Skip to main content

Puzzles, puzzles all the way


I’m now living in a country that should rightfully belong to Shakespeare’s witches who declared, “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” Good people go to prison and bad people to the parliament.

Narendra Modi’s acquittal by no less than the Supreme Court in the 2002 Gujarat riot cases did not surprise me. I ceased to expect justice in this country a couple of years back. But I had not anticipated the arrest of Teesta Setalvad along with R B Sreekumar to instantly follow Modi’s acquittal. Even in the world of Shakespeare’s witches, vengeance wasn’t so instantaneous.

I should have known better. My own ignorance puzzles me more than that of my compatriots who hailed the apex court’s verdict. Are they really ignorant about Rana Ayyub’s Gujarat Files: Anatomy of a Cover Up and/or Manoj Mitra’s Fiction of Fact-Finding: Modi and Godhra and/or Gujarat: Behind the Curtain by R B Sreekumar and/or Teesta Setalvad’s Foot Soldier of the Constitution? Most of them may not have read the books but they are aware of the facts documented in them, surely. If not, that ignorance does puzzle me.

In other words, why do too many Indians choose to be ignorant or choose falsehood consciously? I can understand a few thousand people embracing falsehood for various motives. But when millions choose to wallow in slush with porcine merriment, I am more than puzzled.

Should I really be puzzled, however? Wasn’t it a court of justice that offered Socrates the chalice of hemlock? Wasn’t it another court of justice that nailed Jesus to his cross? What would have the Supreme Court of India done to the killer of Mahatma Gandhi today?

Courts of justice have never ceased to puzzle me.

Nevertheless, I seem to be living on an alien planet now. In a homeland that I don’t understand anymore.

It’s a place where they say the cow is holy and then they let lakhs of cows starve on streets and highways. They say the Ganga is holy and that remains the filthiest river in the world with 3 million litres of sewage emptied into it every day besides the microplastics dumped into its waters from the holy cities of Varanasi and Haridwar as part of religious rituals. They say that India ranks at 101 out of 106 nations on the Global Hunger Index though the Forbes List has nearly 200 billionaires from India.

What am I to expect anymore? Is there room for hope in my lifetime?

The latest issue of a Malayalam weekly (Mathrubhumi) which enjoys a high circulation in Kerala carries an interview with R B Sreekumar. The exceptionally long interview was taken just before Sreekumar’s arrest. One of the many puzzling things that the top police officer says is that it was “innocent Muslims who became victims of the Gujarat riots. Not one Muslim goon was killed. The whole Muslim underworld was with BJP.”

The Muslims who beheaded Nupur Sharma’s supporter in Udaipur were also BJP men!

My puzzlement reaches its inevitable orgasm. What exactly does my government seek? 

Image from Twitter

PS. This is written for Blogchatter’s Blog Hop: 4 things about today’s world that puzzle you.

My previous post in this series: Happy Days of Long Ago

 


Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanJuly 7, 2022 at 8:26 PM

    Hari Om
    By now you may have heard the news from the UK... all the rats deserted their king yesterday and today he - very begrudgingly - shrugged his shoulders and said he wouldn't lead them anymore but that he was glad to continue as our prime minister in the mean time. It's the world that has gone crazy my friend - some parts more than others... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 8, 2022 at 6:32 AM

      A similar desertion won't happen in India in near future. Our man has assumed divine proportions. Terrifyingly so.

      Delete
  2. magiceyeJuly 8, 2022 at 6:51 AM

    Theater of the absurd.

    ReplyDelete

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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more