Between religion and superstition we need to discriminate well and proper

                 That’s what makes individuals, societies and nations grow and prosper

                 My post for you this weekend my friends is a brief note about it all  

                 While this hot summer day what we need is a burst of good rainfall

                                          

                                             Religion yes; superstition no                 

“Religion is the opiate of the people,” Karl Max famously said.  And Lenin added, “It is spiritual booze.” I don’t know how well these expressions fit in the Indian context. Perhaps we will have to look for stronger and different vocabulary for the good, the bad and the ugly that is unleashed by religion in India. Yes, religion is a great unifying force that binds people together. Yes, it serves as an anchor for hope and faith and provides succour and relief to the suffering humanity. Yet this same religion has also bred wars and killed millions. It has also bred superstition which clogs the minds of millions across this big wide world. Sadly, India too is one of its worst victims. Even the most highly educated, with awesome academic degrees to flaunt, are ensnared in the cobwebs of basest kinds of superstition. That’s why fake babas adept at exploiting religious sentiments of gullible masses have a field day. They use their glib tongues and felicity of expression to perfection in hoodwinking people- Indian woman being particularly vulnerable to their guiles and religious chicanery. No wonder such dubious babas make millions and lead a life of luxurious splendour at our cost… and those of the women devotees who arouse these babas’ lust, end up in their ‘gufas’ and beds.

 

Well, all of us nurse superstitions of various kinds. It runs in our veins and has been so since the times of our ancestors- the Neanderthals. But the degree varies. I see nothing wrong with being innocuously superstitious: A cat crossing the path is a bad omen for most of us; so is a sneeze by someone while setting off from home or on the launch of a new project. Sounds absurd; but no problem with nursing such irrational notions. But problems do arise when superstition becomes the guiding mantra of life often leading to disastrous consequences. Driven by blind faith, a lot many people rush to the babas, tantrics and other kinds of self-proclaimed healers for miracle cures for several fatal or chronic ailments and mental disorders. And more often than not, treatment administered by the ‘godman’ proves worse than the disease. Even the snakebite incidents which should make us run fast to the nearest hospital for anti-snake venom treatment, we often end up iat the door of some such fake healer. Vital time thus lost, sad and tragic death is the result when the bite is venomous.

Well, I don’t want to preach or pontificate too much on this. But I believe that the extent and degree of superstition that afflicts a society or the nation is a crucial index of its health, progress and development. And when even the highly educated and highly placed people practice and perpetuate superstitious practices, it not only speaks of the quality of our education system but also bodes ill for the nation. We need not only study science and get good scores but also need to make it integral to our day-to-day living.

My ex-students - including the lively, exuberant batch I taught at a private university in my brief post retirement stint recently - are my best blog readers. I do expect them to well and truly develop and propagate scientific temper and keep off (fake) babas, their charms, spells, miracles and mantras for cures.

                               

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           Not just Kasauli but the entire state is turning into a concrete jungle

           The politician has a lot to answer for, for this shocking bungle

           Read what have I to say on this, this week, and tell what you make of it

           And to save the 'green' of our greying towns, let's contribute our little bit

         Act tough on illegal constructions, Mr CM please

                            

The Tribune, 05 May 201

Excuse me if it is a boast. But I think my voice represents all the sane and sober Himachalwallas who are a silent but shocked and angry witness to the rapid decline of all that is beautiful and pristine that Himachal is proud of. Needless to say, the biggest cause for this steep erosion is reckless, unplanned, unsustainable, unauthorized construction…construction that is unscientific, unaesthetic and in direct conflict with hill ecology and hill architecture. And therefore this small, seismically sensitive hill state groans under the weight of 25000 illegal structures of concrete– a mindboggling number by any standards. It is a virtual time bomb awaiting a temblor or some kind of natural disaster to trigger a major catastrophe. Imagine the tragedy – tragedy which could have been avoided – that would be unleashed.

