Democracy is Freedom to kill Freedom

 

Reading through Frontline I came through an article that was about how a book ,“Such a long journey” written by Rohinton Mistry, was ridiculed and out casted from the syllabus of BA in Arts because Shiv Sena and its brother organization like Yuva Nirman Sena ,headed by Aditya Thackeray, didn’t approve of it. Well my question is  “who gave them the right to take away the freedom of voicing one’s opinions in pubic”. Last time I checked India was a democratic country, the largest democratic country on basis of population, and not a Fascist were people in power can crush the people who speak against them.

Time and again we have seen books and films getting banned because a few people or group in the country are too chauvinist  to see every negative reference as an insult and on top of that our government is too afraid to do anything to stop such a nonsense. This is an absolute insult of democracy and the rights that the constitution offers us.

Well it would have been better after all that instead of a democracy we had a communist government. Then we would only have to worry about the government and not about the sensitivity of every tom, dick and harry.

Was Buddha right?

Date: 30 Oct. 2010

Today while taking a walk, not in a garden or park but on road, and smoking my cigarette suddenly a thought came to my mind. Long time back I read a saying by Buddha “ Life is painful and miserable”  and I started relating his saying to the life in real. Well in beginning I started to think in terms of small things like, I like to eat sweet stuff but I can’t eat much cause I can easily gain weight, people like to smoke but smoking kills, people like to drink but alcohol harms liver. Its just that one can take small amount of all of these things. But isn’t that painful too? Once you eat some really good cake sweet you would like to eat as much as you can but you can’t do that every time, you can’t smoke all the time or it will kill you, you can’t drink all day long.

After getting passed my initial thoughts I pondered more and started thinking about greater things in life. Well I start from the beginning. During childhood a child is made to suffer in the school. He is made to compete with other students so that he get better grade than others and get admitted in better college. During college he is again forced to perform better so that he can get better jobs. Again at job he in under pressure of working day and night so that he gets promoted and gets a better salary. Once he is little settled he gets married and now he is tensed about his family and children. And in closing chapters of his life he struggles with life and all kind of pains. Even death, the last page of one’s life,  is painful. And that’s the life of a of common man. One has to go through all these trails and pains if one wants a normal life. Well should we call it normal?

In the end I think Buddha was right. It is not a divine knowledge but a better understanding of our lives and I think that’s what Buddha did.He just analyzed the life like an observer observing  a phenomenon.