The Not-So-Fine Line

They've told us time and again that the line between a terrorist and a freedom fighter is thin, and the labels depend upon perception alone.

It is not my brief to venture into technicalities on such a subject, for no doubt, scholars may have done much splendid work in the field. In my mind, 'terrorist' and 'freedom fighter' are contradictory ideas. Simply because, a terrorist does not fight for anyone's freedom.

Is it for the freedom of his people that he fights? The people are the ones who suffer most, for he is one of them.

Is it for his cause that he spills his blood? The cause only becomes illegitimate for it is marred by violence in its means.

Is it for his rights that he terrorizes? He only takes away the rights of others, taking away his own and another's right to life.

Is it for God that the terrorist becomes a terrorist? God gives an individual life and never the right to take it away.

A terrorist may be fighting for a selfish cruel instinct but he is not fighting for freedom. A freedom fighter's is a real battle. A terrorist's is one that nobody wins.

The City of the Lake

I have seen the city of the lake and it is beautiful.

Sunbeams rain reflection upon the surface of the hazel brown water and gleam upon it like firestars in the day. At night, it is the more artificial gems that shine upon a still black plain that the lake creates - pearls scattered on velvet. The hills surround you at every point. They are green in abundance and their foliage dances to the mountain winds sweeping through clouds made of pure wool and gossamer. The sky is always a sharp and stark blue, clear in its colour and crisp in its texture.

Market places are few, but relative to the size of the city, several. Colourful stalls stand short and at shoulder with each other, filled to their gills with woollen, wax and plastic treasures. Candles on a dozen shelves every half meter tell fascinating narratives of grandeur. Figures in black stand in worship, white waves intertwine in elaboration, colours mingle in harmony, treats of pink sprinkled with illuminable delights, ferns and dried floral glory embedded into permanence, sugar encrusted aroma of translucence, glazed fruit, creatures of the forest, characters of a fantasy. Wood broods in its majesty elsewhere, ornamented with metal that is restrained in its yellow blaze.

One turns to the lake again - it is a festival of sails and boats where dragons and swans of exquisite gloss spin and trail making ripples and oars create small splashes that shine like diamonds from where you're looking.

A temple red, exuberant in its music, ringing and streams of small golden lights is near a Gurudwara of pristine white and tunes. The mosque, under renovation is architectural beauty embodied in marble and stone and the minarets are many. The church is resplendant in the hint of a glorious past - gray cool stone and red calming peaks that are led to from a blue metal arch.

The hills around are dotted with habitation in the style of literary towns of the fantasy canon. Red roofs and colours from the entire palette of nature - faint greens, gentle pinks, sparkling whites, candy yellows, sky blues, peaches and oranges, flora and fauna, fragrant mauves and wood.

The market places are alive with the scents of spices and sizzling smoke. Here something steams and is being fried - sauces, chillies, sweet syrups and cream are heady.

The city of the lake is a feast for the senses and the panoramic gaze will settle on nothing - there's a glint of colour after every scene.

Rationality is Nothing At All

One needs to define rationality before one may embark upon its advocacy, for the concept in itself is flawed and given to contradiction. Rationality functions on the assumption that a given thing is better or worse than another thing. Does it not then depend entirely on variable choice, which may itself be irrational? Take a conflict situation for example, say a civil war. Rationality of solution would depend upon perspective alone. If A can find the two-state settlement rational, B may find re-unification the brightest of ideas. Even so, if rationality is defined as something that 'logically creates a situation which is best for all involved', it depends upon the determination of what is good and what is not. Upon what is dependent the determination of the 'best situation'? Further irrationality? The preference of the individual answering the question? Dependant entirely on his or her location?

What then is Rationality? Nothing at all. Because even these logical statements linked may not arrive at a rationale.

The Dirty F Word

I mean Female of course. Also Feminism. One likes to get things clear at the outset.

When a nation's resources are usurped, its decisions made by an authority outside of itself and its economic independance stunted, you call it Imperialism. When the same thing happens to a woman, its just the way the world is. When certain ascribed identities - castes - are denied entry into temples, you say its discrimination and grossly unfair. When a woman is kept out by a temple, you bring up the fact that a temple is in fact, private property, and can frame its own rules. You don't care so much when text books use the word 'man' for all of human kind or where it could have used the world 'people'. Heaven forbid if the text book said 'white man'. When a particular racial group is denied employment, a political crisis grips the media and the world. When a girl is prohibited from leaving her home to work, indeed, not allowed to seek employment, its family tradition and conservatism. When the upper classes, upper castes, the rich, the aristocrats, the manistream, the majority dominates or monopolizes something to the detriment of corresponding opposite groups, it's injustice. When men dominate a field, its perfectly normal.

