The Need to Redefine and Reform Islam

We can help this world by helping our Muslim brothers to redefine themselves in ways in parallelism with global world involving blending of cultures and openness to beliefs and lifestyles. More than anything, it will save non-Muslims from hair-raising problems at many levels in future.

Secular theorists should be gagged for some time and allow some real practical talk and do some reality check. We have to find ways to gradually melt paranoid apprehension in Muslim minds regarding anything non-Muslim, be it dress, places of worship, mode of prayer, food, relationships and what not!

We have to ensure that next generation of Muslims is more tolerant to those beyond the Muslim walls having their own distinct ways of life. We have to tell educated next generation of Muslims that touching a Hindu temple’s walls from outside does not mean they have lost their Muslimhood. We Hindus are very lenient in that we accommodate multiple realities linked to inter-religious strains. We hardly have any qualms about entering and even offering prayers in dargahas and mosques. Muslims are conditioned to take any such bravado into others’ shrines as blasphemous. An ultra-modern, educated Muslim colleague of mine in corporate used to openly throw Tuesday prashada into the dustbin. Well it was just a simple ritual by God-abiding Hindu employees to collect money on Tuesday and distribute prashada on the floor. If the educated lot behaves that way, imagine the situation in crammed slum type Muslim neighborhoods!

Islam has to be fundamentally redefined to inculcate mercy at its core philosophy like other world religions. A lady colleague of mine still gets palpitations when she recalls an incident from her childhood in an African country. Her father had taken her to visit his Muslim friend’s house. All went well till she saw the host’s small kid catching a mouse and scooping out its eyes with playful relish. The proud father just looked droolingly. The fundamental philosophy is to kill the softer side in the young ones to make them less tolerant, less humane, aggressive and merciless so as to annihilate the kafirs and non-believers. We have seen the consequences of this fundamental Islamic approach in war-torn and strife-lorn Muslim countries where kid jehadis commit heinous crimes against humanity with the ease of performing something holy!

By sticking to the rigid medieval line, Muslims still think that there are enemies around and they have to stay like a pack of wolves to ward off the danger. This psychology is reflected in crammed, unhygienic, slumish Muslim neighborhoods where the age-old lifestyles are forced to stay alive in semi dark behind closed walls overlooking narrow streets. Even those well-to-do Muslims who can afford to shift to better social environment prefer to stay here. In fact there has been a reverse trend. Upper class Muslim families have shifted to congested predominantly Muslim colonies from the earlier secular kafir-infested locations having better facilities. It does not augur well for a cosmopolitan society.

The governments world over have to devise direct and indirect, covert and overt ways and means to break this fear psychosis in Muslim minds to draw them out of the wolfish packs behind closed walls and redistribute and relocate them as prosperous neighbors of tolerant culture involving people of different religions.

Governments and their institutions have to bring about subtle fundamental changes in the ways Islamists lead their lives so that at least the next generation of Muslims would not look stealthily, apprehensively over the Islamic walls and peer at the world outside as an alien entity. If this is not done then the world inside Muslim neighborhoods and outside will become so different that it will have sky and earth differentials. Such differentials never allow stability. The remedial effort might even involve nurturing modern maulvis who keep Koran and computer together!!      

Haryanvi Hangama

Post Modi-wave in Haryana, BJP is set for heartbreak in Haryana assembly elections.

There are three boats in perilous political sea. Two are apparently under the risk of sinking. The third is apparently going to safe shores carried by the victorious swirls of Modi wave. So politicians of all hues and colors are jumping into the sea from the other two risky boats and board the safe BJP boat.

This is where the BJP boat, overenthusiastic about the sudden windfall to have more leaders in its famished cadre in the state, is allowing every tom dick and harry from INLD and Congress to board its boat. But do they realize the carrying capacity of their boat that is being crowded with contradicting political aspirants? It is like having lions, lambs and other animals that are inherently antagonistic to each other in nature in the same room. A lot of music is in store on board! So the overcrowded boat might collapse on account of liberality shown by the BJP managers in Delhi.

Parliamentary results in Haryana are in gross disproportion to the BJP's grass root reach and party infrastructure and local leadership in Haryana. They know it. So are accommodating everybody defecting from other parties. It is like puffing in too much air into the balloon. It might bust. Perhaps it is too late!

Hung assembly!!!! — feeling excited.

God, it would have been better to have a Godless world!!

