Are we not done with the blame game yet?

The mask of radical Islam has been so over-represented in the media, it's confused as the real face of Islam. The responses to last night's bombing emerged mostly in the form of solidarity and humanity but inadvertently turned into a de-facto "Progressive West" discussion of how "Islam needs to change" if radicalisation is to be tackled.

To these people, I  ask this question: Is the purdah and the jihad all that people see? You think those are the only boundaries Islam operates in? You condemn religion because of the actions of a few evil/power-hungry men?

A number of people find it easy to say, "It's not the people, but it is the diktat of the religion that they follow that I have a problem with". The most common argument against religion is the opinion that it has done nothing better than divide the world. Religious people are considered the opposite of progressive and the fanatics are played up for effect because they reinforce all of these assumptions.

The real question here is; why do we need to challenge the beliefs of another to legitimise our own? Why are the progressive intellectuals so threatened by the faith collective?

As a writer, there can be nothing more absurd than the idea that religious structures resist change. In fact, our ability to form and mold abstract ideas came with the beginning of religion. Logic was born as an antithesis to it when we went too deep at one end.

Without religion, there would be no philosophy. There would be literature. There wouldn't be the wisdom to guide us through our tribulations and joys in life. Death would become just another business and the lessons of life would have never come into their true meaning. Without mysticism (an otherwise acceptable off-shoot to religion), we would never mourn our dead or celebrate the phenomena of life. Without our awareness of our mortality, we would have never evolved in the kind of thought that transcends it. Religions were threads that tied communities together.

How did we stop being thankful for these little mercies?

I'll return to what I began discussing. While the world leaders were understandably restrained as the tragedy was occuring; everyone knew why they were not saying what they were saying. The victims were many, and the world watched in horror. The villian screamed "Allah-uh-Akbar" as they gunned down the innocents.

Suddenly, the world threw a collective, questioning look at Islam and every Muslim in the world was forced to prove that they did not rub their hands in glee as these attacks were carried forth.

The others who opined, said, "Well, we know you guys are cool, but you religion mandates beheadings and cows so maybe you guys should come back after you've updated your beliefs?"

To me, this is the equivalent of screaming at the copy of Quran (and by parallel, a Bible) for being such a pro-violence text book. One might have heard this argument before, but when has the KKK is a representative of all white people? What about the Neo-Nazis who have taken Hitler's hatred for Jews a notch higher to hate on the other races? Do I just waltz up to them and be like "Yo guys!  You wanna try'na tone it down and be a little less aggressively white??"

ISIS is group of nihilists who are not fighting to live to see a better day; rather, they are the harbingers of end. They don't recognise Islam as a collection of belief systems, rather, stick to a While they're driven by ideology, it is confined only to the lessons that help them further their agenda. They are dangerous because their fanaticism only allows them to turn a blind eye to the appeals of humanity. To them, it is all of them against all of us. It is a sect of Islam which is waging a war against humanity. It is the belief of that one secluded group collecting in the god-forsaken, war-torn Syria. It is not even all of the Sunnis.

Islam is one of the oldest and largest religions in the world. As with all major religions, it boasts of many off-shoots that resulted from it. Would you be able to imagine Sufi without its messages of peace? Can we deny being touched the depth of feeling we feel when read the compositions of Rumi? I'm not going into claim that Islam began to teach people about the lessons of love and understanding. To be honest, it was more a manual of survival in a thankless world when it was written. It still advocates mercy to it's enemies, but it also tells them to leave no stone unturned if they didn't convert. Though are we really going to find a problem with it given that this was happening before and during the Crusades? When Christian faith was burning people on stakes and killed others in the various conquests disguised as evangelicism?
Hindu extremists their actions by echoing the fundamentalist view that "you only deserve to live if you do it our way". The killings over suspected cow-nappings. How is this ANY different from what happened in Paris the other night? What of Lebanon, what of Beirut?

In all of the cases above, when one group disrupts the peace of the collective (not the Ayn Rand interpretaion of the word); it is because the agenda is not about co-existing peacefully. There is no room for diversity in their communities.

Should we really be choosing sides, especially using ideology as context? Does it serve any purpose at all?