As I have said before, Shimla has become virtually unlivable. Kasauli, Manali, Dalhousie and Mcleodganj are no more the pristine wonders of ‘green’ but ugly concrete jungles. Other small towns (including my own beautiful Palampur) are not far behind in this race towards uglification with illegal constructions and encroachments on government lands, PWD roads, link roads in its suburbs (including Aima-Sughar area where I reside) and highways, a common sight. Even those lands which can neither be sold, nor their use altered under the law, are being exploited with glee by cunning manipulation and by conniving with the powers that be.

And I hold both the Virbhadhra Singh-led Congress and the PK Dhumal-led BJP governments squarely responsible for this mess, chaos and the potential danger of enormous proportions they have landed us in. Shockingly, they have been brazen enough to  try and  circumvent the NGT’s orders and High Court/Apex court rulings even, to appease and oblige the builder/contractor/hotel lobby. The death of an upright TCP officer and lately of a PWD worker at Kasauli is a sad reminder of how deep the rot is.

The Tribune, 05 May 2018

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And let’s not gloss over another point. How many of such illegal constructions –the hotels, the offices and even residences belong to the worthy lawmakers or their kin? The Supreme Court has rightly taken a serious view of the whole issue and asked the government to take action against the conniving officials of TCP/PWD and other related departments who didn’t stick to the rules. But my point is: why no one talks about action against the politicians at whose behest the officials worked? Beyond doubt, our venal politicians are the main culprits as well as the beneficiaries (directly or indirectly) in this plunder, loot and destruction of our green hills by facilitating and promoting illegal constructions. It is they who should also be hauled up by the courts and held personally accountable together with the complicit officials.

The Tribune, 05 May 2018

Amar Ujala, 05 May 2018

                                                     

                                                    

                                             

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                  Keep it up, Mr L S Guleria; we are with you

A similar view has been expressed by an enlightened and intrepid soul from Mandi: Mr Lakshmendra Singh Guleria, Chairman of ‘Mandi Bachao Sangharsh Morcha’ and I fully appreciate and endorse all that he has said. No one is or should be above the law, he contends, and wants the tainted politicians to be punished too. Well,  in case he decides to take the case to the Supreme Court – as he says he will - we all need to stand by him and lend our support. I certainly do. Guleria ji, I laud your initiative and would be glad to join you and contribute my bit- any which way. Please carry on.                                     

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We would also want the present government to bring out in the public domain full information on how many of these illegal structures belong to political parties, the politicians, the high and mighty bureaucrats, or their kin.

The Aam Aadmi of Himachal Pradesh holds our present CM Shri Jai Ram Thakur in high esteem for his clean image. Therefore, we expect him to act tough. The pressure on him will be momentous. But unlike his predecessors, he has to save Himachal from further slide towards the dark abyss of ecological disaster. Let the entire state be rid of all illegal constructions/encroachments (including those in small towns too) once for all – to restore its original beauty and spaciousness once for all.  That done, he will have delivered as a CM. And he will also have earned the eternal gratitude of the ‘common man’, as also of the Mother Nature. And undoubtedly this will be good politics as well, for such saner, law-abiding Himachalis far outnumber the greedy, unscrupulous and manipulative flouters of law.
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   Rapes  have become daily news, strict though may be the law,

  The  malady is deeper and begs a question: where lies the real flaw?

  Worse, even holy sites are becoming the haunts for crime

  A rape near Palampur was one such near a place- holy and sublime

  I vent my spleen on this, this week in a post just short and brief

  We all need to address the evil rather than sitting idle in plain grief

                  Rape in Palampur's backyard

                 

The Kathua and Unnao incidents stunned and singed us. The (as yet unresolved) Gudiya rape-murder incident in Kotkhai continues to fester as a sad, haunting memory. And now there is a rape case right in our backyard. In April, this horrific incident occurred at a breathing distance from our own town Palampur: a forest wilderness around ‘Garh Mata’ near Paraur. When bad things start happenings closer home, obviously, the shock and horror feel sharper…as this one does.

