And when the three religions climax in a warring orgy it will be here..

Russia is busy with her new wealth and power, with the Siberian oil fields and the Caucasus. China is emboldened by her visibility post the Beijing Olympics and is steaming ahead on the economy front. America has lost her war in Iraq and in the mountainous deserts of Afghanistan, and her banks – the fortresses of capitalism are crumbling down and bottlenecked. Europe is busy with clean energy, trade and tourism. Australia is still pre-dominantly uninhabited. Africa is battling disease, starvation, dictators and other third world troubles. Latin America is busy with soccer and sex.

Though bogged down by political entanglements and power struggles, floods and infrastructure constraints, disputes and shaky status-quos, the Indian subcontinent remains the only landmass with adequate representation from all three of the world’s greatest religions and enough idle time for the three religions to climax in their warring orgy. And if you have noticed it has begun.

Forcible conversions, murder of holy men – self-proclaimed and otherwise, blatant bombings, desecration of prayer-halls and churches, it has all begun in earnest. As these pick-up speed our landmass will become the Kurukshetra of religious antagonism, rife with war and plunder in the name of our shepherds, boiling with the burning fury of men who love their Gods.

Our soil will soak in blood, our rivers will be stained.

we would better answer.

Now is perhaps the best time to write about Jammu and Kashmir. Jammu is back to normal after 64 days of violent gimmicks while Kashmir is still hit with the wave of dissension and disillusionment. Popular media has dissected Kashmir and examined it short and long. Arundathi Roy wrote thus in the Outlook while K Shankar Bajpai wrote thus in the Hindu.

I have a few questions to ask M/s Roy.

She advocates Kashmir’s independence from India as well as India’s independence from Kashmir and justifies it putting into light the present ground situation and the atrocities of the past. She is at times one-sided against the successive Indian Governments and blames them for having manufactured and then exacerbated the dissent. She points but cursorily at the foreign elements that played. It seems she had the case first and then chalked out arguments to suit.

Has she considered the following givens?

That Kashmir was voted into India pending a plebiscite is a given. Conducting the plebiscite now is out of question given that it will not reflect the Kashmiri choice of 1947. There is no question of plebiscite now. There is only a question of the J&K polls.

There is no denial that the Indian Government has a role in the present mess. But the Pak tribes and army men who infiltrated into Kashmir post-Partition and stayed, denying the law and order the state deserved are most responsible for denying the Kashmiris their plebiscite. It is high time that they get the scorn and we as a nation start concentrating on polls in that state.

M/s Roy, if given the fact that Kashmir is and was an integral part of secular India and what transpired in 61 years has made you game enough to advocate Azadi for the valley- then if 50 years from now if the evangelical Christians of India’s demographically engineered coastlines (which are as of now India’s uncontested integral part) rise up with the demand for a Christian state will you be ready to say ‘Aye’!      Same is the case with the district of Malappuram in Kerala. Say, twenty years down the lane they rise up in a muslim-majority trance and shouts pro-Pak slogans, will you concede? And in another century if China creates enough unrest in Arunachal Pradesh (which China claims as her territory even today) and demands her accession into the Chineese mainland, will you agree?

When Roy’s article is read, please keep these questions in mind.

The second article is more level-headed. More apt. It asks the right question to the Indian politician and the Indian masses. It asks “Has the concept of India lost its cementing force?”

We would better answer.

Can I walk on my city streets with a donut in hand and not be blown up into pieces?

Mr Vee steps out of his office and heads to the nearest Donut Baker; he grabs two honey dipped donuts and gets them packed in a paper bag (and not a plastic one at that). He is intent on walking five kilometers to the place he is temporarily put-up at; for now he is a ‘rove’.

As he rounds a certain curve on the main road he dips his hand into the paper bag, fishes out donut number one and bites off a heavy chunk; the stuff melting into his mouth in no time. As the sugar pumps into his blood, he crosses a large metal garbage bin and trembles at its sight. How can he be sure that the bin is innocuous; that it does not house an improvised ‘timed’ explosive. In these ‘Interesting Times’ he cannot be.

Mr Vee and many others like him had their lives ‘shaken’, when low intensity serial blasts went off in Bangalore to the tune of terrorist elements. And his countrymen are facing a tirade of bombs and hate. What followed in Ahmedabad and Surat has made a long story even longer and deadlier.

There is more to this story that I have been weaving around Mr.Vee. If I should cap it in three lines, here is how it would go. ‘Madivala’ is one of the doors to Bangalore, a bus boarding/alighting point for passengers to/from Tamil Nadu and Kerala. If a bomb explodes right at your exit door, your passage seems unsure, threatened, unsafe, aimed at and targeted. It reads, “You better be forewarned!”.

rain douses fear; and angst. Bangalore – 25/7/08

Rain affects a bombed city’s morale. Rain dulls her; but along with it douses the fear and washes away the panic and angst. But hate is a different thing. The rain turns the flames of hatred into a conflagration; gives her a face more grim and taut; and voila in a day’s time hate manifests its new form in a different city like never before.
Are my cities safe, can I ask?
Are my cities safe,
can I ask; can I at least wonder?

Can I walk on my city streets with a donut in hand and not be blown up into pieces?