I've gone deaf

The blog sphere is flooded with sagacious advice, radical calls for action, screeching accusations of incompetence, Government officials to be sacked, people confessing this is the last straw and that India is a lost cause and overall, a mood of great depression, doom and intense brooding.

I am quite fed up with all this. No one is for a moment denying your right to mourn and remember those who died and those who laid their lives down. By all means, decry fascism and radicalism in all its forms. But please stop, in your oh-so-articulate ways trying to give incisive explanations and insights into what is wrong with the systems, how our politicians are the cause of all this, how our bureaucrats are another cause, how this and that and this again is done wrong in our country and the list goes on.

Of course everyone knows what the problems are. Of course we all accept our apparatus whether political or security related is pathetic. I won't go into the details of all that is wrong because so many thousands of you out there have already screamed it from the top of your roofs and made me deaf in the process. When I watched the attacks and the diabolical aftermath I was left numb. However I am now angry. Not at those 10 or 20 idiots who came here and randomly left death behind nor at the larger machinery responsible for these ideas. I am angry at the outbursts that I have seen, heard and read. All of civil society, all the articulate folks out there are on TV shows, in newspaper columns, on blogs all berating institutions of India. And now I don't want to hear any more of your theorizing and your suggestions. Stop it already.

All you folks out there who think you have a solution, why don't you have the intestinal fortitude to convert some of your zealotry into action? We all know what the problems are so instead of further underscoring what we already know, how about being part of a possible solution?

You think our politicians are inept and you are more capable?
You think our education system breeds mediocrity?
You think our hiring policies discriminate?
You think Muslims are disenfranchised and suppressed?

All of this is true. So how about you be part of a solution? Contribute your time, your money, your knowledge to root out these problems instead of turning all serious and pious , gloomy and worst of all intellectual when such events happen. It takes but a day's searching to know how you can work with educators, with NGOs reforming Muslim education, to work with unemployed youth support groups to increase employability. It takes but a day with Google and your mobile phone. That's it. No one's asking you to don combat gear and take a chopper ride to Baluchistan. You can contribute here. And the need is more urgent than ever. I have only listed a few and very random list of things that you could do to help. I honestly am not optimistic about it really happening you know because, this is our way the Indian way. We know best how to theorize. We know best how to device the most perfect solutions in our well-groomed, grammatically correct English. It seems actually, that we seem to know it all! Kudos to all you smart folks out there. I am sure many of you are going to take part in walks, protests, white shirt days, black band days et al. While I admire your awareness and sense of sharing your thoughts in this peaceful manner, do also remember that as important as symbolism is, by going for a protest and back to work the next week you are no better or no worse than the very politicians you derided so heavily for flying into Bombay to visit the sick and dying when the attacks were still on.

I know so many of you out there all of whom seem to have solutions for everything that's wrong with civil society. Now more so than ever, all of us has an opinion, something we want to change. Yet how many of us will act? I shall leave that to you to ponder upon.

But please, for now enough of your screaming. Enough of your shouting yourselves hoarse. Either act or go back to your cocoons, knowing now of course that no one really can cocoon themselves anymore.

It is I, Satan

I find it deliciously ironic that Salman Rushdie has become Sir Salman Rushdie around the same time that I am reading one of the best books I've ever picked up, by another Muslim author titled "My Name is Red" penned by Orhan Pamuk.

It gets better because I just finished reading a chapter in the book which is titled "It is I, Satan". Without giving too much of the book away, the way Pamuk has written the entire book is in a series of chapters where the narrator of the chapter is one of the many characters in the story. So the way he (magically) weaves the entire tale is through this incredibly powerful style of writing.

"It is I, Satan" is a chapter where Satan is speaking in the first person to the readers about how he (Satan) is unnecessarily vilified, cursed and hated by mankind. Satan goes on to share with us his perspective on why man does the stupid things man does and how Satan is, for the most part just a stirrer of the pot, a stoker of the flame or even a mere (albeit gleeful) bystander as Man goes about his own demise.

The complete significance of this chapter, I have not yet understood. Is Pamuk secretly mocking (God forbid) Islam's beliefs of right and wrong, of what is Evil and what is not? Is this chapter his way of heaping scorn on radical Islam or even extreme religious beliefs that judge us on what is pure and white and what is the dark side?

It seems to me that Pamuk's writing is replete with messages for those who care to spot them...maybe one of the things he's telling us is man has enough latent malice and evil within himself and it really doesn't matter if Satan tempts you.....or if people like Sir Rushdie write the things they write. And of course right on cue the "satanic" element is there for all to see with Sir Salman Rushdie's knighthood being condemned by Pakistan (!)

Its a reflection of our society (in India, Pakistan and the other Islamic and supposedly secular nations) that we treat one of the brightest intellects of our time in a manner befitting a social leper. India has of course stayed true to form in displaying her hypocrisy by long banning one of his best pieces of writing, stating it not fit for a "secular" society and it not being kind to the "sentiments" of certain people. At least we still have countries and societies such as the United Kingdom that have the fortitude and foresight to do what should be done, to have the conviction to challenge misbegotten beliefs born out of an unholy alliance of religion and degeneration.

Where will it end?

Yet another...

Yet again bombs have been detonated in a major Indian city by those who don't like peace and are deluded by a misled sense of being left behind or being denied...honestly I don't know why. Anyhow, immediately following the explosions riot police came in to defuse other devices that were planted and to disperse the mobs that had gathered at the site of the explosion: the biggest mosque in Hyderabad. In the ensuing confusion, violence broke out and the police fired shots into the crowd killing 4 people.

The next day, several Muslim - political organizations and supposedly "activist" groups (mainly Muslim) supported by political parties, staged day long protests in Hyderabad indulging in (the now almost routine Indian practice) of burning effigies of the chief minister of the province. What left me confused and bewildered was the fact that these groups weren't protesting any security lapse in protecting the mosque or anything of that sort. Oh no, they were denouncing in their hundreds, the police firing that led to the death of4 people.

Here we have possibly a terrorist outfit exploding bombs in one of India's global business hubs and the next day we have people coming out to protest, not the insanity that was setting of explosives in a mosque but the ensuing police action. As is now routine I'm left with the inability to understand.

I'm not with him on this...well not completely anyway but Dylan I guess reached his own conclusions when he sang:
People are crazy and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed

come on over

Despite growing evidence of Pakistani support for the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the Bush administration has so far rejected pleas from President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan for a showdown with Islamabad's military ruler, President Pervez Musharraf....

Disturbing on many levels. The article goes on to explain the enormous subsidies totalling billions of dollars that Pakistan receives in military aid and debt relief in return for cooperation in the fight against terror. This really is an impossible situation because to begin with General Musharaff is, at the end of the day a dictator and not an elected representative, hence making it extremely difficult for him to build any form of consensus around sensitive issues.

Secondly, in spite of genuinely good intentions, his hands are tied: to satisfy the radical Islamic elements in his own country (to whom he has to pay allegiance because without their support he would not remain in power too long or he would be assassinated), he has to look the other way when the Taliban hop across the border into Pakistan to seek refuge while planning another insurgency. The first step would be to root out radical elements in Pakistan...but how to begin when the radical elements are intwined so with the ruler, that too of a nuclear armed state?