There is something good at the end of it

There is light beyond the deepest dark depth,
There is a bright day after the ghostly haunts of nightmarish night,
After a barren famished fight there is a blossomed springed delight,
After pining pangs of separation there is a worthy end to the desperation,
After crashing in the gutters there is a surge and rise to bathe in holy waters,
After crying convulsions on the lips, a smile takes honeyed sips,
After the last deafest, still there is an undying urge to accomplish the feat,
Even when blind with despair, there is hope hiding and cajoling somewhere,
Even in hate love still lurks somewhere!!!!

A smile on your lips

A smile is like the sun on a cold, frigid, gray day. Comforting. Warm. Healing. It dispels the gloom. It absorbs the pain. It touches you with sympathy. It becomes your nonjudgmental confidante. You may not be enjoying a rollercoaster ride in life. There are pains and problems and of course you feel like crying. Of course you are not in a position to laugh. But you can smile. Just to yourself. Without any reason. Or at least try. Even a fake, feeble smile will do. It reshapes the mask of your tensions, your worries. You will instantly feel its warmth, its light. It cannot be the other way. Even a fake smile cannot give you pain, cannot aggravate your messiness however hard is the situation. Give yourself a reason to smile. Forget about the little world of your problems. The world around you is too big. And you are a part of it bounty. The things of beauty are as good for you as are for any other happy person around. Claim your share. Observe. Look around. Pick out from the unassuming treasure lying around in bits and pieces. A flower. A bird chirping. A gust of breeze. Some green tree. A sparrow’s free dart in the sky, a child’s pure smile, the sun, the stars, someone helping somebody. There are infinite reasons to let a smile kiss your lips, to help you, to sympathize, to emphasize. Just open up the door for smile. It will open up a huge gate of comfort for the inner self. Light will enter the dungeon of real and imaginary problems. There is no logic for this. It just happens. Just like you feel the healing warmth of sunrays on a cold day. Try to smile without reason. Immediately you will get a feeling of so many things to be smiled at, to be felt euphoric about, or even laugh about.     

Cow candies in patriotic barn

An effort at inciting hate is always condemnable. Be it the leftists who bind a soul to the red book so tightly that even violent options become defendable for the cause of principles cast in iron. So communists see class enemies, there are purgings, extrajudicial killings, dictatorships. Or be it the rightists, who insight phobias, sloganeering for some mythical past, blaming some section for the present woes, show exclusivist dreams. Or be it the poison-sprouting mullahs in mosques, who raise fiery speech to blur the line between faith and fundamentalist blindness. All extremist ideologies thrive on creating hate, turning a human being against a fellow human being, on flimsy, assumed, disillusioning grounds.  

There are cow patriots in Haryana. In a country where millions go deprived of even the most basic facilities, where people die for lack of clean drinking water and basic healthcare, the mythical love for cow sounds misplaced. Of course, as an animal, and like any other animal for that matter, cow needs better days, better pastures, better economical use. But cow as an instrument of fake nationalism. It sounds unjustified. Haryana government has even constituted a cow commission. But there could have been a commission for stray, homeless humans as well. In our city Sonipat, there are more stray humans than stray cows. The cow commission allocated funds. Just like the favourite Indian trait of turning any institution into the instrument of embezzling public money, it also serves as a means of siphoning funds for those in good books. There are lampoons and semi-criminalized fit-for-nothings, who having run after the saffron brigade during the election time, get reward for their patriotic loyalty. They get money to open cow shelters and cow care centres. No wonder the budgeted amount is multiple times than the amount actually spent.

They opened a cow shelter on the outskirts of the city. A good set up.  At least apparently so. A minister inaugurated the cow shelter with a fiery patriotic speech. The euphoria over cow welfare but fell too heavily on the head of a poor watchman just on the third day after the speech. The poor guy died. The main gate crashed on him. You can imagine the level of construction material. There are just a few cows in the big facility. Rest of them roam the city with stray dogs and humans like before. Nothing has changed in reality. But a lot has changed on paper. Pseudo-nationalism you know. And cow shelters proof of that. Another idler, who had been tailing after the ideologues, got a big grant to run a cow hospital. He has set up just a facility in the name of it. Groups of drunkards drink there. Cows, where? You will question if you step into it. Those who can't love people from other religions, how can you expect them to be caring for animals. Poor cow. Just a political pawn. So is Ram Mandir. So is national anthem. Oofs. What a cheap candy type nationalism. Served to the masses. Eat the candy and spit out hate. And vote for us of course. A person blinded by hate is easily taken by political tricks. Let's hope UP results put a check to their sham nationalism, forcing them to opt for healthy one, where people are progressive, loving, receptive..    

