"me no big chief …

you can hit
one when he is down
you can bully and harass and torment and tear
like a pack of hyenas till you feel you are the superior

but for how long the king,
always the animal deep inside. . . . . hyaenas

and you delude you have won
but for how long
forever?

Who wants to live forever – Queen

There’s no time for us
There’s no place for us
What is this thing that builds our dreams, yet slips away from us

Who wants to live forever . . . . . Who wants to live forever . . . . . ?
Oh

There’s no chance for us
It’s all decided for us
This world has only one sweet moment set aside for us

Who wants to live forever . . . . . Who wants to live forever. . . . . ?
Oh

Who dares to love forever . . . . . Oh, when love must die
But touch my tears with your lips
Touch my world with your fingertips

And we can have forever . . . . . And we can love forever. . . . .
Forever is our today

Who wants to live forever. . . . . Who wants to live forever. . . . . ?
Forever is our today. . . . . Who waits forever anyway?

in universal time
the lie which is your life is just a blink
pride, dishonesty and you will soon be rotting to dust for eternity

Where did my freedom go?
My free spirit.

Now caged within bars of
deep prejudices, dishonesty and untruths.

When days are spent dreaming of a world truly free.

Mr Tambourine man – Bob Dylan

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to.
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you.

Though I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand,
Vanished from my hand,
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping.
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet,
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming.

Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship,
My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip,
My toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels
To be wanderin’.
I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade
Into my own parade, cast your dancing spell my way,
I promise to go under it.

Though you might hear
laughin’, spinnin’, swingin’ madly across the sun,
It’s not aimed at anyone, it’s just escapin’ on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facin’.
And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind,
I wouldn’t pay it any mind, it’s just a shadow you’re
Seein’ that he’s chasing.

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to.
Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you.

Take me to a place where the clock-hands can go backwards.
Anywhere or anywhen, this world or beyond,
this universe or the next
or an x^th dimension.
Please?

by hatred between communities.
by hatred between regions.

and not necessarily by the different religions

A traveller in her blog had stated:

india india

so here i am finally again. india india. somehow i feel like home but same time this feels a big chaos. or well landing in mumbai after peaceful and nice christmas holiday in finland…it can be a big change. and not much to say about mumbai but that i really did not like it. i love kolkata which is big and noisy but something there still makes me love it. in mumbai i did not see anything worth to stay more than 1 night.

This is a blog of a visitor writing of her own experiences.

One would assume that we would
acknowledge her capability to judge for her ownself
and respect her the right to decide as to what she likes and loves.

Not,
if Indians can help it.
Not if they dribble hatred
towards a community or city referred
and all the more vitriolic if it is about “the bengalis”.

So why wasn’t I surprised to read this first comment to the blog.

melbas said:

January 11, 2008 at 9:05 am

In Mumbai people actually do work.
It’s the commercial capital and contributes 25% of India GDP.
The bengali’s of Kolkata like to spend their time contradicting everything the central government says and then some years later doing what it had spent years arguing against and congratulating itself heartily for being such a progressive city.
Kolkata… yikes!

So this melbas has to poison the blogger’s mind.

Not only is his logic out of context to what the lady had written,
in his effort to malign a city he generalises a whole community – “the bengalis”.

That too, if his argument had any truth.

The government central government,
the government that is clinging to power
by forming a coalition with the same hated bengalis,
shamelessly holding hands with their sworn enemies the bengali communists.

The same government that turned a blind eye to the communists atrocities
in Nandigram
all in the name of holding onto power
and be able to twist the communist’s arm to accept the 123 agreement.

Hypocrisy so blatantly defined .

But this individual is not finished, yet.

melbas said

January 11, 2008 at 2:34 pm

I can’t tell whether you’re being sarcastic, but any people who radiate the hypocrisy and foolishness that the residents of that city do, deserve to be hated.
Not only must the Good be celebrated but the Bad must be put down.

Anti-Indians, or should I say anti-hindus like the Bengalis, ultimately paint themselves into a corner, because their beliefs are based on jealously opposing a better and nicer people.

He now has to label all residents of the city (surely referring to bengalis only)
as hypocrites and foolish and Bad, to justify his hatred,
and to declare they be put down.

Bengalis are anti-Indians, and being hindus themselves they are anti-hindus.
And all non-bengalis are better and nicer people.

A delusion of grandeur.

Not content with the above, it returns again to spew some more venom.

melbas said,

January 11, 2008 at 11:13 pmThe truth if the matter is that people don’t derogate Kolkata. They will complain about the poverty, slums, beggars and crime elsewhere, but refuse to mention any of these when discussing Kolkata. These things are actually cheered on. The propaganda that has been spread over the decades, makes it “cool” to derogate all other cities except Kolkata.

And all this because a lady had blogged to say she loved Kolkata.

Propaganda!
This individual doesn’t begin to understand the meaning of it.

This, sadly, is the reality of regional hatred and the true communalism in India.

I am glad that this commenter himself/herself is not a bengali ,
I would hate to think there are any such morons amongst the bengalis.

