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Holy cows and unholy people

The Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) is being saffronised.  Two office bearers of RSS-backed Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana (ABISY) and a former professor who unsuccessfully contested Lok Sabha elections in Manipur last year on a BJP ticket find place in the reconstituted team of ICHR.  Maharashtra has become the ninth state in India to ban cow slaughter.  We can expect more additions to the list soon.  The past as well as the future of the country is being altered.  History is written by the victor, as they say.  The destiny is also written by the victor. The Deccan Chronicle says that the lives of about 20 lakh people will be adversely affected by the ban on beef in Maharashtra.  One assumes that is the ultimate purpose of the ban.  Hitler overtly killed his perceived enemies.  His counterparts in India do it without attracting the attention of other countries whose cooperation is required if the regime has to deliver its electoral promises.

Religion, Politics and Truth

Dhaka killed Avijit Roy because he encouraged people to think for themselves, think freely and rationally.  Saudi Arabia is threatening to kill Raif Badawi , another blogger who, like Avijit Roy, used his rational faculty to analyse and understand his religion as well as his life. Roy and Badawi are just two examples of people who are martyred for being rational and sane.  For the crime of thinking freely and honestly. Badawi was originally sentenced to a decade in prison and 1000 lashes on the charge that he insulted Islam.  Now the charge has been modified as “renouncing Islam” the punishment for which is execution.  Why can’t a person question his religion?  Why can’t he give up his religion if he finds it unsuitable for him?  The most terrible irony is that we live in a world driven by science and technology but our sentiments are still mortgaged to antique belief systems.  Why do people find it difficult to break themselves free from the shackles of obscure an

Cravings

Fiction Maniklal Pyarelal’s irritation had mounted day by day until it reached a crescendo and metamorphosed into indignation.  The cause of the fury was his young wife Chandramati’s refusal to be happy in the opulence of her husband’s house. “What is it that you lack here?” Maniklal Pyarelal questioned her. “Tell me one thing you lack here and it will reach here in seconds.”  A fleet of cars waited outside ready to bring anything from anywhere at the order of the master. It was not lack of anything that caused Chandramati’s mounting melancholy; it was surfeit.  There was too much of everything: food and clothes, servants and entertainments.  She longed to lack something.  She longed to long for something. Maniklal Pyarelal, entrepreneur and industrialist, beacon of India’s rising economy, the man who could forge or topple the government at the centre, could not understand his wife’s longing for longing.  He thought it was a kind of insanity that only the spiritual