My world this week

It has been a pretty hectic week this, in terms of official work. As usual we (a group of like minded guys in office) thought of ending the hectic week with a few games of cricket. We followed up the game with a casual get together in one of the restaurants. After dumping in a few beers and some food to go with it, headed back home. And it was pretty late, reached home at around 12:30. The next day, spent most of the time at home (trying to compensate of being late on Friday night ;) ). Rather quite unusually, saw a couple of movies in a single day. I would like to say that I am not at all a movie man, and by movies I refer to Hollywood, Bollywood and Mallywood movies. The first of the movies were 'The sound of music' an old English classic, winner of five Oscar awards early in 1965. The other movie which I saw was 'A Wednesday', a contemporary movie and quite a good one too. Most of the part of the remaining day I was more or less contemplating on the view points of the movie 'A Wednesday'. Sunday morning, as usual, I went to the Church near by to attend the Holy mass. Perhaps for the first time in my life I attended a Sundays mass with police protection. Post mass, I thought of penning down my views about a few things that happened and about which I have made a brief explanation before.

I will start off with the happening in the restaurant, post the game of cricket. I would like to state here that I am a kind of personality you can easily infuriate. I get excited perhaps way too quickly, and to top that off if I am kinda drunk no one needs to put any effort at all :). Over the drinks, the topic of terrorism and its effects on our society came up. The views expressed by my friends across the table was that it was a certain community which has to be blamed. They tried to substantiate it with examples and quite naturally there were no dearth for the examples. The notion that came up was that, it is this particular community which is aiming at disrupting the communal harmony and breaking the secular fabrics in a country like India. And from some oblivion a statement came up, and it went like this: 'All terrorists are Muslims'. So then what about the disturbances caused in Orissa and Karnataka by 'Bajrang Dal' was the next question. To me personally, the group which aims at forceful conversion, the set of people who aim to tackle that by violence pose equal animosity to the communal harmony of the country. Now don't these groups also be termed as terrorist. Why do we have different yard sticks for different situation, different people? Terrorism is literally defined as 'The calculated use of violence (or the threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimidation or coercion or instilling fear'.

The group of people who aim at forceful conversion, use their violent thoughts to instill fear in the mind of poor and ignorant. They get them converted promising (and perhaps giving) money, food or shelter. These people are anything but the victims of their ignorance and poverty and there are fair number of people to exploit this condition. The sect of people who wants to tackle this social issue use brutal force and violence to spread fear among the entire community, cause damages to the property they own and also their health. Yet another group of people, perhaps the most established and systematic, aim to win the religious war by killing people and spreading fear around. To me all of them are terrorists, it is only the kind of impact they have vary, but they all of them cache in on spreading fear.

Hmmm... Now the movie 'A Wednesday', it is one of the intelligently made movies and the guy Neeraj Pandey has really done a commendable job (I am no one to commend him though). I saw the depiction of 'The common man' in a pretty effective way in the movie. I could sense and share the same sort of helplessness, frustrations and stigma of a common man. Though most of the Bollywood movies claim to be of the common man, I perhaps always witness the uncommonness of common man in all those movies. Typically Hindi movies are so much lost in unusual, fairytale love stories and they still claim it to be close to reality and DIFFERENT. The film maker here has to a great extent shared the sentiments of real common man in the country. The statements like: "Jhagda chahe kisi kaa bhi ho.. marta main hi hoon" and "We are resilient by force, not by choice" echo the reality to such an extent that is hardly seen or heard in Hindi movies. The (stupid) common man is being pushed against wall, his patience is tested day in and day out. Khuda na khaasta, the patience fades off...

There was a pretty subtle mockery of the entire establishment, system, governance of the country and man wasn't that effective. I saw the common MAN in Naseeruddin Shah, not the uncommon kids, frauds and superheroes of general Hindi movies.

Coming to the third and final story, as I told earlier this was the first time in my life that I attended a Sunday mass with police protection. I am not all feeling great about it, rather I am feeling pretty embarrassed. Who am I being protected from, is it from the same set of people with whom I live, with whom I COEXIST. Or am I protected from some foreign forces. Who am I to blame for this situation. The people who does the conversion ( I would be blatantly lying if I fail to acknowledge that there is nothing like forced conversion) or the set of people who have jumped to streets against conversion. For me both are responsible and to some extent the former group the more responsible. In a country like ours, you have freedom to preach and follow the religion of your own choice. Preaching a religion does not mean, disgracing the other religions, it does not necessarily mean that you exploit the poverty and ignorance of people just to create a few more (so called) Christians. More importantly, you have law here to catch and punish the people who are objecting this by violence. But we do not have law to stop the people who are actually doing the forceful conversions. Are we supposed to remain happy about this sort of lame law. We should aim to tackle the problem by identifying the root cause and the cause here obviously is forceful conversion. By doing forceful conversions you are just providing a perfect opportunity to anti social elements to take to violence and in the process become more visible.

Apparently these were the three different but related things that I witnessed over this weekend. These incidents sends down a feeling of apprehension in my mind. I feel that the divide in the country on the basis of community is widening. The identity of our country lies in the fact that it is a place where many people from different religion, CO-EXIST. The cultural crux of this country lies in the fact that we have been hospitable and open to different cultures across the globe. Off late, it seems we are creating different silos and we exist only in silos. We have a political system that thrives on the division of the society. Not one political party exists in our country, which actually does not exploit the social division in the society, every one of them is equally responsible in deepening the divide that exists. The sentiment of aam aadmi has to be heard and addressed, and this could happen only if the aam aadmi get more involved in the social processes. Hope we all do.... ( I am in the process of determining a way)..