Snippets

"There a huge trust. I see it all the time when people come up to me and say, 'I don't want you to let me down again.'" --George W. Bush, Boston, Oct. 3, 2000.

"Are non-state actors coming from heaven or are they coming from another planet? Non-state actors are operating from the territory of a particular country." - Pranab Mukherjee. Unfortunately, the problem is not where they are coming from, it is where they believe they are getting into.

"When people, ostensibly seeking justice, stoop to violence, peace can never prevail. Peace is always desirable for its own sake, and every other desirable state comes after peace, not along with it. So, the maxim to follow, when peace is the desired state, is, "Ignore the problems, and avail of the opportunities." - Maulana Wahiduddin Khan.

"This woman (Madonna) comes here and in an incredibly shameless manner, she provokes a crazy enthusiasm, an enthusiasm of lust, lustful thoughts, impure thoughts," - Roman Catholic Cardinal Jorge Medina, during his homily at a Mass in honor of the late dictator Augusto Pinochet, who oversaw the deaths of some 3,200 dissidents during his 1973-1990 rule. Cardinal Medina has also said that some of those who claim to seek justice forthe  violations of human rights under the dictator's reign are actually seeking revenge. When I got my first pay, it was for fourteen days, because I had joined my job on the sixteenth of the month. The pay was not much, still I wanted to give something to those close to me out of the income I had first earned. To a cousin, I bought and gave a large poster of Madonna (the Marilyn Monroe look). We were not sex-driven, she just looked so beautiful. I don't know what the world is getting to, mass murder is okay, but lust is bad.

Statistics is scary, you can't really trust them, but they are intriguing, aren't they? In a CBS Poll, it has been found that more than 48 percent of the Americans believe in ghosts... 56 percent of the women believe this, only 38 percent of men do. Though, in all, only 22 percent of Americans claim they have actually seen ghosts.

"Don't mark in red pen (which can be seen as aggressive)- use a different color." - Good Mental Health Rocks kit, distributed in Queensland state. Apparently they are concerned that 14 per cent of Australian children and adolescents suffer from some sort of illness, and would like to do something for them.

The ego is a barrier to receptivity. "There is this story about the son of Ved Vyas. He wanted to be trained by Raja Janak, a wise king. Ved Vyas requested Raja Janak to take his son, Sukh, under his tutelage. Raja Janak asked him to send his son over. Sukh arrived at the appointed hour outside Raja Janak’s study and knocked at his door. "Who is it?" Janak asked. Sukh replied, "Main Sukh (I am Sukh)." Janak didn’t open the door. Sukh knocked again. "Who is it?" Main Sukh. Janak didn’t open the door. This was repeated many times till Sukh was tired of knocking and waiting. Suddenly, a realisation dawned on him. He knocked again. Janak said, "Who is it?" This time Sukh replies, "Sukh." Janak opened the door. Sukh realised that as long as he had the "I", Janak did not wish to take him as his student. -Pavan Choudary

On Religion

Yesterday, I visited Rediff and was surprised to see that it had accumulated in less than eight hours more than  thousand comments for a single news article. Here I am, blogging everyday and looking for comments and feeling great when I find one.

But the Rediff comments did not make me feel good. They were in response to an interview with a Hindu fundamentalist, and as it could be expected, people were screaming at one another.  I asked myself, 'Is this what I want?'.

I feel that when you are forced to take a position, you are not yourself anymore. The Memes, so to say, take control of what you say.

In this particular issue, it was Hindus, Christians and Muslims justifying the use of violence. Well, mostly. There were some moderate comments, but not many.

When Gandhiji was asked how he felt about the Western Civilization, he is supposed to have replied, "It would be a good idea".  I did not find that kind of intelligent and  humorous comment there. I was reminded of Gandhiji, because once you read all those comments, you come away thinking, Religion is a good idea, but just that, its time has not come.

In general, we should hesitate when we find ourself reacting to something. I can't explain this clearly, but I feel that when you react to a bombing for instance, you are focused on the bombing, and because of that, your sight is clouded, your thinking gets muddled, your heart gets dehydrated and your tongue gets twisted. Same goes when you are fighting with your business partner, or wife or child.

That is why I prefer posts to comments. Ha ha!

Speaking of this Hindu-Muslim-Christian issue, it is unimaginable how scholars of  religion, the saints and the mullahs and the priests, are not speaking out against violence. No violence, never. They should make that clear. Gandhiji himself maintained that the means justified the ends. No one is saying that these days. Instead we are blowing ourself up, burning or uselessly ranting against the theory of evolution. How regressive can you get!

Seriously speaking, if anyone from any of these religions came out speaking boldly about this issue of violence, and were serious about doing something about it, they would end up as founders of another religion. That would make it only worse, of course.

I think someone questioned J.Krishnamurti what he would do if his sister or wife was raped in front of his eyes. Would he still not feel violent? JK usually did not answer such hypothetical questions, but for this, I think he replied along these lines: if your mind was in order, and if you felt love, you will find the right response without being violent.

When you hear that a nun has been raped, love is the last thing you feel. Or when you read that a small boy picked up a package to return it and it exploded in his face. It is hard not to want to hit out against these evil people.

Yet the simple fact is, it is not that the evil people enjoy violence, it is the violence in us that comes out as evil.

An Inspiring Speech

Since we are talking about the violence in Jammu and Kashmir, I would like to share with you the text of a speech given by Robert Kennedy when Martin Luther King jr. was assassinated. I found it moving, and I think it is relevant to our discussion.
It is rather long, but i feel it is worth spending some time over it carefully.

On the Mindless Menace of Violence

This is a time of shame and sorrow. It is not a day for politics. I have saved this one opportunity, my only event of today, to speak briefly to you about the mindless menace of violence in America which again stains our land and every one of our lives.

It is not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one - no matter where he lives or what he does - can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason.

Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.

"Among free men," said Abraham Lincoln, "there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs."

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.
Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach non-violence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.

I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.

Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.

Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again.

I got this text from darrenhardy.typepad.com. You can also listen to the speech by accessing a link there.