A genuine ode

I am sure most of you would agree when I say that we do not need any special day to express our love for our mothers. Loving is a continual process or rather, a way of living. I don't wish to sound pedantic but for each one of us, they are our first teachers...the academy shifting from their lap to their knees. I think a mother's love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible. Please let me extend it our fathers too. Our parents lay the building blocks of the kind of human being we grow up to be.
Not anyone but our parents are the most affected by our success and failures...yes, even more than ourselves.
After a long and hectic day at work, I was relieved to find a vacant seat in the local bus. My eyes rested on a father-daughter duo. They were seemingly new to the city. This person pointed the India Gate to his darling daughter but his eyes were admiring the smile the lit up his daughter’s face. Not even once he spared another look to the monumental document of our modern history. For him, the excitement and happiness on the angelic face of his daughter meant the world. A silent prayer from my heart went to God to bless them.
On each day of our lives, our parents make deposits in our memory banks. We owe them...our lives, our being, our smile, our beliefs,...everything.

Can never thank God enough.

A serious concern...

Of late there has been a mounting discourse about the meaning and content of Indian identity provoked by the various communal crises afflicting India. I am talking about what happened in Vadodara recently.
The wounds of the communal conflict of 2002 in Gujrat have not healed yet; and it faced Vadodra episode.
Ironically, after four long years, justice seems to have finally caught up with the perpetrators of the anti-Muslim violence in the Indian state of Gujarat. Nine persons were convicted on Friday by a court in Mumbai for the killing of 14 in the notorious Best Bakery incident in Baroda. The bakery was set alight by angry sword-wielding Hindu extremists during the orgy of communal violence in Gujarat in 2002 in which some 2000 people, mainly Muslims, were killed. It is viewed as a little hope, as the first step in bringing to book those responsible for the terrible massacres that swept through the state. At the height of the troubles, Gandhi’s home state was overrun by bloodthirsty mobs killing Muslims in a brutal and chillingly systematic manner as the authorities looked on. It was the worst communal violence witnessed in India since Partition.

But what does one expect from this state where people are so communalised. Where would this hatred take Gujarat and the country as a whole? The twentieth century politics of deprivation has eroded the culture's confidence. Hindu chauvinism has emerged fom the competition for resources in a contentious democracy.

Amitav Kumar in 'Husband of a Fanatic' rightly said:

"It is not merely respect for the other's religion that is important; what is essential is that we have respect for the other's rights as a human being. The fundamentalists in India deny the former and thereby also the latter; the secularists fight for the latter but pay very little attantion to the former. Both aspects can come together in the celebration of a shared life."

We cannot wait for a miracle to alter the situation, we ourselves have to be the deus ex machina. Are we working towards it yet?