This is the alt handle of @jai_menon
The @jai_menon identity has been hacked or I've been locked out of it. Weirdly X is not letting me use it though it is a subscription account. I'm guessing it's some sort of "official" lock, though that account remains visible. C'est la vie.
It was 2004, and I was at a dinner in Delhi’s Vasant Vihar.
Sonia’s government had just been sworn in, and for the first time in my adult life I understood what my grandfather had meant all those years ago, sitting there amongst that familiar set.
The most educated, privileged Indians, people who have enjoyed every opportunity this country could give them genuinely believed that only a European can govern, deliver, and lead; that only a Christian missionary institution can impart “real” education; that only a Mr Smith is incorruptible and only a Mrs Smith can truly serve the poor.
And to ease their own conscience, to pretend they still “connect” with the people of this land, they needed a Lalu Prasad.
Someone who confirmed, in the most convenient way, every prejudice and bias they carried about their own countrymen.
Which is why the rage, that impotent, unforgiving rage has burned for the past eleven years.
Because one man shattered every notion they and their collaborator forefathers held for two hundred years.
He broke their script, and they’ve never forgiven him for it.
They are even selling properties owned by others, like Defence Ministry property, under the previously firm conviction that they would never be charged, let alone convicted. It worked for decades under the Gandhi dispensation with some percentage likely to have been kept aside for their Congress too. All in all, a happily entrenched criminal setup under the umbrella of faith, is unravelling due to greed, internal strife and a government that does not want, or need, the percentage for any particular family.
@ShekharGupta No it is not. Terrorism has to be definitively ended in India with 10 demonstrated years of zero terrorism. After that, we will consider.
@MRavinderReddi Several of these groups still remain in the area, but having been converted to Christianity have been converted again to Islam. The traces of these groups stretch as far east as India, in fact. Some people carry the Cherkess (Adygei) lineage as Hindus.
Unveiling of Sushrutha’s statue at the Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh. What a great event, a historical event in the histories of both India & the U.K.
@MinhazMerchant@AutoVega Never understood this defeatist attitude that plagues so many of us. Talk about yourself. Don’t put us all down because of your limitations.
All of those you mentioned are dead. Killed and trophied. India is not, at least not yet. We have put up a millennium long fight, and are not planning to give up. In fact, if you had the capacity, you may have detected signs that we are on the cusp of a pushback in the millennium ahead. Wish you the best of luck.
We shall see who is left standing, eventually. As for us Hindus, we think not of reward or outcome - only of duty, each in our own little way, increasingly unconstrained, increasingly free and, increasingly, remembering.
@the_hindu@samzsays She gives an evasive non-answer, essentially saying it is the "Hindu subaltern" who does not understand secularism or liberalism today. As if the other communities do. A strangely delusional character. For her, liberalism seems to be a cloak against knowledge of her own people.