Click here for a listing of all published essays on my website.
The different categories as listed below represent my broad interests and roughly outlines the topics I intend to cover in due course of time.
INDIA
This category is really close to my heart and the one I’m really excited about. I hope to cover the following topics under this section:
History
When I say history, I don’t mean going over my school textbooks again and writing about what was told to me. I’m referring to the part that has been wiped clean from India’s history books and a part I believe is vital to understanding our today.
According to the information that I’ve come across lately, the Islamic invasion of India between the 12th and the 16th centuries was extremely violent. Millions of my countrymen were slaughtered and a vast majority of them were forcefully converted to Islam. In hindsight, the ISIS and the methods it employs today are not new in any way. The intent of these invaders (and now the ISIS) was to establish an Islamic caliphate across the globe, something that has continued for centuries now and the path chosen in order to attain this goal has been anything but peaceful.
This is not the worst part as far as India is concerned. The worst part, as mentioned before, is the fact that this strand of history was hidden from my school textbooks. I was taught how the arrival of the Islamic invaders altered the architecture of the buildings, the musical instruments they introduced and related noise. I was never told that the culling of the Indians at the hands of these invaders was probably the worst genocide in the history of the world, eclipsing even the Jewish genocide, about which I was taught at length and know more about than my own people’s killings. If that wasn’t enough, these invaders were presented to me as my heroes, akin to the Jews being taught to worship Hitler.
One might wonder what could my intent be behind investigating this genocide. Remember the ethnic cleansing of the Kashmiri Pandits (Hindus) from Jammu and Kashmir by Islamic terrorists under the garb of establishing the ‘Nizam-e-Mustafa‘ (rule of Allah/government a per the Sharia law). This purging of Hindus from a state in a Hindu majority country went without a public outcry or any strong action from government of the day. Moreover, I cannot imagine this scenario being played out in any other country, wherein the citizens belonging to the dominant faith followed in their country are forced out of their home state simply because they didn’t share the extremist’s view on how to attain Allah after death. Could people have forced the government’s hand in acting against this atrocity had they been aware of their violent history and would have put their foot down against any further abuse? Would the government then, have handled terrorism differently and not seen going soft on terrorists as a ploy to keep India’s largest minority, the Muslims, in good humor?
In addition, I plan to explore various other topics pertaining to India’s stormy political scene in the post-independence era like the emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi, the life and times of Jai Prakash Narayan and the JP Movement of the 70s, India’s wars with Pakistan and China and P.V. Narasimha Rao’s tenure as the Prime Minister of India.
The Self-deprecating Indian
Call it the hangover of the British ‘Raj’ who left India in 1947, Indians, even today, possess a colonial mindset. This regressive thinking not only translates into the way we behave with people of other nationalities, we end up disparaging ourselves consciously, and at times, unconsciously. It’s difficult for us to acknowledge our own strengths and appreciate what we’ve accomplished since independence. Rather, we’re at the forefront of belittling our own government and our own people. The Commonwealth Games held in Delhi in 2010 is the prime example. Our media was so critical of the preparation for the games that a few countries nearly decided to give the event a skip. It was only after the players from these very countries appreciated the arrangements that we stopped criticizing ourselves. I’ll cite other such examples and investigate in detail as to how this self-deprecation has translated into us shooting ourselves in our own foot over and over and over again, all because we are too ignorant to acknowledge and take in pride our accomplishments.
The Present
Since the Narendra Modi government came to power at the center in May 2014, the largely leftist media has been working relentlessly to discredit the government and put it in a spot by highlighting non-issues. Selective reporting and projecting an atmosphere of intolerance has been their bread and butter ever since. I’ll attempt to expose the hypocrisy of India’s ‘intelligentsia’, whose views resonate with mostly the über rich south Delhi/south Mumbai wannabe crowd favoring anything remotely western over the rustic and earthy appeal of the Prime Minister and the people supporting him, which is too crude and unrefined for their taste.
Moreover, I plan to read up on other issues as well, like the one related to allegations against Mother Teresa of prodding people to embrace Catholicism under the garb of her social work, while simultaneously exploring maladies like casteism in our society that make people susceptible to such antics. I’m guilty of dismissing the Tipu Sultan controversy in Karnataka and the meat ban during the Jain festival in Maharashtra as noise by the Hindu right, only to realize that it was selective reporting by our media to put the government of the day in a spot. So when there is an allegation against Mother Teresa, I’d rather read up on the issue on my own from seemingly objective sources as opposed to trusting the clearly biased media.
The United States
Under this category, I’ll explore issues that perplex me about the United States society. For instance, the notions of ‘southern pride’ and ‘vibrant southern heritage’ when the south was the hotbed of slavery in the past, the remnants of which remain even today, mostly in the form of bigotry and racism. With such a grisly past, what aspect of southern history could possibly constitute pride?
I’ll also be looking into the workings of the society in the post segregation era, the associated fragility and the dangers posed by the excessive use of police force against people of color, mostly the black Americans.
Society
Broadly speaking, this section will cater to how our present day societies evolved and the role of important historical events in shaping these societies. This section will cater to topics related to terrorism, racism and religion to name a few.
Sifting through numerous articles and op-eds across media, one observes that the inherent biases are anything but subtle. Hate and bigotry are countered by more hate and more bigotry. A proponent of ‘All lives Matter’ will hurl racial abuses at those supporting the ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaign, while the latter does not mince words in ridiculing the former, also on racial lines and propagating even more hatred. The attack on a gay night club in Florida was an Islamic terror attack for the right and an outcome of lax gun control laws in the United States for the left. One-upmanship and catering to a targeted audience takes precedence over any attempt to even work towards a solution. In the end, no one wins. Some egos are bruised, some are massaged, and it all dies down until the next flare up.
These are the kind of issues that I’ll be exploring in this section, while simultaneously trying to find a common ground between the right and the left.
