Shared Thoughts: June 2015

SHARED THOUGHTS.........01..07.15........7/7

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A son’s message to family, on his birthday.
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Dear family,

As I sit in heaven and watch you all every day, I try to let you know with signs that I never went away.
I hear you when you’re laughing and watch you as you sleep.
I even place my arms around you to calm you as you weep.
I see you wish the days away begging to have me home.
So I try to send you signs, so you know you are not alone.
Don’t feel guilty that you have Life that was denied to me.
Heaven is truly beautiful. Just you wait and see.
So live your Life, laugh again as I see you do …. though I can see the tears beNEATH YOUR laugh.
Enjoy yourself, be free.
Then I know with every breath you take, you’ll be taking one for me.
With love always, yours forever,
Lalit,
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Remembering our dear son, on his Birthday.

Happy Birthday Dear Lalit. Thank you for a wonderful message. Yes, we have seen your signs. We have felt your signs. Many times over the past 8 years.

We realise that we come with nothing, we go with nothing. We know this message from Gita. Nothing belongs to us. We belong to nothing. What was ours yesterday will not be ours tomorrow. So be it with you dear. In the span of time between birth and death, it is great to endear oneself to many … It is so nice to be remembered and to find a permanent place however small, even in few hearts. This dear, you have achieved, for you live in the hearts of so many who fondly love you and miss you.

We will abide by your message to live our Life in full measure. We will laugh though only you can see the pain beneath. We see your loved little one grow to be such a smart and sweet girl, you would be so proud of her. Love & care she receives in abundance and you’d be really happy, that she is in very safe and loving hands. Her sister and your two nieces are so lovely .. they fill our hearts of all emptiness we feel.

WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU THOUSAND REASONS TO CRY,

SHOW LIFE THAT YOU HAVE MILLION REASONS TO SMILE.

On your birthday today, we will smile for you and remember all the lovely moments we spent together that made your short 29 years with us so wonderful. We remember the happy moment this day you came into our lives as a healthy 9 pound bundle of joy!!. We remember your First birthday and the gifts that gave you world of thrills. We also remember your birthday in 2007 and the lunch we had together, with the ‘love of your life’ you were so proud of …

We accept that everything that is happening is God’s Plan and we pray you find eternal peace and we are able to live through this, until we meet.

With love,

Family.

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Remembering a dear brother,

The ‘Grateful Dead’ are performing their last ever tour.. oh how my Cheta (brother) would've loved it.

One of my earliest memories is of me trying to do my homework while AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Grateful Dead and the likes would be blaring at full volume. My 10 year old brain couldn't comprehend this music and my 16 year old brother probably couldn't comprehend this silly girl he had for a sister.

A year later I moved to Dubai with my parents while Cheta stayed back in Chennai to join college. Him there, me here. Our meetings were limited to 2 months of annual vacation when he would visit us in Dubai. In his brown jeans.. I can never forget those brown jeans. Which, after one wash would miraculously turn blue! The bane of my mum's life.

Years went by.. him there, me here. When I met with an accident and was lying in the hospital I had a sudden urge to see my Cheta. Of course my happiness on seeing him was short lived when the first thing he told me was 'Hey you look like Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins'! Who was not a handsome guy at all!! But that was him. He could diffuse any situation with his smile and a 'hey take it easy man' attitude.

We were growing up, him there, me here. My life was all about friends, friendships, boys & crushes. And at the ripe old age of 16 I had my first boyfriend. The first person I emailed was my Cheta. And he replied with some sage advice, 'have fun, live life but don't forget your studies'. What a guy huh.

Few years later he returned the favour when he met the woman of his dreams and mailed me about it. How honoured was I! That dream team eventually went on to create an amazing baby.. who is now turning into an amazing babe.

There are people who didn't think we were close enough. And maybe we weren't, in the traditional sense. But we had something, a special bond that I will never share with anyone else. He was always there for me when I needed him. All through the darkness of the last eight years, I can still smile because the last thing we ever did was share a hug. I have not one single regret of our short time together on this Earth.

Today we celebrate his 37th birthday. My mum will make sambar, I will bake a cake and we will light a lamp before his picture. Years have rolled past.

Even now, he's somewhere else and I'm still here :(

Madhvi.

Note: we would welcome your recollections on your interaction with Lalit or any particular incident of fun and laughter. .

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Have a peaceful week ahead. Also, wishing Ramadan Mubarak to our fasting friends.

MOHANDAS KIZHAKKE.

http://mohandas-sharedthoughts.blogspot.com/

Shared Thoughts – 06.06.15.

O Almighty!

You are the infinite, the universe is also infinite!

From infinite the infinite has come out!

Having taken infinite out of the infinite, the infinite remains.

O Almighty, May there be Peace, Peace, everywhere.

(Ishawashya Upanishad)

India is fighting a civil war. Unfortunately it is very true.

The article below and my comments herein are neither meant to express a particular political inclination nor are these in support of it in any way. For the first time, someone saw the present scenario unfolding in India from this perspective.. as a Civil War, which I wish to share with a wider circle through this platform.