Not being a great idol worshipper, I have not been to this popular shrine. But I have driven through the link road and am aware of the point from where a track leads to this pilgrim spot. The landscape along this entire stretch is lovely beyond words. How sad that such idyllic sites and places of worship and faith should also become the scenes of ugly, ghastly crimes.

Well, rapes now are a daily headline- an inescapable morsel of our news feed as if to ensure that we start off the day on a note of anxiety, pain and depression. What is most alarming is that it is not just the cities, big towns or the badlands of Haryana, UP, Bihar and Rajasthan notorious for gender bias and misogynist mindsets, but even the peaceful states like ours too are succumbing to this virus, this scourge, at a rapid rate. And then these are not merely plain rapes emanating from some pathological sexual frustration or insane lust. But the violence and brutality of the worst kind, leading to murder, is becoming increasingly frequent and integral part - a 'new normal', as the popular expression goes - of such crimes. It is this aspect that sends a chill of horror and shock down one’s spine.

How can any human being - even if totally depraved, perverted and deranged - can turn so beastly and cruel is simply beyond my comprehension. Then another disturbing aspect is the increasing involvement of teens in such heinous crimes: both the victims as well as the perpetrators. The Kathua girl was a minor (her innocent, bewitching smile haunts me still); and the ‘Garh Mata’ rape victim was a minor too and so were two of the accused who have already been arrested. Equally worrisome is the fact of 'gang' rapes becoming more frequent than ever before. Is it the poor law enforcement or something else that despite making new and more stringent laws, there is still no let up or abatement of violence against women and the girl child?  Why has the fear of punishment not been able to deter the criminal minds from such dreadful acts? There are no easy or simple answers. Laws howsoever deterrent alone cannot prevent crimes. In fact  the malady lies in the general  rot in our society, faulty grooming of our children, eroding value system, the mess that our school education has become,  and the caste, gender and other such prejudices and biases that run deep in our psyches and are fostered by the politicians for grabbing votes.

We need to adopt holistic, multi-pronged strategies with proactive participation of the enlightened and committed do-gooders in our midst to make our society healthy, happy and vibrant where every woman and  girl child can walk free, play, smile, laugh, dream, and grow and live without fear.

                                   

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 ...The malady is 12000 years old and deep

 The gender bias which is the root cause of crimes against women is old and has been flowing in our veins right from the era of ‘Agricultural Revolution’ 12000 years ago. It afflicts all societies and all nations in varying degrees. A  book  'Sapiens: A brief History of Humankind’ that I am reading these days says  that as of 2006, there were still fifty-three countries where a husband could not be prosecuted for the rape of his wife. Even in the developed Germany, rape laws were amended only in 1997 to create a legal category of marital rape.

I reproduce below a para from the book to give you an idea about how bad the gender discrimination has been in human society:

In many societies women were simply the property of men, most often their fathers, husbands or brothers. Rape, in many legal systems, falls under property violation- in other words, the victim is not the woman who was raped but the male who owns her… The Bible decrees that ‘If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife’ (Deuteronomy 22:28-9).

Hmmm… Shocking...isn't it?

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             देव आनन्द की जीवन गाथा पढ़ी है मैंने अभी अभी,

             चाहता हूँ पढ़ कर इसको, आनंद उठायें आप भी सभी I

             सच्च मानो वह तो जीवन में भी था एक अद्भुत प्रेम पुजारी,

             इस उम्दा पुस्तक पर ही लिखा है मैंने ब्लॉग अबकी बारी I 

          

                                      Dev Anand

                  A romantic's journey through life            

It  took me a month to finish reading 'Romancing With Life'- the aptly titled memoir of one of the most romantic and ‘evergreen’ actors who took Bollywood by storm: Dev Anand. 

