Inner Metamorphosis

“If you think that your culture is being unfairly portrayed in news, books and movies, why don’t you produce them yourself?” I’m old enough to remember how leftists used to the taunt Hindus who complained of biased representation of their religion in the popular media. At the height of their cultural monopoly, they didn’t anticipate a day when Hindus could escape their choke-hold. Enter, 2014. Leftists assert that it’s BJP’s ascendance to power that radicalized people. They’ve got it upside down. It’s the new breed of aware Hindus, energized and educated by literature on the internet (which left didn’t set its eyes on yet) that made BJP’s rise possible. Without the ideological support of these self-educated people, angry at the systematic injustice meted to their lot for decades, BJP could still have been a marginal power. Certainly not the juggernaut it has become today. No more monopoly For his seminal work on Veer Savarkar, its author Vikram Sampath got elected as a Fell...

It’s hardly a secret. We know the day will come. Yet, when it announces its arrival, we’re in denial. At some point, we begrudgingly accept it: the middle age. It’s difficult to pin the middle age. It’s probably when we experience what it means to be parents of rambunctious children and to be children of overbearing parents. When stray sprains and headaches show no signs of budging for days. When your memory fails you at the most inopportune time. During one of my long morning walks, it stuck me: what if I had misinterpreted the script of my life so far? Did I allow myself to be sentenced to silence too long? Did I willingly forfeit my right to defend myself and let others' judgment to prevail upon me? Could it be possible that guilt blinkered me from seeing how debilitating circumstances forced my hand as much as my own incapacity. The middle age, for all its attendant decays, provides one extraordinary compensation in bargain: perspective. All these years there was no data to und...