It has been very easy to observe and identify a common trend in the poltical developments in countries of the Middle East and North Africa. And the common Indian is almost compelled to think about it, and try to put it in perspective against the backdrop of India's socio-political status and going upstream to search for relevant issues in the stream of time.
While he might be ridiculed for wasting valuable time to pose as a " socio-political commentator", when he is gasping for breath nose deep in slime. Both hands are full, carrying a handful of brittle plans to defend against the after-shocks of the latest trend of Corruption. His knees shake observing De-spiritualization of India's saffron essence -- the holy brigade casting aside its potentially marketable halo, and jumping into the band-wagon carrying every possible pair of chalk and cheese. Its destination, if at all, is unknown, though as a hardened Indian I feel the toy-train is actually running on a looping track. At night he looks in Wikileaks for bedtime stories to read out to children.
Yet, attention is drawn westwards because some of these have been revolutions, that gained ground by participation of the electronic audio-visual media, and the rapid, undistorted spread of informations about ground reality to every corner of our global village. In a time less than never before, his story-telling may be interrupted by the rain of ash because volcanoes in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Jordan have erupted big time, and have been spewing molten venom over the last few months.
A Trial in Chicago is breaking the hearts of both the heartless and the broken-hearted. As a result the ghost of 26/11,( or rather the ghastly prospect of the ghost of the guilty in 26/11 getting away unpunished) refuses to go away.
Jehadis are all over the place -- Al Quaida, Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jamaat-Ud-Dawah, Hizbul Mujaheedins, Indian Mujaheedins - genocidal suicide missions seem to be never-ending, (well the prospect of Sublime Biryani and 70 ethereal virgin belles have definitely made its point).
Looking through all these creates a question : why is these barbarians continuing to take up arms, fight and bleed? What is the stake? What is the Core which should be neutralized, around which these bearded mercenaries continue to thump feet in their war-dance.
All eyes are on Pakistan -- host to all sorts of homicidal psychopaths as they continue to plot and plan, interacting with "rogue elements" , former army officers and ex-ISI, who are coming up as killing coaches to deliver human bombs in hundreds every day. Of course the country is bleeding because of its self-made mess.
Diplomatic and Military exercises are in full swing to get the better of these bearded two-legged man-eaters.
I guess it will never be possible because the targets of drone-attacks and Navy Seals intruding under the cover darkness do not make the Core.
The terrorist psyche has to be re-oriented. He must realize the futility of the 'spoils' of Holy War. And here is where Religion comes in, the uncomfortable issue lies in everybody's mind too sensitive to be debated upon, possibly to even confront.
And who is the ultimate instigator of not only the Mumbai terror attack, but all the jehadi attacks, not to mention the more direct wars that India has had to fight against an implacable foe?
No, it's not Pakistan. While this country is the apparent cause for all the bloodshed, it is not the ultimate cause. The ultimate cause of all this wasteful, mindless violence, the ultimate cause behind the very creation of Pakistan itself is Religion -- in other words, God. Or rather, the human perception of this Myth of Divinity. Let the perception stay -- only thing it has to proper and correct.
Religion has wrecked havoc in India too. Or rather religious intolerance is the issue. The demolition of the Babri Masjid -is also, and even more obviously,a manifestation of theo-politics, the lethally vengeful politics of God.
It is not geo-politics but theo-politics which has been responsible for brutal hostilities.
Today everybody is playing theo-politics. And in doing so, we are all, willy-nilly, becoming pawns of the very game that we think we are playing. It is not just Kasab, and the Taliban, and the Al-Qaeda, and Pakistan's ISI, which both exploit, and are, in inevitable turn, exploited by theo-politics. We, in our own India, are also increasingly held to ransom by the politics of religion, the viciously perverted sectarianism of a God with a schizophrenic, split psyche, divided along the razor-edge fault-lines of Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and all the 'isms' that man has invented to hide from heaven's eyes while he creates hell on earth.
