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| Thursday, September 07, 2006 |
| India is my country and i love its rich and varied....... |
This happened during the recent mumbai blasts. (What an irony i need to add the adjective recent) My neighbour is a kannadiga and runs a bakery. He was speaking about the blast with my dad in my presence. He told us the incident where he met an auto driver in bangalore who was an ex-serviceman. The driver told that he quit the job because army was not in the same way as portrayed in the outside world. There was a sectarian environment. He accused muslims in military for supporting the terrorists in india. My neighbour, a gentleman in his 50's bought his story and was arguing against muslims and their participation in indian army. "How could they infiltrate without the support of muslims?"
Now, before everybody jumping into attack mode against this old man for his views, let me tell something about him. He is not the usual bigotry one would falsely associate with iyengars. He is a kind man, has a good rapport with the colony people (rare in a higher middle class colony like mine), a hard-worker and helps poor people. The intention of this post is not to shower diatribe on him but to question why did he buy the story. He could have cited the recent controversial census which gave the report that representation of muslims in army is very low. He could have defended his fellow countrymen ignoring a story from a stranger. Afterall, his customers included muslims even though his shop's name has iyengar in it. I am not sure but i think the man's ability to strike similarities among people is both a boon and a bane. Man has this ability to form groups according to the need of the hour. The groups could be based on colour, caste, religion, place, language.. the list is endless. Even in our college, the place where we can expect partisan views the least, we had this oors concept, north-south, madras-nonmadras, paalaru-ponnaiyaru etc. Recently, there has been a sickening trend of associating oneself with their companies. Something like me and prad greeting "Hi companies". "Yintha madras payalgalae yipadi thaan" is not that harsh as "Yintha muslim payalgalae yipadi thaan". But, they are both similar. People who are willing to say the former, would at some point of time say the latter also. Man is so fond of forming groups that he will lose his identity as a human, as a living thing, as a wonderful creation of God.
I jumped into the discussion although i was not invited. I argued "Uncle, your argument is baseless. LTTE is a terrorist organisation in its own right though it started as a liberation movement. They involve drug trafficking, child soldiers etc. Does that mean all tamils are terrorists? Does that mean i am also a terrorist?". Sharp came the reply. "Hey babu, nuvvu tamil kaathura telugu vaadu". |
posted by Ramkumar @ 8:54 PM   |
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| 5 Comments: |
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This article is deep as well as it is tricky ground to tread, so I shall look into this artcle from another light. That of my alter ego Peter :)
The usual pain-in-the-ass vocabulary dude in me noticed that you say "the usal bigotry". Me thinks that it is "the usual bigot"
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accepted peter.
btw, i thought this wud bring many a discussion but found nothing.
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Good to see that the real peter atlast accepts peter as a part of him. Prad - that's one step u've moved closer to reality :P
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okie - something interesting and related to this post! Pretty bad really - but interesting yes!
A female from Gujarat refused to speak to me coz i am a Muslim :) This happened long back but i got this ocnfirmed only y'day. She saw my profile in PG, wanted to ask tips for GMAT preps and sent me an SMS. When she got to know my name, she went dead.
She got back in touch with me y'day and agreed that she ran away the other day coz i am a Muslim! Nothing wrong with her - that's the divide these politicians and their games have caused in our society. And as an individual who has seen the riots happening - she sure wud be affected by it.
This was like expected and all that, but it was kind of weird to experience it first hand :D
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yeah - check my blog for a detailed post on the same :)
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This article is deep as well as it is tricky ground to tread, so I shall look into this artcle from another light. That of my alter ego Peter :)
The usual pain-in-the-ass vocabulary dude in me noticed that you say "the usal bigotry". Me thinks that it is "the usual bigot"