Skip to main content

Remembering the Rally

On 6th December 1992 a 'political rally' turned violent and destroyed one of the largest place of worship that was built as old as 1527. It might seem ironical that the dust that rose from the fallen monument became the building block for a political party that was to grow into the top 3 slots in the country.

How many of us really know what was lost on that day. Just to give you a spark of thought, until the mutiny of 1855 people from two major religions used to worship in the same building. Probably it sound like something you heard about while in school and you were learning about our constitution. Something that you probably never really saw around you. It wasn't really just a building that came down that day. Under the dust lie an icon of togetherness. Under it lie the commitment by the leaders to the Supreme Court that the monument would not be touched. Under it lie the faith of the people who chose to be on this side of the border.

If i have been successful in provoking your thought. Just think of what we would have called this 'political rally' had things been the other way round? What if the 'leaders' came from a different religion. Would it really be remembered as something as casual as a 'rally'!!! Yes? Well then probably we have achieved something with regard to our right to freedom of religion...!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Bell the ‘Bell’

Recently I was reading a book about an Airbus 320 landing in the Hudson River. As a bird hit it, the plane lost both its engines and the pilot had to fly the plane like a glider. He had to break a few standard protocols. And he even communicated the wrong plane number back to the control tower! And during those critical seconds, while the pilot followed his instincts that came from his experience, the person at the control tower supported him by not asking too many questions as per protocol and not trying to give him more procedural insights! Though the control room offered him a few runways to land, the pilot chose to follow his instincts and glide a billion dollar plane into the Hudson River! I believe that every experience and learning we go through will have a residual effect on our next experience and the learning we have. There is rarely something we can call a ‘new experience’. Think about what actually happens in a vast majority of instances that you go through - the...

The Gods of Compulsion

Around 3000 BC, in a place we today call India, the sages made two proclamations. ‘ Vasudaiva Kutumbakam’ – which means that t his world is one family and ‘ Ekam Sat Viprah Bahuda Vadanti’ –which implies that the universal reality is the same though wise people call it by different names. Putting to use the intelligence acquired over centuries, this simply means that we are a big world of enormous differences that ultimately bond into one single family. Isn’t it quite inspiring that over four thousand odd years before people thought of ‘the global village’, ‘we’ believed in tolerance and submission? That even before the world got ‘connected’, ‘we’ believed that however different we may be by gender, colour, philosophies, beliefs, language or location - we were all ‘one big family’! Fast forward to year 2015 - it has been close to 7 decades since over 14.5 million people crossed the Indian borders looking for a safe haven from the seething imbroglio of partition. I t is ov...

The Professional Amateurs

“Just go for it and give it a try. You don’t have to be a professional to build a successful product. Amateurs started Google and Apple. Professionals built the Titanic.” I just happened to read these lines on the whatsapp profile of one of my best friends from college. And it struck me hard like a bolt from the blue. Being part of the academic domain by profession, it made me wonder how true this reality is and how far it stays from what we instil in our younger generations through the current system of education. Today’s education system stigmatizes failure and standardizes creativity. And that is one of the biggest reasons why our children feel so scared to try! That precisely is why our younger generation wants to be only engineers and doctors even though our land is filled with unemployed or ill employed people from these streams. Very few of our youngsters display the guts to follow their real dream especially if it is not the fad of their times. And ultimately we get...