Skip to main content

Vamana’s Deception


A few years ago, Home Minister Amit Shah infuriated the people of Kerala by wishing them Happy Vamana Jayanti on the occasion of their state festival Onam. While Vamana is the fifth incarnation of God Vishnu for Amit Shah and his counterparts in North India, Vamana is a monstrous impostor for Malayalis. (That’s yet another of the umpteen instances that highlight the impossibility of a monolithic Hindu religion.)

Vamana sent Kerala’s most beloved king, Maveli, to the netherworld merely because of jealousy. Maveli (elision for Maha Bali or Bali the Great) was a demon (asura) king. But he was beloved to his subjects because during his reign Kerala was a utopia. There was fraternity, equality, justice, truthfulness, and so on everywhere in the kingdom. Maveli had become greater than the gods for the people of Kerala. Obviously, gods didn’t like that. So none less than Vishnu took the form of a dwarf, Vamana, and deceived Maveli. That deception was punishment from gods to an asura for being good!

Amit Shah could not have been ignorant of this legend when he greeted Malayalis on Vamana Jayanti. Someone who is an arch-villain for a people was being transmuted into a divine figure with that greeting. Shah and his people are experts at rewriting histories as well as making villains out of heroes and vice versa. But Kerala won’t accept those histories and inversions easily. I wonder whether Shah and his friends have ever tried to find out why their party doesn’t ever win a seat in Kerala’s elections.

Of late, there is some tilt among Kerala’s Hindus towards the BJP. This is achieved by spreading the poison of communal hatred. As I have written in this very space time and again, hatred is a powerful tool, far more powerful than love or any good emotion. Even the people of Kerala can be susceptible to its intoxications. If the nascent sectarianism takes deep roots in the state, that will be a Vamana moment for Amit Shah and his colleagues.

PS. I am participating in #BlogchatterA2Z

Previous Post: Ulysses

Tomorrow: Wiesenthal’s Revenge

 

 


Comments

  1. To not know the legend or promote anyway - an intentional insult??? Leaders need to respect more.
    U

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm sure Shah knew what Onam celebrated. He was playing a game as usual.

      Delete
  2. I am just hoping someday, we will be a truly secular country and love will win. It is also ultimately upon us to choose.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I would like to share your hope. It's possible but not with the present leadership.

      Delete
  3. Must have been testing the waters to see what happens- If it worked good for him and party.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's more likely. In fact, a few BJP people in Kerala went to the extent of defending Shah.

      Delete
  4. That's expected from those who are rewriting history..it almost made me laugh that he wished. So far I have been very happy by seeing how Kerala is handing the political hatred. Now that you say they are falling in their traps...it's painful!!!


    I have written something today which is related to this post. If time permits do read. Little long post though!


    Dropping by from a to z "The Pensive"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Politics is a power game and in that game anything is grist to the mill. Since all other strategies have failed, BJP in Kerala is doing what it did in other states: rouse up communal hatred.

      Delete
  5. Sometimes, you suffer less because others are bad and more because you are very good (just too good to be tolerated by the bad ones). People like Amit Shah will only take the side of the tricksters and present them as role models, not the naïve and the nice ones.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The wicked are scared of the innocent. But gods getting scared of others' goodness is quite bizarre.

      Delete
  6. Well, this could also be a saazhish (not getting teh exact English word for this at the moment) of Amit Shah ji and his friends, for all you know. These guys can do anything!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Mixing politics and religion is a lethal combination. How I wish, as a common man/ woman, that life could be simpler with live and let live policy. Instead of being religious, if we could just be spiritual wont that suffice? The moment all will understand this, no politician would ever be able to milk the cow of religious hatred politics.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Spirituality is obsolete today, made so by a man who sat in meditation in a Kedarnath cave for as many seconds as a mushroom in Badrinath longed to be in a Chinese soup.

      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

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...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

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...