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The self appointed leader of the Hindu community in the US, Rajan Zed is on an advising spree for the past few months.  From advising Mischa Barton about sitar player gurujis to protesting about Playboy’s investments into India to rubbishing Vanity Fair on their list of best dressed celebrities to advising Claudia Ciesla to seriously explore Hinduism.

If indeed he is worried about westernization of the Indian society, why does he hang around in the US in the first place? Wonder if Rajan Zed has ever heard this quote

“It’s better to keep your mouth shut and have people think you are stupid than to open your mouth and remove all doubts about it.”

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This ruling was a long time coming.  Over the years we  have been seeing a small stone / religious place besides a road converting into a massive place of worship that blocks the traffic on the road, creates law and order problems and encroaches on public and private land.   Simply because a few morons decide that its a place fit for worshiping.

Even when the government allocates them alternate land and facilities, they intend to stick to the encroachment beside the public roads as that gives them the leverage to create a nuisance whenever they want to.

I have always believed that a religious structure beside a public road is nothing but a public nuisance.  And this means any religious structure, whether its a temple, mosque, church, gurudwara etc.   Its high time the government picks up the gauntlet and takes on the anti-social elements who use these religious structures to achieve their own narrow political ends.

Am not sure why the Supreme Court is not asking for the current hurdles to be removed and only to prevent such things happening in future.  Does that mean that the tax paying public will still have to struggle traveling on the roads just because some graveyard or religious shrine blocks the access?  Has the dead become so important that the living has no rights?

Though am not a great supporter of Narendra Modi, i very much appreciate his government’s decision of razing of all religious structures that dot the public roads.  It doesn’t matter which religious group has put up the structure.  Anything that is a hindrance to the safety of the people traveling on the roads should be demolished.

Treading a cautious path on places of worship springing up unauthorizedly in public places — including roads — the Supreme Court ruled on Friday that while existing structures may remain, the government must prevent such encroachment in the future.

While acknowledging the difficulty in demolishing existing shrines even if they caused serious traffic bottlenecks, given the sensitivity attached to religious places, a Bench comprising Justices Dalveer Bhandari and M K Sharma found nothing holy about them and stressed to solicitor general Gopal Subramaniam the need for framing guidelines to strictly prohibit religious places from occupying public land unauthorizedly in the future.

Subramaniam assured the Bench that the Centre would take up the issue with the states. The Bench asked the Centre to file an affidavit by September 29 intimating the progress made on the contentious issue.

Interestingly, the proposal for framing guidelines came on an appeal filed by the Centre in 2006, challenging a Gujarat High Court order directing the Modi government to remove all religious structures, without any discrimination, that were encroaching on public land across the state. The SC had stayed the HC directive on May 4, 2006.

When the authorities took steps pursuant to the HC order in Vadodara and started demolishing a dargah right in the middle of a road, violence and riots broke out and the Army had to stage a flag march to bring the situation under control. According to a PIL before the HC, a survey by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation threw up 1,200 temples and 260 Islamic shrines encroaching on public spaces.

Above news source: TimesofIndia

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According to Mahatma Gandhi, India would gain real independence the day a woman can walk fearlessly on the roads at midnight.  With the economy liberalising and with the advent of BPO and the back office industry, a bit of that dream of Gandhi was being realised, but we were not there yet.

With the decriminalising of gay sex by the Delhi High court last week, we have moved one major step towards being an equal and just society.  Ignore all the religious nuts and naysayers.  For them, anyone who doesnt believe in their religion is an adversary or a non-believer or someone who needs to be stoned to death.  And that’s true of all the major religions of the world.  So, all the false propaganda that religous leaders would like us to believe that all religions are peace loving and stuff is nothing but ‘false propaganda’.  Their love is simply restricted to people who belong to their school of faith.  Anyone else is either simply banished or is left to burn in hell.

A society is said to be a modern, progressive and liberal when everyone is equal under the eyes of law.  That’s what our founding fathers envisioned when they wrote our constitution.  They believed that no Indian will be discriminated on the basis of their colour, creed, religion, region, caste, political or otherwise belief and so forth.