It's all quite logical actually. Discrimination against half the world is Not Relevant.

Let's just accept that it isn't relevant to deliberate upon patriarchy and women's empowerment. Not intellectual enough, and quite disconcerting to say the least. It's both more important and more intelligent to talk about racism, imperialism, caste bias, communalism and tribal issues. But a group that constitutes 50% of the world's population doesn't qualify as a cool enough debate. It never has. Gender studies are a bizarre and irrelevant discipline to spend your academic years studying. Women are something that loud and screechy women NGO workers talk about, and ugly dishevelled women academics.

It's something a teacher once said during a lecture on 'Instability'. It is assumed that instability is a consequence of fairly widespread inequality. And yet, women who constitute half of the entire world's population and have been subject to the grossest forms of violence, discrimination and subjugation, have never caused any political instability.

They're Irrelevant after all.

The Right of a Nation to Exist

The idea of rights is in the nature of evasive fireflies. Difficuilt to pinpoint, capture and determine. In the context of international affairs, there are conflicts, and in some of these conflicts, the rights of some nations to exist has come under the scanner. The right of Israel to exist has been qustioned by a number of Arab states and a considerable portion of the Palestinian people. Zionism has been considered discriminatory and it is asserted that a nation created by people moving into a nation already someone else's, is unjust.

But conflicts are so much more complicated than that. And hard as it may seem, the only way anything can possibly move (given that time travel still has a few glitches to be sorted out, in the scientific sense) is forward.

If you don't recognize Israel, the reason you give is that the creation of the nation meant unfair occupation of Palestinian land. Can you accept the United States of America, a land Europeans took from Native Americans? Can you accept Pakistan - created of a partition along communal lines? Can you accept Australia - which pushed the aborigines to make way for European settlers? Can you accept the dozens of African nations whose boundaries were drawn up in straight indifferent lines by the Imperial powers? Nealy every single nation of the world today has in its past a war, invasion, manufactured boundaries and fractured ethnicities.

Would you deny the right of these nations to exist? Then why deny that right to Israel? Only because it was created in living memory and the conflict has escalated in the recent past? Annihilitic doctrines cannot resolve a situation of clash between politics, interests and identities. These are sensitive things and must be sorted out realistically and in a manner that creates justice, not destroys the opposition.

Think about it. What nation has the right to exist? Then again, what nation has a compelling enough reason to be singled out to be not recognized?

Democracy is a Mirror

Interestingly, it is easy to see what we value as societies across the world. What the intellgentsia, if I may blatantly stomp all over diversity and use that term, holds 'good' and 'right' manifests itself in the multiplicity of attributes it accords to universally admired concepts. Take Democracy, for instance. Democracy, in textbooks of imagined consciousness, you are always warned, is not about representaive government alone. Democarcy is about equality, civil liberties, justice, duties, secularism... Love, most certainly. And with each textbook I read, the writer infuses his/her conceptualization of Utopia into the idea of democracy. Democracy, they say, is an idyllic pasture of cool breezes and the rising sun.

I'm personally all for democracy. I am only noting that its interesting how when something is largely accepted as the 'right' thing by a society, it is endowed with features that it was quite unaware of to begin with.

The Woman who left her feet behind

There is a window behind me, which I bestow my passing glance upon from time to time when Goddess Fidgety has definitely taken over. It's mostly frosted, but there are lines in between that will give you a view of the office that lies within. the bottom pane is almost entirely clear and through it I see a most odd sight - a little foot stool emerging from under an ankle length hem. Now, to a sane person that may not seem much. To me, its like having seen plastic toes edged with rubber upon a woman. The footstool rocks and wobbles all day and gives free reign to my imagination. I like to think of it as an alien at work, employed by the organization to regulate its outer space transactions, perhaps a being from Planet Toilet Equipment. For the first time today, the hem is missing. What I mean of course is, the woman there is gone, but she has left her feet behind. They lie there despondant and lonely, four short legs without the body that infuses life in them.

They bother me, sitting like that.

They also give me the perfect opportunity to illustrate what its like to read an exciting title and find a morbidly eye batting tale following it.