Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Though India’s own Entrepreneur Baba keeps denouncing everything foreign as unhealthy for the holy people of Bharat, Gujarat Gauseva and Gauchar Vikas Board have imported Egypt’s own Cleopatra as the model of beauty for Bharatiya nari .  According to these Gujarat gaurakshaks, 1.      Cleopatra was the most beautiful woman in the world. 2.      Cleopatra used cow’s milk for bathing. 3.      Therefore the Indian women should use cow’s dung and urine for enhancing their beauty. Don’t ask me what the logic is in that syllogism.  Where on earth have you found logic in any religious assertions and scriptural truths?  Take it on faith.  Faith is “belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel,” as defined by the Devil’s own immortal Ambrose Bierce.  Forgive me for borrowing a foreign definition; Indians are yet to acquire that sort of sense of humour – we are still steeped in bovine scatological aesthetics. Cleop

There’s a lot that India can and should learn.  For example, our terrible lack of civic sense.  We think that public spaces are enormous garbage bins, spittoons or even toilets.  People are treated no better than these public spaces.  We have no qualms about stepping on other people’s toes in order to move ahead in our life.  The most terrible vice is what I call the Indian missionary zeal. That is our typical instinct for poking our nose into other people’s affairs and then giving them unwanted and unwarranted counsels.  Like the missionary who is consumed by the divine zeal to save souls, we go around seeking what’s to be corrected in the other person’s behaviour.  I too possessed this obnoxious zeal for some time in my life.  But I was fortunate enough to have too many people around me who possessed it a million times more than I did.  So they kept a tab on me with a religious zeal that would have put the real missionaries to shame.  And there were the real missionarie

In his well-known book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington implied that peace was an impossible dream.  “People are always tempted to divide people into us and them,” he wrote.  For example, let us assume that the Saffron Brigade succeeds in creating a Hindutva India after the present  face-off with Pakistan is surmounted.  Let us imagine an India where everyone abides by the principles of Hindutva.  Will it be a peaceful nation?  Huntington would say that we would soon start dividing ourselves into us and them, us being the dominant sections and them being the marginalised sections.  That’s how human nature is.  There is no escape from clashes. Huntington has evidences from history to substantiate his argument.  “World War I was the ‘war to end wars’ and to make the world safe for democracy,” he writes.  What actually happened, however?  Communism and fascism with their various versions of dictatorship.  Not democracy as dreamt by