Cracking the code

"The Hunter"

The hunter crouches in his blind.
'Neath camouflage of every kind.
This grown-up man, with luck and pluck,
Is hoping to outwit a duck. -- Ogden Nash

Just a small reaction to a couple of anonymous reactions to my post on the asinine stance of the pompous and lunatic fringe of the Catholic Church calling to ban a not-so-hot piece of fiction – the Da Vinci Code.

The Brother of the West Wind [hopefully nothing to do with gastric juices]
seems to say that if the lunatic fringe of the Muslim community goes on rampage --
[I heard very sane voices from the Muslim community including a descendant of the Prophet – a Saudi Arabian princeling-- categorically say on the BBC that the Prophet (MPBUH) would never have approved the ruckus being created by fundamentalists over the cartoons. He even said that destroying the Bahmian Buddhas was anti-Islamic.] --
and if the lunatic fringe of the Sangh Parivar takes umbrage at Valentine’s Day cards –
Then the Christian lunatic fringe can also get a film banned if they want to… tsk .. tsk…
So the Church Militant rises again and Jesus Christ is buried…..

The second anonymous posting … a long torturous piece possibly posted by the same brother, interestingly uses the same language as the Sangh Parivar … ‘pseudo secularists’.. etc… etc…

Fascism raises its ugly head. What difference between Hitler and the neo-nazis of the present day: the terrorists of the cross, the crescent or the cause of the Parivar?

Heil il Papa –Ze Nazi Pope and his new breed of black-shirts [or turncoats , who will not use their God-given intellect. It’s so sad..]

Dogs of War???

NO ONE is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite – Nelson Mandela


I have been silent for a few days. Observing. Cogitating. Listening to so many anger-filled voices, spewing so much of venom.

Politically, the resident doctors’ strike is a replay of the Mandal Nightmare that shook the VP Singh Government. In a country where resources are limited, and state-of-the-art educational resources are scarce, the competition becomes fiercer. And here we are, fighting like dogs over a plate of tripe. The ones with the most muscle bark and bite the loudest, as they want to snaffle the juiciest bits. The weaker ones retreat to the very edge of the bowl, and then there are those poor mongrels which can’t even get a sniff in.

There is this one plate of tripe, and a kennel-full of canines to feed. No prizes to guess which dogs muscle in on the feed … a couple or three of the strong ones. But that plateful of tripe is not to nourish the three strongest dogs, and so the guy in charge has to make sure that the others in the pack get some share as well.

When the man in charge wants to set aside some of the tripe, the stronger dogs growl, bare their teeth, even try to bite. So the man has to resort to a stick, to force, in order to facilitate the weaker ones to snatch a bite or two from the plate. Now there are far more weaker dogs than stronger ones … and the objective of the keeper is to see that the special, nourishing tripe is utilized in a way that the general well-being of the kennel is maintained, not just a few smart dogs with velvet coats.

I have witnessed the howls of protests, the bared fangs, the threats of the top-dogs who are using everything in their power to hang on to that plate of tripe.

The top dogs have used the internet, the English language, and their vast international resources. Well, natural animal instincts at work here. Might is right in the animal kingdom, and might is not just brute force… it’s pedigree, breeding, the whole blue ribbon.

Social Justice, however is something that animals can’t understand. That the meek will inherit the earth. That the extra cloak in your closet belongs to your naked shivering brother….

And perhaps therein lies the rub...

Why we need reservation

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field. Edmund Burke 1729 -97.

My take on the reservation issue exactly.


Most of the real India doesn’t have a level playing field.
Have you chaps who are making such a fuss about skipping a couple of meals all in the hope of making a point in the overfed media, ever have tried to live on what the poor in India make?
Between Rs 60 and Rs 90 a day! And only if and when they can get work. Most people on the poverty line [those fortunate to earn a dollar a day] hardly scrape together a thousand rupees a month because work is seasonal and scarce.
And they have to feeds their whole family on that.

The reservation issue is the biggest non-issue ever. Why increase seats when most of the real Dalits can’t ever make it near those high-tech Medical institutions, ... except to clean toilets, maybe.

