The day I stopped drinking milk

What or who inspired you to write this book?
There is no one in particular who inspired me to write this book. I have been fortunate to have met and interacted with people from different walks of life and socio-economic strata, all of whom have influenced and impacted my life in many ways. But I must admit that one woman in a remote village in Orissa taught me the lesson of my life.

I was in the village building a school for children, when there was a heavy downpour... My translator took me to a hut nearby... The owner of the hut asked if I wanted tea or coffee and I said I do not drink tea or coffee. He then offered me milk and I agreed, so as not to hurt his feelings. Then I overheard his wife, who was trying to pacify her bawling baby, tell her husband that she could offer tea with a few spoons of milk or fish curry or leftover rice cooked with water, as there was only one glass of goat’s milk left for the baby. She also told her husband, “That lady has grey hair but no common sense. Doesn’t she realise we are poor people who have to work hard to even get a glass of milk? She shouldn’t be asking for an expensive drink like milk.” The couple did not know that I could understand Oriya.

When my host brought some milk for me, I refused saying that I had forgotten that I was on a fast that day. From that day on, I drink milk only at home. I realised that I am a difficult and expensive guest, especially in the company of poor people.

More Here

Justice Markandey Katju's remarks on media are not off the mark

Much of what Justice Katju says is not new. In media circles, the falling standards of the profession have been a subject of discussion for a very long time. For example, it is almost universally admitted that younger journalists joining newspapers, magazines or television channels are much less aware of Indian history, politics and society than their counterparts a few decades ago. This can partly be blamed on the education system, which relies more on rote learning than on genuine enquiry. A system where students can and do get 99 per cent marks can only be an assembly line where talent and intellect is measured by grades which reflect a good memory and little else.

To cater to the demand for journalists, colleges have eagerly taken to offering media courses at the bachelors level, but without the requisite faculty; a lot of the output of these courses is, to put in bluntly, rubbish. But such is the need in a sector that has grown exponentially over the last decade and more, that almost everyone lands a job soon enough, writing or thinking skills be damned. There are scores of channels and hundreds of publications looking for staff and the general tendency is to just take what you can get and then hope that they will learn something on the job.

The bigger question is, what of the job itself? Regrettably, Justice Katju’s remarks about the frivolous nature of the media are not wide off the mark. Though it is wrong to paint the entire media scene with one brush — the “media” can include the serious as well as the trashy channels, the quality papers as well as the rags — the perception is that TV channels are about hyperbole and the newspapers are dumbing down news. The person holding the remote control sees either panellists shouting at each other, film songs, filmstars airing their views on everything, cricket and astrology. And this is on news, not entertainment channels. One often hears viewers ask — why do correspondents get so breathless while reporting, why do anchors shout so much? Bollywood stories make it on the front pages and the supplements are of course full of glamour.

Sidharth Bhatia in The Asian Age. Here

India's Foreign policy and Malayali Interests

National Security adviser S.S. Menon was in Tehran on March 8, the eve of the Persian New Year. Attempted flattery went awry as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s office let Mr Menon’s view be known that the President’s predictions of global economic and political developments were prescient.

The national security adviser’s Tehran sojourn was perhaps based on the following assumptions:

• a convergence in concerns about post-US Afghanistan; 
• Iranian worry over Gulf Cooperation Council-Saudi Arabia and the Iran stand-off over Bahrain’s street uprising by the majority Shia population; 
• and the Indian United Nations Security Council membership till 2011-12. Such reasoning subsumed that Iranian national imperatives have remained static over the last decade. 

In fact, as Iran’s external environments evolved so did its polity and tactics. Mr Ahmadinejad, a hardliner, replaced the urbane Mr Khatami. The Vilayet-e-Faqih model created by Imam Khomeini was conditioned on the Supreme Leader balancing the interests of the clergy, the Revolutionary Guards and their off-spring, the Baseej and the Bazaar, or the business class.

The 2009 election has upset this balance.
China has replaced India and Japan as investor in oil and gas and technology sources. Iran has worked out a modus vivendi with the Taliban as the US is a common foe. The US is perceived as a retreating power, no longer a military threat. President Hosni Mubarak’s exit was followed by two Iranian naval vessels transiting the Suez Canal, a first in decades. Even the Taliban may want to reduce their dependence on Pakistan. Sa’di, the 13th century poetic voice of Shiraz, has this advice on revenge:
Wait rather till fortune blunts his claws
Then pluck out his brains amidst friends’ applause.

