Freedom of expression

I don't understand why such incidents keep on happening. We had enough controversies when M.F.Hussain portrayed indecent pictures of Hindu deities. And this time we have yet another so called Expressive artist Chandramohan Srilamantula, who was considered as an award winning student from Vadodara's Maharaja Sayajirao University.

When I read a newspapers, everywhere I see people pin-pointing Bajrang Dal and other organizations who believe in Hindutva. Especially editor's of almost every newspaper try their best to prove how violent or iconoclastic these groups are. At the same time they deliberately overlook the root cause of the agitation. When someone uses the freedom of expression to express something which is morally very hateful, then he / she must be punished and should be shunned from doing so. It's because freedom of speech does not mean expressing something that will hurt the sentiments of the society. One should not take liberty of doing anything just because he / she lives in a democratic country.

Few of these questions that I would like to ask to those existing and emerging "Expressive Artists" and to the useless National Human Rights Commission of India and to all those who don't understand the difference between a sacrilegious act and a real art.

1. Why is always a Hindu god / goddess chosen to express their aesthetic approach. Why not any god / goddess from other religion ?

2. Why the name of a painting is related to India, e.g. Bharatmata drawn by M.F.Hussain? Why can't it be Queen Victoria? Why can't it be a icon of Christianity like Pope? Why can't it be Mohammad Paigambar.

3. Why is Nandita Das named as Sita and Shabana Azmi as Radha in the movie Fire? Why can't they find any other names?

4. Why only minorities are counted as seekers of justice? Why not the pracharak of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha who were hostages for a long time and found dead in North-Eastern India?

5. Why an Al-Quida bellicose who killed hundreds of innocent people is suddenly considered as humane at the time of testimony?

Wikipedia effect

These days I am enamored with Wikipedia. It is such a wonderful site. Each day you get lots of new stuff to read. And though the contents could be edited by anyone, we get highly authentic information. That makes it a true wiki site, combined with a great oracular repository of information.

I was reading Srinivasa Ramanujan, C.V. Raman, Chandrasekhar Bose, Dr. Homi Bhabha and Dr. Vikram Sarabhai. Their work and their contribution towards our motherland was amazing . These eminent Indians did a pioneering job in Mathematics, Physics, Indian Aerospace Programs. And they did suffer a lot while doing so, perhaps that's what made them so great. After completing these articles, I started experiencing pity on myself. There are people who had done some great jobs in past and here I am, pushing each day, waiting for a rosy weekend.

I don't want to compare myself with those great souls. But still, I feel I should do something that will make me feel proud. Leave the rest of the world, I want to make myself happy.I argued with one of my friends about my monotonous life . I was not convinced that my job makes me so exhausted that after office hours all I can think of is a sound sleep. Neither a fact that we did not meet with a situation that could foster our creative thinking. I fretted about my problems and hardly tried to solve them. And these great people faced difficulties, surmounted them. Their difficulties were certainly bigger than mine.

I need to read more and keep myself motivated by these sources of information. Let's see if it can make some change in my "way of looking at things" and could help me somehow?

Thanks Wikipedia for those nice articles.

Birds fly away to the southern sky searching a home

This is a line from Parikrama's song 'But it rained'. I am writing this blog when one of dearest friends Sanket is flying to Japan. His company has got a Japanese account and they need him on site. It will take almost a year for him to come back to India. When I first knew it I was delighted. And why shouldn't I ? You don't go on-site so often; at least not at the start of your professional career. It's not that I am not happy but I don't know why I feel so nauseated.

Sanket, Bhushan, Charu, Nikhil, Abhishek, Amey and me. We had some great times in our college-days. I still miss those golden moments that we enjoyed together. But someone said is right, time doesn't wait for anyone. As days passed, we graduated, earned jobs. And now I see, we all are cruising towards some aim, a demanding aim that will never keep us physically together. We will never play cricket in the scorching sun neither bunk our computer classes for a football match. We will never talk about 'always welcome' topics of our discussion that includes everything in our little world ,neither will spend a complete night bugging each other.

As I see it today, Amey is getting married soon. Charu and Nikhil are enjoying their jobs in Bangalore and are planning for their post-graduation most probably in US. Abhishek found his love and will soon be getting engaged and will be pursuing his PG in States. Bhushan is doing his job and looking forward for C-DAC preparations. And I am preparing for GRE. Looks like everyone is set for a new beginning.

Yeh, this was bound to happen one day, we knew it. But I never thought that this day will come so sooner. I may sound a bit emotional, but guessed that this is a right topic to write a blog on. Thanks a lot to the revolutionary internet,messengers and emails, phones that will keep us all together.
So, here I am taking an opportunity to wish a bright career to all of my friends.

We will always be in touch, wherever we go...
Friends forever!!!!