned, they will lose one day.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 14, 2022 at 7:02 PM

      Indeed the US is the most deadly nation in this game of war and conquest and manipulation. I don't deny that Russia has legitimate fears. Nevertheless i can never support war. We need to find solutions, not create more problems. I know that sounds idealistic.

      Delete
  6. G.PMarch 17, 2022 at 10:03 PM

    Fear and Pride can make people take dangerous steps. Even I am not a fan of wars sir but that animalistic instinct is inevitable. I love ideals too as they are almost impossible to achieve. There is no solution for these people sir. Every international organization that is medium of ratification are dysfunctional organs. I wish too wars could be avoided. Thinking about future Anarchy setups gives me chills. They are going to breach every remaining line of humanity that exists.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Country where humour died

Humour died a thousand deaths in India after May 2014. The reason – let me put it as someone put it on X.  The stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra called a politician some names like ‘traitor’ which made his audience laugh because they misunderstood it as a joke. Kunal Kamra has to explain the joke now in a court of justice. I hope his judge won’t be caught with crores of rupees of black money in his store room . India itself is the biggest joke now. Our courts of justice are huge jokes. Our universities are. Our temples, our textbooks, even our markets. Let alone our Parliament. I’m studying the Ramayana these days in detail because I’ve joined an A-to-Z blog challenge and my theme is Ramayana, as I wrote already in an earlier post . In order to understand the culture behind Ramayana, I even took the trouble to brush up my little knowledge of Sanskrit by attending a brief course. For proof, here’s part of a lesson in my handwriting.  The last day taught me some subhashit...
10 comments
Read more

Lucifer and some reflections

Let me start with a disclaimer: this is not a review of the Malayalam movie, Lucifer . These are some thoughts that came to my mind as I watched the movie today. However, just to give an idea about the movie: it’s a good entertainer with an engaging plot, Bollywood style settings, superman type violence in which the hero decimates the villains with pomp and show, and a spicy dance that is neatly tucked into the terribly orgasmic climax of the plot. The theme is highly relevant and that is what engaged me more. The role of certain mafia gangs in political governance is a theme that deserves to be examined in a good movie. In the movie, the mafia-politician nexus is busted and, like in our great myths, virtue triumphs over vice. Such a triumph is an artistic requirement. Real life, however, follows the principle of entropy: chaos flourishes with vengeance. Lucifer is the real winner in real life. The title of the movie as well as a final dialogue from the eponymous hero sugg...
4 comments
Read more

Abdullah’s Religion

O Abdulla Renowned Malayalam movie actor Mohanlal recently offered special prayers for Mammootty, another equally renowned actor of Kerala. The ritual was performed at Sabarimala temple, one of the supreme Hindu pilgrimage centres in Kerala. No one in Kerala found anything wrong in Mohanlal, a Hindu, praying for Mammootty, a Muslim, to a Hindu deity. Malayalis were concerned about Mammootty’s wellbeing and were relieved to know that the actor wasn’t suffering from anything as serious as it appeared. Except O Abdulla. Who is this Abdulla? I had never heard of him until he created an unsavoury controversy about a Hindu praying for a Muslim. This man’s Facebook profile describes him as: “Former Professor Islahiaya, Media Critic, Ex-Interpreter of Indian Ambassador, Founder Member MADHYAMAM.” He has 108K followers on FB. As I was reading Malayalam weekly this morning, I came to know that this Abdulla is a former member of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind Kerala , a fundamentalist organisation. ...
10 comments
Read more

Empuraan and Ramayana

Maggie and I will be watching the Malayalam movie Empuraan tomorrow. The tickets are booked. The movie has created a lot of controversy in Kerala and the director has decided to impose no less than 17 censors on it himself. I want to watch it before the jingoistic scissors find its way to the movie. It is surprising that the people of Kerala took such exception to this movie when the same people had no problem with the utterly malicious and mendacious movie The Kerala Story (2023). [My post on that movie, which I didn’t watch, is here .] Empuraan is based partly on the Gujarat riots of 2002. The riots were real and the BJP’s role in it (Mr Modi’s, in fact) is well-known. So, Empuraan isn’t giving the audience any falsehood as The Kerala Story did. Moreover, The Kerala Story maligned the people of Kerala while Empuraan is about something that happened in the faraway Gujarat quite long ago. Why are the people of Kerala then upset with Empuraan ? Because it tells the truth, M...
11 comments
Read more

Violence and Leaders

The latest issue of India Today magazine studies what it calls India’s Gross Domestic Behaviour (GDB). India is all poised to be an economic superpower. But what about its civic sense? Very poor, that’s what the study has found. Can GDP numbers and infrastructure projects alone determine a country’s development? Obviously, no. Will India be a really ‘developed’ country by 2030 although it may be $7-trillion economy by then? Again, no is the answer. India’s civic behaviour leaves a lot, lot to be desired. Ironically, the brand ambassador state of the country, Uttar Pradesh, is the worst on most parameters: civic behaviour, public safety, gender attitudes, and discrimination of various types. And UP is governed by a monk!  India Today Is there any correlation between the behaviour of a people and the values and principles displayed by their leaders? This is the question that arose in my mind as I read the India Today story. I put the question to ChatGPT. “Yes,” pat came the ...
11 comments
Read more