Taking Umbrage

Taxi drivers in the city I live in deserve special mention as prospective Zen masters. They utter a sentence and lo and behold you are bound to experience a satori moment. That is if you are in the right path to enlightenment, must I add? Yesterday, I met a rather patronizing one -common in this part of the world where India shining still means glitzy Bollywood wear-, the kind who will say Vanakkam and expect you to be grateful for learning ‘your’ language (how many times I have tried explaining to them that not all Indians speak Tamil?!). The kind who advise me to move out of “the horribly expensive city area into a suburban HDB flat” so that when I go back to India, I’ll be “as rich as a princess” with the money I make here. (Make no mistake- this is not their xenophobia, just a way of saying you are fortunate to be here but make sure you go back). So this guy who apparently was a regular reader of a local newspaper, had a few well informed opinions; women still “die of dowry “in India, to be born as a woman in India is a curse, Indian food is “too spicy”, Indian men always hold hands when they walk and here comes the satori statement - Indian women do not work (this when I was on my way to work on a gloomy Monday morning)

Actually the story runs beyond the cab driver obviously. Some colorful whirling spirals later, comes this moment in which we decided to give in to the charms of Pradeep Sarkar’s camera team (what gorgeous views of the Banaras!) and set out to watch Laaga Chunari Mein Daag. The first ten minutes were very engaging despite the pathetic lyrics (humto aise hain?!)- What with the Ganges forming an almost lyrical backdrop to the setting (a family mansion which invokes more jealousy than pity), lovely ethnic wear sported by Rani and Konkana and the clichéd but inviting treats of Banaras (paan and kachodis...smack.)! What followed was a combination of Karan Johar’s wishful thinking, Sooraj Barjatya’s saccharine scenes and Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s mind-numbing pseudo-profound situations. I know I was supposed to talk about taxi driver-induced zen and not vent my love for these glorious filmmakers. The film was as clichéd as any but the anger it generated was catalyzed by a zen master into a satori moment.

Yes, I have heard this one before- that no matter what statement you make about India, you will most likely be right. And you well might be right Mr. Pradeep Sarkar that in today’s India, there are poverty ridden “family” girls who transform overnight into uber expensive escorts. But to come up with a fairy tale wherein Shivshankar’s pride is redeemed by his son-in-laws and not his daughters is repulsive. Aren’t those days are long gone? On one hand, we have a national campaign trying to create awareness of daughters being equal to sons in the most remote and rural parts of India and on the other, we have monsters right in the midst of our “urban” class who propagate ideas contrary to that. So who can blame well-informed readers of newspapers in other countries? This thought...if this thought doesn’t call for Zenness, it calls for us going berserk. Punct.

Sethusamudram Project

I loved the whole Sethusamduram yarn woven with purely original anecdotes (" Lord Rama never strikes an emotional chord in the south"- certainly not true Sir, unless there is only one state in South India which, of course would be oh-so-convenient but sadly, is not the case) complete with the proverbial proof of the Indian political pudding, the cherry on which has to be none other than the Dravidian atheist CM's grandiloquence: "From which engineering college did Rama graduate?".

I was in stitches when I read the feminist’s view of Rama (yes, growing up in Andhra with a communist of a mom, I did read the legendary “Ramayanam visha vriksham by the Ranganayakamma) and the way his disservice was being touted as the justification for building the canal. It would shame the Bush gang if they knew how creatively one can build a case with unadulterated opinions and still be called intellectual (as opposed to being ridiculed for "Bushisms").

Oh and did I say I totally loved the “intellectual” (read the classic apologists who start a piece with a disclaimer that is along the lines of “let me put this upfront, I am a Hindu but only by birth, I don’t give a damn to religious sentiments as long as it is not about Baabri Masjid and oh the 9/11 too”) Hindus’ take on the sethusamudram?-It is not about religion, it is about progress/national security and some such brain waves?

Rather neglected in this cornucopia of emotions and intellect is the logic of using survey details from the 1970's in planning this project. But that’s for experts in Navigation technology to debate on. Equally neglected is the impact this project will have on the environment. As a biologist, as much as I feel compelled to add my slant to the story, I realize I have only one thing to say - it is a lie when anyone tells you that projects of this magnitude will not negatively and irreversibly affect the environment. The rest as we Indians (yes Sir, even the southies) say …Raam jaane.

I do want to write about how an educated person can be perfectly normal (not me perhaps but I assure you, a lot of people I know are normal) and still call oneself a Hindu (Muslim, Christian, Jew) among the myriad other identities that one takes on in the course of life. I do want to say that I will not be coerced into being apologetic about my faith. I do want to say that we should start seeing issues in the multi-dimensional manner that is demanded of life and stop slotting things into "communal" and "everything else". To say that I believe in Rama is not blasphemy as is to say that I don’t, for that matter.

Having said that, one question teases my mind since the beginning of this episode. Would our intellectual pundits and the pseudo-intellectual politicians dare say that they do not believe in Mohammed and hence scrap the Muslim personal law that allows polygamy among Muslims in India? If we as a nation cannot profess to have the courage to rise against religion in the name of justice and equality, what gives us the right to rise against religion in the name of progress?

Yes, I know- writing this means I am well on my way to being honored as the next saffron queen (since when did the queen of spices become Hindu, did you ever wonder?). I am also well on my way as being labeled anti-Muslim, anti-progress, anti-whatever. We can argue endlessly about how the hindutva fanatics react to the sethusamudram project, how religion should not come in the way of progress, how this project would cause environmental havoc. But certainly, not all that happens in the name of progress is good.

I think it is time to pause and think if causing a national debate in the name of religion/faith is worth the fuel that would be saved by destroying the bridge. It is time to think if Hindus do deserve respect for their faith at least as much as those who belong to another religion. After all, an overwhelming majority in this democratic country are Hindus. Can our secularism afford to be a-religious only in the case of Hinduism?