For the Love of God!

Well after a break of what felt like ages, am back to blogging. It feels great to realize that you are alive and blogging. This is not just a block-breaker but something that has been doing rounds in my brain for years now.

I was never sure of my spiritual inclinations, neither am I now. Being in such a position could be pretty dicey, esp. when you are from a place where people kill and get killed for the love of God, well, not exactly God but their own renditions and names of him. Being a Hindu by birth, I was exposed to a million and half gods by the time I had reached my early teens, let alone the number of daemons and the negative forces that could possibly harm you.
Children world over are taught to get up in the mornings, remember the name of God, almighty as many times in a day as possible and pray before you go back to bed. Sounds pretty harmless but what we are actually doing is forcefully insinuating our thoughts and ideas into their heads. Worse yet, we teach the philosophy of God in schools. This has become so inherent of our cultures that we seldom see anyone question anything. Any person who dare raise his voice against this is termed an infidel and the idea or proposal is rubbished as blasphemy. No matter how forward we go or however civilized we say we are, we never were or are open to a debate on this. For us this has always been something that has to be blindly believed in and worshipped.
These remind me of an episode from Boston Legal where Alan Shore asks Denny Crane, "Denny, why do you believe in God". To which Denny replies, "If there is no God, then am safe, for we lose nothing by believing in Him. But if God happens to exist then we are all screwed!" Our stand on this is no different; just that most of us would never say such a thing, even though deep down somewhere inside many of the believers would choose to worship and be safe.
By now you would have started frowning at my post, but believe me; I have nothing against any of the existing religions and absolutely nothing against God. But, I believe that believing in some unnamed super power above and choosing to worship that should be a personal choice and not rubbed upon people, unlike what we do today. Instead what we can do is give children a holistic view of things and leave the choice to them, just like you would do for a career option.
I personally have nothing against the 'God created the universe’,’ offer him some form of sacrifice'[intangible, that is],'pray daily' concepts. Do those if you feel you reach some psychological or spiritual high ground by doing so, but again having said that I can never understand why kilos of ghee, milk, musk and honey are poured on an idol while millions go starving? I can never understand why you would shoo off a person begging for alms but drop a gold chain in the hundi or get a 3Cr rupees crown made for an idol. I better not discuss why you would kill or beat a person up for not worshipping 'your' GOD!
You needn’t visit some distant temple or go far off places or flog yourself or trek mountains to find God. Do that only if it is your way of worship not because others do so. But first love the person beside you, you would find God.

RePost:Crutches to hop around

Crutches to hop around

This was about time when I was fresh out of Engineering Admission Counselling and had to throw away the seat I wanted to someone who had scored half as much as I did.Reservation on any ground puts me off.This was also about time when I had started sending articles to The Hindu and they used to publish it!Found this on one of the usual random browsing rounds.

Read On...

Come the counselling sessions for admission into post graduate or undergraduate courses and the bright and hardworking students have to face "the ground realities". A friend or classmate of his manages to get into a better college and stream.
How? He has reservation, on social grounds.
In my college I see and meet scores of bright students, who cannot afford even the bare minimum amenities a student needs, and their families toil hard just to pay their semester fees.
And there are students who would spend an equivalent or even a few times more the same amount just on `ordinary outings'.
Let me remind u that the latter are the same people for whom our government reserved a certain percentage of seats and the former category of students, in most cases, are among those who have been burning the proverbial midnight oil till now and have worked out of their skins.
Some have toiled for more than a couple of years, just to get into a college and study with the people whom he has seen wasting time and money, roaming around and having a gala time till now.
Just imagine how depressing it can be!
These students get a seat into the most preferred stream in the most preferred college or somewhere near that, still way lot better than the seat he would have ordinarily got.
No wonder they continue the same wayward attitude here as well.
As in any other case, there are still many backward classes, which need reservation, and it was for this section of people that the system of reservation was initially launched and is still in place because many of these people need an opportunity to progress.
But I strongly feel that there should be reservation on Economic grounds.
Contrary to popular perception, the so-called socially backward class is in most cases economically better of than most of the socially forward class people and vice versa.
As one person aptly put it -India is perhaps the only country where the rich enjoy the fruits of socialism while the poor are fully exposed to the vagaries of capitalism.
But people cannot be blamed for this it is just the politicians who cannot let go of a valuable tool to get the votes in their favour.
But again the government should not forget that the knowledge is the cutting edge of development and social reservation just blunts it.

Read the Original Article Published in THE HINDU

Read the Original Blog Post

India,the land of prejudices

I was just reading about the recent case of a British national Kaya being humiliated in the court to a point where she broke down.The defence lawyer asked her obnoxiously irrelevant questions,people in the courtroom were all laughing,the defence council was laughing;but this is no laughing matter neither is this an independent incident.The lawyer,Prajapati represents the sorry state of the rest of the nation.Even today a girl who dresses in a certain way,ties her hair in a certain way,drinks or smokes is considered to have 'invited' molestation(whatever that means!).It is absolutely ok for a guy to smoke or drink but not a girl?How can a girl dressing in a certain way 'provoke' a guy to molest her?We aren't animals,or are we?Kaya,the girl who was molested and then humiliated in the court of law ,said that she would file a defamation case.The issue doesn't end there,we cannot go about filing defamation suits;what we can do is sensitise the society and general public on how to treat women.

Respect for someone does not,and I presume should not,change with her choice of clothing or lifestyle.The problem is more about education and awareness than anything else.Till the time we set these things right we'd continue giving such shady pretexts as foreigners are casual about love,a girl who dresses western outfits could be molested on similar grounds. All this sounds so lame!It's high time we started debating about such things on open forums.