Intimacies Remapped

Hi Harish,

Quite a soulful piece. Me from vapi too... so i know exactly wat u mean :)

harish_hyd,

Thank you fellow imposter! Just got a roasting from Manto ! Please do stay if stmina allows, and text is engaging.

nb,

Oops, sorry. Your words must have seemed wiser than our years!


malikjahanzeb,

Thank you for the good words. I do examine the issue of religion`s relevance through the story of a cross religion marriage, and the need of the widow to inculcate her own religion, after her husband`s death, for some very sound reasons. But that is much later in the safarnama!

Tupac,

Thank you. I am particularly pleased that you noted my reasons for writing it. Would be happy if you stay with this piece, though am not going to be remotely upset if you did not, because it does seek extrordinary stamina!

Harish,
I loved your piece, and your reasons for writing it.

A nice `safarnaama`. To achieve the ultimate cohenrency, need the following formula:

(Hindu minus Hinduism)+(Muslim minus Islam)=Hindustani

Re: # 63

Let us put it this way:


State- Hinduism - Islam = India or Bharat

Ref HP #36
.
[Former President of India would not say something or even imply that the Former PM of India shied away from doing anything positive without having first hand information on what exactly took place in the Indian power corridors when Gujarat Massacre was in full swing.]

The former President of India has accused the BJP of not giving him a second term and admitting to be a ``Nehruvian socialist``. (I suppose ``Nehruvian socialism`` is what is feeding India today). Bootlicker of the Nehru Family would be more appropriate to describe the man.

[The Gujarat massacre was the direct result of Hindutva followers’ propaganda and lies.]

You are absolutely correct. The Muslims were lovey-dovey with the Hindus and were actually giving them kerosene so that they could make tea in their train carriage which probably spilled and caused the fire.

[There will be more minority massacres in India because that is what Hindutva followers want.]

What the Muslims want is for Hindu pilgrims and their families to accept death by fire as part of their karma so that the Muslims can have some fun with fire. After all, if one is going to be cremated after death, does it really matter if the fire comes first or death comes first?

someone (i think feroze) claimed that communalism is BJP leveraging prejudices into political action. this is true, but BJP is not the first. this has been done before by congress in vote-bank politics, and in pakistan movement, both very successfully.

So, the BJP and its allies and independents who support them have 41 seats in the Jharkand state assembly among them in an 81-seat legislative body but the governor invites the ``secular`` Congress and its allies to form the ministry. The newly appointed chief minister is none other than Shibu Soren against whom a couple of very serious criminal charges are pending.

The governor who did this bears the name of Syed Sibtey Razi.

People should accept that there has been no ``I-scratch-your-back-if-you-will-scratch-mine`` policy that led to this state of affairs. So long as we keep the Hindutva party out of pwer so that ``secularism`` can triumph in India and if a Muslim governor participates in such a secular, socialist, democratic act by finding that 40 is bigger than 41 (is this due to the governor`s possible education at a madrassah or is it just plain New Math coming out of Jawaharlal Nehru University that I know nothing about?), the majority community should not feel cheated of an electoral victory but should pledge to improve the secular credentials of the nation by voting a bigger Haj subsidy next year. Perhaps we should also voluntarily pay a `jizya` too to demonstrate how much we are willing to bend forward to appease our minority citizens.

Maybe we should leave a suicide note next time pilgrims from our religion get burnt in a train carriage locked from the outside.

Harish, I don`t think India is getting more polarized that it ever was.

The animosity between Hindus and Muslims has existed for ages. This is nothing new.

The most important thing is to not allow these feelings to manifest themselves as physical violence.

Simply superb Harish!

#51 by HP

[But, we have some optimist who w/o knowing what actually is taking place in India, paint a rosy picture of communal relations.]

I assume you are talking about veeresh. In case you didn’t know, he still lives in India, just as Harish does and I do. So tomorrow, if I write a flattering picture of communal relations here, will that mean that everything is fine and dandy?

I have more Muslim friends than Hindu and I come from what is labeled as a communally sensitive city, Hyderabad. Whenever a riot breaks out in any other part of India, the security forces here get nervous.

The truth is that relations between the two communities are neither as bad as you seem to imagine nor as rosy as many of us would want them to be.

As someone who has seen a fair share of communal violence, I feel it is difficult to say for sure how and why a riot starts. It can be as minor a provocation as a dispute between a Muslim shopkeeper and a Hindu shopkeeper. It often snowballs into communal violence when more people become involved and in the heat of the moment, any one of them imagines a perceived slight to his/her religion (something like calling a Muslim a pig).

