Sick to the soul

Headlines ~ Shots fired, lakhs out on Lucknow streets
… The Asian Age

Lakhs of muslims – from eight-year-olds to 80-year-olds – turned out on the streets of Lucknow on Sunday to protest against offensive cartoons of Prophet Mohammed. Shouting slogans against those who had offended religious sentiments, the protesters burnt nearly 1,000 effigies and fired several rounds in the air to register their protest …
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Some youth turned violent when they broke the show-window panes of Café Coffee Day outlet and a Domino Pizza outlet …
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More here ~ “Shots fired, lakhs out on Lucknow streets -By Amita Verma ["This page can only be seen in IE" … Compatibility: Your web browser needs to support HTML4.01, CSS2 and JavaScript to correctly view this page.]

What I have to say about this ~

Well! These people are reacting now? And like this? What is the use of reacting like this anyways? What does eight year olds know about all this? Why drag our future generation into all this? How strong are the eighty year olds to protest? Why not let them live the remaining days of their life in peace?

I had read about this a long back on two or three blogs… An American blog, blog of a Muslim and another American blog and you will be surprised to know that these blogs spoke in favor of the other one. The American blog detested the offensive cartoons while the muslim persons’ blog loathed the attack on the twin towers on 11th September.

Yes! Offensive cartoons were really an insult. The attack on twin towers was an insult too. The bomb attack on London was an insult. It was an insult to print pictures of Hindu deities on bikinis and have picture of goddess on the advertisement hoarding of a bar, but truly speaking these all acts are a matter of shame for Humanity. I do not hate these guys who do such things, I hate the kind of mentality they have. It makes me sick to the stomach, liver, lungs, heart or whatever organ I can think of, or to be appropriate, it makes me sick to the soul. It is fine to protest against such deliberately done acts but to protest in such a manner at places where the offense has not happened in first place is really ridiculous. If you want to protest, do that in the appropriate manner. Is it of any use to break the show-window panes of Café Coffee Day and Domino Pizza outlets? Were they responsible for what happened? Had they participated in the act in any way? Were those people not common folks trying to earn their breads?

I feel that anger management program should be a must for everyone. Only when one knows how to control anger would there be end to such protests, which cause more harm than positive outcome.

I am not sure how many of you would agree to what I say but at least I would be able to sleep peacefully at night [if no one out of those who have read this article and disagree to my viewpoint throw stones on my house] because I voiced my opinion and stated that I am against such an insult of humanity. Sometimes I feel, someday someone who hates me for being so frank and does not agree with what I say may shoot me and I would die or may be die a natural death after many years BUT all this nonsense and bloodshed is not going to end.
Now please do not throw a bomb on my blog…

Arti D. Honrao 

What’s going on? ~ Ekta Kapoor ishtyle

There was some problem at Bloggers yesterday due to which I kept losing the comments for my post “It is all about money, honey”. But as I have email notification “ON” I got all the comments and I have reposted the comments. [Do check out]
Past few days there has been some serious discussion on my blog and hence an serious mood so here is something on the lighter side …

How would Ekta Kapoor present the Blogger server problem that I found out? Now, as Ekta Kapoor has not produced any English serial [as per my little knowledge] the rest of the post [dialogues] would be in Hindi.

Scene – Artis’ room
Time – 1:20 am [don't rub your eyes, you read it right ... am]

Arti is typing an article that has just popped out of her head… As she finishes typing she presses the publish icon in Msword. The article being published, now Arti logins at Blogger to do some editing. She uploads a banner designed by Janice and edits the template. She creates a link for her poem post ~ Appreciation and then republishes her blog, takes a back up and shuts down the pc and goes to bed.

Next scene – Typical Ekta Kapoor sunrise ~ birds chirping, two-three boats floating in water [obviously] and the sun [of course!] and then Artis’ room [which is actually very far from such an scenery]
Time – Long time after sunrise [won't tell the time, izzat ka sawaal hai... Ekta Kapoor ki nahi, meri]

After brushing her teeth [complete set] Arti comes to her room with a mug of coffee and sits on her desk [chair actually] and starts her pc and connects to net and opens her blog. She sees that there are two comments on her recent post. She opens the comment page and finds that there is only one comment. She opens Incredimail and finds that there is email notification of two comments. There is worried look on Artis’ face. Then Incredimail tells her that there is one more comment, she checks blog … Oh no! No comment seen! She puts both her hands on her cheeks and screams, “Hey Bhagwan! Yeh kya ho raha hai?“

All of a sudden there is a lightning [yes, inside the house, Ekta Kapoor is capable of doing that] and a figure dressed in dark brown [because I don't wear black] walks out of Artis’ body and stands on her left -

Original Arti <OA> – Tum? Kaun ho tum?
Bad Arti <BA> – [bad part of you always wear dark clothes according to Ekta kapoor] Main tumhari antaratma hu.
OA – Kya chahti ho tum?
BA – Jawab!
OA – Kaisa jawab?
BA – Kya karr diya tumne? Kisne kaha tha template se khilwad karne?
OA – [with tears in here eyes, thanks to glycerin] Parr maine to aisa kuch bhi nahi kiya. Template to hamesha edit karti hu, kuch nahi hota…
BA – [angry tone] Parr aaj hua na!

