10-07-2007, 02:58 PM
<span style='color:red'>Ram-Ravan War II</span>
Tarun Vijay
What defines our Indian-ness? A passport or an emotional relationship that goes beyond any written document?
<b>India consists of two kinds of people. One who live her. And the other who live here. </b>The former respect the Constitution and the icons of the nation like the Tricolour and Ganga and Himalaya and her people as their own, same blood and flesh. This feeling of oneness is most thrillingly displayed when we see an Indian in a distant alien land â the warmth that moment exudes is indescribable or get ecstatic seeing Yuvi earning six sixers in as many balls. We get angry when any Indian falls or our airports are badly managed or we lose a war or a match. It's because we have stakes in the glory and the fall of our motherland and it goes beyond any boundaries of faith or caste or colour.
Our micro identities, like province, language, religion, way of worship or even an atheist viewpoint, all merge with one singular identity â India, a unifying force that celebrates diversities and abhors uniformity. That becomes our raison de etre to be called Indians. We love Homi Bhabha, Abdul Kalam, Annie Beasant or Gandhi, not because they wrote books and produced some scientific formulas or held high positions. They are great to us because of their devotion and perseverance to see India grow, for their efforts and passionate dreams enhancing our motherland's glory. We shared those dreams and saluted them without ever caring what's their faith or colour. Every Indian, who works for the nation in any unique way, becomes our hero. Naturally. No matter to which region or faith he belongs to.
Sunita Williams is not mobbed with love here because she stayed up there in space for a couple of months but because of the fact that in spite of her professional achievements she remembered her punya bhumi , the virtuous land of her ancestors, revered Gita and Ganapati, saluted memories of a land that spells light and warmth. We feel elated to see an Azim Premji and Lakshmi Mittal topping the list of wealthy people on this planet, though we never met them and get excited to see a Lagaan or Swades or Chak De , because those stories on the celluloid gave us an adrenaline of greatness about our nation. Who really cared about the religion or language of Aamir or Shah Rukh or Gowarikar or John? It's the idea of India and a shared feeling of respecting all that she represents that binds us together and not just that piece of cardboard called a passport and a name in the common voters' list.
<b>And there are those who just live here. Without any emotional attachment to their nation or her people. Like passengers in transit. </b>Their passports and the voter IDs are like transit boarding passes or 'visa on arrival', facilitating a life in their own world. Nation remains a shrunk, usable idea for their power and wealth. They erect statues in their 'honour', because they know none would bother after their demise. For them anything is good and worth doing if that serves their personal agenda to enjoy power and luxury. Hence they welcome alien infiltrators, feel no pain seeing their fellow Indians being ousted from their own homeland. If they find it convenient and beneficial, they align with those who powered politically Ram Temple movement and in next phase abuse Ram if that consolidates their political fiefdom. How does it matter if that offends millions who worship Ram? Respect and honour are reserved for those who would sever heads and bomb houses if hurt and offended. Rest can be taken for granted; they are not even vote banks. Hence even those who worship Ram and ask for a promotion or an election ticket, standing devotedly before His stone images, keep mum seeing abuses being hurled on their God. Ram shall never complain of course.
At a juncture when India is moving fast to earn wealth and new heights of strategic prowess, issues that could have been avoided and the nation's precious time saved, have been raked up by an intensely insensitive governance and its 'anti-everything good for the nation' Leftist allies. They have failed miserably in the states ruled by them- in West Bengal and Kerala. Their industrialisation, economic growth charts, minorities' development, law and order and poverty alleviation records show the lowest and weakest indicators. The way the Leftist government handled Singur agitation, killing helpless farmers and labourers described by the press as Jalianwala massacre, is not an isolated example of their bad governance. Yet they choose to jeopardise every opportunity of an Indian quantum jump.
In a nation's life, alienation and collective amnesia go hand in hand. But amnesia tinged with revenge is found in the Left-driven secular notions we are burdened to face. And here is a regime that not only conveniences those revenges but also forces a kind of selective amnesia on its citizens in its pursuit of power through vote banks of religion and caste. It forgets that the national life seeks energy from its cultural roots and tributaries of civilisational grandeur and pride. Besmirching those sources and humiliation of nation's core constituency is repeating the acts of foreign assaulters and horse-ridden robbers who had just one aim âto strengthen their marauding armies and enjoy the fruits of their adventures. The woes or sentiments of the people they rule or plunder never forms a detectible spot on their radar of concerns. Only the ruling elite that has a sense of blood relation with the ruled, can have an attitude that risks losses and invites pains to provide soothing regimen of laws and expressions that heal the wounds inflicted by the strangers and alienated. <b>The forced selective amnesia by the Left and its facilitation by the ruling conglomeration which is horribly blinded by the immediate goals of holding on to the political power has created a situation where Gods of the majority are the easiest targets to have some fun, and draw sadistic pleasure without fearing a backlash or reaction. In crude words those who fear death from the Islamists show off their brevity on Hindus by lampooning and defiling their icons of faith with semi-literate analyses. </b>
They create a sovereign plagiarist regime of myths perpetuating them through state apparatus and brutal falsification of facts. Demonising the ideological foes, de-contextualising the documents and finally making a society and her people dispossessed of their national treasures of wisdom and continuity are their identifiable goals. This they did in Africa, in New Zealand and Australia and the Americas. Now they are doing it here. With the help and active participation of the kith and kin of victimised people.
