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A Love Life so Painful
Once Upon the Tracks of Mumbai
Those enchanted four and half years
One and a Half Wife
The Bankster
Love You Forever : Only In That Way
Nine Lives
The Mistress of Spices
The Fortune Hunters
I Too Had A Love Story..
Ladies Coupé
The Krishna Key
Mumbaistan: 3 Explosive Crime Thrillers
Of Tattoos and Taboos!
Left from Dhakeshwari
I loved a Street woman
Chanakya's Chant
Dreams in Prussian Blue

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Friday, October 23, 2015

Should We Burn Ravana?

Please Note: This is a personal opinion with no intention of hurting anyone's sentiments and beliefs. Read with an open mind. 

It was Dussehra yesterday, which for the uninitiated is a festival on which, after 9 days of celebration wherein the Ramayana is enacted in different parts of India as "Ramleela", the effigy of the demonic ten- headed giant named Ravana is burnt; as it is believed to have happened long ago according to Hindu mythology.

The characters of this story have always amused me as I am sure it has many with a critical attitude. As my understanding of human nature grows I am in a conflict of what was told to me in stories by my grandmother. The chief conflict post reading many books and people now is, if there a possibility of an absolute white or dark of a man's nature or character? I know I am not the first person asking this question but I often ponder whether it is because the Kaliyuga that we live in that an absolute white of a person is out of our boundaries of imagination. But looking at the very characters we worship or burn more closely they do not appear to be white and black themselves. Infact Rama and Ravana are like humans today, just shades of grey. They have the very qualities we ourselves do, both the good and the bad, so why is it that only the Ravana is burnt? 

As Anand Neelakantan explains in his best selling book Asura, which is one of the texts that does justice to the wrongly understood character of Ravana (atleast in northern region of India), the ten headed demon showed his true character, each head a symbolic of one, and the :dashamukha" of the fact that he wasn't the one to hide his true self out of shame but express himself clearly, or what we call in a word as - straightforward. His true nature of feeling lust, greed, anger etc. all the emotions that all of us as humans feel and express only to a more or less extent was visible to all, a symbolic representation being the ten heads. 

While he did lay his eyes on Sita, abducted her, he never touched her or violated her in any way. He waited for her to love him for his valor instead of imposing himself on her. Now abducting her is wrong but what Rama did to her was any better? Think if in a parallel universe Sita did accept him for all his efforts, would her life not be better than being with a man who wouldn't even trust her enough to be with her for the rest of his life?  Also later on like a weak man just take away her sons and she being no longer capable of forgiving him, or his insult to her love and devotion; just leave her mortal form? I think with Ravana she would have been happy ever after. She would have been the recipient of all the love and respect from him. Call him dark for he kidnapped her, true; but why worship the man who abandoned her? Why burn only the man who fought till his last breath for her, keeping at stake all he earned with so much pain all his life and worship the one who was the reason wanted to be free of her mortal existence?

So basically both Rama and Ravana are shades of grey, in short-human. It is therefore injustice to make a man so learned and straight forward a symbol of "evil" while we choose to worship another. Its like adding a label, a wrong one, which when done to us, we hate it. If you wish to burn something as the marker of good against evil, Rama was not all white either. If we worship him, we should at least learnt to respect the goodness in other.

May be a more patriarchal world story was what you grew up with, but its time to open your eyes and think deeply what your actions stand for. A goddess suffered at the hands of the very man we have built temples for. A hope that someday we would not embrace people blindly but the goodness in them. Next time just burn the grey in you and try to make to make it white at no one's cost. 

Thursday, October 15, 2015

KLASS by Prita Yadav

Title:  KLASS
Author:  Prita Yadav
Publisher:  Self published
Date:  2015
Price: Rs. 180
Pages: 312







Saturday, October 10, 2015

What Defines Us? A Doris Lessing Nobel Prize lecture

Have you ever thought what is the world, the one without books? It is your worst possible nightmare if you are addicted to reading. Yet not many of us cherish that treasure, for we have always had it around us. But imagine a school in a dusty desert of an under-developed nation. The schools there barely exist. Though the eyes are filled with dust and throat that is dry, the legs tired by walking endlessly just to fetch a quail of water, a woman's thirst is for a piece of paper that interests her beyond every other thing. It is her, that may define us someday, for we are non-existent, we the rich, the famous, the privileged or just the plain lucky.

This is one of the best ever Nobel Prize lectures I have ever heard by Doris Lessing. It speaks of that love for books and learning like never before. After listening to this donate a book, it might change someone's life.  Listen to it here.