They say you die and with you goes your body and bones. Pufff! But your thoughts, how you made people feel, the ideas you helped take root outlive you. Be Kind!
How do you like your tea aka chai? I like mine, depending upon my mood, with a degree of ginger. Sometimes a subtle feel of it and other times a strong hit of it. I usually add ginger to the tea when it has just started to boil and then stir it so it becomes slightly cold and will take an extra bit more to boil again. I have followed this method without change for a long long time except for this brief interval when I met this date at their house. I noticed how they boiled water with ginger before even adding the tea leaves. That felt really off and so I asked. I was told this ensures ginger leaves its max effects (or flavour) into the water to which later milk and tea leaves are added. I tried this method couple of times. One, the taste didn’t seem much different and two, it just felt tedious, one extra step thrown in for not much of a good reason. And so I abandoned this new method and got back to my old tried-and-tested one.
From what I know and can remember Muslim girls in school (not all but some of them) have been wearing hijab (or headscarf) for ages now. It was just another piece of clothing that never bothered us, to the point that we never even noticed its existence. I even know of girls and even teachers who would arrive at school in niqab (or burqa, black outer clothing like a rain-or-sun-coat) and then they would remove it before entering a classroom. Again, this wasn't a point of conversation or of difference. The only time I have been thinking of these clothing choices and the faces of friends that wore them is now. Now when many schools in Karnataka (and even in Madhya Pradesh, another BJP ruled state) have banned young girls (and even teachers) from covering their hair with a cloth also referred to as 'wearing hijab'. It all started with Hindu kids sloganeering and hooting – all of a sudden – as Muslim kids passed before them. Or running to Muslim kids and shouting – Jai Shri Ram – a war cry of Hindus now. The lord Ram (or simply Ram) of Ramayana, if you have ever read, is a soft-spoken and light-mannered hero of the epic. He does everything in a measured and reserved manner. There is this soft tenderness to his actions and his approach to things. In the whole of epic, there is only once that we see Ram agitated and outraged – when the ocean god does not agree to his demand to make way for him and his army to go to Lanka and rescue his wife. It is this image of Ram that the militant Hindu organization Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) has adopted on their posters and hate paraphernalia, and it is this Ram you see depicted elsewhere by Hindus that subscribe to RSS's worldview. The same is the case with Hanuman (there is no instance in the Ramayana of Hanuman displaying aggression but the monkey-god posters you see everywhere now show him in desperate anger and in all-red). The usual picture of Ram that we saw was of him smiling quietly and standing alongside his wife and his brother while Hanuman stood at his feet. The impression was of a feminine soft-spoken hero, not of a military general. And chant at his temples, say at Mathura and Vrindavan or Ayodhya was 'Siyavar Ramachandra ki Jai' (Victory to the groom of Sita, Ramachandra). He was not the centre of the chant but his wife was; he was invoked through her. That was the Ram from Ramayana, the one I knew until the mobs of RSS-BJP descended on streets, heckled and lynched to death the many Indians with chants of 'Jai Shri Ram'.
Geelani addressing a rally in Sopore 2012. In Kashmir, even the tallest political leaders have eventually fallen from grace, after compromising on the demand for autonomy. Geelani’s unflinching stance won him a steady mass following across the region, across generations.
Image and caption courtesy of Caravan Magazine
You have to read stories from Kashmir. We are every day sold this lie by our media and govt that Kashmir is peaceful, its people are happy but not once do we let them speak on camera and voice their opinions. We recently snatched their statehood from them, we divided their state into three parts, we jailed their political leaders and their journalists for no particular crime of theirs. We jailed them simply on the assumption that they might commit crimes. This was imperialism, the kind we fought against when the British were the imperialist forces. And I say we because we voted this govt to power, it's we who find exalted meaning in a piece of cloth, more meaning than lives of thousands of humans we are going to affect, we find collective meaning in a piece of land than people living on it for generations, even long before this piece of land got its present name and form.
We have never let these people speak out and inform us of what they want. Each time they sneak somehow and find a way to speak out, we rush with our pellet guns, army tanks, gunmen and barbed wires to silence them. Then our media overwhelms us with boys throwing stones. But they don't show who they are throwing stones at. It is at gunmen who they see as aliens on their lands.
Sitting by seaside I'm wondering what happened
The life that was, the days that were.
I remember being in love with one, madly so
I remember how that felt
I remember every bit of it and its been like forever since then
But remember I still
We all do, don't we?
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even Reddit have suspended or banned accounts of or related to Donald Trump. You want to believe in it or not, the sad truth is Donald Trump is President of the United States of America. He is the most powerful man on the earth. And God did not make him this powerful nor did he acquire Aladdin's lamp, scratched it and become President. People, a large number of them, voted him into this office. They chose him to be their president. And by these platforms, he was reaching his audience. And that platform has been snatched from him now. And this snatching was not achieved after thorough parliamentary or congress' dialogue or arguments in court, this pulling away of carpet from underneath his motormouth-empire was decided by few men behind the closed-doors of these platforms in total secrecy. Their decisions are beyond the purview of public scrutiny. There is no set of logic that applies to what went behind these decisions. This is, believe it or not, arbitrary. Trump, to all our delight, was banned from these platforms by platform owners out of their own volition.
It is six months since the genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 was published by Chinese scientists and was available to the world. What has India done since that January should find no excuse in the otherwise legitimate accusation that China did not inform about the novel virus to the world in time or it kept WHO in dark. It is true that China erred and it is also true that there are reasons to scrutinize WHO. But what have we done since it indeed released the information about the virus? For instance, while some countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Japan had cases of probable infection long before China released the vital information, India registered its first case only in late January, long after China had published genome sequence of the virus and WHO had informed the world about such an outbreak. So unlike those countries, and they have it under control now and cases are breaking new records in India, we cannot blame the outbreak on Chinese malfeasance. Whatever situation we are in today is our own making. While this bit of truth is hard to digest, especially to a large population that has personally attached their egos with the present government, the refusal to acknowledge would move us into a further abyss, further down the rabbit hole.
Monsoons evaded Maharashtra in 1992. In a country where even today agriculture is largely dependent on rains, this naturally made people distraught then. In this helplessness, blankness, in this void came Maharashtra governor's appeal other rather a dictate. On a particular day at 11 am, people were to collectively pray. Authorities jumped in to enforce the governor's appeal. Directions were announced left, right and centre. And pray people did.
Misinformation and our inability to think a level down the surface are going to kill us before the virus does. Karwar which recently treated 11 coronavirus patients and discharged them successfully is about to see it manifest before its eyes. Misplaced fear and paranoia spread through news channels and Whatsapp University are consuming us. Would they devour us completely before we wake up remains an open-ended question. Karwar has zero Covid-19 positives. The 11 patients it treated were not from Karwar but many km away from it. If that makes you applause Karwar for its altruism then you must hold your hands some meters apart.
16 मज़दूर औरंगाबाद में ट्रैन की पटरी के नीचे कुचल के मर गए है। शायद आप तक यह खबर पहुंच भी गई है। आपको शायद बताया जा रहा है कि यह हादसा था। हादसा क्या होता है? हादसा वह होता है जहां किसीको पता नहीं रहता कि वह होनेवाला है। रवीश कुमार अपने चैनल पर हफ्तों से बता रहे थे/है कि पुलिस अपने गंतव्य की तरफ चलनेवाले मज़दूर वर्ग के लोगों को रास्तो से कैसे हटा रही है और पुलिस से बचने के लिए मज़दूर कैसे रेल्वे की पटरियों पर चल रहे है। वे कह रहे थे कि यह कितना भयावह और ख़तरनाक है।