Minority

Minority doesn’t mean Muslims, though the words have become synonymous by mis-usage.

Here are few facts - Muslims are the 2^nd largest population in world and the fastest growing by a wide margin. In the Indian subcontinent, Muslims are almost as many as Hindus and at least ten times bigger than any other religion (Christianity for instance). And in India, they are not only the 2^nd largest but also more than all other minorities combined.

Hardly a species facing extinction! Then why Muslims are called minority?

Your guess is as good as mine. On my part, I daresay that they are the only majority in India. Let me explain.

In the context of electoral politics, politicians look to tap votes. No other group of people can influence the result of an election as Muslims. Monolithic or otherwise, they are veritable bank of votes! On the contrary, Hindus don’t see themselves as Hindus. They are loyal to their little caste affiliations. Some of them think for themselves. They too vote in blocks, but if and when they do, they vote in caste blocks. None of these caste blocks can come close to Muslims numerically. Muslims remain the largest vote bank. And that’s precisely why all political parties court them at the expense of so-called majority.

No matter what, no political party in democracy can stay in business without the blessings of majority. That's the scared law of electoral politics. In India what misleads is nomenclature - a majority is a majority even if you call it by any other name. It's fun and effective if you call it by its antonym. 

Let me not go pedantic on the technical definition of the word minority. But one would imagine that minorities are generally the people on the periphery. They are relegated outside the system and its discourse. They are not significant let alone powerful. In short, these people don’t count an awful much.

In India, people of North-East are real minorities. Leave skull-cap type identity politics, they have real integration issues in their own capital. It's hardly surprising that our politicians don’t talk too long about them. Politicians don't see enough return on investment. Their situation is pole-opposite to that of Muslims who hog the whole minority space alone, leaving nothing for real minority groups like homosexuals and transgenders and tribals etc.

Coming to think of it, the politics of India has been hijacked by two groups – Muslims and Corporates. The former has number-power and the latter has money-power. Everything else has become minority. 

Sum(Truth) = Lie

What was yesterday was true yesterday. That’s not true today anymore. What is today is true today. It won’t be true tomorrow. We live everyday life with everyday truths. These truths don’t last, nor do we. In long run, we won’t be merely dead; we'll be as if we have never been. We come into being from non-being and return into the same. Non-being or the one big being. Perhaps that’s the only truth. When this truth strikes, all other truths turn into a lie.

Life is a zero sum game, more or less – sum total of many little truths turns out to be one little lie.  

I see the open secret that’s for all to see. The puppet has come to know that the script is playing itself out. He has come to know that he is a puppet. He has come to know that what’s being played out is a script. It is not what it looked like. It is not real.

You preened yourself in dark brown mirrors. You admired yourself in others’ eyes. You found yourself in them.

But they who were there are not here anymore. They have been withdrawn in the background. They don’t matter to you today. And those who were never in sight have appeared on the stage. They will disappear tomorrow. They will be withdrawn. By now you see the pattern. But they matter to you today. Keep playing; the play is going on.   

You didn’t know her. But she was somewhere. She came by. She kissed you and smiled. She put her head on your shoulder, and squeezed your hand while saying something warm in your ear. She melted and became one with you. Forever. Came tomorrow and she changed. And she said that you’ve changed. Doesn’t matter if you did or you didn’t. Change catches you for sure. Things fall apart in ten directions and you find out that you are eight hands short. She will turn to other side. She will walk out of love. She will have tears in her eyes. Before long, she won’t be there. You won’t know her again. Forever.

I find myself in local train. People are around me. They were not around me half an hour back. They won’t be around me in a short while. I don’t look into their eyes. I don’t smile and say hello. I don't care. In a while the train will pull over and I will step down. That’s how it is.

iBania

I understand practical choices. 

I understand why the best of Indians line up in scorching Chennai heat and fawn over consulate clerks for Visa stamping. I understand why we Indians make hundreds of rounds of "Visa Balaji" in Hyderabad. It's tad bit too much to expect a software slave to prey "Where the head is held high" to his defeated God. That's understandable.

What is not understandable is why we are so awfully proud of these choices. I stay in Bay Area these days and I might want to stay here longer and this place being a great place notwithstanding, I never for a moment felt proud about it. I don't see my moving here as me going places. Migrating is not "going places". There is no pride in Indians fleeing India. If anything, it's an admission of collective failure. It proves a colonial point that we Indians are incapable of building a system that we want to live in. And that's not at all flattering. The better ones among us should feel humiliated, not at personal level of course, but collectively.

But we loudly publish "moved to San Francisco" on Facebook. We are proud of what we should be ashamed of. We have a strange and skewed sense of pride and shame. And superficial sense of belongingness and collective. That's why our whole is much less that the sum of our parts. And that pretty much explains why we are the way we are.  

Nude vs Porn

In happier places, people have families, friends, and some board/card game with good supply of snacks and drinks. Here people have hobbies, and they invest time and money in their hobbies.

Anyway, I am here these days and I have been dabbling in photography. Like all software stenos, I too have purchased a guitar, a tennis racquet and a DSLR camera. I am deaf to chords, I can hardly get the ball cross the net and now I’m all set to prove the point in photography as well. That’ll complete the software dude trilogy.

Since my friends are far better off in their career as well as in social skills, they don’t need a hobby to pass time. That pushed me looking out in the outer space for activity partners. Finally I have found and joined few meet-up groups. I cannot travel for whatever reasons so I am stuck mostly with the indoor photography groups. Most of these groups claim to do artistic shooting. All they do is hire a model and shoot nudes.

So here I am, a loser who can’t play strings or tennis and now poised to become a pornographer. Nice!

