Here I am, back again after a long break. Had been mourning - the death of a friend (un)surprisingly leading on to a temporary (?) death of my muse - these past few months, unable to bring myself to believe that life must go on...
Random thoughts off and on did flip through an inattentive mind, floating up like semi-inflated balloons but not really able to achieve the desired buoyancy
Random thoughts off and on did flip through an inattentive mind, floating up like semi-inflated balloons but not really able to achieve the desired buoyancy
- For instance, Delhi University has 100% as the "cut off" for B.Com students while, on a recent trip to Gujarat I read a news item that said the cut-off for MBBS was 72% - duh??!!
- VVS Laxman calls it a day because MSD was not answering his cell phone - and till just the other day the press was baying for VVS' blood but all of a sudden now he's a tragic-hero? (VVS has always been someone I've admired, though - ALMOST as good as Azhar of the silken wrists)
- Pakistan's Supreme Court has been busy (in between sacking errant Prime Ministers) determining the price of the humble/mighty samosa...
And then many more deaths took place. Disasters, man-made... in Kokrajhar, Assam when Bodos clashed with Muslims; in Myanmar/Burma when Buddhists (aren't they supposed to believe in non-violence or did someone come along and amend Buddha's 8 fold path? In Sri Lanka, too, prior to Myanmar) clashed with Rohingyas...
"Clashed with" sounds so very delightfully martial, doesn't it? Brings to mind images of two warring groups facing each other across a battlefield
The reality must be vastly different, no? Rioting, murder, looting, rape, people running helter-skelter, being chased by a mob, mindless to reason, focused only on that one single thought that mobs seem to develop, that atavistic thirst for savagery...
So, there was the provocation. And hence there was the retaliation too. In Mumbai, first, on 11th Aug., followed soon by similar reactions in Lucknow, Srinagar and Allah only knows where else. Oh? How could I forget the targeted attacks on "Assamese" peoples in our modern cities - Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai, Mumbai...
and, while all this has been going on, I feel compelled to ask these questions...
is it all right for a Muslim to kill a Muslim in Syria or Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan - the mullahs do not march to Azad Maidan asking for peoples to live in harmony and co-existence? But a Buddhist killing a Muslim in far off Myanmar means a mob of 5000 can attack policemen AND police women , beat them up, tear off the ladies' clothes etc?
is it all right to attack anyone who "looks like as Assamese" because some gang of equally reprehensible scoundrels have killed Muslims in the Bodo districts?
I wanted to wish all my Muslim friends whose cell phone number was on my contact list - and discovered the "5 sms per day" limit. Eid Mubarak was e-mail driven, thereafter. Equally, think of the sheer injustice faced by all the millions & millions of law abiding Muslims who would not have been able to share their feelings over SMS with their friends! How sad?!!
Around the same time we also had our Independence Day - 65 years after the bloody partition, why is it that we have still not been able to remove these walls from our hearts & minds?
Iss desh ka kya hoga?
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