Betrayal

Betrayal of our Constitution

Today, again, I see on Facebook the bile that is coming out against the Muslims in India as a matter of course. I feel like closing down my Facebook account - I don't want to see this daily nastiness. BJP and that awful Sangh have a great deal to answer for.

Now, I have to make it clear -- I am not a Muslim. Religion-wise I call myself a nothing person. I don't practise any. If religion helps others negotiate this,what can be sometimes, a confusing world, I am glad it is of use to them.

The Sangh is trying to bully a minority community, provoke it constantly so that they have a legitimate excuse for gratuitous violence. Please find something else useful to do, Sanghis. Leave the Muslims, the Christians and all such alone.

The confusing thing is, all these friends and family members that I know and care about, kind and considerate folk, like to have a go at the Muslims. These are mainly well-educated, well-read people. Have they no respect for our constitution that enshrines equality as a central principle? 

Equality for all had to be fought for -- don't throw it away. My father was an activist that helped the cause of temple entrance for all. He was the person who supported the first Muslim Municipal chairman in Thalassery.

My neighbours were the Mukkattil house, a Malabar Mapla family that remained great neighbours all my life. In any case, what have the Muslims done to these guys who spout hatred?

Is this a form of entertainment for the idle rich Hindu. I say, take a laxative. And when you sit in your sandalwood-and-jasmine scented puja room, remember that the Muslims are also an integral part of our India. Even your own huge pantheon of Hindu Gods will disapprove of your lack of compassion.

 

Nostalgia

 Nostalgia

Anand Nair

 

Nostalgia: sounds like a medical term, like neuralgia. Makes me think about what the word actually means to me.

   So, I dug into my inglorious past, for places, people, events that I long to remember, to return to, albeit briefly, in my mind. Like all good Maths teachers, I started from the beginning, or as far into the beginning as my memory reached.

   Childhood? A time to forget quickly. 1942 and thereabouts -- war time in a household with two other children, one old aunt trying to make a tiny income stretch to the end of the month – and then she had to start all over again the next month. Rice, sugar and kerosene were rationed, the only wage-earner in the house, my father, was enjoying the hospitality of His Majesty, George the sixth, for daring to line up behind Gandhi, Nehru and the rest of the bevy of activists, who had the impertinence to believe that the British should get out, (Quit India was the slogan of the day) and India left to self-destruct, in whatever manner it wished.

   Forget that time quickly and move on. School and College were uneventful – a succession of books, notes and exams. I remember some excellent lecturers in Malayalam and English Literature, who managed to make me, for the rest of my life, totally dependent on words and books to inspire me. But, do I want to go back to that time? A resounding ‘NO.’ This was a time when others made decisions for me: what was respectable to wear, say…

   I got married, as all Indian girls were meant to do then, in 1957, to a man who was vetted and picked for me by my family. The poor man never realised what he was walking into. The less said about my married life, the better. Suffice it is to say that in the first ten years of my marriage I did not read a single book.

   The small beach near my home in the little town of Thalassery, on the south-western coast of India, was peaceful and let me think and grow. The many places I lived in after my marriage – Colombo, Jaffna, Ikot Ekpene in the Nigeria of the early sixties, the totally westernised Ndola of the late sixties in Kaunda’s Zambia, the small Kyambogo Hill on which the Teachers College perched, in Kampala…were interesting, different. Makeni in the north of Sierra Leone, hot, dusty, friendly, was home for six years, but it soon outgrew me. They were all way-stations and I was glad to move on.

   It is a little pitiable that I cannot remember anywhere, anything, or anybody, that makes me glow with nostalgia. Are there many others like me? Or is it that some essential empathy was always lacking in me?