I asked Mr. know-it-all Google to tell me when exactly a nude turns into porn, in my usual incognito mode. And he replied - a work of art tends to grip you in "aesthetic arrest" and freezes you in that moment. On the contrary, porn is more yang by nature, and draws the beholder towards the beauty (yin), or into the loo. It seems Joyce talks about this topic in his Portrait of an Artist. Well, I’ve read that book and I swear there was nothing like that. I just remember the relief I felt when I finished reading it.

Well I digress. Let me spare you what the Ancient Greeks had to say about art and porn. Let me say what I want to say.

To me, as a wannabe photographer, nudity seems like a loud fart in a corporate boardroom while the CEO is announcing something really important. The fart punctures the solemn balloon of civilization. In a flash it shows us what we are – animals with live orifices. The sheer contrast with the designer decor triggers humor and laughter. That’s the moment when the speaker is pitted against the f almighty fart and it’s subversive powers. And if he is able to retain the mental space of his audience, or reclaim it without losing time, and reduces the fart in just another background noise, he can consider himself a good speaker.   


Apology for that scatological detour. I realize it was not necessary. I should mind my language.

The point is, a good photo is a good photo, with or without tee-tees. The twins are liable to distract the viewer and monopolize his interest. Your job is to show these twins artfully so that viewers see the heart and soul of the subject and don’t run for privacy. If you could do it, you are the Joyce of photography, if you know what I mean.

Easier said than done though. The third part of trilogy is in the making.

Bhakt

Hindu-bashing is the only thing that brings both Blue (Left) and Red (Right) together, especially in media and academia (starting from schools). This Hinduphobia not only shapes Western minds from impressionable age but also influences international politics and policy-making, and affects the position of an ordinary Hindu in increasingly multicultural society he lives in. He is a soft target everywhere for everybody, like a meaty bird that cannot fly. Worse, he is delegitimized and demonized before he is slaughtered. And there is no place for him to go!

Last month an elderly Hindu gentleman was assaulted by none other than police and before a single murmur of protest from the ever-apologetic hey-Sam-I-am-not-really-a-Hindu-but-a-wannabe-let-me-kiss-your-ass diaspora could be heard, the left-liberal voices loudly forewarned that this incident is expected to be exploited by Hindu right-wing fundamentalists! That was wicked but clever! Now keep your mouth shut or prove them right. No matter what, you retards fell in their trap!

There was a time when even Jews and Muslims too were discriminated against by the Right. But they have a sense of organization. They understood the rules of the game, organized themselves, found sympathy from the Left, and got the syllabus sanitized. Hindus are doomed to not understand anything from their history of holocausts. And as they say, history doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme time to time. Become a sheep and a shepherd will turn up from somewhere; or a butcher!

Have a look at the predominant narrative in mainstream media – Hindus are Aryan invaders who conquered and subjugated the native Indians – Dravidians – and terrorized them with ritualistic Vedic violence despite repeated efforts by Buddha, Mughals and British to civilize them. Hinduism is a degenerate caste-based system of idol worship (including idols of animals, even phallus) and other medieval practices like widow burning and child marriages. It’s responsible for economic backwardness, ecological damage, and relentless offenses against religious minorities, women, dalits etc. In short, if India has to develop and modernize, Hinduism has to be defeated.

If you found that outlandish, you are ready for a shock. That was plain vanilla. It gets hardcore fantastic with Wendy D, and even she is as mainstream and credible as anyone could be. 

I don’t intend to respond to this charge sheet here. I'm not sure if I need to. However, our own narrative has been prepared, answers are being articulated, questions are being asked, and the overall process of intellectual decolonization has belatedly but thankfully begun*. The frontline might be pushed into their territory. And that’s shaking the status quo in its roots, rocking chairs and bottoms sitting on those chairs for years. These Nehruvian bottoms don’t want to budge from their position of unchallenged monarchy and the power that followed. But the elephant is in the room, and it looks mad. Now what does the progressive mob do? The easiest way to win a debate without doing anything is to call names. So the name-calling has been started on war footage.

Hindu Fascist! Hindu Fundamentalist!

By the way these bottoms know neither Fascism nor Fundamentals of Hinduism.

The latest in the cuss-series is “Bhakt”, as if it’s a cuss word. And it indeed is for the MacBastard commies. It’s apparent that they know nothing about Bhakti, or Bhakti Movement, or Bhakti Yoga. To them they are not at all important.

Given their mental make-up, they are likely to confuse Bhakti with Faith, which is understandable given their Western sensibilities. And faith implies blindness, uncritical and unconditional submission. Well commies, here is the news - Bhakti is not faith. Put it simply – it’s another form of Love; like poetry is another form of expression. And it is meant to solve a specific problem in the spiritual quest. I am going to heed Jesus and won’t cast my pearls here. Read chapter 2 of Gita if you want to fill up your tank so that your tap stops blowing air.

Whether the so-called Modi Bhakts are critical of Modi or not need no rhetoric. The proof of pudding lies there on social media for everyone to see. Following yours truly would be edifying in this matter.

Dear commies, this is your last chance to keep peace. Let’s have an open environment for fair intellectual exchange. Let’s have free and fair debate in pursuit of nothing but truth. Let a student have equal exposure to all the versions. Let him weigh all the evidences to make up his own mind, because the process of concluding is as important as the conclusion itself, if not more. Let’s stop indoctrination.

Otherwise, let us assure you – Bhakti will show its Shakti. Hindus are rising after a thousand years of colonization, not by ritualistic Vedic violence but by making positive contribution in this world, and they are not going to live like Dhimmi anymore. If that hurts you, I am not sorry. 

*Read Rearming Hinduism – Vamsee Juluri and Breaking India – Rajiv Malhotra & Aravindan Neelakandan