And let me tell you exactly why we need more doctors from the ‘lower castes’ even though they may not be as ‘brilliant’ as the well fed and pampered upper classes: we need them to look after their own community, to work in places where your so-called upper class doctor yuppie kids will never be. To man those several thousand health centres in rural India that have absentee doctors. To give the very poor and disadvantaged access to health care. A Dalit doctor will be a damn sight better at forensic medicine than the Brahmin fellow who sits outside while an underling does the autopsy, because good Brahmins never touch dead bodies. I have researched this one and I have seen this with my own eyes, so don’t get cute with me and contest it.

The government of India has been subsidising medical studies for decades, and it only benefits the rich, the urban, and those with means. It’s time that some of that subsidised education is accessible to doctors who will not flinch from bringing succour to the untouchables, the Dalits, the humble communities in the remote villages.

An ordinary non-brilliant physician is a damn sight better than no physician at all.

Da Vinci Code

The politics of the Catholic Church surfaces once again

Pity those foolish people who are braving the heat protesting over a stupid film!
Is the Christian faith so fragile that a fictional movie can smash it?
Looking at those absolute idiots protesting makes me think that The Church of Christ
must have been built on SAND... must we sacrifice freedom of expresion to base sentimentality???

So what if Jesus Christ is linked with Mary Magdalene ... if they say he married he and had kids ... I certainy can't picture JC himself getting his underwear in a knot over that little piece of fiction ...

When will all these religious fundamentalists SHUT UP and let the rest of us people live in peace and enjoy a flick or read a book.

For Christ's sake, the film has been reviewed as a bloated drama... it's panned by the critics ... who but the stupidest would even BELIEVE that it's a true story ... The Church is terribly pie-eyed. Catholic priests have said that there's nothing wrong with the film... uGH!!!

I suggest that if these fundamentalist Christians feel so strongly about this entirely stupid film, they should climb upon the nearest cross and crucify themselves to death .. it would certainly relieve the earth of a tremendous burden ...

Mother's day ...

Mother of mine
you gave to me
all of my life to do as i please
I owe everything
I have
to you
Mother, sweet mother of mine....

So here's another 'imported' festival gaining ground in India.
Mother's day , ce;ebrated on the second sunday of May
is probably of American Catholic origin
the Month of May is dedicated to
Our Lady the Queen of Heaven
and a special time of devotion that devout Catholics have
to felicitate Mary, the mother of Jesus

Anyway,
there are a great many things that are not so great
inspired, or driven by evil maters around the world ...

But, happy celebrations to all
and for the time being
MUM's the word ....

nuthin' to say

if a fire raged
in one room of your house
could you sleep in the next room?

if a dead body lay
in one room of your house
could you sing in the next room?

If corpses lay rotting
in one room of your house
could you pray in the next room?

if yes
then i have nothing
nothing at all to say to you ...

And I see no bravery

And I see no bravery
No bravery in your eyes
Only sadness…

James Blunt

Once upon a time there was a tavern
Where we used to raise a glass or two
Remember how we passed away the hours
Dreaming of the things that we would do…

As I scan the inner reaches of cyberspace
I come across this news item from Iraq
That some ‘moral enforcers’ entered a neighbourhood
Dragged out a fourteen year old boy and butchered him
Because he was ‘gay’ …
The reality was that he had no other option but to have sex with other men
In return for food or cash
In order to feed his starving fatherless family
This is the fallout of the so-called war against terror
It has reduced a secular nation, no doubt a dictatorship, but a fairly stable, secular one
To utter chaos, anarchy, and it has unleashed the blinkered forces of unreason.

I see the look of defiance in the eyes of many an activist
fighting for the basic rights of those in same-sex relationships.
I read about the protests and processions in Bangalore, in Bengal, and elsewhere
These protests by Hijras, transgender people, kothis, Gay men, lesbians calling for an end to discrimination and that they be granted basic human dignity …
And I sense, not just the bravery of these activists who speak for the silent majority
But the infinite sense of sadness ...

Heterosexuality isn’t any more natural than homosexuality, it’s just more common.

Wordification … vilification … venomspewing…. Rot

Cry, the beloved country … but how?