Hafeez Sayeed is a fuckingly fabulous dreamer. Hafeez Sayeed, who?? He is that champion jehadi of Lashkar e Taibba fame!! Well the poor innocent Hindu in me gets scared whenever I see him thundering in public meetings in Pakistan. I have reasons to get scared! I have read enough of medieval Indian history to know Muslim zeal in cutting down Kafir Hindus to size and get them, the poor grass eaters, intimidated by the burly meat-eating champions of Islam.

Well, Lashkar e Taibba has taken up the goal of liberating Kashmir from India and then set up a Mughal state of Islamic India. It is a free world by the way! Hafeez Sayeed reserves the right to act and behave as per the norms set by his sanity or insanity (both are same by the way). Suppose he succeeds in installing some descendant of Mughal kings on throne (he has to find out peacock throne as well for this purpose), the main challenge facing him will be to find out the real claimant out of thousands of princes of royal blood who may turn up for the title. It will be still more arduous task given that most of these princes will comprise emaciated rickshawallas and beetle nut chewing ruffians. But even to claim that authority they need to know about Mughal history and for that you need at least a history book. So the dreamers of pre 1857 world should know that at least basic education is essential even for mindless work of jehad.

As a chicken-hearted Hindu, I at least pay namashkar to the Englishmen for weeding out the Mughal dynasty. We grass eaters would have continued to pay homage to the feeble most princelings for centuries to come. Somehow that era still rules the hearts of common Muslims and unfortunately even the educated ones. I had this Muslim friend as my colleague in corporate. He was dashing, handsome and his narcissism ever pampered by the adoring ogles of Hindu fillies. On top of that he got extra soft treatment by educated cultured Hindus because the latter are so damn crazy about proving their secular status. They will leave no stone unturned in mollycoddling the minority prince charming lest he felt bruised and broken hearted on account of majority tyranny. So this educated minority prince was my closest buddy. He would drag me to eat chicken and mutton biryanis by the mosque, muttering, ‘Enough of grass eating!! Eat the real food!!’ Then there was some issue where he let down because he found me lacking in overenthusiastic support of an educated Hindu for the cause of minority. Sullen faced, he just muttered over his lunch plate, ‘Yes bro!! Now this has to happen. We guys are surviving under your rule!’ It just seared through my heart. If an English speaking ultra modern Muslim still recalls Mughal era with such aggrieved nostalgia, what will be the situation of illiterate people in the minority! So at least Hafeez Sayeed is entitled to keep his Mughal Raj dream alive.

A friend of mine was passing through a really tough phase in life. Somebody suggested the help of a tantric-type-mullah from a mosque. The happy glutton arrived at my friend’s place; got pampered by the royal treatment; suggested a few things to dispel the evil spirits; and made us cram ‘La ilaha illaha, Mohamed rasool-ul-ullah, salal illaha vassalam!!’ thousands of times. Whole peasant family of my friend chanted this new Vedic mantra for months, hoping that at least Allah’s angels will bring them happy days. Even though the fucker was just a single Muslim entity in the neighborhood, he still had a last laugh on our poor Hindu heads. I realized it four years later in a sleepy suburb of North African town. Meanwhile, just like a typical educated Hindu I never missed an opportunity to chant out the Islamic mantra to every tom dick and harry Muslim coming my way, just to showcase my secular spirit and that I also know about Islam. But the secret was busted that sultry evening on the residential outskirts of Djibouti in East Africa. I was talking to this young chap Moosa, sipping coke in their small eating point round the corner of their house. Moosa had been to Pune in India for studies. Again to prove my Hindu secular credentials, I started the Islamic mantra. I was expecting appreciation. But lo what happens! Moosa was dying with laughter. He nearly choked over. Almost fell down from the wooden chair. He frantically called dozens of his siblings. They rushed in for entertainment. Being asked to cite it again, and to prove my secular status to a larger audience now, I sang out with more enthusiasm. It created a flutter of curious, proud peals of laughter.  Then Moosa the great told me the secret. Now I got to know it was in fact the hymn of somebody getting initiated into Islam. ‘Anybody saying it even once becomes a Muslim’, educated and enthused Moosa informed me. Fuckers!! He seemed to believe it. Thank God my friend somewhere in me did not get a taste of Muslim religious initiation by getting a cut on its head!!

