Day 54

11th June, 2011

A saturday, but a boring one. Still the infection in my throat is not clear - Antibiotics are taking their own time. This reminds me of a conversation with Mr RD Mathur in MRA. He is associated with MRA since it was born in India. We were discussing about the current affairs and related topics. He was sharing his experience of his recent dinner with Chinese ambassador in Delhi. He said a sentence which banged in my head. The infection spreads rapidly in a wound. Today India is being attacked from various fronts in one or the other form by one or the other known or unknown agency to dampen one or the other factor or parameter of prosperity in India. This is not possible unless one or the other internal organ of the body called 'India' is wounded. The wounds which I am referring here are not the external ones, but the internal ones which are extremely hard to heal, though not impossible. The stories I hear here at MRA are the proof of the fact that healing IS possible. Switching to my throat, the bacterial infection in there is result of a wound - not to be sentimental, it was an external wound due to a lot of shouting and lot of cold water and ice creams. And it is still not clear even after a full course of antibiotics! An infected throat, the rains, the wet atmosphere and the hell lot of work load - a perfect combination for a boring day. But then the interns came up with a plan of watching movie. Movie called My Name is Khan. I had watched it 2 times already and I was not at all in a mood to watch SRK pretending to be an abnormal human with asphurgur's syndrome and wieredly telling people around that his name is Khan and he is not a terrorist and yes - Kkkhan from the epiglottis! But then I didnt have any option as a lot of them wanted to watch it and I had to give up! The movie started after dinner. Well, I must admit that it was different this time.

It was different. The audience was different. The atmosphere was different. The reactions were different and the observation was different. I was sitting with the interns. 2 of them muslims from Afghanistan, 1 from Uganda and 1 from Korea. Last time when I watched the movie, I had people around me with similar line of thoughts. But this time, the minds were from various parts thinking in way different manner than what we do. After the movie, we went to my room and had a healthy discussion about the present situation of moslims and the Hindu muslim relations in India.

I was glad to know that the 2 Afghanis knew Islam way better than the self proclaimed leaders of Islam all over the world. The word Jehad is a highly misunderstood word. It is said in quran somewhere that Jehad is to be done against the unjust. Which is very similar to what Krishna said in Geeta to Arjun - Fight for the justice. People have started generalizing Islam with terrorism and thanks to the media for helping that happen. They always say that Most of the terrorists that are caught follow Islam. Hence lets declare Islam as a cruel and violent religion. If we look at the numbers then people killed by Hitler and Mussolini during their reigns is far more than total of all the terrorist attacks in the world. And they were christians. Then why not declare christianity to be a violent religion! It is clearly mentioned in Quran that killing of an innocent is killing of humanity. The point that I want to make is that its not the religion that is bad, its the people. One more fact that I would mention here is that most of the muslim terrorists that are caught are Pakistanis. Make your own judgement now. Moreover as RD Mathur rightly said - Infection spreads more rapidly in the wounds. We need to see the wounds and try to cure them up. Only then this infection (read terrorism) can be stopped.

Thanks Tamim Alam for this wonderful eye opening discussion.

-SD