Gujarat state, the birthplace of the “apostle of peace” in the modern world
Is the post-modern graveyard of sanity
The fifth Reich rears its head : gorgon-like,

A four hundred year old sufi tomb-shrine
Labelled an encroachment and razed by men in uniform

Who’s happy about it?
Certainly not those of us who hold our own beliefs as sacred as those of others.
Certainly the hundreds of Christians, Jains, Hindus who would take part in the rituals around the tomb are dumbstruck, shocked, sorrowful.
Certainly those who love history and heritage can look at this as an act of insanity, remember the Taliban and the Bamiyan Buddhas?

Strange how these rightists, these fundamentalists work together.

The Orthodox, narrow, fundamentalist Muslim fringe can’t stand the Sufis
Because the sufi saints spoke about a divine love that surpassed the narrow limits of written lines on some ancient parchment.

The Muslim fundamentalists call the sufi cult an aberration, a satan, something to be eliminated…

So who’s happy at this turn of events?
The Muslim fundamentalist clerics … the splinter Islamic groups … those that spread hatred and separation in the name of religion.

How wonderful for them … the sufi shrine being destroyed …
and their false doctrine of Moslem-being-victimised can be vindicated

so riots …
and then the pseudo-doctrine of Minority-being appeased
and Hindu-being-victimised can flower…

Remember, every time the bell tolls
It tolls for me … and you….

Let’s not get trapped in vilification and verbiage
Let the power of bhakti… of divine love .. shine all the stronger

On the 30th of April, right after the Bihar Low-cost videofest, I was admitted to Holy Family Hospital, Kurji with severe renal colic, this post springs from a weird experience I had there…

I belong to the generation whose parents spent a great deal of time instilling ‘up-bringing’ into. Along the way we picked up certain notions that are being severely tested these days. One of them is that you can rely on whatever the doctor says, because a good doctor always works in the best interests of his patients.

Another belief that has been taking a beating is that the doctors in the good old mission hospital are doughty pioneers who do their best to serve their patients, not for filthy lucre, but because they respond to a higher calling. The good Lord knows that in the many summers that I have roamed this earth, I have had the great good fortune to have benefited from the ministrations of such angels in the shape of human healers – Dr Anne Neidfield MMS, Dr Ekka, both surgeons at the Holy Family hospital at Mandar, now in Jharkhand’s Ranchi District and ‘Doctor’ Tom Gunther, an apothecary who dispensed DeChane’s herbal medicines that saved many a child from the grim reaper in those days when routine immunisation was unheard of in India – were such people. They walk the earth no more.

What does one say when they come across a doctor in a Mission Hospital whose whole purpose in treating patients seems to be to direct them towards another hospital and more expensive treatment, literally scaring them off?

This slimeball, who had responsibility for my case, confronted me with reports within 12 hours of my stay in the hospital, suggesting that the levels of certain chemicals in my blood were unusually high and suggested that there was indication of possible kidney damage and that I should waste no time in getting the latest non invasive treatment for a stone in my left kidney and also visit a nephrologist who also happened to own a “stone clinic” and a hospital. Holy family hospital, he warned, did not have the competency…. Strange, I thought, because I had received very satisfactory treatment for stones in my right kidney from this very hospital almost twenty years ago …. Being the suspicious creature that I am, I did some quick checking up using my mobile phone, to find out that the particular joint he was trying to pack me off to was his favourite on the referral list, and some other patients had not-good experience there. And very curiously, I found out that the calculus was not in my kidney, and that the particular chemicals that were ‘abnormally high’ were so because of the extreme pain I was in when the tests were taken.

I immediately switched to another surgeon, a Doctor Hamidi who had butchered me before, when my appendix ruptured in the 90’s and had done a pretty good job of putting me back on the road. Guess what, a second round of tests showed that the chemical balance was normal, so IVP could be performed – what a relief, my kidney wasn’t damaged, and I left the hospital with choices, all information provided by the doctor so I can decide for myself what to do with the calculus bouncing around inside.

It’s a pity that today’s mission hospitals have few medical men with vocations, merely lots of younger ‘career doctors’ who are time-servers … wonder what will happen when the old guard, the practicising professional stalwarts hang up their stethoscopes?