There are many eager souls to do something for the country. Feelings apart, they are incapable of doing hardly anything, not even leading the life of a law-abiding, self-responsible citizen. Following the basic principles of humanity, doing just as much as to follow the rules and regulations even if there is no chance of penalty in sight. The blood is but on boil for the cause of the nation. They fight pitched battles on social media. It won’t so much as give them the pain of a mosquito bite. It is hundred percent risk free. No dangers. All you have to do is to like, forward and gloat over hate messages. And stamp with a vote. You then become a patriot. Beyond that you can go out, take bribe, grease palms with corrupt money, break queues, eve-tease, molest, urinate anywhere, use road like it’s your courtyard driveway, pass remarks, shout, holler, do whatever. Your conscience is clear. You are a patriot. Because you just hate the perceived enemy. That is your contribution to nation-building. Still left with surplus patriotic energy, you go out and mix with ABVP zealots and attack other students who are not as patriotic as you because they have not picked up the toy gun for patriotic fun. For the extra-energied patriots there is a possible hangout. Breakroom. Gurgaon sector 29. Operated by Sanwari Gupta. Go there and smash out your hate and frustration on junk TV, microwave, radio, etc. It will soothe the angry man in you. The blood on boil will cool. And utter sense of heroism will prevail as you smash the screen. It can be a suitable punch-bag for the paper tigers of pseudo-nationalism. After pouring out hate and frustration you will come out happier and, possibly, more loving beings. You might even go beyond the tools of fake nationalism like Ram Mandir, cows and national anthem, and do something more important for this country.

A well-timed realisation

Sometimes you have to nearly die to discover the meaning of life.

Dalit-Muslim-Tribals Vs. Brahamanical Hinduism

Pseudoism is the art and craft of using a positive emotion, feel-good verb, or a relaxing sentiment, picking its hypothetical meaning in letter, and grafting it over the mean spirit. The spirit to dominate, to manipulate, to rule at any cost, the end justifying the means. It becomes a blindfolding instrument. No wonder, pseudoism is a suitable device with power aspirations particularly. Pseudo-secularists have cashed minority fears. The stroke inexistent phobias. They want the minority to stay scared. They keep the apprehensions and insecurities alive, to turn these into votes at the election time.  Now is the turn of pseudo-nationalists. The latter create a rhetorical stage, offering people a feeling to contribute to the nation. It’s a stage set for papery heroism, where one can contribute to national glory without putting anything at stake, without any risks either. It’s a goody goody dream-world. You shout slogans, you pour hate on social media, you condone the acts of violence against your target, you claim to be more patriotic than others. That’s it. You need not do more. Shouting amidst the frenzied crowd, like it’s a picnic outing and this a new entertainment game, is all that it takes to be a nation-builder. You are supposed to stand to the national anthem before the movie starts. You do it and you are a patriot. Doesn’t matter if straightaway after that you elbow the girl in the next seat, or rub your leg against hers on the pretext of extending your limbs out of boredom. These liberties and many more. You can be a simple law-breaking chit of a human being in scores of daily routine, like violating traffic rules, passing lewd remarks at women, scattering garbage, peeing in the open. All this doesn’t matter as long as you ride the bandwagon of pseudo-nationalism. It’s very easy to fall in this trap. Who doesn’t want to keep the belief that he/she is contributing to nation building. Feelings apart, only a little section can do actually so in practice. Rest can take this sip in the meow meow on offer on the stage of populist rhetoric. This risk-free nationalistic spirit but comes at a big cost. Little do people realize that by the time they are still enjoying the echo of their slogans, they have already crossed a line to enter a zone of practiced mass-hate. They are getting trained for being less loving, less tolerant, and hence lesser human beings than they could have been otherwise. Even before they realize the slightest change, they have already surrendered a part of their good self. They are smaller than they were before. Something gets cut off from the real self. They get polarized. The vision is skewed, not open-minded exuberance required for healthy mind and creative spirit. They are just a diminished self of their former self. The society gets a fracture. It's painful. The current wave of pseudo-nationalism led by the Brahamanical Hindu resurgence has many takers, especially the younger generations. Not surprisingly. When hormones are yet to stabilize, the stage is shaking, the world is a shaky vision, they, the youngsters, need to pour out their straying energies. Papery nationalism is a suitable means. It makes them paper tigers. They are exploring. They get the pill, pick it up, savour it. It’s tasty. It’s even better than alcohol in fogging the mind into delusions. They thunder and roar against imaginative foes. They hunt down invisible enemies of the state through hate speech, by clapping stray killings here and there, by condoning acts of violence, arson and shouts here and there. Brahamanical Hindu led pseudo-nationalism is particularly trying at the communal level. Islamo-phobia is the common ground in the strategy. Little do they realize that within the Hindu society itself, there are sections that have been exploited for thousands of years by their own co-religioners. Dalits and tribals, the frozen class, with fates frozen at the sub-human levels for generations, have as much to grudge over caste-based exploitation, discrimination and humiliation, as a fundamentalist Islamist might have against other religions. Dalit-Muslim-Tribals, the super-entity which can easily identify with discrimination, have much in common in terms of discrimination, systematic second-hand treatment and exploitation. In Indian politics, there are permutations and combinations of caste and communal identities. These shift over and acquire strange shapes. The latest can be Dalit-Muslim-Tribals. Muslims safely ensconced in the trio. The lethality of Islam-phobia melting in the historical wrongs against the frozen class in the Indian society. Some strange mutant of Congress, leftists and other non-BJP regional parties can be formed. Overblown Brahamanical Hinduism, having the exploitation of its own lower society as the core, can fuel a new trend in political jugglery.