problamatic patriotism

I'v alwayz been quite uncomfortable with the idea of nationalism or even patriotism....especially military nationalism....actually just military patriotism.

I am aware of the linguistic crime i am commiting by using both the terms nationalism and patrioatism simultaneously...

But the irony never escapes me when the culture tries to justify the war and bloodshed for peace and when the jingoists shout out for unmitigated revenge for some political hulabaloo.......hulabaloo, yes its nothing more.....the term used for monkeys and "imaginative" children can be used for the people who run the countries for us beacuse we do not have enough time to spare from our corporate lives...but that some other time

Does the justification of the 'naughty child' in all of us justify the waging of wars for nothing more than ego?? some psychologists claim that the childhood fantasy of planes and bombs and guns gets transformed into the frenzy, the madness which kills more men than any other "cause" year after year....

Whats more men revel in gore.....

What is the parameter of civilisation which bases itself on such violence??? the supremacy one can claim in the hobbsian world?????being the fittest in the race for survival?? or the ability to transform oneself like a warewolf....the perfect gentlemen off the battlefield and the savage-est man on it????

I saw the movie 1971 today....about the POWs who are still stuck in Pakistan.....the ending wherein an Indian soldier who has gone through hell to reach the border of India, a runaway from a prison-camp from Pakistan dies jus a couple of meters away from the border of India...piognantly wearing a Pakistan army uniform which was supposed to be his "passport" to freedom ultimately led him to be dragged away back into the Pakistani territory....and left to rot.....is this what nationalism and patriotism make of men....scavengers...

That was just a movie...but there have been men living in those jails beacuse there are'nt enough people who can see them as men....sharing something in common with them but as those who wear another country's colours and swear by another constitution.....and i am not jus refrring to the Pakistani jails....

It reminds me of one line from a novel by an irish guy called Josef Conrad i read once.It is about a white man going into the heart of africa...the dark continent....the man kurtz, sees black men on the shores and feels a shudder when he realisez that he is afraid of these people not beacuse they mite be primeval but because he could percieve some sort of a primordial-rudimentary-genetc link between him and what he pronounced on behalf of the civilized world, to the civilized world as savages.....the threat is of all the distinctions being dissloved.....supremacy cannot be claimed then.

There is no winner no loser...no rite side....no wrong...only men dying and others who see them suffer and do not flich from feeling proud about their contribution in it!!!!

The irony at a personal level is ofcourse that this line of thinking is not in conjunction with what has been taught to me all through my life. Of saluting the flag as it stands for the nation...of feeling a sense of awe for the men who are ready to sacrifice their life for the country.....there is even some amount of sex-appeal attached to it!!!!!!!!!!!

Sometimes i feel that there are more who can see this the way i see it...who can understand why i feel it is all hollow...and perhaps that is why they carry on with the pretene.....there needs be some justification for all the effort, energy,emotion and resourse which goes into sustaining this brand and strand of nationalism....

There needs be some justification for the sacrifices made by the soldiers and their families.....the idea has to be worth the history of sacrifices and the future of scarifices which lie ahead....the glory has to be worth it...

One ashoka was enough for history and the world....

now its yoga

i recently realized a new energy in me to start yoga....no spiritual awakening....jsut a tiny minute little rebellion against the system.

does that sound like utter crap? yoga a way to rebel!

i heard the newz that some guy...i dont know if there were just one or more...some crazy group or an organisation....wether indians or americans or africans or what! but i heard that they had filed a patent for yoga...

this is one of those times when u feel helpless sitting in your drawing room and try to make yourself feel better by merely changing the channel...i did the same thing

i am not much of a tv person or even a newz person...its after every zillion years that i feel the urge to now whats going on in the world i live in....and this is what happens...i feel bogged down and stiffled by the system....the structure which gave something like yoga as a cultural inheritance to us...it's specifically indian....atleast to me and to crores of other people who cannot find the root of its origin...or its influences or its possible migrations from other places even in the ancient times...hey its all possible in this world of "intertexuality" as a freind o mine puts it

all of us have been reduced to diasporic subjects...living in one nostalgia or the other....my golden world experienced a rupture when i heard this newz....a part of me which i defined and detailed by my "indianness" can now be potentially controlled or "copy-righted" by someone who i do not know and who mite not know what he/she is taking away from me and countless others...

every aspect of me can be advertised or controlled.....not speakin of the so called "brain-washing" of the media

perhaps an over-raction to the changing face of the world....

perhaps the world will come back full circle as they say evrything does and the system will gradually give back what its taking....perhaps the patents will hold no value one day.....even the social ones...

perhaps i'll forget about this in about 6 onths and become a part of the whole encroaching process....

perhaps no one will read this and one day silently i'll erase this weak testimony of my protest....

perhaps....