Extremists find religion the easiest thing to politicise because their followers are already invested in the ideology. The conversion to fanaticism is catalysed by the misunderstanding and hateful reactions subjected to them by the rest of the world. Generalizations cement beliefs in popular consciousness. Ideas like migrants/refugees are stealing the local economy, for example, have made a bad situation even worse because people stop sympathising with those who are on the run from harrowing situations that have chased them out of their homes. Do we really want to push them back to where they came from, and prove the people back home were right? Do we really want to reinforce the belief that the only other person who will look out for you in the world will only be someone from your particular community?

To put this into perspective, let me quote Ser Jorah Mormont (yes, from GoT) when Danaerys tells him she must fight because people are praying for her: "The common people pray for rain, health, and a summer that never ends. They don't care what games the high lords play."
Ordinary people need enough to eat, a happy life and a home to call their own. Our individual ambitions are about seeking better days and living a peaceful life that sometimes mattered in the bigger picture.

The Middle East crisis has cascaded into a threat of an impending world war. The complexity of this situation was explained best by the actor John Cusack in a recent conversation with Arundhati Roy:  "In Syria, you’re on the side of those who want to depose Assad, right? And then suddenly, you’re with Assad, wanting to fight ISIS. It’s like some crazed, bewildered, rich giant bumbling around in a poor area with his pockets stuffed with money, and lots of weapons—just throwing stuff around."

Should we really be blaming a religion for the consequences of bad political decisions, displaced people and an oppressive regime? Should we really give these battered people more reason to hate the world?

OPEN your eyes to the suffering such seemingly innocuous endorsements of stereotypes. If you want to offer solutions to a problem, don't settle for the vague generalizations. Don't blame the refugees - political or otherwise. Don't blame the system.

The thing we should be up against is ignorance and intolerance - religious or otherwise.

Hatred has many excuses, we don't need to throw the "progressive-liberal" terrorists thrown in the mix. We should mind humanity first; and saving nit-picking the failings of religion to the fanatics.

We keep asking for change. We should all begin by becoming decent, thoughtful human beings first.
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NOTE: These are not pro-religious statements. People who know me, know that i'm ANYTHING but religious. I don't pray to a divine being as part of my daily routine. I don't do it because coming from a household of mixed faith, I have come to see the truth in the adage: "Where there are a thousand faiths, we are apt to become skeptical of them all."

Old timers and coffee shops

It was Tonio Kroger, Thomas Mann's decidedly bourgoise protagonist (believed to be one of his many roman-a-clefs) who stomped off to a coffee house to resolve the war inside his head for the lack of a better way of doing so. It was Jean Paul Sartre, the famous existentialist, who found himself at comfort at the "nuetral territories" that offered home to the exiles of respectable society (aka the artist). Albert Camus' notebooks proclaim his love for the various cafes he'd been to in his journeys around the world, claiming that they offered the perfect vantage points to a culture.

When I first visited Lamakaan with a friend (who happened a regular) after a year of sequestered existence in Hyderabad, I found a world I hadn't expected to find in this bipolar city. The collective wisdom of my favorite authors was put to test as I mingled with the patrons, and indulged in observation.

Am I saying that Lamakaan is the Cafe de Flore of Hyderabad? In ambition, mayhaps, and definitely in spirit.

Words to a writer in doubt

"Do you know what is the thrill of creating? Knowing that your work is going to move someone else who was like you at one period of time. Lost and confused and had nothing to do. Do you remember the time when you picked that book up from the counter and could not stop reading because within those pages you found everything that you wanted to hear coming to yourself? It indeed is exactly like it. Instead you are going to be the one who will be striking that match and someday, sometime, after posterity is attached to your name... someone, somewhere will be walking through his life, holding your book close to his heart to guide his way."

A room with a view

It is so easy to believe that you are uninspired, that life in itself is no more interesting than each moment that has passed by, until you look out the window and see this.

"... while the sky grows dim and dimmer, Feel no untold and strange distress­ - Only a deeper impulse given
By lonely hour and darkened room,
To solemn thoughts that soar to heaven, Seeking a life and world to come."

- Evening Solace
Charlotte Bronte

A guide to a small city

"One has to live a long time in Algiers to understand how desiccating an excess of nature's blessings can be. There is nothing here for people seeking knowledge, education or self improvement. The land contains no lessons. It neither promises nor reveals anything. It is content to give and does so profusely. Everything here can be seen with the naked eye, and is known the very moment it has been enjoyed. The pleasures have no remedies and their joys remain without hope. "

- excerpt from "Summer in Algiers" by Albert Camus

For a city as middling as Vizag, "City of Destiny" might seem like an over ambitious epitaph especially to the world weary traveler who knows better than to depend on such claims. Nothing much to mention about it, really, perhaps except for the ersatz structures that vie for your attention at every vantage point. Standing between the ocean and great hills, its love for symbolic gestures that shift between extremities reflects itself with better taste when one finds himself looking over the horizon from the hills that line the coast either overwhelmed or entirely unimpressed.