I am not into politics. I am not into a debate on religion. I am an ordinary Indian citizen, minding my own business. Yet, it would be a travesty of truth, if I am to say, that I am far removed from the foray of politics and religion into our normal life, corrupting every single aspect of our life with no redemption anywhere in sight until now. Alas, now redemption is in sight and within reach, or so we feel. But will the ‘old order’ permit the next generation to be redeemed? This is the question.

The civil war in India is non-conventional. It is being fought in people’s minds. It is a war declared by the so called ‘old order’ against the new regime led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, ruling India since May 2014 mandated for 5 years. The two sides in this ‘civil war’ are simply defined as “Pro-Modi” & “Anti-Modi”…or “Communal” versus “Secular” . Such is the influence of Modi’s personality, that it evokes only two emotions – love or hate.

On the side of ‘hate’ army, is the media, almost in its entirety – print & visual. Every day, day in and day out, every news channel has only very trivial issues blown out of proportion solely aimed at discrediting the Modi Govt, with one issue or another.

Important speeches and Government announcements of various welfare schemes find mention only in the corners of inner pages of newspapers or no mention at all. Most national TV news channels ignore as far as possible, or debate only upon the flip sides of such measures, conjured up by a battery of analysts. .

So called Opposition’s main spent force Rahul's sneeze is re

ported as "Rahul blasts Modi"... Rahul's every statement of attack on Modi is dubbed as a potent God given cannon ball aimed at destroying the ‘evil force’ to rescue India. News reporting is sans sanity.

The Modi Govt is branded ‘communal’ ; a permanent branding by the ‘old order’ by which every ‘secular’ minded is supposed to keep a safe distance from. Successive brain washing through print media and visual media over the past several decades & generations have portrayed the picture of a communal person or party as pro-Hindu and ‘secular’ as anti-Hindu. Anti-communal is not enough to be secular. One has to be anti-Hindu and this is in a country where 80% are Hindus.

Herein lies the tragedy of a calculated campaign ever since Independence to force a feeling of guilt on Hindu mind set… a guilt to acknowledge “I am a Hindu”. In today’s India, such a statement can only be made if one accepts the label of being branded “communal” !!! The fact that Gandhi was shot by a Hindu, was a very convenient tool for the ‘old order’ to ban the organisation the assassin belonged to, effectively dashing any hopes for Hindus to find succour of any kind from this ‘old order’, which flourished at the expense of the guilt felt by the majority community. In mute silence the majority community witnessed and accepted grudgingly the largesse doled out to the minorities in the form of reservations, resulting in a clamour to be classified as ‘backward’ in a society striving for progress..

Thousands of years ago, during the late Bronze age to Iron Age, when civilization was nearly absent in most parts of the world, ancient India was blessed with a flourishing community, endowed with knowledge par excellence, gained by innumerable saints as a result of years of meditation of the highest order, which were conveyed orally to passing generations. These treasure house of knowledge were later compiled into volumes of sheer brilliance in poetic beauty, resulting in classics such as Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads, Ithihasas (Mahabharata, Ramayana), science of Yoga, etc etc. the list is endless.. these are beyond normal comprehension of ordinary people. In fact, the Vedas are known to be ‘apauruseya’ which means “not of a man, but superhuman” and impersonal, authorless. These are divine revelations.

It is a pity that such vast powerhouse of knowledge is left to die a slow death, only because there is no support system and no pride. Further there are no competent people who can understand and educate others in present India. The conquests of India by the Mughals and the West dealt a huge blow to the Indian culture that would have otherwise preserved this ancient knowledge.

It should have been the priority of the new independent India to repair this damage and resurrect the ancient Indian culture and infuse this into the new generations. Instead what happened was that they presided over the demise of Indian culture and the tragedy does not end here. It also made sure, that subsequent generations of Hindus would fight with each other – one segment feeling proud of being Hindu and the other imposing a sense of shame of being a Hindu, being Hindu themselves …and the latter is winning.. It is time to put an end to this onslaught of our ancient culture.

Lately, we are witness to different types of attempts by anyone who matters or not, to cast aspersion on the majority community. Celebrities have taken a fancy to portray themselves as tragic heroes or heroines not only on the silver screen, but also off the screen to drive home the point that minorities are a deprived lot, at the receiving end of a brutal Hindu majority.

I recall Shabna Azmi the actor who was loved by ALL Indians, who went on air in BBC with a sob story that she could not buy an apartment in Mumbai, becos she is a Muslim. Azharuddin, the cricketer, who was loved by ALL Indians, suddenly played victim using the Muslim card, when he was caught and found guilty in match fixing scam along with few other players notably late Hanse Cronje. I lost my respect for these two very lowly Indians who did not deserve the love and adoration bestowed upon them by a country of one billion.

Purely from a neutral point of view, one will see some reason in the lucid expressions of Mr. M. Vidyasagar, an eminent scientist. It is time for right thinking Indians to wake up from this slumber and feel some sense of pride in our ancient culture. The present anti-Hindu tirade, manifesting itself in the garb of incessant Hate Modi campaign must be neutralised.

