Katy Perry does a Facebook timeline style music video.
Some time in the not-so-far future, someone would get really pissed off with all existing religions and ask the same stupid question, “Why can’t we all just get along?” After trying some twenty three times to rephrase that question in order to get an answer that makes sense, he will decide to set things right by starting his own religion.
He would specify tolerance and peaceful co-existence as the benchmarks of his proposed faith. He would also, as an afterthought add a point about its being essential that the followers of this faith always greet each other with a smile. A token of their benevolence.
Then the religion would take off and convert millions with its straightforward attitude about life and living and stuff like that. The guy would live to be a hundred and die happy in the thought that he made a difference, and that nothing more than a smile would see to it that everyone gets along.
Ages down the line, when the image of the guy with a smile and two thumbs up is God to millions more and when entire states have adopted Smileyism as their faith of choice, the emphasis surreptitiously shifts from the goodwill to the token smile. Smilies would despise those who don’t continuously smile. Mile long texts would be written to prove the origin of The Guy in some far away and mystic land immediately following cosmic signs. Smiley constellations would be charted in the starmaps of the world.
Further down the line, the figure-heads of Smileyism in different states would openly declare their preference for certain cosmetic tools that help keep the smile bright for longer. Smileyism splits and the sects start persecuting each other. Myths of The Guy returning again to rid the earth of the others are born. Around the same time in an ardently Smileyistic family somewhere in the world, a young Smiley finds himself disillusioned with the faith. He asks the world, “Why can’t we all just get along?”
Ursula K. Le Guin
First you acknowledge the existence of evil. Then you start assigning the quality to others. Then you show pity and try, rather self-righteously, to bring them over to the good side (your side). They refuse of course. So you, for ‘the greater good’, start killing and destroying.
I would rather not believe in evil at all, thank you very much! Evil is an idea. It turns you by making you believe in its existence. That is how it works. See no evil, there will be no evil. Instead, you will be faced with a reality that is much harder to bear — that the object of your hatred / pity / condescension / anger is just like you.
Here is the unedited (and therefore much more fun) interview that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi gave to Rahul Kanwal of Headlines Today. Also see the interview that he gave to IBN7. Watch out for the polite challenge he issues to Kanwal in the course of the talk. Would be interesting if HT carries it through.
Ulrik McKnight throws some light on the presence of a cyber battlefront that India seems to be underestimating (at the very least) or ignoring. In particular, he draws attention to continued security breaches being made by China into sensitive Indian installations.
China has repeatedly been found to use its expertise as a cyber-power to access highly confidential information relating to the national security of other nations, including India. India should take note, not only because of its historically contentious relationship with China, but also because of China’s undeniably close ties with Pakistan, a country that continues to sponsor terror across India. Just as armies fight on land, and navies at sea, national cyber-forces now fight in the online world. Cyber warfare is the new battlefront. But it is a battle that India, like many countries, is ill-equipped to wage. This has left the country under-defended against sustained, damaging state-level attacks.
The answer to the above question becomes a tricky affair when you realise that history-writers in India can be very selective about what they choose to term history and what they don’t. A friend pointed out last night that perhaps the reason the Godhra riots continue to occupy so much space in Indian public discourse is that it was the first ever instance of communal violence televised by our mass media. It is nobody’s case that Godhra didn’t deserve attention, but when one goes to the extent of calling it the “worst ever” communal violence in the history of modern India, there are somethings that do need to be cleared up.
That is exactly what this piece by Kanchan Gupta published in Rediff.com in 2005 does. In order to get a hang of the problems India faces, it is important to have a proper perspective on matters as sensitive as communal violence. Over-the-top hyperbole painting things in black and white does not make for a useful environment to do so.
More often than not we come across claims of ‘thousands of Muslims butchered by Hindu fanatics in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat.’ This is a lie that has been repeated ad nauseam since that terrible day when Hindus travelling by the Sabarmati Express were roasted alive after their coach was set ablaze by Muslim fanatics. It has been repeated the most by India’s Marxists who subscribe to the Goebbelsian tactic of repeating a lie till in the popular perception it comes to be identified as the truth. And, it is on the strength of such contrived truth that the Marxists make preposterous claims. For instance, the claim made in a recent editorial in the CPI-M propaganda journal People’s Democracy that the communal violence in Gujarat was ‘the worst in modern Indian history.’
