A letter to women!

     Women! What a wonderful creation you are! All the poetry of the world would not suffice to behold or describe the charm of you. Without you, how barren the world would seem! You bring the color to the otherwise black and white world.

     Just because you were physically weak, how men persecuted you all over the ages! You were seen as a mere object which would satisfy carnal appetite. Shame on the men of the world who did this to you! The idea of men being superior to you was obviously created by the men. Except in physical strength you are no way less than any men. In fact in many others, you are far superior. 

     But thanks to changed global scenario that the situation has began to turn around. You are seen as capable as any other men in the world. But what I feel is that you also fell as a victim to the disease called imitation. Instead of growing in a unique path, you always wanted to tread the path of men. 

     Whenever you imitate any person, you obviously see the person as superior to you and you set the standard accordingly. The person you imitate becomes your yardstick of measurement. You may love or hate the person you imitate but somewhere in the mind, you hold the person higher than yourself. Oppression for many millennia has made a rebel out of a few of you. But when a rebel acts, it is actually a reaction to the existing pattern. So, the rebel can’t think of independent pattern. He/she just modifies the existing pattern.

     You started imitating men from clothing to lifestyle to everything. Though on the outside you claim to be no way inferior, in your psyche you are yet to come out of that. All the feminists who clamor for the equal rights are still keeping men as the reference point. With this kind of thinking we are working well to create a chaotic world where gentleness, love, care are costly commodities. Love, compassion are natural traits of you but have been jeopardized in this mindless imitation. 

     Women of the world! Please heed to these and create your own paths, tread on them fearlessly and thus create a beautiful world in which there is no prejudice based on the gender and both the genders are in harmony with one another.

Awards never give the complete picture

Fame is a perfume of heroic deeds, said Socrates. The way of acknowledging the special deeds of men has been through awards. Surely it is a way of recognition and also as a way of encouraging the talent to achieve something bigger. But, whether the awards are serving their purpose, whether the deserved ones are getting them and whether the awards are deserved by the recipients is always debatable. There have been some serious errors in selection & some serious omissions. For instance, some literary awards are in the stranglehold of some ideologists who stand for particular ideology that any literary work however genuine and genius it may be, if found contrary to the ideology will score some big negatives for the consideration for the award. Many great literary works of many languages have gone to oblivion owing to this factor. It’s not the story of any particular level of award. It happens in all levels: local, national or international. 

The most prestigious award of India ‘Bharat Ratna’ is sometimes given to inept people (like VV Giri, the former president whose only qualification was that he was the president of India once) or given purely out of political reasons (Like when it was given to MGR of Tamil Nadu posthumously). MGR, except being a superstar in the Tamil cine world had no achievements which could entitle him for the prestigious award. For some reasons, Congress wanted the help of the party of MGR. The easiest way congress found to lure the party (AIADMK) was to offer MGR a Bharat Ratna posthumously. What a wicked way! 

Padma Bhushan

Journalist pimps like Burkha Dutt have got the Padma awards, not to forget her cousin brother (not literally of course!!) Rajdeep Sardesai. We all know what kind of a lobby they make and which party they do the lobby for and knowing that we shouldn’t wonder about the awards given to them. I lost my respect for Padma awards when I came to know Teesta Setelvad had got one of those. Teesta Setelvad is a person who has made fame and a living out of Gujarat riots of 2002. Special Investigation Team (SIT) which was set up by the supreme court reported that Teesta Setelvad had cooked up cases and conjured false witnesses in testifying for the Gujarat riots. This was proved beyond doubts. She has been instrumental in demonizing Narendra Modi. When this kind of a person can get the award, anyone can get any award. 

Jnanapeeth

The literary world of India is in the strong hold of some people who have subscribed to some ideologies (mostly leftist). Their number is so huge that the panel which recommends and selects the literary awards most of it will be with leftist ideology. Any works however brilliant they may be, if found conflicting to their ideology, will never get the deserved award. Else how can one explain a literary giant of kannada S L Bhairappa is yet to get Jnanapeth award? Some leftist writers like U R Ananthamurthy or Girish Karnad got the award decades ago. This is not to belittle their literary capabilities. But the way will be paved easy for the one who is a leftist and termed ‘progressive’. 

We might wonder the credibility of the booker prize after seeing downright nonsensical people like Arundati Roy getting awards. There is an allegation that almost all the Indian authors who have bagged the booker prizes till now (with the exception of Kiran Desai perhaps) have portrayed India and Indian life poorly. Because I have neither read Arundati Roy’s ‘God of small things’ nor Arvind Adiga’s ‘white tiger’, I can’t vouch for this.