The “melbas”es of India will carry on living with unreal beliefs,
in an unreal world, rotting away inside with hatred.

India, you may be shining,
but deep in your heart there is only hatred.

Who needs to play politics with religion to fragment India into bits,
when there are poisonous minds like these burning with hatred, day after day.

With the controversies raging in Australia
over alleged racism by an Indian cricket player against an Australian,
there are many journalist who are making the most of the opportunity to
to further stoke up the issue – for motives selfish and / or not entirely honest.

Photograph: Sydney Morning Herald

This is one of them from the Guardian Unlimited

India in denial – Mike Marqusee

The response of the BCCI to the cricket row in Australia illustrates
the problem of entrenched racism in India – January 8, 2008 11:00 AM

Racism, towards people of African origin and and more broadly towards people with darker skins, is commonplace and vivid in south Asia, yet rarely acknowledged.

Visit Indian offices and factories, hotels, cricket grounds or airports, and the colour hierarchy leaps out at you. The higher up the managerial scale you go, the more likely you are to find lighter-skinned people. As a white-skinned visitor from the west, I can’t count how many times strangers have boasted to me with pride of their offspring’s fair complexion. Children with darker skins are often teased as “blackies”. Matrimonial adverts frequently emphasise fairness.

Skin lighteners are sold in vast quantities. Advertisements for “Fair and Lovely” skin whitener adorn cricket grounds and intrude endlessly on TV cricket coverage. In one of them, an earnest, dusky-coloured young female cricket fan is transformed by the application of skin lightener into a star cricket commentator.

I doubt if this author really comprehends what constitutes racism?
Yes there is colour hierarchy in Indian society, even to the point of discrimination
but that is not “racism”.
We Indians also believe anything made abroad is better, how does he define that?

The corollary to the authors logic,
Indians by nature bow to fair skinned people, so the Indian team acknowledge
the other 10 players in the Australian team are a “superior” race,
it is Symonds who is the only “inferior” individual.

That is ridiculous.

But as the laws of cricket now recognise, racist abuse is an offence of a special magnitude. If Harbhajan did call Symonds a “monkey“, then it was absolutely necessary for Australian captain Ricky Ponting to make a formal complaint, and for International Cricket Council (ICC) referee Mike Proctor to punish Harbhajan accordingly.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India’s (BCCI) statement on the Harbhajan ban read more like an emotional defence of Indian cricket and India as a whole than a considered response to the referee’s ruling.

There are abuses and swearwords and their are racial abuse.
Every time a person swears at another of a different race,
does that become a deliberate “racist” insult.

Had Harbhajan called Ponting a monkey, would that too be a racist jibe?
It is alleged that Hogg had called an Indian player a bastard – is that a racial insult?

Indians equate stupidity to asinine behaviour.
If an indian calls a white /black person a donkey
does that insult the intelligence of the other or his race?

The match referees has accepted the word of five “white” players
and ignored the evidence of two “coloured” players
with not a shred of corroborative evidence.
Is that a discrimination?

What an enquiry was to prove without doubt as
1. the alleged abuse had taken place
2. to racially insult was the deliberate intent.
I do not see that has been proved against Harbhajan Singh.

Colour hierarchy in south Asia is rooted in the history of caste and labour. (Incidentally, seven of the 11 who played for India at Sydney were of Brahmin background, though Brahmins make up only about 7% of the Indian population.) Colonialism, in which all Indians, however elite, found themselves on the wrong side of the colour bar, entrenched the value of whiteness and its associations with power and privilege. As the US shows, modernisation and GDP growth do not necessarily dissolve colour distinctions, and in their much-vaunted upward mobility, the Indian middle classes do not appear to have abandoned the old prejudices. Indeed, since so many now prefer to identify with their western counterparts rather than their impoverished compatriots, these prejudices are likely to be strengthened.

How does caste come into this?
Other than Ganguly I do not know who the other six brahmins are.
And like myself, there will be million Indians who doesn’t care.
Caste becomes an issue if it is proved
the BCCI is run by brahmins, who have all the selectors of that caste,
the team selection has been deliberately picked only brahmin players
and deliberately discriminated against worthy players from other castes.

I challenge the author to prove this.

This is the author’s attempt to pass off is personal and untrue assumption as an evidence. It is not only irrelevant in the present context I also resent his unsubstantiated insinuations.

The value attached to whiteness is a sickness in south Asian society, which badly needs the antidote of a “black is beautiful” movement. There are precedents in the lower caste insurgencies associated with Periyar (founder of Dravidian movement in south India) and Ambedkar (the Dalit, ie “untouchable” liberator). The skin colour hierarchy can in the end only be uprooted by a transformation in attitudes towards caste, marriage, the female and male bodies, and social stratification in general. But the first step has to be breaching the widespread reluctance to acknowledge or discuss the realities of racism in Indian society. The Indian response to the accusation against Harbhajan indicates that this will be an uphill battle.

Does this author understands what “racism” really is?
Or he seriously believe we, as Indians,
are incapable of defining racisms.

