Taslima, you may be wrong, but you're welcome

So Taslima has done it again. An article of hers in a Kannada daily has caused a riot that has killed two already and injured several more at Shimoga, Karnataka. At the newsroom that I work in, there was quite a lot of discontent over the fact that the government allows a troublemaker like Taslima back into the country time and again despite she being up to no good.

About the troublemaker part, well I agree. After all her writings cause riots so you’d have to give it to her.

But the problem is not as much with her writing as it is about the gradual destruction of a culture we have nourished over the centuries. The ability to be brash about our religions, our ways of praying and our general outlook towards our Gods.

We have been taught that wonderful poem by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar in our schools about how the man who conquered Lanka would be called God, but the powers that made the bridge to Lanka would remain monkeys.
I have not known of any problem that poem has caused anywhere in the country. It still remains in the Hindi textbooks of all ICSE schools in Bihar and Jharkhand.

Kancha Illiah, that cerebrally-gifted bureaucrat turned Dalit ideologue can get any religious Hindu’s blood boiling every time he gives an interview to the Times or any other publication for that matter.

His hatred for Hinduism and everything that it stands for is so acute that you can feel singed when his blood boils and takes the shape of vitriolic words.

But have there been riots ever after any of interviews are published? I don’t think so.

So why poor Taslima. Jut because she writes about a community and religion that since inception did not allow freedom of thought to the individual. A religion where the process of thought-creation was handed over to a cabal of people called mullahs and maulvis who set about decoding Arabic texts to their advantage and ended up building a homogenous mass of non-thinking people who surrender their weapons of reasoning and insight the moment someone utters that what has been written in the holy book must be followed in detail, by rote.

But should that allow us to forget our culture? The one where on Holi people drink to death and then tell jokes that involve everyone from the pantheons of Gods to saints to godmen.

And the same people who have a problem when Taslima writes about that horrible cage called the burqa find it absolutely secular to support MF Hussain when he draws gods and goddesses in the nude.

Creative freedom should be absolute. It is for the individual to control his temper and concentrate on something better. If I tell you that your religion sucks, then you have the right to tell me too that my religion sucks. Once that is out of the way, we can probably sit and agree with each other that both our jobs suck.

That is secularism, my friend, not digging out the wounds of old riots and Satanic Verses and Taslima’s Lajja and disallowing a community to move forward. Because the way forward is the only way we were taught. Let the memories of the past subside, move on to better thoughts, better times.

All that all the saints did over the centuries, good for them. All that we will do, may it be good for us.