Heart to Heart

  Elections 2024: musings Who you think will lord over 1.4286 billion of us Hindustanis from the hot and high PM’s seat after Elections 2024? As the year of our Lord 2023 with a sorry saga of mayhem and misery, Manipurs and Nuhs, shouts and shoutdowns (in the parliament) makes for a noisy, ignoble exit, the question is bound to cross our minds with growing urgency. For bhakts – both andh and moderate – the answer is obvious. Set in stone. A foregone conclusion. For the bourgeois class in general of which I am a rabbit-holed, self-aggrandizing, never-stick-your-neck-out type, I think the answer would be the same. For the toiling millions busy with eking out a living the hard way, sweating it out day and night, it matters not. Whether it is king A or B, their destiny is carved in hard rock: immutable. Hungry stomach has no appetite for these idle, elite ruminations. But they are a game for the lawmakers to bribe, corrupt, seduce and bamboozle with some quick cash and a bottle to boot.

                  ‘Hinduism/Hindutva vs Islam’: an interview I don’t enjoy a cosy kinship with social media platforms including the all-pervasive, omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-much else WhatsApp, primarily because they exude more venom than amrit, befuddle more than enlighten and emit more smoke and fire than any balmy sunshine. Yet I recently happened to watch a 1-hour plus WhatsApp video of interview on the recommendation of my dear friend of great charm, refinement and suavity, in three sittings. It was arguably a scholarly exposition backed by meticulous research in support of the thesis on Hinduism vis-à-vis Islam. Mining ancient history to trace the origins of Islam including Wahhabism and Sufism, the main drift of the interview was on the militant aspect inherent in Islam and how our religion has borne the brunt of its hostile anti-Hindu philosophy. It was this old adversarial core element-turned-driving force, went the argument, that triggered partition of India and was n