Skip to main content

Posts

Beef, BJP and Football

One BJP minister beefs about his chief minister of the same party in Karnataka and goes to the extent of threatening to behead him if he ate beef “and play football with his severed head.”  We have so many beef-heads in the country who have bizarre notions about games and their tribe is increasing especially since the cow migrated from its usual habitats on the city streets to the new lullabies with which our present leaders are trying to put the whole nation to an intoxicated sleep.  The lullabies are, however, beginning to sound like beef-hearts – at least to some of us. The BJP chief minister of Karnataka does not eat beef.  He was merely defending the people’s right to eat whatever they liked.  But the BJP does not believe in such magnanimity.  It is a party beefed up by religious and cultural ideologies.  Religion has its god-given truths which no beef-head can transmute into beef-hearts.  A plain truth is that beef is no delicacy.  It is hard and extremely fibrous. 

Chetan Bhagat’s Fallacies

According to Chetan Bhagat, a liberal in India today is a person who was born in an upper class family, received English education, absorbed the world culture, carried hotdogs to school in their tiffin box, visited Disneyland, and ridiculed those who spoke English in India with a vernacular accent.  The popular writer said this and much more in his Times of India article yesterday.  He goes on to reduce the current communal disturbances and acts of intolerance to a mere class struggle between the privileged and the underprivileged, the latter being the present-day nationalists whom the former refer to derogatorily as the right-wing, or sanghis, or bhakts, or chaddiwallahs.  “There is a reason why liberals are derogatorily referred to as pseudo-secular, pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-liberal,” claims Bhagat. “For their agenda is not to be liberal. Their agenda is to look down on the classes that don’t have the global culture advantage.”  He goes on to say that “If, for insta

Hope

Standing between yesterday’s history and tomorrow’s mystery, he clung to the wings of a dream with a hope born anew. Hope was the last item in Pandora’s box. Hope is the well that the desert hides somewhere within it. But he saw his companions falling on the way, falling dead. They had hope, they had dreams, that they would be free next Christmas. When Christmas passed, they postponed their dream to next Easter. Easter too came and went. Too many broken promises of hopes and dreams break the wings. Break the heart. Face the reality, he said to himself. We are in hell, that’s the truth. How to beat the heat, find the ways. That’s the real hope. Hope is not a longing. Hope is not a dream. Hope is the toil that breaks the shackle bit by bit. The last item in Pandora’s box. Note : The poem was inspired by the Stockdale Paradox.  Admiral Jim Stockdale was a United States military officer held captive for eight years during the Vietna