Prejudices are quite common even among city folk, but that has never prevented most Hindus and Muslims from leading peaceful lives. My Muslim friends often joke about my vegetarianism and in turn, I joke about their “purdah-ed” women, but that hasn’t affected our friendships in the least. I speak not just for myself, but a whole lot of other Hyderabadis.

It is not the prejudice per se, but a rash of inexplicably bad temper that often causes communal riots, at least in India. Of course, at times, systematic indoctrination can also be a cause, but the percentage of people who would be willing to lend themselves to such manipulation are miniscule and most wouldn’t care less.

The fate of Hindus and Muslims is so intertwined that it is difficult for one community to imagine life without the other. Without the Muslim flower-seller, most Hindus will be hard-pressed to perform even the simple act of offering flowers to their gods. Without the largely Hindu buyers, many successful Muslim businesses would never flourish.

While I do not deny that there are constant attempts to drive a wedge between the two communities, the fact is they are too integrated and their lives too intertwined for anyone to really succeed.

``Now India only has 2 to 3 % Brahmin! That’s a Good one. In that case, rest of the 97 to 98% Indians are shudras``

Actually that is true. Brahmins only make up 2-3% of India`s population. And most of them have no interest in India . I am one of those 2-3%. I have more relatives outside India than in India. Thats why I find it funny when accusations about India being dominated by brahmins fly around. Truth is , the only place in India dominated by brahmins is the US Visa counters. In rural India - brahmins are almost extinct. There are more brahmins in Detroit than in Lucknow or Jaipur, for instance.

Basically - India is ruled by shudras. Modi/Advani/Thackray/Uma Bharthi....all these hindutwa guys and gals...are shudras....just a matter of different shades of shudra-hood...one more so than the other....

Vajpayee will go down in history as India`s last brahmin prime minister.

``Obviously, there is no need to remind here that only a bunch of criminals, thugs, and killers would love a leader like Modi.``

Well...5 crore Gujarathis did vote for him...so I`m assuming they are criminals , thugs and killers....all 5 crore of them..

Kabuli, Nazzz, Avenger,

Thank you for reading. I do hope to address the issues of form and content more to your satisfaction.

# 22 paindupastry,

I share your hope myself.

ana,

Thanks!

Veeresh,

I liked your secular gig on the Arabian Sea...and in my neighbourhood. Hope you read the later installments too.

nb,

Thank you for the encouragement. Yes, India has changed. But it is the pace that is mind boggling. From your generation`s station it looked like the behemoth will never ever change.... from that of mine...the speed of change is mind numbing. I am hoping to offer a strictly impressionistic, personal take on the process from inside the churner.

Feroz,

Yes. There is nothing to disagree. I do hope you stay with the progression of this work. Yours is a valuable voice.

dost-mitter,

Dost, I was waiting for you to have read it. You have done similar pieces before, and it is particularly important that I get your take on the issue. Thanks.

And yes, we have had so many discussions that finally cleave the chowk community to the two halves of status quoish nationalistic viewpoints. A slice of life piece, I hope, will help a more realistic debate. Finally, abstractions are not worth too much, especially when progress in understanding is stymied because of the anxiety of betrayal to long held, but unreviewed, views.

Please do stay with this.

Maharana,

Thank you. My pleasure.

masanamuthu,

Very true. In fact, i did myself see a lot of realities that I was not prepared for, and on this one trip itself. Many will unfold in the later part of this long work.


To everybody else on this board,

Thank you for having read this mammoth 5000 word piece. It is the longest, but I thought it set the tone perfectly for what is to follow. I did not want this to be an essay. Essays can be thought provoking, but dollops of real life helps bring in what I think, would be called a compassionate understanding of issues. Besides affording us a chance to update our understanding of the current reality.

Taking incidents or quotes from this piece alone to push one`s chosen view on scambled issues might not be so challenging, but it will definitely be less rewarding.

I liked the fact that several people on the board connected this section to their own individual experiences, like Amrita and kabuli. Besides a politically incorrect slanging match, this is also the ribaldry of young life. A parental eye cast on it will be morally outraged!

HN

Re: HN # 53

Harish, I will stay with the progress of this article and its interacts, because the experience has been highly educational and eludicating and it promises to be more educational in the future.

