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 11 January 2012

JARAWAS CLICKED IN ANDAMAN TO RATS IN JODHPUR HOSPITAL ICU TO FATWA ON SURYA NAMASKAR – IT TOO HAPPENS IN INDIA!

It was a weird day. First it was the rash rush about the stories on the Jarawa tribe in The Guardian and the The Observer that in the hindsight tells us of human greed. They released a video and alleged a policeman had taken bribe to take tourists into the protected Jarawa reserve. The Jarawa tribe has been living on the Andaman Islands for thousands of years. Jarawas are a threatened group of around 300 members and are believed to be amongst the first to migrate out of Africa thousands of years ago. Now their privacy and so their exclusivity is under threat by the convoys of tourists circuiting their place in the jungle of South Andaman. Jarawas love to live in isolation away from any interaction with the civilized world of you and me. It is pathetic that in place of preserving their sanctity, we are allowing our greed to make mockery of their existence as in this case where this silly video was shot with some Jawara members dancing in nude. Shouldn’t Anthropology be Didactic as well? Tweets said it was a story and so airwaves, always in the look-out for something bizarre, grabbed it. Many in the newsrooms came to know about existence of Jarawa today so at least one good thing was put forward by it, a bit of history of human evolution injected! Shows were planned. The day by the evening created enough buzzword especially the crude video in bad taste. And there came the climax. The Andaman Administration threatened to serve notice if the video was aired. It saved some skin in the end as the legal threat put the video off the menu of programming. It is good to have shows discussing the human greed that is threatening the exclusivity of tribal heritage of human civilization and sans silly videos like this, such shows will get some required sanctity to show their sincere intent, if they have any.

Photograph taken from 'The National'

Photograph taken from 'The National'

Then there was this news story about rats nibbling a paralytic man in the ICU ward of the MDM hospital of Jodhpur. Your anguish will not abate even if you come to know this one was one of the several government hospitals with the similar predicament in the Democratic Republic of India. Rats bitten off the face of the person while he laid there helpless, blood oozing out from his lips, eyelids, eyebrows and ears as everyone was sleeping. It made a good visual story and so was in the news agenda of most of the media outfits. But expecting some healthy debate on continuance of human misery in the government hospital was a far fetched thing. We do come across such stories like shoddy cataract operations blinding hundreds or rats or dogs nibbling patients in hospital wards but no media outfit takes it as a mission beyond routine packages with some visual elements. Politics! Politics! Politics! Here too! In this case no case was lodged by the victim or his family as both the father and the son are Congress party members and so could not go against an administration being run by the government of their own party.

Finally it was about bunch of stories on political idiocy so prevalent today. The heightened activity continued adding to the controversy on Salman Rushdie’s upcoming India visit for the Jaipur Literature Festival. It is indeed the Satanic intention behind such politicking in the backdrop of the assembly elections in five states. Another was the ‘Fatwa’ by Muslim clerics banning ‘Surya Namaskar’. The Madhya Pradesh government intends to have a Guinness moment by organizing a collective ‘Surya Namaskar’ at the same time in all of its schools. Though the Madhya Pradesh government like other BJP governments has been taking overtly religious steps to polarize votes, this ‘Fatwa’ is looking more political in intent here as this whole exercise is voluntary in nature.

Whoooo! Let me have the freshness of maddening Delhi’s cold chill.
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/