What he describes
is more a “sickness” of many white societies?
I am yet to see a neo-nazi group of fairskinned Indians
goose-stepping through the neighbourhood of coloured Indians?

He equates an individual’s colour preference as racism.
He also wrongly generalises that every Indian prefers whites over others.
Indians in general do not accept homosexuality, would he also condemn
an Indian’s reluctance to accept certain sexual preference
as another “reality of racism in Indian society”?

This is irresponsible journalism.

First they banned her book
but the ban was overturned in a Court of Law.

Then they forced her out of the state,
at the rioting of Islamic extremists and marxist sympathisers.
And refused to let her return, or give her the refuge she had requested.

And all so conveniently timed to divert attention from the Nandigram massacres.

Now,
following the victory for ideology
the defeat of pseudo-secular hypocrisy
Gujarat, has abraded the apathetic eyes of the nation.

We have woken up, at last.
Hopefully some of us.

Questions will be asked, policies examined, manifestos scrutinised.
Where is our freedom of thoughts and expression?
Who robbed us of our basic human rights?

The Marxist politburo is unable to go back on their arrogant stance.
Like cowards they stayed hidden, instead
their 93 years old ex leader made the humiliating turnaround.
“If she wants to return to Kolkata or elsewhere in West Bengal, she is welcome.
But the Centre will have to ensure her security,” Mr Basu told reporters.

It is us Bengalees, who have failed
if not Ms Nasrin,
but surely the rights of every human being, to free thoughts, speech and expression.

Most of all we failed to give safe refuge to one
who today is homeless for her courage to speak out against injustice and prejudice.
The shame is on us.

For freedom of expression

by Taslima Nasreen: November 12, 1999

Taslima Nasreen took the floor during Commission V of UNESCO’s General Conference,
as a delegate of the NGO “International Humanist and Ethical Union” (I.H.E.U.).

This is the full text of Ms Nasreen’s declaration, from Webworld:

“I was threatened by the religious fundamentalists in my country Bangladesh. They have decreed a fatwa against me and set a price on my head. Not only that, I am a criminal according to the government of my country too. The government there has banned my book, and issued an arrest warrant against me for committing blasphemy. I was forced to leave my country. Since 6 years I have been living in exile.

I was born in a Muslim family, but I became an atheist. In course of my training in science, I developed the powers of observation, experiment, analysis, and reasoning. Without reasoning, I found, nothing should be accepted as fact. I have been fighting against injustice, unreason, and prejudice. I exposed the crimes of religion, particularly the injustice and oppression against women.

It makes me surprised that some Western states have declared the protection of human rights to be one of their supreme objectives, but then they patronized fundamentalism both overtly and covertly. Democratic governments recognize military dictatorships for short-run political interests. Secular states make friends with autocracies as well as theocracies. They even tolerate the completely inhuman behavior of their own fundamentalists. Such double standards practiced by so-called democratic and secular states at home and abroad give the fundamentalists a sort of legitimacy. Governments then have to succumb to the fundamentalists’ pressure and proscribe books and make arrangements to send its writers and authors to prison.

Some Westerners argue that not all the customs in the third world countries are harmful for women. They find a sort of stability and social peace in the oriental world. It is nonsense. For me, there can be no difference in the concept of human rights between the East and the West. If the veil is bad for Western women, then it is bad for their oriental sisters as well. If patriarchy is to be fought against in the West, it should be equally fought against in the East. The fight, in fact, is more urgent there because most of the women have neither any education nor any economic independence. If modern secular education is good for Western women, why should the Eastern women be deprived of it!

The fundamentalists cannot be countered without a relentless and uncompromising fight. The struggle should be both theoretical and tactical. Democracy and secularism should be applied in practice and not remain a mere play of words.

Fundamentalism is an ideology that diverts people from the path of natural development of consciousness and undermines their personal rights. Fundamentalists do not believe in individualism, liberty of personal choice, or plurality of thought. Moreover, as they are believers in a particular faith, they believe only in propagating their own ideas as autocrats generally do . They do not encourage or entertain free debate, they deny others the right to express their own views freely, and they cannot tolerate anything which they perceive as going against their faith.

I believe in fundamental rights of human beings to express themselves orally or in their writings; in equal rights for women in every sphere of life; and in constructing a society in which everybody gets a fair deal. We all should work for it. Media is helpful for spreading the ideas of human rights. And for media to work, the state has to be secular, the religious laws has to be abolished to create uniform civil code in which women get equalities. Education, of course secular education is important for women to get the knowledge about their rights. Religious education and politics based on religion must be banned to save the mankind. As they are not banned in my country, and the country is not secular, I, as a writer and journalist, once worked in media, was prevented to express my ideas and thoughts. It is impossible to have coexistence of religion and freedom of expression.”

It is never too late to make amends.
We need to stop fighting amongst ourselves
and for once, just once, stand up to say, enough is enough.

We are entitled to our rights, we are entitled to know the truth.

Bengalmarxismislamnegationismpseudo secularismhuman rights

Photo: Wikipedia