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Let Gandhi Return

The nation is gearing up to celebrate the 150 th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi with an array of year-long programmes. Undoubtedly the great soul deserves the celebration. Gandhi was one of the greatest souls that ever walked on the earth. India has been converted into a quagmire that inevitably submerges any Gandhian value or principle that dares to make its presence palpable. Gandhi was religious but genuinely so. For him religion was a tool to make himself a better human being day after day. It was his spiritual sustenance. It helped him see other human beings as sparks of the divine. It enabled him to love every person as his brother or sister. He had no enemies. Even the British were not his enemies, as he declared time and again. Religion would never make Gandhi sectarian; on the contrary, it gifted him with universal love. Truth was the foundation of Gandhi’s morality. Every genuine life is an endless quest after truth and Gandhi’s life was nothing else. He experimented

Make them feel good

Add caption “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” said Maya Angelou. Making people feel good is an art. I confess I don’t possess it. Not that I didn’t try to learn it. It just doesn’t come to me naturally. So I chose the next best option: stay silent when you don’t know what to say and just give as sweet a smile as you can. A smile makes people feel good. My Christian upbringing and the Malayali cultural background have much to do with my inability to make people feel good. Neither Christianity [the version I was taught or learnt] nor the memes I was condemned with congenitally ever made anyone feel good about anything. Life is evil, according to Christianity. We are born evil with the original sin. And then came the typical Malayali cynicism which added colours and nuances to the original sin. Wait. It’s not all that negative. Don’t judge yet. My best friends are my s

Success without Character

In the former half of 2000s I suggested a topic for an inter-school declamation competition. I was teaching at Sawan Public School, Delhi at that time and the competition was an annual event. More than 30 schools from different states of North India participated. My suggestion was: “Success without character is hollow.” It was an adaptation of a quote from Albert Einstein: “Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.” My suggestion elicited a few dissenting murmurs. “Is success possible without some compromises?” A senior faculty member asked me. The others desisted from articulating their dissent. For some reason the Principal nodded his assent and as was the practice the topic was displayed on the stage of the auditorium where the competition was to be held. You can see it in the picture below. It was an interesting competition with more than 30 brilliant young speakers from some elite schools of the region trying to enlighten a few

Beef Janata Party

One of the communities I like and follow on Facebook is Beef Janata Party . Though its sidebar proclaims “Just for Fun”, it isn’t fun at all. It is a consistent, devoted and knowledgeable resistance to what the Right wing in India is doing. It has a good share of friends and followers: 270,149 people like the community and 273,606 follow it. The comments that appear below their posts show that there is a sizeable section of people in India who are frustrated with Narendra Modi’s governance. Beef Janata Party does not launch cheap attacks on anyone. They are serious about their mission which ostensibly is to make people aware of the mendacity and duplicity of the Right wing in the country. It questions all forms of falsehood, chicanery and assaults on citizens. It mocks silly claims made by the so-called Modi bhakts. Beef Janata Party has a mission and a vision. It is a concerted effort to cleanse the political atmosphere in the country of hatred and malice. It exposes falseh

Love Marriage

The latest victims of bigotry “If we had a daughter and she came home with a boyfriend, how would you react?” Maggie asked me a few years ago. The context was a love marriage that had taken place rather too privately. We knew the girl whose parents were staff of the residential school where Maggie and I worked. The parents were opposed to their daughter’s affair and rightly so. That girl was found dead in her husband’s house a couple of months back. “I would be amused,” I answered Maggie’s question. I explained that love was the most natural feeling between a young boy and a young girl. It should not, however, divert their attention from their career aspirations and life’s goals. On the contrary, love should invigorate their goals and aspirations. Maggie sighed. The sigh probably meant how naively idealistic I was. But she persisted with her questioning. “Suppose the boy belongs to a different cultural, linguistic and religious background?” She asked. “None of those

Mark Twain’s God

Mark Twain Mark Twain had a quaint sense of humour. Someone who says things like “Go to heaven for the climate, Hell for the company” and writes stuff like Huckleberry Finn cannot but be freakishly funny. When it came to God, however, he was more incisive than humorous. Much of his writings on God were not published because he knew that even his heirs would be burnt alive if they published if “this side of 2016 AD.” He wrote that in 1906 and those writings were published before the century wore itself out with the kinds of irreverence even a Mark Twain could not imagine. He believed in God, a heartless one whom he called The Great Criminal. Even an ordinary human being is a far more benign entity than God, according to Twain. If you came across a suffering being and you had the power to cure him of his suffering what would you do? Obviously you would cure him. You will remove all evil from the world if you have the power to do so. God is omnipotent. Then why is there so mu

Metaphysics of the Masses

Image from Cartoonstock Philosopher Schopenhauer called religion the metaphysics of the masses. Schopenhauer did not believe in God. He did not set much store by science either. Art is a better way to understand truth, according to him. Religion, science, art and philosophy are all ways to understand reality and communicate that understanding to others for their benefit. Science understands reality in a very rigid system which is of not much interest to the average man. It makes no difference to the ordinary man whether there are 8 electrons in an oxygen atom or how hydrogen and oxygen can combine to form water. The waters in the rivers of Babylon which set the psalmist crying nostalgically for their lost Zion continue to interest the ordinary man though centuries have passed since the Captivity which created the biblical poem. Philosophy is the ideal way to understand life and reality. But how many people are capable of thinking philosophically. Very few. A few more wi