The Arab world is in turmoil, which can lead to a renaissance or chaos. India’s Gulf policy stands outsourced to sectional Malayali interests. Its West Asia policy is in induced sleep. Iran is leafing through its Sa’di poems. The Manmohan Singh government, with its mono-thematic focus on the India-US civil nuclear deal in UPA-I and Pakistan in UPA-II, needs new advisers and a wider spectrum foreign policy. The only Arabist secretary at headquarters in the ministry of external affairs deals with Europe. Otherwise its fate shall be of the partridge in the Persian poet Hafiz’s couplet:
O gracefully walking partridge whither goest thou? 
Stop Be not deceived because the ‘devious cat’ has said its prayers

K C Singh in The Asian Age. More Here.

Arab awakening and collusion of civilisations

The Arab world is on an earth-shaking course of revolutionary transformation. No political pundit could anticipate such a turn of events since they underestimated the revolutionary potential of Islam. All of them thought that Islamic political thought has no rejuvenating energy. But they have been proved wrong.
In this context, there is a need to re-visit the socio-political discourse of Prophet Mohammed and develop a new understanding of his spiritual politics.

The Islamic concept of God became universally understandable and acceptable only after the Prophet made it philosophically valid following his struggle against the idol worshippers among Arab tribes.
The Prophet dismantled the structures of idol worship and instituted the practice of praying to an abstract God among the Arabic tribes that were warring against one another over their idols. For them, a God creating all human beings equal was unthinkable.

That was the primary democratic principle — in the eyes of God all human beings are absolutely equal — that the Prophet established among those warring tribes. This established the notion of spiritual democracy among backward and self-destructive tribes. By doing so the Prophet changed the route of social change in the Arabic world, which otherwise would have slipped into caste brutalism as it happened in India. Or it would have followed the African path.

But by inspiring the tribes to pray to Allah, the Prophet transformed the men and women of the Arab world into philosophically more advanced people than the other Asians, who were struggling between animism and idol worshipping cultures.

Though Christianity took its followers out of the idol worshipping ethic, the Church did encourage the worship of Jesus Christ and Mary. Ironically, though born as an Asian (Israelite) religion, Christianity attracted the Europeans more than the Asians in its early days.
But Islam expanded into the Asian continent very rapidly. Within 200 years of the Prophet’s death it had spread far and wide.

While Jesus tried to separate the political realm from the spiritual realm, the Prophet combined political and spiritual theory into one in a much more nuanced and moral way. That seems to be developing into a democracy of its own model.

The present democratic revolutions in the Arab world are more spiritual-political than what Europe had seen in the 19th and 20th centuries. They might result in re-interpretation of the Islamic notion of democracy on the one hand and change the meaning of secularism on the other. Though the notion of God was very much part of the Euro-American revolutions, secularism was made the core anchor of those revolutions.

The Arab revolutions seem to be evolving a different language of political science. How these revolutions negotiate with the notion of secularism is yet to be seen. The European mode of secularism does not disconnect itself from the notion of God. This is very clear from many Euro-American constitutions, which use the notion of God in their preamble.

Islam seems to be re-negotiating its relationship to politics and democracy differently. The Prophet has more substantial claim to be a political philosopher than Jesus, as he led the community and his sons-in-law became the initial rulers as Khalifs.

There is an attempt to belittle the Arab revolutions by describing them as “Jasmine Revolutions”. On the contrary they have the potential to re-position not only the Islamic world but the whole world.

In the Asian continent the implications of these revolutions would be huge. China, Pakistan, Bangladesh and even India and Sri Lanka have not evolved their democratic cultures through mass revolutions.

In India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the British-imposed systems of democracy survive. They sustain inequalities, unemployment, illiteracy, and so on. China evolved a communist culture through a revolution but that culture is very fragile and cannot be compared with the Islamic cultures, which have a cementing commonality across nations rooted in one God, one Book and one Prophet.

If that cultural commonality is used for transforming the political systems of nations, no civilisation would match the Islamic civilisation.

If the present trend is any indication, Samuel Huntington’s thesis of Clash of Civilisations would not only fall apart but possibly be turned on its head —to “Collusion of Civilisations”. The same Arab world that the West once thought had no imagination of its own would make that collusion possible.

Kancha Ilaiah in Asian Age. More Here.