At the general level, Muslim society believes in quantity. The more the numbers, the better!! The food, even certain postures seem to be meant to add to the men’s libido to keep four wives and produce as many kids as possible. In the distant future, it is expected, when they will have numbers on their side, they will teach grass-eating Hindus a mighty lesson. A few months back a Muslim family took up a rented accommodation in our part. Miyanji was a burly man. But as a carpenter he earned almost negligible in comparison to his Himalayan libido targeting his emaciated wife. Result?! They were poorest of the poor and had six children. In his heart of heart he must have been thinking, ‘Even I am contributing to Hafeez Sayeed’s dream of a Mughal India in 21^st century through bringing as many true species of Allah as possible!’

Muslim society is haunted by this massive insecurity that puts them closeted within a claustrophobic sphere. It pervades in Muslim neighborhoods. From first world countries to the poorest ones, the very same pattern of Muslim neighborhoods shows a deep sense of distrust for anything un-Islamic. The streets are so narrow that you just find it difficult to sneak out once you are unlucky to get in. The doors are shut. Almost no windows! They just do not want to see the world globalizing in beautiful blend of cross-cultural sinews. It is a world lost in its own strange maze. I never felt more insecure as I did when I committed the mistake of searching a Muslim merchant in the claustrophobic Muslim neighborhood in Colombo, Sri Lanka. To make it worse I was having a vermilion mark on my poor Hindu brow, put by a smiling priest in a Tamil temple in some other quarter of the city. The first person whom I asked about the concerned individual just shot through my Hindu-marked forehead with his blood shot aggressive eyes. I could feel that typical antagonism for the kafir. Afterwards, while I walked lanes after lanes of lost world, I felt my feet giving under me. To be hell with metropolitan Colombo, this world ruled itself in its narrow lanes, dim light, dingy shut-doored and windowless houses, foul smelling stagnated air!! ‘If they decide to slaughter me, the outer world would not even come to know in which quarter I had my last breath!!’ I felt horrified. Thanks to the Hindu priest’s blessing hand, I came out in one piece. I had exactly the same feeling in Rangoon where my Muslim friends found me intimidated while I just chickened out of their quarters like a rabbit runs away from a pack of wolves.

Travelling in a train across the snowbound wastes of central Asian republics, me and my group was scanned by the blood-shot eyes of another Islamic zealot. Baring his gold-plated fangs, that allowed him to tear any type of meat, he asked, ‘From Pakistan?’ ‘From India!’ we the lambs bleated. There was a queer aggression in his eyes. A joker friend of mine had the audacity to say, ‘I am Hamidullha!’ God, how I wish if you guys had seen the sense of relief and composure pervading his tensed being after meeting a co-religionist!!

No hesitation in confessing that I am feeling more and more scared of Islam and Islamists. And more so because I have just closed my doors to Hindu rituals and that means Hindu Gods would not have anything to do in saving this newly turned atheist. How did I come to turn an atheist? Well about that sometime later!! Till that time some God of some true religion save me from Muslim tyranny!!

   

Modi Sir, Congress is yet to be defeated!

We are lucky to have an un-politician type Prime Minister of India. Narendra Modi’s administration in Gujarat fetches him enough credit points to be taken as an administrator first and a politician second. The new educated generation has high hopes from him. Right from the evening of May 16 when election results were declared Modi has been busy like a true son of mother India and has started drawing the roadmap for a better India for majority of the Indians. We don’t have any reason to be skeptics regarding his capability to take India ahead on the path of multi-dimensional progress.

But there is a roadblock that might face Modi when he again fights for another innings in 2019. It is born of a certain Congress legacy. All of us do agree on taking Congress and Corruption as synonymous. And rightly so! But decades of Congress-type mis-governance ensured that the very roots of the tree got corrupted to the core. Corruption is not just about 2G Spectrum, Commonwealth Games and Coal Block distribution; it is also about common Indians’ belief that without shortcuts nothing can be done. It generates a mentality that does not consider the shortcuts or the typical Indian jugadbaji as the means and mechanism of corruption, but the simple convenient facilitators. People have come to accept the extra costs as additional service charges; officials in various departments have come to consider it as their well deserved unofficial bonus. These officials have set up their budgetary benchmarks to keep their families. Unofficial bonus plays a major part in satisfying this excessive-consumer-lorn mentality. Any cut in this part, which clean governance surely will result into, will find them recalling good old days with nostalgia.

