Sunday, July 19, 2009

Life goes on

The last few weeks, I've been going back and forth on the real importance of a person. How much effect does a person really have on another, and how easily life goes on with or without that person in their lives.

Around the time I started blogging, we had two major incidents in the indian political scene regarding the killings of Satyendra Dubey and Manjunath Shanmugam (linky). There was a big hue and cry at the time, the media covering it 24/7 and all sorts of online petitions to ask for justice. Its been about 4 years since then and precious little has been achieved.

Indians have generally a myopic vision of life, constantly trumpeting about how Pakistan is a failed state, even though the trifecta of judiciary, politicians and the police have all but failed the people. The fourth estate, the media, has all but forgotten the incident. After all we wont have too many advertisers keen on sponsoring shows which keep harping on the past.

So in the end maybe nothing really matters. Except for a select few, no one really matters.

The words of Mark Knopfler from Brothers in Arms

These mist covered mountains
Are a home now for me
But my home is the lowlands
And always will be
Some day youll return to
Your valleys and your farms
And youll no longer burn
To be brothers in arms

Through these fields of destruction
Baptisms of fire
Ive watched all your suffering
As the battles raged higher
And though they did hurt me so bad
In the fear and alarm
You did not desert me
My brothers in arms

Theres so many different worlds
So many differents suns
And we have just one world
But we live in different ones

Now the suns gone to hell
And the moons riding high
Let me bid you farewell
Every man has to die
But its written in the starlight
And every line on your palm
Were fools to make war
On our brothers in arms

Sunday, July 05, 2009

A long way to go

India took steps this weekend to be the 127th country in the world to decriminalize gay sex. As expected the ruling hasn't gone down well with the muslim groups and right wing hindu groups.

Considering the debate here in America has been about legality of gay marriage, it shows how much road we have to travel to reach the stage of being a mature society. At the very least it gives the law enforcement much lesser sweeping power to police what goes inside a bedroom and treat homosexuals to a different level of personal rights. The law though might not change the current indian society's perception to homosexuality anytime soon.

Islam does look down on homosexuality (to my knowledge), but I'm not really sure on Hinduism's view on it. Hindu mythology has quite of few characters of the "third gender", so the very act of being homosexual has been observed from centuries. It will be interesting to see if now the real debates do start and whether the indian communities will be more welcoming of people unlike themselves instead of ostracizing them.