Who's afraid of Caste Census?

If caste census is done, the India democracy would thrive on the firm support of the lower castes who keep hoping of getting their share based on their numbers. The upper castes may feel desolate with the system of democracy itself, if this shift begins to take place. They might call such a shift “castocracy”. But would they call a state or a nation being ruled by women “womenocracy”?

Cognitive social psychology says all such theories are constructed on a convenience known as “comfort zone”. If brown upper castes live in white societies they see brown bashing but black bashing remains hidden in their blind spots. In white societies the browns are not in their comfort zone but in India they are and do not want to see the other’s “discomfort zone”.

Many upper caste intellectuals say that caste was a construction of the colonial census system. They talk as if caste never existed before the British started an enumerative process. By their logic we should come to the conclusion that before the British enumerated people based on religion, there were no religions in India. There are many such blind spots in India and that is why we still remain backward in theories of knowledge.

Let all castes — not just OBCs — be counted for strengthening our democratic system. I know that even mine is a blind-spot theory but it may have the effect of an antidote.

From veteran Dalit activist Kancha Ilaiah's comment in The Asian Age. More Here.

"We are a country of a billion dollars" said Manmohan Singh

To a question as to whether he was really as pro-American as the Left makes him out to be, the Prime Minister said he is “working on an agenda that serves India to the best of my ability” and that it was for the people of the country to judge him.

(In September 2008, as he sat beside George W. Bush at the Oval Office of the White House in Washington D.C., Dr Singh had said: “The people of India deeply love you”.)

A few minutes later during the press conference, one wonders if the Prime Minister’s made a proverbial Freudian slip of the tongue when he said that “we are a country of a billion dollars”, before quickly correcting himself to replace his last word with “people”.

From Paranjoy Guha Thakurta's column "What the PM didn't say" in The Asian Age

To read the full article click here

Surely in Allah's remembrance do hearts find rest

Every culture has metaphors alluding to the heart — cold hearted, warm hearted — and we use phrases like “breaking” or “touching” the heart. In Islamic traditions the physical heart is residence to the ruh, the spirit. Muslims are obliged under their laws to look after one’s spiritual and physical being.

Prophet Muhammad(PBUH) spoke of the heart as a repository of knowledge and a vessel sensitive to the needs of the body. He explained that it perceives wrongful action and is agitated by it. One of the Messenger’s most cited statements is: “Actions are based upon intentions”. All intentions emanate from the heart, which means that every action is rooted in the heart.

The heartbeat is not initiated by the central nervous system but by itself, by God. Modern science informs that the heart beats before the brain is fully formed, and that it could continue to beat despite its connections to the brain being severed. The difference between one who remembers God and one who does not is like the difference between the living and the dead. Spiritually dead hearts are the cause of all injustice and oppression in the world. When people are completely immersed in the material world they forget or refuse to believe that they will be accountable for their actions — this brings about diseased hearts that are in turmoil.

Nothing in the biological, physiological or spiritual world is static; everything either blossoms or decays. Similarly, the heart by its very nature is constantly turning, either moving towards purity or impurity; either towards God or away from Him. Interestingly, the Arabic word for heart is qalb, meaning something that turns and inqilaab is from the same root, meaning to turn something upside down. Two of the 99 names of Allah are Al Qabid and Al Basit, “The Constrictor” and “The Expander”, for it is Allah who makes our hearts expand and contract, both physically and spiritually.

God has programmed the heart as an organ designed to be in a state of calm, something that is achieved by remembrance of God. The Quran says, “Surely in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest” (13:28). The heart naturally gravitates towards God and the best nutrient for a healthy heart is polishing it with remembrance of the Creator.

Islamic scholars say the foremost requirement for remembrance of God is making amends for wrongful action with nidamah, remorse. This is not the same as guilt, for in Islam there is no original sin, which is the concept of sin being natural to human nature. Islam believes that a child is born in a state of fitrah, natural goodness, which if not cultivated leads man to falls into states of ghaflah, forgetfulness. State of heedlessness can lead to temporary slips into wrong action, from where one can move into the state of remorse and seeking forgiveness (taubah), and ascend towards high ranks with God.

From Sadia Dehlvi's gem of an article in The Asian Age.

To read the full article click here.

— Sadia Dehlvi is a Delhi-based writer and author of Sufism:The Heart of Islam.
She can be contacted at sadiafeedback@gmail.com