Part 1
Being an Indian Malayali who grew up in Kerala has permanently damaged most people for life. You grow up thinking of everyone and everything in terms of religion and caste. You think like this: the world around you or rather India is divided into Hindus who are upper caste and not, who when they are in or enter power are all from the upper castes, Muslims who seem divided only on the basis and nature of caste but united fundamentalists regarding their religion, Christians who are few and struggle and are divided on the basis of both class and caste, with the few in power being subservient to Hindu upper caste matrices of ideology. Later you find out that all these people are also divided in other ways, Christianity suffering less from patriarchy, all suffering from racial inferiority issues presumably, not being either white or Aryan but only Dravidian with mostly not fair enough skin. It is like being born into a madhouse. There is no overt violence in this world but the violence hangs heavy in the air like unspoken menace that never bursts forth. Into this already volatile unbreathable air of heirarchical scions and heirs of Marxists, atheists, Christians, the Congress, Muslims and Hindus along with the ever changing landscape of the new rich depending on the fiscally viable latest foreign destination (it is now presumably Germany) to bring in the forex, (but it has been Singapore, Malaysia, UK, USA, Canada, Australia, the Gulf etc earlier), into this combination of unseemly layers, I repeat, came the RSS’s growing power and now the influx from the North of cheaper working class labour, more urban than rural presently. To escape this rat trap of burgeoning hostility you leave the state by chance and find it is even worse outside because in Kerala people at least think that they are Indian but outside people think everyone is a Hindu, not an Indian, since the slow emergence of the BJP.
One is forced to take sides in a discourse not of one’s own making. I mean basically who cares for any of these things? Class, caste, nationality, language, identity, race, gender, religions, culture, the Hindus, the Mughals, the Christians, the capitalists, the Marxists, colonialists, imperialists, the British, the atheists, the gender warriors, the ecowarriors, the scientists, the regional parties or one representing the bahujan. Not enough. It is a matter of fundamental sounds, pun intended, as Beckett would have said. They are all people who looked too long into the abyss and have become monsters to their own undoing, unknown to themselves, and not satisfied with that grow more monstrous daily.
Bangalore, for instance, has many problems like garbage, filth, stink, poverty, unemployment, bad roads with poor lighting, no water, overcrowding, rampant growth with no planning or enough infrastructure, caste, communalism, inflation, linguistic chauvinism, education and healthcare as traps to extort money etc.
Can any of these groups by themselves solve all these problems? No, they cannot but can only keep on talking either adding drops to the water of solutions or fire to the fuel of more problems.
There is no hope for anyone except in unity, harmony, melody, balance, equity and looking at things the way God does or as human beings think God should, in terms of being doers and not talkers, in humility, in love, in forgiving, giving, mercy and compassion. Not in tolerance, dreadful word.
In active virtues. God is Life and impersonal at the same time, and creative, so every day for God is a new day of creation. He is the lessener of suffering by taking on suffering, but also its giver as He sees fit and He is the giver of death. His will still reigns supreme, over all these clashing ideologies, discourses and worldviews and He alone is for the underdog or the underdogs, but His plan includes overthrowing what and whom he considers evil and maintaining all that is just and good in this world. His ways remain inscrutable to all except those with eyes of faith. Beyond all things, whether the earth or nature or the universe or laws only those whom He considers poor, broken hearted, crushed, contrite, humble, even know of his existence. They experience his grace and miracles daily.
He looks after all creatures but also lets the immutable laws of nature work and waits for unity among human beings or certain fixity on their part as to their stances to manifest Himself.
Be ye therefore one with Me and each other as I am with the Father – I in you and you in Me and we in the Father and the Father in us – and whatever you ask in My Name will be done for you on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus says. This is the way.
Greater love has no man than this that he lay down his life for mankind. When everyone does this, like Jesus the forerunner, the world will finally become heaven.
When mankind comes to this which it will not due to the presence of evil, those who do will be saved and the others not.
Part 2
Remembering The Rise and Fall of Rome with reference to the results in the local body elections in Thiruvananthapuram.
It is good to remember what ONV Kurup wrote on the RSS earlier for background.
https://www.doolnews.com/onv-kurup-note-criticising-rss…
I was born in Trivandrum. I grew up there. I spent the first thirty seven to thirty eight or more of my years there.
The cancers of communalism due to Hindutva, Naxalitism and Muslim fanaticism in pockets by the Ma Adani types and virulent casteism have always festered like never healing sores under its veneer of peacefulness. Seeds take a long time to mature. The Nairs with their activism supported by the other castes like the Menons, Panickers, and the Namputhiris though few in number and yet others, the Christians with their insularity and casteism, the Ezhavas with their collective stick-to-themselves and rise groupism and Leftism identities, the Muslims with their economic struggles, the Left with its regressive reactionary outlook in recent times, a less active Congress, the Pulayas and Parayas with no one to lead them into activism unlike Ayyankali earlier, the rise of the RSS amidst the always Brahmanical Kerala, and this was just waiting to happen. To see authoritarianism and oligarchy, and fascism and dictatorship come to pass in my own home town through peaceful means by the ballot should be incredibly painful for me but is not simply because I always saw it coming even in my twenties.
My comfort is in Jesus and Gibbon and the lessons I have imbibed from Nature, Earth and the Universe. What rises will fall but the things that are invisible, microcosmic, those that dwell in the lowliest places which are the secret dwellings of the most High God will always eternally forever everlastingly endure and overcome.
Dr Koshy AV