It is not just the Taliban. It's Indian qualitative reverse image too, the Sangh-Parivar, is the practitioner and unwilling dupe of theo-politics, equally complicit, equally the propagator as well as the victim of the politics of the religion of a divisive God. The massive price that human civilisation as a whole (not individual societies, communities or races) has incurred in the name of Religion and a highly condemnable God who encourages genocide and fratricide. Religion has been twisted to accommodate the issue at hand.
Can humankind (ah that's a ironically curious word; shouldn't it be human'cruel'?) as a whole afford such a omni-savouring God any longer? Perhaps it's time for those who believe in God-of whatever colour, creed, stripe or nomenclature-to pray to Him(or Her) to turn us all into atheists, or at least agnostics. We would no longer be required to, in the name of a God, no longer believed in, by the grace of the same God, to kill each other to complete annihilation to His greater Glory, and could get on trying to deal with mundane, down-to-earth,and not up-to-heaven problems like poverty, illiteracy, disease and eco-destruction.
All of you who swear every moment of your lives by some kind of Divinity or the other,, seem to know the mind of His Schizophrenic Holiness by the back of your hands. And you are ever-ready to jump to attribute to His schizophrenic Will or to His Cause, any social phenomenon, or actions perpetrated within the civilized society, creating controversy. It is always perverse homicide or genocide, and all kinds of degradation to the deepest of the nadir, a free man/woman/child is subject to :- rape, paedophilia, pervert sexuality within a temple or a church, or child sacrifice.
However you can rest in peace, all of those believes in a God who allows vengeance
..because this will not happen, of course. The more troubled the times (and ours are very troubled indeed, what with global terror, pandemic disease, economic meltdown, greenhouse effect et al), the greater the premium that people pay to God as insurance cover.
Fear and Religion are just two sides of the same coin since prehistory. Prehistoric hominids invented the gods to appease them because storm and lightning, draught and flood, fire and ice, frightened them. And we haven't changed much. Self-invented Fear over caste, race, gender clash and exploitation still hold us to random, and provide us with spurious excuses and enough mistrust to enable us with mutual hatred to fight and kill each other.
My words would have never come into existence if you really respected religion. If you believe Religion is Truth, you should stand up to dissociate your Religion whenever crimes are committed in its name. Be it Hinduism or Islam or Buddhism or.. Etc etc.
Everytime a Hindu has sacrificed a baby girl in the name of Ram, or a Muslin has beheaded a fellow human being in the name of Allah, you have, just by your silence and cowardice, failed to condemn the evil, and most importantly failed to dissociate your Religion from these homophobic fanatics. It is you who have degraded the same religion and its holy teachings (-- those you are so religious about), into a malevolent god who doesn't seem to be the same harmless and hyper-hyped up bloke who believed in Creation of life.
At the moment, terrorism is going on rampantly again in the name of Allah, and societies who should be evolving in consciousness witnessing more respect in and towards humanity, are dragged back into its ancient perceptions when social law is replaced by Islamic law, allowing a neo-hedonism against which not a single Muslim leader has ever stood up. The factor is not Islam. It is the absence of sheer responsibilty of various religious leaders who didn't let the religion evolve and adapt to changing times.
*(I have read all the holy texts that are existent now even the Tibetan Book of the Dead, having been pushed by my interest in history, prehistoric sociology and its wonderful concomittance with anthropology
( specifically anthropo-biology & anthropo-bio-psyciology -- do these terms exist? I guess I was able to guide your attention to the intended direction..but have never found any chapter which let's these rituals to run amock )
Almost 200 years back, laws in Hindu society were sanctified by principles of Manu-Samhita. Widows are socially tortured and raped by temple priests, little girls were married off to old pervert minds to keep alight the continuity of family line (degrading Woman to a vessel to impregnate and reproduce) -- mind you, this was actively facilitated by the girl's parents because the child, according to the Holy Scriptures would face ostracization if not married off before menarche!