So, the declared atheists tell us, Ram is in every heart, why erect a temple? Ram didn't preach hate and violence why complain or cry if hit by others? You guys, the bloody criminals of Gujarat riots, have no right to demand justice, because you wear saffron, the colour of anti-minority violent mindset. And they, the secular have a right to align with those who did â84 riots and said, 'when a huge tree falls, the earth shakes'. They forget and force the nation to de-memorise that saffron had been the colour that defines India, from Mauryas to Shivaji and Sikh gurus. They change the syllabus to force a process of de-memorisation, use various mediums to repeat falsehoods too many times so that the traditionally-preserved truth is replaced by their recent constructions of new history and socio-political morality. Hence a meteoric pressure to delete Godhra and the bridge that Ram built. As if it didn't happen. No need to answer why fifty-nine lives of Hindu children and women and men were smoked out in that mobile inferno. And people spread out in more than eleven countries have continued to sing and write about the bridge of Ram since centuries, much before they learnt calibrating a metre.
Every single innocent life lost is bad and condemnable, whether Gujarat or Godhra but why paint death and pain in religious colours? And then there are lies, total lies and manufactured lies. And then what about Kashmir's refugees? Oh, Jagmohan drove them out of the Valley for political reasons! Can you get driven by any Governor against your will unless you are feared to death by midnight knockers? The Governor who provided a way to save half a million lives gets portrayed as the offender by secularists!
So don't speak for Kashmiri Hindus, who stand for India, but go talk to the Hurriyat who demand secession. Don't try to protect Ram Setu, 'what's sacred about it', but make the clan's memory spots as pilgrim centres of the nation. Nothing is honourable except the votes and the family.
We have been experiencing brutalities and humiliations to such long periods and have passed through the fascist Stalinist channels forcing fragmentation of our collective characteristics that gradually we see a trend to Islamise or 'brutally secularise' stray responses that put a reward on the head of a Ram-abuser. Nothing can hurt the Hindu cause more than such tendencies, as Hindu society has never internalised or approved extremism of any variety in language or actions. These outbursts are un-Hindu in nature. But nevertheless it must worry us as it shows an utter frustration with the state siding with offenders and finding that no decent protest seems to work.
Those who justify Naxal's violence (economic backwardness, corruption et al) and Osama's jihad (American bully, anti-Muslim policies, no cultural freedom to wear veils et al), would do well to study growing helplessness and accumulating anger amongst a large section of unorganised Hindus who are bewildered to see how a chief minister abuses their God and the 'friendly' central government having an alliance with it keeps silence, though it issued warnings and expressed deep displeasure on cartoons that weren't drawn in India.
We always wanted to live in peace. But who attacked us? From Qasim to Kargil? We saw our own people defiling Vande Mataram , a song for the nation, denouncing lighting of the lamp as an evil Hindu ritual, Saraswati project being dismissed as a myth propounded by Hindu communalists and goddesses on scotch bottles. Nothing new, or strange, but social dynamics needs more than a self-effacing crowd, hence the significance of sacrifices and a life beyond our own material realm.
We are told to tolerate and articulate our views in decent tones of an evening candlelight dinner. Be nice, you are not supposed to be violent; you are the inheritors of a great civilization. Do these worthies know about it though? Which of our great cilvilisational heroes pardoned a mischief-maker? Why do we celebrate Dussehra? Because it signifies a peace talk with the abductor of Sita?
Surely we got to fight through our means of Dharma and a resolve not to pardon the habitual offender within a democratically permissible framework of corrections and not through borrowed means that will never be accepted by the Hindu masses. But every thing has a limit. You can't stretch it too far. The truth invites wrath of the liars. Remember how novelist Elif Shafak faced the ire of the intolerant groups. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel laureate, experienced the same harassment. No community and society has faced continuous torture and brutalities like the Hindus since last many centuries. And the nightmare is not ending even after a partitioned Independence.
<b>The war has been announced between those who live in Mother India and revere her as a living entity and those who live here treating the place as a platform. Accepting the challenge and taking it to the logical end is the only way left for every Indian, who may belong to any faith but respects the nation, which has provided space for every stream , including agnosticism. </b>
There is no other nation like ours, what stops us to prove worthy of her?