Oscar is blind :

Oscar eluded many people who deserved it and has many times gone to completely wrong set of people. One of the greatest directors of all time Alfred Hitchcock, some of the finest actors like Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole never got Oscar. So goes the saying: Oscar is blind. 

Oscar

I wondered how a cheap movie like slumdog millionaire got the Oscar! What artistic values had the film got! I could not find any of them. I felt the director was like a rag picker who picks and looks out for crap and as we know whatever one is in pursuit of, he is sure to find it. So the director found all the craps in India and using that he made a film which got an Oscar. The so-called first world still wants to see India as the country of snake charmers. So, the movie made an ideal menu for the first-world appetite for poor portrayal of India and thus got an Oscar. People would have dismissed the movie as garbage and would have forgotten it but some people tried to immortalize it by giving an Oscar.

So, in the midst of all these issues I am forced to think that awards are not the ideal way to judge a person’s worth and perhaps a person’s capability or worth can never be judged!!

A small critique on religions !

Muni Tarun sagar once said that the house should be destroyed after a hundred years of its construction and then should be rebuilt. In the same way, religions should be destroyed after one thousand years. Because of a long duration of time, many junks might have made their way to the religion. So, it would be near impossibility to set all the things right. The actual meaning and intention of the religion would have lost long ago. So, the process of cleaning the unwanted aspects should always be on.



Any religion should be open to criticism. Because that’s the main thing which helps to look deep about certain aspects and clean them if needed and also helps in reaffirming the faith in the good aspects of the religion. But a few religions consider themselves to be perfect and beyond evaluation or criticism. Worse than that, they intimidate the people who criticize it and create a kind of phobia.

Hinduism which is perhaps the oldest religion of the world has faced the same. Owing to the long-presence of it, it picked up junk and some aspects of it became intolerable. Though it had some very beautiful things that no other religions had, the junk had piled up so much that it began to mask the great aspects of the religion. So, the reformers came for the rescue. They could see the problem. Many of them criticized and brought many reforms. But due to its enormity and vastness, still many junks has remained. But, one appreciable fact is that Hinduism is open to criticism. No acts were considered as blasphemous acts even though many acts were nothing less.

Christianity also gives a fair amount of freedom in criticizing the religion and for the reforms. But as Christianity is a highly organized religion, it is not as easy as Hinduism to criticize and evaluate. Organization of religion has its own weaknesses and strength. But, with its limitations, Christianity has come a long way and it has given scope for criticism and evaluation.

But the religion which hasn’t opened up at all is the religion of Islam. The very word Islam means ‘to surrender’. It’s a beautiful thing to surrender to something. Unless you are truly humble, it is impossible to surrender to something completely. But as mentioned before, no religion is perfect. Every religion has its own piece of scrap which has to be cleaned up from time to time. If the scraps are not cleaned, the scraps become more and cover the entire religion and the religion appears as a joke.

Islam has hardly gone through reforms over the years. It is as medieval as it was in the 7th century. There is not much difference between Aurangazeb and Osama Bin Laden. Both might belong to completely different eras but the point to be noted is that both were motivated by the same ideology. Obviously, there should be something wrong in some part of the religion. If someone questions that, instead of brooding over the reasons, the very act of questioning is considered blasphemous and the person who questions it is persecuted or worse, killed. So, none dares to question and all want to be politically correct.

Subramaniam Swamy (President of Janatha Party and former minister) had written an article about Islamic terror and the ways to wipe it. Though there were some extreme points in it, he had raised some valid issues. I had posted the article on my Facebook profile. Irfan, one of my college mates in my post graduation got offended by the article and he began to throw some personal slurs at me and also started his line of defense defending his religion and tried to portray his religion as the religion of peace(had he said piece, I would have readily agreed!). The person was so blind that he was not even ready to acknowledge the well-established fact of the Islamic terror. Then Naveen, one of my college mates in my graduation joined this guy and they continued to defend their argument.

Then the rhetoric began: ‘Terrorism has no religions’, ‘You can’t attribute terrorism to one single religion’, ‘Terrorism has a socio-economic-political cause than religious ones’. It was a typical Indian situation: One guy from the minority, to defend him a pseudo-secular intellectual and one hopeless moron against them. My hope to drive home some points to them remained hope till the end because one person had mortgaged his intelligence to his religion and the other one to some ideology and pseudo-secularism. So, the arguments yielded no results. But, the next morning I was surprised to see that my name was promptly removed from his friend’s list. I was bewildered at the level of narrow-mindedness!!

To do a cover-up job for a problem is not the way to encounter a problem at all. To solve any problem, one has to acknowledge the existence of the problem first. If someone is the denial mode and act as if the problem doesn’t exist, the existence of the problem is undeterred and it can only exacerbate over a period of time.