Skip to main content

War and a Dream


India has retaliated. My morning news on Asianet used the word ‘revenge’ gleefully. India has taken revenge on Pakistan. A few friends texted me personally to imply that Modi, whose faithful critic I have been, is a real hero, fit to be a world champion. A septuagenarian and former professor of sociology quoted Modi proudly: “Ab Bharat ka pani Bharat ke haq mein bahegi.” Now India’s water will flow for India’s benefits. The rivers flowing into Pakistan have been blocked by Modi.

My response to the prof, who is apparently aging without acquiring wisdom, was: “That’s a jingoistic view. I’d put is as: India won’t tolerate terrorism and we know how to deal with it.”

I’m not against violence per se. You can’t preach nonviolence to an aggressive buffalo, as a proverb in my mother tongue says. I salute India’s latest action on Pakistani terrorists. They deserve it.

However, my question to my old prof friend – who is as much a fan of Modi as I am his critic – is: Does that retaliation (revenge or whatever you call it) make Modi a great world leader, Vishwaguru?

The world needs healing, not more war. Light, not more darkness….

I know that line of thinking won’t work. Because it will be mocked as futile idealism.

Idealism is not dead, my friend. It still works. In the palaces of the rulers who sacrifice their citizens, their soldiers, their country if need be, for the sake of their ideals! Idealism has become the privilege of a few. Would Lord Rama approve of that? What about Lord Krishna?

The world stands in need of a leader who can bring ideals to the ordinary person on the streets. To you and me. And the poor woman who is begging for alms on the street to feed her little children. Especially to the man who shouts jingoistic slogans for the leader who is taking his country to war in the name of ideals.

Is it possible to take the country to peace in the name of those ideals? The one who can do that is the real Vishwaguru, for me.

I dream about a leader who can reinterpret the scriptures and the epics. Make Rama or Krishna relevant today. And awaken the spiritual potential that lies latent in human breasts. Instead of arousing violent passions, dark emotions, and savage instincts. The plain truth is that no one requires any particular skill to move a mob towards violence. Any twopence gangster can do that.

Leadership is a totally different affair.

Leadership is not taking the country to a war. Which will end one day. And then the leaders will shake hands, as the Palestinian poet wrote. They will pose for photo-ops. Display trophies. Advertise success stories. Rewrite history.

Who loses? The mother loses her son. The wife loses her husband. Children become orphans.

This has been going on ever since human civilisation originated. If your leader is repeating the same thing, what greatness can he claim, my dear prof friend?

Is there another way out? You may ask. I have no answer. If I had one, I would be the Vishwaguru. Since I don’t have one, I dream. I dream as I prepare for the mock war drill that my country is giving me this afternoon.  


 

Labels:

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanMay 7, 2025 at 3:44 PM

    Hari OM
    Dreadful news this morning... already the banging of shields/words leading to escalation. I despair at the world... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 7, 2025 at 5:45 PM

      With the kind of leaders the two countries have, we have reasons to worry.

      Delete
  2. Liz A.May 8, 2025 at 1:21 AM

    I'm so sorry. No one really wins a war.

    ReplyDelete
  3. magiceyeMay 9, 2025 at 10:25 AM

    Sad state of affairs brought on by our own actions.

    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

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

A Government that Spies on Citizens

Illustration by Copilot Designer India has officially decided to keep an eagle eye on its citizens. Modi government has asked all smartphone manufacturers to preinstall a government app, Sanchar Saathi , on every phone in such a way that no citizen can ever uninstall it. The firms have been also ordered to install the app on existing phones too using software-update technology. The stated objective is to strengthen cybersecurity and protect users from fraud. The question is why any government should go out of its way to impose “security” on its citizens. For over a month now, I have been receiving a message every single day from the Government of India’s Telecom Department to install the app on my phone. I wanted to block the sender, but there is no such option. Even that message is an imposition. I don’t trust any government that imposes benefits on me. “ Beneficent beasts of prey ,” Robert Frost would call such governments. When Modi government imposes security on me, I ha...
8 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
10 comments
Read more