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/article...5,prtpage-1.cms
Tarun Vijay
What defines our Indian-ness? A passport or an emotional relationship that goes beyond any written document?
<b>India consists of two kinds of people. One who live her. And the other who live here. </b>The former respect the Constitution and the icons of the nation like the Tricolour and Ganga and Himalaya and her people as their own, same blood and flesh. This feeling of oneness is most thrillingly displayed when we see an Indian in a distant alien land â the warmth that moment exudes is indescribable or get ecstatic seeing Yuvi earning six sixers in as many balls. We get angry when any Indian falls or our airports are badly managed or we lose a war or a match. It's because we have stakes in the glory and the fall of our motherland and it goes beyond any boundaries of faith or caste or colour.
Our micro identities, like province, language, religion, way of worship or even an atheist viewpoint, all merge with one singular identity â India, a unifying force that celebrates diversities and abhors uniformity. That becomes our raison de etre to be called Indians. We love Homi Bhabha, Abdul Kalam, Annie Beasant or Gandhi, not because they wrote books and produced some scientific formulas or held high positions. They are great to us because of their devotion and perseverance to see India grow, for their efforts and passionate dreams enhancing our motherland's glory. We shared those dreams and saluted them without ever caring what's their faith or colour. Every Indian, who works for the nation in any unique way, becomes our hero. Naturally. No matter to which region or faith he belongs to.
Sunita Williams is not mobbed with love here because she stayed up there in space for a couple of months but because of the fact that in spite of her professional achievements she remembered her punya bhumi , the virtuous land of her ancestors, revered Gita and Ganapati, saluted memories of a land that spells light and warmth. We feel elated to see an Azim Premji and Lakshmi Mittal topping the list of wealthy people on this planet, though we never met them and get excited to see a Lagaan or Swades or Chak De , because those stories on the celluloid gave us an adrenaline of greatness about our nation. Who really cared about the religion or language of Aamir or Shah Rukh or Gowarikar or John? It's the idea of India and a shared feeling of respecting all that she represents that binds us together and not just that piece of cardboard called a passport and a name in the common voters' list.
<b>And there are those who just live here. Without any emotional attachment to their nation or her people. Like passengers in transit. </b>Their passports and the voter IDs are like transit boarding passes or 'visa on arrival', facilitating a life in their own world. Nation remains a shrunk, usable idea for their power and wealth. They erect statues in their 'honour', because they know none would bother after their demise. For them anything is good and worth doing if that serves their personal agenda to enjoy power and luxury. Hence they welcome alien infiltrators, feel no pain seeing their fellow Indians being ousted from their own homeland. If they find it convenient and beneficial, they align with those who powered politically Ram Temple movement and in next phase abuse Ram if that consolidates their political fiefdom. How does it matter if that offends millions who worship Ram? Respect and honour are reserved for those who would sever heads and bomb houses if hurt and offended. Rest can be taken for granted; they are not even vote banks. Hence even those who worship Ram and ask for a promotion or an election ticket, standing devotedly before His stone images, keep mum seeing abuses being hurled on their God. Ram shall never complain of course.
At a juncture when India is moving fast to earn wealth and new heights of strategic prowess, issues that could have been avoided and the nation's precious time saved, have been raked up by an intensely insensitive governance and its 'anti-everything good for the nation' Leftist allies. They have failed miserably in the states ruled by them- in West Bengal and Kerala. Their industrialisation, economic growth charts, minorities' development, law and order and poverty alleviation records show the lowest and weakest indicators. The way the Leftist government handled Singur agitation, killing helpless farmers and labourers described by the press as Jalianwala massacre, is not an isolated example of their bad governance. Yet they choose to jeopardise every opportunity of an Indian quantum jump.
In a nation's life, alienation and collective amnesia go hand in hand. But amnesia tinged with revenge is found in the Left-driven secular notions we are burdened to face. And here is a regime that not only conveniences those revenges but also forces a kind of selective amnesia on its citizens in its pursuit of power through vote banks of religion and caste. It forgets that the national life seeks energy from its cultural roots and tributaries of civilisational grandeur and pride. Besmirching those sources and humiliation of nation's core constituency is repeating the acts of foreign assaulters and horse-ridden robbers who had just one aim âto strengthen their marauding armies and enjoy the fruits of their adventures. The woes or sentiments of the people they rule or plunder never forms a detectible spot on their radar of concerns. Only the ruling elite that has a sense of blood relation with the ruled, can have an attitude that risks losses and invites pains to provide soothing regimen of laws and expressions that heal the wounds inflicted by the strangers and alienated. <b>The forced selective amnesia by the Left and its facilitation by the ruling conglomeration which is horribly blinded by the immediate goals of holding on to the political power has created a situation where Gods of the majority are the easiest targets to have some fun, and draw sadistic pleasure without fearing a backlash or reaction. In crude words those who fear death from the Islamists show off their brevity on Hindus by lampooning and defiling their icons of faith with semi-literate analyses. </b>
They create a sovereign plagiarist regime of myths perpetuating them through state apparatus and brutal falsification of facts. Demonising the ideological foes, de-contextualising the documents and finally making a society and her people dispossessed of their national treasures of wisdom and continuity are their identifiable goals. This they did in Africa, in New Zealand and Australia and the Americas. Now they are doing it here. With the help and active participation of the kith and kin of victimised people.
