IT’S old wisdom that until we come clean on the table with the truth, we cannot begin anew with love, affection and respect. Some food for thought this week. We don’t need any more evidence in this country that religious politics is back with vengeance in the South Asian sub-continent of India. I’ve been feeling very diffident for some time now and would like to express it here. Like I’m born Hindu — if one is born into any religion at all other than that of being a human first!
I thought we’d all become human beings over centuries of religious warfare in the name of power, profit and control over land and resources of wealth and wellbeing. But today we see a far more powerfully armed world brimming over with a population of eight billion people across an increasingly finite earth. I don’t see anybody shifting to other planet in search of greener pastures! History past and present is being re-played out ever anew to manipulate a future for the few leading utopian lifestyled minority in a world which continues to descend majorly into dystopian existence for the many at the bottom rungs of the ladder of the good life, its fringes.
Orwell’s “1984” predictions have come and gone elsewhere and segments of people are still wooing the African and Asian countries where the Western colonialists of Empire heydays are still fixing situation to woo back slavery, exploitation and their own gross development detrimental to Mother Earth.
Religion is just an excuse. Hatred between Christians and Muslims shaped much of medieval history in Europe and elsewhere wherever the white colonials so called civilization spread its tentacles good, bad and rotten. We have seen it. History is very educative, we don’t learn from it. We seek repeats of the same disease of religious beliefs, for that’s all they are, going back 8,000, 5,000 2,000 and in between so much glorious as inglorious.
I’m asking myself are we on the path to more partitions of the country given today’s Hindutva or politicised Sanatan Dharma politics? I admit that the Hindu majority have suffered some terrible brutalities and experiences courtesy Islam and Christian colonialism, both religions had their glory and shame in the countries of Africa, Middle East, Asia…we thought ah yes, came democracy with the USA promising it to all its citizens but not to the rest of the world.
Democracy which details equal playing grounds for all regardless of religious diktat, but say democracy is dead, it never was either in China or Russia or India (which perhaps had something older and wiser in its Vedic ages as detailed in our mythology and Sanskrit literature of yore); various empires rose and fell in succession, also giving rise to philosophical and austere Jainism, Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism…Japanese Buddhism enshrined in the code of Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism. We also have Bahaism and several pleasant offshoots of Islam which believe more or less in gardens of paradise and comfort for all. As long as we leave the bees of happy pollination alone, something like that.
IF the bees, butterflies, the wilderness spaces of Mother Earth die, we know our death is also certain, a matter of time. Just imagine how much hotter the earth will become as it goes under water increasingly in time to come? The Arctic and Antarctica are no longer Mother Earth’s potable water reservoirs …they’re melting away beneath the onslaught of mod con human civilization which has touched extremely unsustainable. Replace Capitalism, Marxism, Democracy and all the other “isms” of religious politics with just one word – sustainability and see our tawdry lifestyles in perspective!
So is this what we want life to be all about? Utopia for the few and dystopia for the many? all about? Not your god or my god but who will own the finite earth? Who will sacrifice large populations and how (Covid being one of them), along with other diseases unleashed with the diminishing of the earth’s protective resources of air, earth, water and spaces? Mother Earth as our one and only garden of paradise is drying up and we’re busy turning it into a concentration camp for one another, privileged or underprivileged or don’t deserve to be privileged. Who decides?
Our civilization stinks, never mind the religions. It is kalayug and the promised amrit kaal of satyayug is a long, long away…we’ve turned the earth into a fleeting paradise for a few and a concentration camp for the many. Think about all this and don’t just think. What must we do to be fit to be human beings clever, wise and compassionate? Without any denominational gods coming in the way? Stop turning the world into a concentration camp of the mind and body, heart and soul. Learning sustainable lifestyles is the need of the day! It begins with reducing our junk plastics proliferating everywhere. Top motto of the day: Refuse, reduce, recycle. Put needs before wants and greed! Draw the Lakshman rekha or lines of conscience now in your life, begin with one to show the way….

Read Ruby Ahluwalia

THEN there is the big C – cancer. The longer we live the more we are likely to suffer from some cancer or another given our lifestyles of affluence and common sense blinded by arrogance. I’ve been reading a rather touching sweet book by a breast cancer survivor, “Fragrance of a Wild Soul” by Ruby Ahluwalia; she is the founder of Sanjeevani which works with cancer patients across the country. A government civil servant living a charmed life with a loving family, hubby, two children, everything to live for – then breast cancer presents at third stage and her life goes for a toss.
She too asks God, why me? What has she done wrong? She visits temples to endure the pain in mind and body, heart and soul, to help her arrive at the right decisions for her own good and the good of all …takes note of the words up at a temple: “Ya devi sarvbhuteshu, Shakti rupen sansthita, namastesye,namastesye, namastesye namo namah” etcetera.
So we learn that no matter how charmed our life may be, we don’t know what tomorrow may bring to shatter us inside out. Ruby Ahluwalia writes with fluid eloquence as she narrates how her life changed from more or less happy to hellish as the questions pile up. “Fragrance of A Wile Soul” is one of the most moving books I’ve read lately and so should you.
Interestingly, Ruby Ahluwalia lives in Goa now and is worth meeting up with if you wish. Hers is an inspirational real life story worth learning from in micro and macro contexts. Like I said we’re turning the world we live in into a concentration camp for one another and along with it life is also turning carcinogenic majorly in most homes…who is responsible?
We, the people. Take it from there. It’s time to put the truth on the table and begin anew, get back on the straight and narrow path of truth, freedom, health (all have a bearing on one another)…and clean up the good earth — if we want to survive and live anew to smell the wild roses on terra firma again!
On that note it’s avjo, poite verem, selamat datang, au revoir, arrivedecci, hasta la vista, and vachun yetta here for now. Be sure to vote out the demons of dictatorship and vote in the angels of real peace in prosperity this May when E day comes! And don’t do this NOTA nonsense. Please vote for Bharatdesh and India, its diversity and its unity in diversity…truly it is said the people of a country deserve the government they get, for it is a mirror image of their own conscience and consciousness.
Is the current government a mirror image of your conscience and consciousness?

—Mme Butterfly