We live in an ever changing world and we are supposed to change with changing times. People and societies which refuse to change are consigned to the dustbins of history.  Its indeed heartwarming that from now on the corrupt policeman can no longer harass two people in love (even though they are of the same sex) and try to extort money simply because a law created in the era of dinosaurs has been repealed.

It was high time the rule was done away with.  And kudos to the Delhi High court for that.  Three cheers for the NGO, NAZ Foundation that fought the case against the might of the Indian government for 8 long years.

And just that the rule criminalising homosexual sex was abolished, two men Amrit and Jeeta have gone ahead and got married in a temple.

This could just be the first real indication of a persecuted community’s sudden faith in the law safeguarding their lives — and loves post Article 377, and the beginning of a string of same-sex marriages in the country.

In perhaps the first gay marriage after the Delhi High Court in a landmark judgment read down Article 377, a law that made even consensual sex between adult homosexuals a punishable offence, two 18-year-old men, brushing aside protests from family and jeers from society, went to a temple near their house in Chandigarh and “got hitched for life”.

As a motley crowd of gays and a few well-wishers cheered the newly married couple, Amrit held his partner Jeeta close and said their union was possible only because of the rethink on the anti-homosexual section of IPC.

“I was so delighted after the court’s verdict that we both decided to get married,” said Jeeta, who fell in love with Amrit three months ago when he stayed in the latter’s house in Kajheri, Chandigarh, as a tenant. “We had been facing discrimination in public, at the work place and at home. But things may look up for people like us now.”

Full article here

We have finally started to take baby steps towards a truly just society where no one is discriminated simply because their sense of morality doesn’t agree with a bigger bunch of hypocrites.

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French President Nicolas Sarkozy believes that Burqa (the veil worn by muslim women worldwide) “is not a symbol of religion, but a sign of subservience for women“.

Iam a great believer in democracy and freedom of choice.  If a woman wants to wear a burqa, she should be free to wear it and if she doesn’t want to, she shouldn’t be forced to,  even though her religion or elders in her family / society want her to wear it.

But then, how do you decide if the woman who has been indoctrinated all her life that the burqa is essential for her to project her religious identity wears the same even after she grows up?

Was reading the debate in CNN-IBN where Asaduddin Owaisi, the leader of MIM party of Hyderabad, India defended the burqa on the same lines as the Christian nuns who cover their heads and the Jewish men who wear a skull cap.

Most importantly, what i simply cant understand is to why only women have to wear it?  Why dont the men also wear the burqa if indeed the women are forced to wear it to protect their modesty?  Do men have no modesty? Or is it that the woman’s modesty is more precious that the man’s?  If yes, who decided that?

What do you think?  Do you agree with Sarkozy’s comment that “women behind the burqa are cut off from social life and deprived of identity?”

PS: Comment moderation has been enabled as there is a chance of this discussion going out of hand.  If all that you want to comment is something hateful, you may as well forget it as i will never approve that comment.  Put your point forth sensibly and it will be posted.

Above picture courtesy: The Muslim Woman

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Our fake ‘Iron Man’ and the eternal Prime Minister in waiting, LK Advani has fallen for a simple internet hoax.  Ya, the same kind of hoax mails that propagate that 30% of all Indians populate NASA, that 25% of all Microsoft employees are Indians etc..

Read Manish’s post as he busts the hoax that is popularly going round on the internet mentioning that almost US$ 5.7 trillion of Indian cash is being hoarded in Swiss banks and that he will bring them back to India.

Self-appointed Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani apparently is too excited about the Internet.  He suddenly is receiving chain mails like all of us – and has decided the government policy should be decided based on these email forwards.

Mr.Advani now wants all black money stashed away in Swiss banks by Indians brought back. And he promises to do that if he comes to power. Well,  how a man who couldn’t negotiate a few hijackers – will arm-twist Swiss bankers is beyond me.

Read the rest of the post here.

We have such morons staking claims for the next PM’s gaddi.  I have always believed that leaving the Prime Minister’s reigns in the hands of a communal Advani (the one responsible for all the communal blood letting in India with his rath yatras) is foolhardy.  And now, with these comments, the belief that he is not only communal, but also a nutcase is only confirmed.

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