As to the value of my voice, it is worthless in this case, because I have nothing to add, to this debate, of anything of much significance. My idea of India is limited to the glances at newspapers and TV reports and secondary travel monologues. What I know of India is more a perception; a view, which is not necessarily India or Indian in its true sense. I would readily refrain from passing a comment on the nature of what it means to be Indian in India of today, in the contempory political-social idiom, because I am acutely aware that there exists a huge chasm between our common knowledge of each other and what we know of each other is nothing more than a one dimensional vision clouded by our personal myopias of rancour and bitterness towards each other. I would like to think that this gulf of ignorance can be bridged with a bit of enlightment, but I realize that it will not happen unless we are able and capable of growing beyond the stunted nature of our emotions, which have been, and continue to be, girded by our mutual historic experiences.

Parenthetically speaking, when Neville Chamberlain died in November 1940, Winston Churchill offered a few words to the memory of his departed political foe. His words were instructive, because he compared history to an old lady and using that metaphor, he said that history, like an old lady stumbles upon a path of memory holding up a lamp, with which she tries to revive the glories and passions of the past. In a way, we are not too dissimilar to that old lady, because we are so immeshed in the quicksands of history, that we have never been able to out live history and thus, forget its passions and glories. We all cherish a past and we dilgently strive to recreate that past, but what we often forget and care not to be bother with, is that opposing interpretations of history are just the two sides of the same coin. The glory of one interpretation is another`s interpretation of infamy and the passion of one is the sufferance of another and as long as we cling to this emotional crutch, we will never move away from the limitations of our common angst.

I am not advocating the denial of history or the historic evolution, which influences and guides us helter-skelter, but I am arguing for the reason and not the rationalization, which suggests that history should teach us the maturity to progress without asking us to subsitute its lessons as a justifications for our contempory follies. As long as we learn from history and what we learn is to treat history with a dispassion, we will surely break free of our emotional historic chains, which bind us to our personal stakes of prejudices. I do not think, and then again I might be wrong in saying this, that we have quite achieved this feat, because history, in our experiences, teaches us to nurse a grudge and wait for vengence and not to forget as we would hope to be forgiven ourselves for our own past trepasses. As long as we use the rationalization of history as a reason for our actions of misdeeds and wrongs, we will never learn that rationalization is never a reason and reason should never rationalize a wrong no matter how justified it might be historically.

Ciao

Kabuli, Nazzz, Avenger,

Thank you for reading. I do hope to address the issues of form and content more to your satisfaction.

# 22 paindupastry,

I share your hope myself.

ana,

Thanks!

Veeresh,

I liked your secular gig on the Arabian Sea...and in my neighbourhood. Hope you read the later installments too.

nb,

Thank you for the encouragement. Yes, India has changed. But it is the pace that is mind boggling. From your generation`s station it looked like the behemoth will never ever change.... from that of mine...the speed of change is mind numbing. I am hoping to offer a strictly impressionistic, personal take on the process from inside the churner.

Feroz,

Yes. There is nothing to disagree. I do hope you stay with the progression of this work. Yours is a valuable voice.

dost-mitter,

Dost, I was waiting for you to have read it. You have done similar pieces before, and it is particularly important that I get your take on the issue. Thanks.

And yes, we have had so many discussions that finally cleave the chowk community to the two halves of status quoish nationalistic viewpoints. A slice of life piece, I hope, will help a more realistic debate. Finally, abstractions are not worth too much, especially when progress in understanding is stymied because of the anxiety of betrayal to long held, but unreviewed, views.

Please do stay with this.

Maharana,

Thank you. My pleasure.

masanamuthu,

Very true. In fact, i did myself see a lot of realities that I was not prepared for, and on this one trip itself. Many will unfold in the later part of this long work.


To everybody else on this board,

Thank you for having read this mammoth 5000 word piece. It is the longest, but I thought it set the tone perfectly for what is to follow. I did not want this to be an essay. Essays can be thought provoking, but dollops of real life helps bring in what I think, would be called a compassionate understanding of issues. Besides affording us a chance to update our understanding of the current reality.

Taking incidents or quotes from this piece alone to push one`s chosen view on scambled issues might not be so challenging, but it will definitely be less rewarding.

I liked the fact that several people on the board connected this section to their own individual experiences, like Amrita and kabuli. Besides a politically incorrect slanging match, this is also the ribaldry of young life. A parental eye cast on it will be morally outraged!

HN

Re: # 52
late 20s, early 30s...I am your generation, but my India is stuck in another time because I left. What I do love about India is that always, people who have had the drive and the ability have been able to make a success of themselves, even if not in the regular engineering, medicine fields so dear to the middle classes. I remember I was struck by jang`s background too once. Compared with the background of most Pakistani chowkies, it does stand out.