All of a sudden there is 2nd lightning [again inside the house] and another figure clad in white walks out of Arti [this is obviously the good one] and stands on her right side <GA>
GA 2 BA – Kyun daant rahi ho useh. Ismein uski koi galati nahi. Zaroor yeh kisiki saazish hai
BA 2 GA [laughing loudly] – Lo sunlo. Ek to isne galati ki aur tum hoke bahane bana rahi ho.
OA 2 both – Ek min, mere paas ek idea hai, saying so OA types Neetikas’ blog address and presses enter, then she leaves a comment to see whether it gets deleted too. No! It does not…
BA – Dekha! Neetika ka blog theek hai kyunki woh template se khilwad nahi karti [apt title for this play as it starts with k ~ "Kyunki woh template se khilwad nahi karti"]
GA – To ismein Arti ki kya galati hai? Isne dekho apna blog kitna accha banaya hai
BA – Aur ab sab vaat laga di hai
OA [screams] – Aaap dono chup karoge! Maine jo neetika ke blog pe comment kiya tha woh nahi raha, I mean delete ho gaya!
Both BA and GA look towards pc, stunned!
GA – Dekha! Maine kaha tha na, ismein Arti ki koi galati nahi! Blogger ki saazish hai
BA [biting her nails] – Mujhe ek kaam yaad aaya, main abhi aayi…
and she walks back inside OA. GA smiles at OA and walks inside too. Arti switches off her pc and walks out of her room.

The End.

Composed on cell at 2:45 am.
Arti D. Honrao

It is all about money, honey

Well! Let us leave the honey part and discuss the money part here. Producers of our Hindi film industry have spent [and gained too, that is different matter] a lot of Vitamin M [Money] to show us the importance of relationships in our lives. They have used the likes of Shahrukh Khan to tell us that it is not money that is important but relations that are important [it is a different story again that none of these “likes” would have done their part if Vitamin M was not infused into their veins]. Starting from movies like Avtaar, Santaan [I am sure no one must have heard about it Starring Jumping jack Jeetu uncle and Deepak Tijori (Khiladi fame)] the trend still continues with movies like K3G and Baghban. I agree that sometimes our industry people exaggerate things, but it depends on us to filter out the sensible matters from these films. On one hand when these films tend to be popular amongst the “parents” and “parent-loving” children on the other hand they are condemned by individuals who are of the opinion that these films in fact impinge on the minds of their parents that they are being ill-treated.

I am of the opinion that it is indeed a matter of shame that we have to depend or learn from these films how to treat our parents. Are we not capable enough to think for ourselves what is important for us ~ relationships or money? I am not trying to tell here that money is not important, it is. But earn money so that you can live but do not live to earn money.
Earn money to buy things that can be bought with money but then do not lose those things, which money cannot buy.

It is really heart wrenching to know that there are cases where parents have been murdered for the sake of money. No! This is not my mind game. I have not personally seen such cases but heard about them on news channels and as far as I know news channels give real life news and do not show any fiction. I agree, that these cases must be very rare happenings but it is a shame that they are happening around in the world we are living in. When we are trying to become westernized we are also picking up the negative points from the west and that is not good. During one of my mail conversations with Janice who is from Canada we discussed this important issue and she said Indian are far better than westerners are as far as respecting parents is concerned and there are a few things that we need to learn from them too [let us leave that for now]

It is seen that the concept of nuclear family is coming to the front on larger scale. It is not bad to have a nuclear family but how can one think of abandoning his parents and set up a completely new life? It is ok if you have a nuclear family still managing to keep in touch with your parents and fulfilling their needs. If they have done so much for us is it not our responsibility to do something for them? Many of us are of the opinion that parents did what was their duty as parents but then they tend to ignore that fact that it their duty to take care of their parents. How justified it is to expect someone else to be there for you when you need them and not be there for them when they need you?

Heard of “Shravan” who used to carry his parents on his shoulders everyday? How did this vaporize so easily out of the minds of those people for whom money tends to be important than parents?
There is one more story I heard when I was a child and I want to share it with you. The story might seem to be stupid but there is a big lesson in it. Many of you must have even heard of it in one of Amitabh Bacchans’ films

There was a guy who loved his mother a lot but after marriage he became closer to his wife. Slowly, over a period of time, he started to drift away from his mother. One night when his mother was sleeping his wife asked him to kill his mother and bring her the womans’ heart. As per his wifes’ request he walked to his mothers’ room with a knife and killed her and took out her heart. As he was returning to his room he tripped over something and fell down and he heard a voice coming from his mothers’ heart, “Did you get hurt my son?”

That is all I can say.
Arti D. Honrao