So, the declared atheists tell us, Ram is in every heart, why erect a temple? Ram didn't preach hate and violence why complain or cry if hit by others? You guys, the bloody criminals of Gujarat riots, have no right to demand justice, because you wear saffron, the colour of anti-minority violent mindset. And they, the secular have a right to align with those who did â84 riots and said, 'when a huge tree falls, the earth shakes'. They forget and force the nation to de-memorise that saffron had been the colour that defines India, from Mauryas to Shivaji and Sikh gurus. They change the syllabus to force a process of de-memorisation, use various mediums to repeat falsehoods too many times so that the traditionally-preserved truth is replaced by their recent constructions of new history and socio-political morality. Hence a meteoric pressure to delete Godhra and the bridge that Ram built. As if it didn't happen. No need to answer why fifty-nine lives of Hindu children and women and men were smoked out in that mobile inferno. And people spread out in more than eleven countries have continued to sing and write about the bridge of Ram since centuries, much before they learnt calibrating a metre.
Every single innocent life lost is bad and condemnable, whether Gujarat or Godhra but why paint death and pain in religious colours? And then there are lies, total lies and manufactured lies. And then what about Kashmir's refugees? Oh, Jagmohan drove them out of the Valley for political reasons! Can you get driven by any Governor against your will unless you are feared to death by midnight knockers? The Governor who provided a way to save half a million lives gets portrayed as the offender by secularists!
So don't speak for Kashmiri Hindus, who stand for India, but go talk to the Hurriyat who demand secession. Don't try to protect Ram Setu, 'what's sacred about it', but make the clan's memory spots as pilgrim centres of the nation. Nothing is honourable except the votes and the family.
We have been experiencing brutalities and humiliations to such long periods and have passed through the fascist Stalinist channels forcing fragmentation of our collective characteristics that gradually we see a trend to Islamise or 'brutally secularise' stray responses that put a reward on the head of a Ram-abuser. Nothing can hurt the Hindu cause more than such tendencies, as Hindu society has never internalised or approved extremism of any variety in language or actions. These outbursts are un-Hindu in nature. But nevertheless it must worry us as it shows an utter frustration with the state siding with offenders and finding that no decent protest seems to work.
Those who justify Naxal's violence (economic backwardness, corruption et al) and Osama's jihad (American bully, anti-Muslim policies, no cultural freedom to wear veils et al), would do well to study growing helplessness and accumulating anger amongst a large section of unorganised Hindus who are bewildered to see how a chief minister abuses their God and the 'friendly' central government having an alliance with it keeps silence, though it issued warnings and expressed deep displeasure on cartoons that weren't drawn in India.
We always wanted to live in peace. But who attacked us? From Qasim to Kargil? We saw our own people defiling Vande Mataram , a song for the nation, denouncing lighting of the lamp as an evil Hindu ritual, Saraswati project being dismissed as a myth propounded by Hindu communalists and goddesses on scotch bottles. Nothing new, or strange, but social dynamics needs more than a self-effacing crowd, hence the significance of sacrifices and a life beyond our own material realm.
We are told to tolerate and articulate our views in decent tones of an evening candlelight dinner. Be nice, you are not supposed to be violent; you are the inheritors of a great civilization. Do these worthies know about it though? Which of our great cilvilisational heroes pardoned a mischief-maker? Why do we celebrate Dussehra? Because it signifies a peace talk with the abductor of Sita?
Surely we got to fight through our means of Dharma and a resolve not to pardon the habitual offender within a democratically permissible framework of corrections and not through borrowed means that will never be accepted by the Hindu masses. But every thing has a limit. You can't stretch it too far. The truth invites wrath of the liars. Remember how novelist Elif Shafak faced the ire of the intolerant groups. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel laureate, experienced the same harassment. No community and society has faced continuous torture and brutalities like the Hindus since last many centuries. And the nightmare is not ending even after a partitioned Independence.
<b>The war has been announced between those who live in Mother India and revere her as a living entity and those who live here treating the place as a platform. Accepting the challenge and taking it to the logical end is the only way left for every Indian, who may belong to any faith but respects the nation, which has provided space for every stream , including agnosticism. </b>
There is no other nation like ours, what stops us to prove worthy of her?
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/article...5,prtpage-1.cms