The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Wednesday 28 December 2011

CBI FINDS NOTHING SUSPICIOUS IN NIGAMANAND’S DEATH – DID YOU GET THAT?

CBI today filed closure report in Nigamanand’s death case but nothing much was heard amid the high decibel developments on the Lokpal Bill. The reason sighted was lack of evidence or rather we should say it is yet another blind case that the CBI was not in a position to solve given the possibility of big names cropping up (another positive argument for keeping the CBI under the Lokpal). Nigamanand was a nonentity and will remain so and so are the silent crusaders like him. He could make news only after his suspicious death in the hospital. The media that went in overdrive to cover his death was never worried about his cause, his struggle for it, didn’t even bother to prepare a good length package on it today. Thinking of having debate shows is far fetched thing. 

Nigamanand was sitting on fast protesting the mining and quarrying activities in the Ganga riverbed that have destroyed millions of acres of farmland besides damaging the delicate ecological balance in the immediate areas of Ganga civilization. He died June this year while in coma after being on fast for 68 days. The advocates of the media and the civil society seldom bothered to take notice of it. He was pitted against a mining mafia that involved many government ministers as stakeholders in the booty sharing deeds as reported by Tehelka.

There are others like Nigamanand who are fasting, protesting, but they are seldom heard in the so-called national media, not even when they get some big wrong checked. One of them is Swami Shivanand, guru of Nigamanand. Shivanand’s another disciple, 20-year old Swami Yajnanand, was jailed for two months and was force-fed. He was released only after court order. Shivanand has alleged that Nigamanand was poisoned by the owner of a local stone crushing company. He has also alleged of threats by the company to stop agitation by Shivanand’s Matri Sadan Ashram. In May this year, the High Court shut down the company’s operations but in October, the state government opened two other stretches of Ganga to mining making Shivanand to go on fast again. Government came into action only after 11 days issuing ban order on mining activities in the Ganga riverbed but with a rider that the ban order would be reviewed after reports of a pending environmental study. All this was going on in the near vicinity of Delhi and only after four months of Nigamanand’s sacrifice but nothing was heard in the national media. Instead, you can find reports in prominent international carriers.

The New York Times wrote on December 8, “Late Monday night, at an ashram near the Ganges, an iron-willed former chemistry professor called Swami Shivanand took his first bite of food in 11 days. Shivanand had been fasting, against the pleas of state officials, to protest renewed mining of stones and sand from the Ganges riverbed in the northern Indian holy city of Haridwar. He broke the fast after officials slid under his door a written order that bans mining and quarrying on the riverbed pending an environmental impact study.”

The National Geographic wrote, “Shivanand and his followers have been fighting since 1998 to defend the Ganges from the effects of mining. Their environmental cause is driven by a spiritual imperative. Quarrying from the Ganges riverbed is a big business, one that appears to have infected the local government and law enforcement. Shivanand and his followers (“saints” in local parlance) have endured years of false arrests and assaults aimed at stopping their advocacy.”

Let’s go sane, now!

©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/