Poetic in tone and tenor, pacy and free-flowing in style, Dev Anand’s autobiography describes his dream-filled journey from Gurdaspur to Bombay and meteoric rise as a film star. His dream was to not settle for a life of mediocrity. He didn’t want to be a stereotype as most of us end up being, under pressure from our ‘ever-wise’ parents, the elders and the society inflicting their ‘how-to-do-well-in-life’ ideas on the young impressionable minds. To my mind, this  wiser-than-thou-attitude, quite often, does more harm than good. But Dev Anand was cast in a different mould. Looking at himself in the mirror he found himself handsome; his inner voice told him that he was not meant to lead a mundane, ghisi-piti life in some mofussil town. Therefore, defying conventional wisdom and parents’ protective embrace, he slipped out of home and boarded the train to the city of dreams. He had a rough ride initially but with his undying passion, verve and self-belief, nothing could have stood in his way to finally touch the dizzy heights of success and celebrity-hood. Of his hard days when he was still on the roads and penniless, he poignantly recounts one incident of how he had to sell his prized, carefully kept stamps album to a vendor on a Bombay street to quell his pangs of thirst and hunger.

Bollywood is a world unto itself. It is a world of glamour and glitz; beauty, aura and mystique…(and much more, not altogether wholesome). The film stars are celebrities adored and adulated by the millions. The enchanting heroines rule many young hearts and tiptoe in their dreams. And handsome heroes are wooed by women. Dev Anand, perhaps the handsomest of all in his days, was no exception. In gripping narrative he describes his ‘loves’ and encounters with the best and the most beautiful in the film world and how women young or old, married or unmarried in and  outside Bollywood fell under his spell and drooled over him. And being a romantic at heart with nothing but ‘love-for-all' the guiding mantra of his life, he loved and lived it all.

From the book he comes out to be a man of passion and childlike curiosity. He is restlessly energetic and always bubbling with new and novel, unthought-of, unexplored and bold ideas for his films. He is seen eagerly scouting the whole globe, forever looking to scale new heights and enlarge his horizons; feverishly in quest of fresh new talent (not just from India but from any corner of the world) and the best locations for film shoots so as to present something special and unique to the world as a film maker. Jeenat Aman was one such ‘find’ of his; also Kalpana Kartik (a product of St Bedes College Shimla who, as we all know, he subsequently married); and so was the fabulous Tina Munim (who later married one of the Ambani brothers), who he brought into the world of films. He also writes about his unrequited love for Jeenat and his date with her when he was all set to make his 'pre-planned' confession-  only to step back in a sad but dignified and quiet manner on sensing that perhaps something (on her side) was amiss.
He describes his association with various luminaries in the film world and the top stars like Dilip Kumar (who he speaks very highly of), Raj Kapoor, Sunil Dutt and others; his creative highs with SD Burman and Kishore Kumar, his launching of own studio Navketan along with his equally talented and gifted brother Chetan Anand and later his joint film ventures with Goldie. He meets and rubs shoulders with the big and great in various walks of life including the politicians. His love and passion for the country and its great people propels him to even plunge into the world of politics with undiminished zeal and enthusiasm but the political party that he and his friends conceive of doesn’t take off- mainly because of lack of will on the part of some. This happens post the fall of Morarji Desai-led Janata Party government soon after the Emergency.

                    

Dev Anand's autobiography reflects his flamboyant spirit and his limiltless love for all things beautiful. At the same time he also strikes you as a man sensitive to the core, a man of integrity, vision, professional competence and idealism who would never buckle under any pressure and sell his soul at any cost – unlike some other stars and film makers - then and now.

I read this memoir  after Naseeruddin Shah’s. They both have style and flavour uniquely their own- as indeed how it should be. They both recount their own stories of struggles, highs and lows, tears and smiles, success and fame to regale us with, in their journey of life. But one common thread runs through  both: self-belief, 'chin- up' and ‘never-say-die’ attitude; the courage to defy conventions and bear the adversities when they come  with a grin…but always keeping the inner flame burning brightly, come what may.

Last word: You ought to have fire in your belly to become great. 

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