The Brave Pedestrian

Every time someone tries to force you to respect an inanimate object, a dead person, an ideology or an institution, they indirectly steal your self-respect from you. By making you "respect" the dead and the non-living, they make you respect yourself less. And they make you respect other people less -- people who are alive. Respect is a currency in our social lives. It is a scarce and precious currency. This is a diversion of respect from those who are alive, to those who are dead, or those who were never alive in the first place. I object to such diversion. When I talk about respect, I talk about all the forms of respect.  Respect for the non-living and non-existent manifests itself in many forms. It manifests as worship and devotion. As fear and awe. As blind following and blind faith. As a refusal to think and question. As a refusal to act rightly, or speak out, when violence is being inflicted upon the living. Without thinking, without questioning, people say ...

July 28, 2009:  Some years ago, an uncle of mine who was in the business of producing TV serials told me and my wife — young couple with stars in our eyes — “If you want to do something in the world  of television, just ask!  Aawaz do, hum saath hain!”  Taking his word at face value. we made a couple of trips to his office at Filmcity, and were quite disappointed to see that he didn’t really mean to help us at all.  Which brings me to the question of what family ties are all about. I believe that being family means that we all have an unspoken contract of  aawaz do hum saath hain!  By this, I mean that we have a confidence that our father, mother, brother, sister, husband, wife, son, daughter will “be there for us when we need them,” whatever that means.  Everybody interprets the when-we-need-them clause in whatever way it suits them. I think very few interpret it honestly and deeply. Most people mean it as, “If you are ill, I will definitel...