Rachita Swain
You are all invited to the auspicious ceremony of the Ayodhya bhoomi pujan, to be held on August 5- to suit our new reality. The Odysseus, PM NaMo, of our new journey to a jingoistic nation will be inaugurating the ceremony to reassure the anxious emotions plaguing the affected 1.5 million of the population, afflicted with the novel corona virus. Keeping that in view, let me tell you a Hindu parable to keep motivating you by dragging a Nobel Laureate’s speech in peppered intervals.
BJP, in an intense phase of its religious crusade, began with protection of animals by banning cow slaughter to the demolition of Babri Masjid(to fight for the rights curbed by the Mughals, some 400 years back) to the construction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya to provide justice to all the citizens of India, irrespective of religious distinctions. Right from the beginning, the right-wingers have synchronized selectively of Olga’s tenderness to be compassion which extends only to jibedaya; human life must be left to Fate! Eastern civilization, specifically Indians, relish spicy curries as their staple diet. Accordingly, we have previous instances of BJP MPs apolitically religious statements as spicy kadha to cure the bland governance of other countries simply aimed at mechanical business strategies to accentuate cold development. To begin with, we have had the Bhopal MP, Pragya Thakur, the direct descendant of Lord Ram, set on the pedestal to help us out of the COVID scourge. She had advised the people to chant the pious Hanuman Chalisa five times a day that will rid the world of the pandemic. What a relief! Instead of emptying chemists’ shop of Vitamin C tablets, now we know what to do: return to our roots. In fact, this statement has had strong influence on devoted minds, and even deeper involvement in social media. A man, accordingly, has become famous by chanting the Gayatri Mantra while being administered the covaxine, at the newly opened COVID Vaccine unit at the SUM Hospital in Odisha. The forty-seven minute video was widely circulated on Whatsapp, while a few anti-nationalists have been indulging in Olga Tokarczuk’s speech, who questions the imposition of the subjectivity of a first-person narrator and misuses of internet in leading to incoherent thoughts amongst various individuals. What a blasphemy!
Haven’t those people been following healthy diets? An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Our revered politicians have been providing diet charts with healthy and ethnic substitutes. PM NaMo appealed to the people of India to blow conch shells and clang utensils as yet another means to rope in the dissipating religious fervor, just for a day though. Well, people love the loquacious orator with all their minds and hearts for keeping the spiritual reasons intact. Never mind if keeping the lungs healthy just for a day by blowing conch shells didn’t throw out the virus. His charisma extends to people who realize that these are small steps which will lead to a drastic change in the future- something, that Olga terms as butterfly effect– commonplace occurrences are bound to have cosmic dimensions. Why then should her discourse bewilder people, at all? However, the ministers of BJP and some of the priests of the Ram Mandir have not been largely immune to the raging corona virus- perhaps, they were not enough devoted to the religious momentum- to think of it like that would mean angering Lord Ram. But they are considerate and have been actively part of the upcoming bhoomi pujan. Taking such situations into account, UP CM Yogi Adityanath, has asked people to recite Ramayana in memory of the people who laid down their lives in the 1992 temple struggle. Shouldn’t critics remember an earlier premonition of PM’s clarion call to light diyas for COVID workers. How could we not revere such martyrs who intend to protect our religious sanctity as we do when we pay our respects to martyred soldiers who protect our topography?
Olga, in her 2018 Nobel Laureate speech, recalls that her mother misses an unborn child –this, she likens with the incoherent radio buzzing as messages from the cosmos, which in her immaturity, she is unable to decipher. Is Congress, also committing blasphemy, by sympathizing with her, in putting forth the theological question as to how can the birth of Lord Ram be celebrated when he was never born. In a system of automatic connections, the amendment of the 1986 National Education is an orchestration of BJP toward achieving the goal of a national literature. Expertly blending values and the flexibility of the choice of language, the usage of English as the medium of instruction has been brushed under the carpet for a number of years of the school education- this has been done to boycott the influence of colonialism of a bygone era to soothe agitated nerves of the postcolonialists. By including Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language, into the education curriculum— with the infusion of astrology in the appeal of lighting diyas to searching a dead man’s zodiac sign and the stations of planetary motions in Olga’s protagonist, Duszejko in “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead”— even BJP knows how and when to pique the interest of the Indian Population for furthering the nationalistic agenda on a cosmopolitan plane.
Cultural differences are, therefore, set ablaze in the absence of an omniscient narrator.