The average tourist is better off at eccentric Goa or the metropolitan Chennai where a plan and a guide will satiate the need for novelty and sport taken heed to by a well versed tourism industry from having catered and obliged to the wanderlust of men for so long.

On the other hand, it is perhaps the empiricist who has much to gain from the inundating sensuality of the nature upon which all attempts at "development" has had but a little effect. The sensualist, the wanderer will find all his modalities satisfied here. Without a beginning or an end, this stands perfectly for the road that would you get somewhere eventually if you walked long enough. It owes nothing to anyone, indifferent and welcoming at the same time.

Any course that one chooses to take to explore the largely incognito city (that has a knack of presenting itself as very au fait) will bring him to the same end. The choice broils down to whether it is a complete purging of the senses one is looking for or a skimming on the surface. Either way, he won't be deprived of the promises it has to offer. It is place where one moves between highs and lows (literally). There is little history one can associate with, but an abundance of places reminiscent of the past. One can enjoy the most pedestrian attractions here for less, like getting on a tugboat for a little fare for a half an hour's ride on the mostly shallow harbor and buy souvenirs from the most "tourist-y" beach that (unsurprisingly) isn't located very far from the tour. A submarine from the WW-II is another popular landmark that is a favorite and later in the evenings, among a number of couples could sit on a park on the beach and watch a movie under the open sky. From the market places where one could wander to the occasional stall selling old books that smell of fragrant tobacco, to the ascent on the hills where one moves further away from the briny odor of the sea and towards the sky that opens up to the one who makes the climb. And unlike many other cities upon which even the skies seem to delimit themselves, the starry skies and clear moonlit nights reveal the inexpugnable verve of nature where it chooses reveal itself at the fullest.

On the best days (the best time would be summer,of course), the punctual sun reveals the resplendence the nature here is capable of. It is an exercise that pays off best in the dawn, if one had the time and the patience (the two traits one needs to truly love) to watch the vast sky that canvases the ocean lift its drowsy pink lid over the dark green ocean that gradually freshens up with it to the perpetual summer blues as the day shuffles to the noon, when the horizon disappears and the invisible hands that had worked through the ante-meridian hours pause to take a break (or to perhaps admire and reflect on the glistening masterpiece that stands in display). Then, when the harsh sun begins to soften with the ocean breeze and the fishermen who have learned to fish ashore start coming out with their wares, the sky turns to the end of the spectrum - the darkening yellow growing an intense pink as the shadowy grey rises up against the cerise sun that melts into a pool of amber upon the rippling ocean that rises up to a warm greeting towards the midsummer night's moon.

W one doesn't find so remarkable throughout (and getting back to the theme) - when the wave of abundance has swept over - is the gratuitous attempts of man to dominate his surroundings. Houses and buildings, tall and small that have of late seemed to have multiplied themselves in a manner that pores do dominate every view that one has of the landscape. A hum of activity and the reverberating drum of bulldozers breaking through the rocks is what one to gets to hear over the roar of the ocean. It is in such moments, the industriousness of activity that one finds the mysticism dispelled, the peoples as detached as anywhere and the realization of a transitory, changing life. Of how the days go by unnoticed, melting into one another and in the baseness of everyday, infinity is realized.

If everyday was what one looked at, while in Vizag, there would be nothing to it, really. Ambitions are realized in bigger cities, knowledge within institutions. But the truth is, the abundance that one finds oneself surrounded with - the dreamy mountains standing with their head above the clouds and the memory-less oceans they look out to - is not a distraction from the frugality of obvious lessons it has to offer. Rather, they stand as a testimony to its greatest and perhaps only, lesson (an objective one,at that) - patience.

This reflection comes from love, and in conjuring the best of the city that dissipates gradually from my mind and turns back into itself, to its occult revelations kept reserved for only those in the inner circle - I let the mountainous ramparts close themselves and the ocean tide over its secrets in my mind as reaches up to the moon, to return to the keeper of memories...


Like Rilke once said "The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you."