A conversation about the Anna stuff going on. a facebook status update.
bargaining to fast! in a country where millions go to bed hungry, day after day. obscene.
This whole drama is really kafkaesque - Na Anna Gandhi hai, na yeh ek revolution hai. It is just a tamasha, perhaps to let people lose energy and to take the wind out of the sails of the movement, such as it is. People wil get fed up and leave after a few days. Do you think he is like Irome Sharmila?
and neither was Gandhi as wonderful as he is cracked up to be....this should really be the first lesson we learn from this nautanki. Anna is a wonderful Gandhian....and that is why it is Gandhianism is bad politics! Non-violence is all very well, but that is not the only thing good Gandhi preached....
i read as much as i can about sharmila and yet know very little about her; she is a terrifying reminder of all that is wrong with the way our society treats marginalized women. few humans in our collective memory can share her moral stature as a person demanding a better society with single minded determination, wielding the only weapon she has -her body. no, i would never compare her to anybody.
there is nothing non-violent about fasting (not the 24 hour, or few days kind). it is self-inflicting violence, in my world, that is pure violence. i had two siblings who at different periods in their adolescence refused to eat food for days to convey their displeasure, anger, frustration with the world. the family was completely terrorized by their actions. gandhian (as something peaceful) is not a word that could be used for those two teenagers (then), they never hurt any one else physically, but their demonic will power to go without food counts as some of the most psychologically violent days of my childhood. briefly, fasting is inherently violent to self and others. gave the above anecdote to avoid giving a biologist's answer for the same.... and why do we always associate the term gandhian to fasting? fasting as a human behavioral device must have a much older history, no?...... fasting and wasting away while grieving for loved ones occurs in all cultures, doesn't it?
Passive aggressive violence is an art-form, it subtly uses politics, and cherry-picks moral stands to perpetrate itself from a higher moral grounds. Passive-agressive violence does not recognize structural violence that state policies and injustices create on the marginalize, Non-violence the way it has been constructed in our psyche is not absence of violence but absence of simplistic enactment of visible physical act of violence, but surreptitious, macro level, structural level violence was all allowed. Therefore Gandhi looked other side when Bhagat Singh, who fasted more than him unceremoniously, was hanged (state-violence) when famine was causing genocide in Bengal and Gandhi was cooperating with the British by asking Indians to join the British troops for second world war. Gandhian violence kills more people than A hurting B with the back of coffee mug. The art of obfuscating macro violence is the essence of Gandhian micro level overt non-violence. and it is a scam in itself.
gandhian thoughts are influenced by the Bible. Being a christian myself, i know much of the quoted lines by him come from the Bible. he twisted and turned the words and made ppl believe in them that is very wrong. first. second. fasting for a cause comes from the Bible as well. it was meant to give away the worldly lusts, and concentrate on what the Almighty has to offer. also, never publicise ur fasting. here, goin on an 'anshan' i feel is getting into fashion today. public display of ur so called accepted pain. that old man has few years to live, and wants to cover up his past deeds trying to do this lokpal thing.
also, India is surviving without that money in the swiss banks. we sure need that for a major upliftment. i agreed wen baba ramdeo did start the process, and that wasn't some stunt. atleast it didn't fell like a publicity stunt. anna's ways do. corruption must be removed from the minds of ppl. its not just about money, its abt changing the way things have worked till now. what r they going to do to bring the top chairs under judiciary wen the very foundations have rotten? the grassroot level working needs to change, so it can worked up the chairs.