Ask anybody what does government service mean. They will say it is about having safe money, almost no work, and unofficial bonus for the small amount of work that one is supposed to perform officially. For this great facility people pay lump sum amounts to get a government job. Since they start their journey after paying the unofficial bonus to somebody, they also get it back when they get the governmental chair. But Modi-style governance will mean full work and no bonus. That will find millions of government vallahas shaking their head in disapproval. Some of my friends are government teachers in Delhi. Their academic enthusiasm found them supporting Kejriwal vigorously. Straightaway Kejriwal talked of more effort by the idling government teachers. They were asked to stay in school for couple of extra hours daily to cover up the massive loopholes in public education system. Immediately their faces got shrunk. They started abusing Kejriwal and accepted their blunder in supporting him. So millions of public sector workers and their dependents will always prefer Congress-type work culture and governance. It will be very difficult to convince these guys in 2019 that the work they are being asked to perform without the unofficial bonus is a contribution to nation building.

Congress and its constituents abused power. But they were really kind in allowing it to be abused by anybody to the lowest rung. India is a free country in every sense. One can defecate by roadside, one can spit anywhere, one can cross red lights, one can call the prime minister a clown, one can molest women, etc., etc. Good governance will find things falling in place and people feeling cheated and that their wings have been clipped. Manmohan government had a bad reputation and they allowed anybody to throw jibes in media in whatever form one wanted. The top office in the country has lost its dignity. Modi will definitely try to get it back. But then people will start calling him a dictator. Even poor Manmohan will earn few credit points for being very lenient and allowing even beggars in Delhi to throw obscenities in his name.

Sum and summary is Congress leaves a ghost. Congress might be out of the seat, but it still survives in spirit in millions of Indians who are in a comfort zone based on the old mindset and its profits. Rectifying things in full vigor might see Indian infrastructure improving, but Modi losing votes as well. How long Modi can inspire people to come ahead for building the nation. It is bloody massively populated country. For one chapati there are ten claimants. At this level people cannot see the world beyond their home and hearth. So Modi’s nationalistic agenda might see India progressing in infrastructure, but at the cost of massive indents in his popularity since Congress is ruling India in terms of work culture, narrow mentality and unofficial bonus!! 

Getting 335 seats in Parliament is no guarantee that whole of India has given go ahead to the green signal of nation building. It is very easy to shout as a part of crowd baying for revolution. But it is far more difficult to come out of the self-centered zone and contribute extra for the nation in lieu of the same rewards. It is very easy to excite voters into a frenzy; but far more difficult to turn these frenzied zealots into responsible and self-governing citizens. Ask people to take extra responsibilities and their faces will shrink. I think already we have millions of shrunk faces because public sector will now be open for six days a week. I have already heard many babus lamenting why did they voted for a particular party. Mother of all political evils, the Congress, may still have something to smile about!!

Modi will have to focus on self-governance apart from good-governance. Only self-governance can make unruly Indians as responsible citizens who will positively contribute something extra required for good governance leading to a better India.

Mindless Talk

There is no absolute truth. All we have is just a pliantly swaying sea of fractional truths. We draw out our share of truths from this sea that will be suitable and complement our sense of identity with the self, i.e., ego, our perception of the world, our vision of the world and the people around.

A beautiful woman's beauty is nurtured and blossoms by the relentless stretch of appreciating words by her lover like a rose blossoms by the dewy intoxication during misty nights. But how long the poor lover can continue to shower the words of unquestioning praise?!! After caressing the rose, the lover also feels the pricks of reality around the beautiful flower. It is called the lover's awakening from the blindfolding slumber. So the words of all pervading praise dry up. The beauty sulks and her narcissism also feels deprived of its customary diet of acclaim. It is now better to go for a new lover. Because during the initial phase of courtship the new lover will again feed her narcissism to help it blossom at its peak again!

A beautiful woman is like a fragrant beauteous hedge. Beauties and aesthetics apart, it has a tendency to grow heavenwards driven and pulled against gravity by the soothing sun of narcissism. But this growth also tends to turn it wild. So the beauties, the hedge and the woman, need an upkeeper, the labouring pruner who maintains the shape. In case of gardener it is done through cutting tools. A man as a lover does it through much hyped love, care and share.

Women are humanist!! Almost perfect except one thing! Their humaneness crosses the zone of perfection and slightly touches an arena where bitchiness for their own sex starts in free flow. It is here that men's chance to appease their women opens up its welcoming arms. A man has to realise that it is more practical to say a few negatively critical remark about other women than millions of appreciating remarks about his woman!!