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India’s Civil War. (by M. Vidyasagar)

This war is being fought in the battlefield of people’s minds through systematic disinformation spread by a horde unwilling to accept the democratic verdict of the people of India. Choose your side, and fight.

India is at present undergoing a civil war. This civil war is not being fought on a conventional battlefield, but in the battlefield of people’s minds. The armaments used to fight this war are not conventional weapons, but rather, the weapons of disinformation.

On one side is the present government led by Narendra Modi and its well-wishers. On the other side is a horde that is unwilling to accept the democratic verdict of the people of India, and/or unable to accept that a person starting his life in humble circumstances has risen to the position of Prime Minister.

By now it is clear that the dynastic Congress Party has systematically entrenched poverty as a permanent feature of the Indian landscape. In order to perpetuate the poverty of Indians, the Congress party consciously imprisoned Indian citizens in a vast web of government rules and regulations, and perverted every institution in democratic India, including the judiciary and the media.

In order to legitimize its stranglehold on Indian society, the dynasty has also created a vast ecosystem consisting of “the poverty industry” in the form of NGOs whose survival demands that India remain a desperately poor country, or at the very least, is perceived to be so. Thus, when the outcome of the 2014 election was not in favour of the dynasty, the Congress could summon up all of its foot soldiers in the judiciary, the media, and the most inappropriately named “civil society.”

What else can explain the daily dose of misinformation in the media? For the past many months, we have had a plethora of accounts of “church attacks,” most of which were debunked as being either inside jobs or simple law and order problems. The rape of a nun in West Bengal was instantly attributed to “militant Hindus emboldened by the election of Modi,” until it was discovered that the perpetrators were Bangladeshi Muslims.

Just a couple of days ago, we had one Misbah Quadri claiming that she was denied housing in an apartment complex merely because she was a Muslim. Even the most inexperienced cub reporter would have gone to the housing complex in question and verified in person whether in fact the complex was “Muslim-free.” But our journalists sitting in their air-conditioned offices were happy to enough to accept this victimhood narrative at face value and play it up for all it was worth.

A minor newspaper, Mid-Day in Mumbai, was apparently the only media agency to take the trouble of visiting the complex in question, to find that there are already Muslims living there (thus blowing Quadri’s story to smithereens), and unearthing the fact that Quadri was being evicted because she did not maintain her payments.

But the rest found it all too expedient to persist with their false narrative of Muslim persecution in “Modi’s India.”

Even as that particular hatchet job on the government blew up in the faces of its perpetrators, comes another one that IIT Madras “banned” a “student group” for “having criticized the Prime Minister.” The Dean of Students at IITM has already stated that the group was provisionally de-recognized because it did not follow procedures, but none of that could be heard in the din.

By jumping into the fray at IITM merely to score some cheap points against the HRD Minister, opposition parties and the corrupted media are again showing that they do not care a whit for the welfare of Indian society, and that their sole interest is in regaining power by hook or crook.

The IITs are among our finest educational institutions, a stark contrast to JNU which is a cesspool of politics and mediocrity. Over-politicization of the “student body” at any institution can have only one outcome: JNU-ization, if I might coin a phrase. This is why I was adamantly opposed to the introduction of humanities departments in the IITs. While in theory, these subjects are supposed to broaden the minds of the students, the reality is that such departments attract intellectually inferior minds for the most part.

Let us not remain under any illusion that the Quadri affair or the IITM affair will be the last. As soon as one issue gets resolved, the media will throw up 10 others, like a hydra-headed monster for which it is a proxy. This is why I call it a civil war. Or perhaps one should borrow from Christian mythology and call it Armageddon, the final decisive battle between the forces of good and evil.

I was born on September 29, 1947—just 45 days after Independence. My entire life has been wasted by the pro-poverty agenda of the Congress Party (disguised as a “pro-poor” agenda). Each time a potential saviour appears on the horizon, be it Jayaprakash Narayan in 1975, or the first NDA government in 1998, or now the Narendra Modi government, the dynasty strikes back with ever greater force.

Each one of these prospective saviours has had a more difficult task compared to his predecessor, because the forces of evil get more and more entrenched after each victory. For me, the present government offers the last hope that India would become a worthwhile country within my lifetime. If we as a nation miss this opportunity to uproot the forces of evil once and for all, then I at least won’t be around for our next opportunity, assuming that it will come at all.

There is only one glimmer of hope on the horizon. Until now, the corrupt media has had a monopoly on information dissemination and could thus control the narrative. With the rise of social media, that monopoly has been broken. But the breaking of the monopoly does NOT by itself, weaken the hold that the corrupt media has on our collective fortunes.

The rest of us must seize that opening and provide a fully competitive alternative to the distorted anti-national garbage that is constantly being put out by the media. We cannot afford to be complacent nor can we afford to underestimate the magnitude of the task at hand.

To repeat, India is in a civil war. As Lord Krishna told Arjuna “Yuddhaya krita nischayah” meaning- You must fight with full vigour.

M Vidyasagar