Skip to main content

Posts

Stan Swamy and some questions

  A lot of people who question the government are arrested nowadays on serious charges that amount to treason or nearly that. The latest is the arrest of Stan Swamy who is a Catholic priest and social activist. Apparently his crime is that he is a Maoist who supported the Dalits in the 2018 Bhima Koregaon case. That is only the apparent reason, a reason manufactured by the government. What are the real reasons? The first reason is that he is a Christian missionary. After Muslims, Christians are the biggest enemies of the Hindu Rashtra that Mr Modi & Co are trying to create in India. A lot of comments made in various social media by the IT cell of the ruling BJP are about conversions made by Christian missionaries in India including Stan Swamy. So let me take up this issue of religious conversion first. What is wrong if anybody wants to convert from one religion into another? Why can’t I choose my religion? If I am not happy with the religion into which I was born without my

A Disillusioned Hindu

  Book Review Title: I could not be Hindu: The story of a Dalit in the RSS Author: Bhanwar Meghwanshi Translator from Hindi: Nivedita Menon Publisher: Navayana, Delhi, 2020 Pages: 236 [hardbound] “Was it for this Hindu Rashtra I was working so hard, so ready to kill and be killed?” Bhanwar Meghwanshi asks in this autobiographical book of his. The book is about the author’s bitter disillusionment with the religion he was born into as well as the most powerful organisation of that religion, the RSS. Meghwanshi was born into a caste considered untouchable by his religion. But he loved his religion which taught him as a little boy that Muslims and Christians were enemies of both the nation and the nation’s religion. He joined the RSS as a little boy and at the age of 13, in 1987, he was on a mission to redeem the Ayodhya temple from its Muslim clutches. He joined the militant group that went from his village in Rajasthan to Ramjanmabhumi in Ayodhya and shouted passionate sl

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus could

The Love Song of a Secularist

The relative of the Hathras victim gather her ashes Watch the video here Let us go then, you and I. We’ll walk through certain half-deserted streets where some neglected truths lie awaiting redemption. We are not redeemers, you and I. We’re just observers. Observers of so-called redeemers. You and I have endured these redeemers for the past six years. We have endured their deafening, hollow slogans. We have endured the poison they spewed into our air in the name of gods and holy cows. We have endured hatred, lynching, raping, and flagrant fraudulence that masquerades as nationalism. We have endured endless, tedious arguments of a billion insidious intents. Isn’t it time now to take a break and ask the overwhelming question? Oh, do not ask what that question is. Let us go and make our visit. Men in saffron come and go talking about Ram Lalla’s palatial abode coming up in Ayodhya. Yonder in Hathras is a young girl being raped by god’s defenders, the yogi’s men by caste. You know wh

Country of Fractions

  Imagine living in a country whose ruler gives a moving lecture on the importance of atmanirbharta (self-reliance) and then dashes off to the neighbouring country to sign a deal on a statue that will cost the nation Rs3000 crore. When there is a conspicuous contradiction between one’s words and deeds, the person obviously suffers from a lack of integrity. In mathematics, integers are whole numbers and fractions are fragments. There are a lot of fragmented people in the world today. If the leaders are conspicuously fragmented, the followers cannot be whole. No disciple can be greater than the master. Wholeness is essential, however, for any individual’s psychological, and hence physical, health. This wholeness is a harmony among one’s thoughts, words, and deeds. If you put on the garb of an ascetic and change your name to Yogi but behave like a criminal, obviously you have no idea of what you are, forget integrity. Present India’s national curse is the fragmentation of our lea

The Evening and the Morning

  Book Review Title: The Evening and the Morning Author: Ken Follett Publisher: Viking, 2020 Pages: 915 Ken Follett is a master when it comes to narrating tales about the medieval period. His Kingsbridge trilogy went on to sell millions of copies in various languages. The Evening and the Morning is a prequel to the trilogy. It tells the story of some very fascinating characters who lived at the turn of the second millennium CE. The plot is set in Kings Bridge (as Deng’s Ferry came to be known in that period with the replacement of the ferry by a bridge) and surrounding places in the period of 997-1097. Ragna, a Norman noblewoman, falls in love with Wilf, a British aristocrat without knowing that he was already married. Those were days when the British men could just “set aside” an existing wife in order to take a new one and thus Ragna becomes Wilf’s legal wife. Those were days when priests had wives and children though not always openly. Even bishops and cardinals had con

Humility

  Human beings like to imagine themselves as the centre of the universe. Our religions and gods render their generous assistance in this process. For example, all the major Semitic religions imagine that God created everything for the sake of the human species. Man is the crown of the entire creation and everything in the universe, including women and the stars, is subservient to man. Other religions do not fare much better in this regard. Hinduism not only places men above women but also some men above others in an elaborate and intricate hierarchy. Such systems have led some people to think too highly of themselves. Thinking too highly of yourself is pride in a negative sense. Pride can be positive too. We should be proud of ourselves, our goodness, our integrity, our identity, and all other good things that we have or we are. That pride helps us to be good and also to become better day by day. Ironically, that pride is the kind of humility that Ernest Hemingway wanted us to le