Love, Life & Happiness

The Fall  - By Albert Camus Published: - 1956 (Penguin) Amazon Link: Click Here Genre: Fiction/ Philosophical/ Classic What is the purpose of literature? - Entertainment? fun? happiness? Revolution? Sharing of knowledge? Quest for knowledge? I found the best answer in Matilda of what good literature is and should be , a book for children by Roald Dahl " So Matilda's strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone." I would think this all comes together in literature. But the most important thing for a good literature is that it depicts the writer's search for truth. He (or she) might make you laugh, cry, have fun while he searches for the truth; but if you play along with complete faith, you will find yourself embarking on an invisible journey which moves acros

We live in a world of dwarfs. All great battles have already been fought; all great thoughts have already been debated; all great arguments have already been settled. We live in a world where terrorists and murderers are called freedom-fighters, while all they have on offer is another cage which they claim to be holier and more beautiful. Nationalism has been made, by the crafty, conniving, so-called conscience-keepers, nasty and patriotism, petty. It is no wonder that the youth of this nation is so disenchanted with the world around him. We like it or not, we identify ourselves with the world we live in, the society that sustains us, the country that is our custodian. When we badmouth and belittle them, we abuse our roots. Devoid of our roots, we are nothing more than helpless, floating balloons in a hostile, or at least, indifferent skies. We struggle to settle our feet on the slippery ground which is fast turning into quagmire. We shout at the poor auto-rikshaw driver who has br

The matter of Rohingya Refugees, having traveled across the air-conditioned conference rooms, have now reached the Supreme Court of India. The debate is shrill, spilling on the streets where a certain Maulana Warsi in West Bengal, which under Mamata Bannerjee has become a sanctuary to the Islamic fanatics, threatened killing of Hindus unless the Rohingyas who have entered India illegally are granted asylum. The rogue state of West Bengal has decided to oppose the Union's decision of deporting the illegals. Those who had feigned ignorance and murmured unintelligibly in broken words, when pushed, under the tinkering of Champagne glasses, on their own countrymen pushed out of Kashmir, suddenly found voice when talking of illegal foreign immigrants from Myanmar. The voices would rise in fury, the Bandhgalas were all open as elegant, Muslim liberals took to breast-beating and the in-your-face allegiance to Ummah suddenly took away the carefully-crafted charade of nationalism from the

          Rahul Gandhi , the dynast of a dynasty which has to its credit a history of great luxury and elitist life, recently claimed in a speech at UC Berkeley in the US that Dynasty is the way things are done in India. His own dynasty  started from an immensely rich Lawyer in Pandit Motilal Nehru, during the poorest days of colonial India,  who not ensured that whenever his son landed into British Prison, he would get enough conveniences; long after he was gone in 1931, the connections with Gandhi did ensure that his son is installed as the first Prime Minister of the freshly-free nation, as a selected candidate against the elected one in Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel. While India matured as a democracy from the first selected leader to slowly move towards able, elected leaders, the sense of entitlement within the family grew over the years, as they kept bestowing the highest honor of the nation, Bharat Ratna on to themselves, generation after generation. Within this deep faith

[ In the Part-1 of this Series, I had tried to cover the story of formation of what we call India, from the sage of split of Super- Continent, Gondwana and the early settlement of Aryan Civilization- Read here ( India-That is Bharat- Part-1 ) In the Part 2 of this series, I covered the the Rigvedic World, the world from where the Vedas emerged (Read Here- India, That is Bharat- Part 2 ). ]  There are times when we feel exasperated with a tendency among the intellectuals to degrade Hinduism, to create a sense of embarrassment among the people of this country- about our history and heritage. For past more than five centuries, we have been ruled by people who were culturally different and numerically lesser than the people they ruled. Their success rested on creating a belief among the natives that they were not good enough to rule themselves. That we deserved to be ruled. What this required was to erase, wipe out and doctor our history. It is really unfortunate that th