Freshly widowed women were drugged and thrown into burning pyres to be roasted alive so that 'feminine sanctity' of the religious institution of marriage ( this barbarian thought still exists, still continues to be perceived) would be preserved to immortality. Her cries would be lost in the din of voices coming up from a dark void so pathetically devoid of soul, who perhaps sought refuge in the high-pitched repetitions of religious incantations, when compassion and guilt threatened to fill up the dark void, persecuting any efforts of repentance. Here I say, religion was used to justify acts of such cruelty. The mourning parents sought refuge from the pain of this barbaric cruelty, in a auto-hypnotised denial, where the religious rulers (the most debauched class in the early decades of the 19th century -- yes, as recent as that) would carry out mass brain-washing in the names of heaven and hell, virtue and vice, again using the 'opium for the masses' to serve their own vested interests including acts of debauchery including sexual exploitation of the simple-minded, unsuspecting village maidens and married women ( emancipation of the soul by consummation with 'God' through his holy emissary, the priests.)
As awareness grew, and formal education was actively pursued by the youth, face of the 19th century renaissance (to be socially persecuted as the face of the renegade) guided by reformers. And they did hound out the barbarism, which had been an age-old inclusion in the socio-religious profile of communities, who carried out social repression by hiding behind pages of the holy texts. These were slowly pushed out by social reforms, (obviously the beginning was strongly attacked by Hindu fanatic zealots). It required a gigantic reformist process by men of wisdom who just didn't quit. Now barbarianism is not there officially. Hindus changed the holy texts by throwing the distorted rubbish.
Islam preaches tolerance too. I have read the Al-Sharif and Al-Hadish (it is important to know what one wishes to put subject to rationalization in context of contemporary trends. They act as milestones in the pathway along which Time guides sociological evolution to follow -- a constant continuity of the inevitable, not necessarily consistent though.) Going through the Scriptures of the Prophet, one has a distinct realization that its message is much more intolerant compared to the essence of other religions.
I would want to point out a very basic thematic truth. These Scriptures, in a way, form a code of conduct for the society of its patrons. I'm not at all qualified to qualify the philosophy of divinity of the Scriptures. Yet the Scriptures are a brilliant commentary that provides insights into sociology of those times, and brilliant literature for studying 'comparative sociology', (if I'm allowed to put it that way, with no intention to distort the language inside the Palace,... well.. as the language of Colonisation too.....)
I would not hide that my perception is of lesser Divinity, and greater Reality as a social code of conduct. A social code of conduct which was laid down to be followed almost 900 years back cannot be expected to accommodate 21st century perceptions of Right and Wrong, of Morality and yes, Relevance too. The reality is that the scholars and religious leaders didn't update the text while everything was getting updated.
Religiosity need not be updated, but organized literature on sociology demands to be updated. One can't understand why there are so few Muslim reformist voices(that can affect) when genocide is carried out, or courts allow punishments like public flogging, stoning to death, amputation of limbs. If a Muslim doesn't feel nauseated to find out that he believes in the same religious beliefs which are exploited to wage war and are glorified in front of the entire world, the impression of Islam on the Non-Muslim is perverse and cruel, nothing close to a divine consciousness who creates things.
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I am a pantheist. I am not a religious person at all. At various stages of life, my family has been embarrassed by my "paganism" in religious places, in religious circumstances.
But I will always shift to make space for Religion, that is because I respect the human being in a man, that can't depend on someone's take on religion. Such thought-process makes me reaffirm that if I were to live in a world where being religious is an absolute requirement, I would choose Humanism -- tolerant, respectful, and propagates peace.
If Islam is updated, it will be upgraded too. I am sure the world would be a better place if peaceful coexistence of religions with more humane essence.
Till then God be damned. Too many innocent lives. Too much blood. He Is mighty Expensive.
Don't get bothered by me, and you, I am sure, won't bother to bother me. I shall survive somehow. So shall you. Perhaps we could do that together?
--- the faceless Indian, just one in a crowd of a billion.
Sent from my BlackBerry®Smartphone
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Dr.Anirban Chaudhuri M.B.B.S
Consultant Physician (special interest in
Cardiology&Critical Care)
Mumbai, India
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"It is important to just listen for a while instead of speaking." -- My teacher
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