Holy Men - Seldom Reverent but Never Omniscient ...

Kate Bracks , a modest mum of three from Orange , Australia catapulted to stardom after winning Master Chef Australia-Season 3 .

But she was in news in India even before Master Chef Australia - Season 3 started airing on Star World India. Reason - she refused to address Dalai Lama , who was on their show as His Holiness. She refuted to the controversy saying , "My belief is that God is the only one that is perfectly holy."

True and logical . It is as simple as that . But , how can we , Indians , who belong to a country where a percentage of the population are holy men and a larger percentage are followers of such holy men , take such a comment lying down and doing nothing? Kate did invite wrath over her stance on holy men.

This reminded me of an incident . At my under grad college, in our third semester , we were given the list of staffs who would handle papers for us . We quickly went through it and found only one lady staff on the list who was incidentally our class in-charge.  How ever we later found out that the electronics paper was also being handled by a lady staff .The intriguing thing about her (besides her teaching that went way over our heads) was her name ; she had a name which  parents would generally name their sons with . Her peculiar name remained a mystery for over a year , till another of her college mate joined our college . It was this teacher who spilled the beans about the popularly peculiar name . When this teacher in question was a baby her parents took her to a holy man and asked him to name the child. The holy man mistook the baby girl to be a baby boy and named it accordingly . The parents realized the mistake but decided not to change the kid's name. After all a reverent holy man had named their kid !!! 

Phew !!! I just couldn't stop wondering how the parents could stand their kid being jeered at and ridiculed for her name throughout her school days , her college life and also at her workplace just because of a mistake by a man who was little better than a stranger .. 

All I could do after this was hope that at least my electronics teacher would realized that holy men may be reverent but not omniscient , they don't know everything , you can't trust them with anything , not even naming your kids !!!

All is Fair in Love and War . Is it?

I spent my entire childhood in Gopalpur-on-sea , a quite and exotic beach along the coast of Bay of Bengal. It was wonderful growing up in that quite and beautiful place where the only noise that graced one's ears was the constant rising and falling of the waves. It is a small place and everyone knows everyone else there. The Gopalpur beach is renowned for a distinct charm of its own which you would realize the moment you see the beach and the wonderful people living there.

 The languorous beach with coconut groves, casuarinas and gentle sand dunes is deserted for most of its stretch. May be the serenity , the divine beauty and the isolation on the beach that made it a preferred suicide destination for many from across the country . 

The fact that people came from far away places to drown their sorrows and merge with the calmness of the blue sea always baffled me. I remember many suicides on the virgin beach , but the one that would always remain with me is that of two lovers who felt that life held no hopes for them .

I vividly remember the walk from the bus stop to home one day in 1999 after school when every person I saw on the way had a strange gloomy expression that I couldn't fathom. I reached home and rushed to my mom and saw the same look  on her face. "Kya hua Ma?" , I spluttered . She informed me the cause of gloom over the entire town. The bodies of two young people who had consumed poison to end their miseries was lying on the shore . My brothers ever the curious lot wanted to go to the sea shore and have a look and they ran off with few of their friends. I dared not to . Mom stayed with me and gave me the details , all that she knew about this, all that locals have been talking of since morning. 

The dead were , a girl hardly 18 or 19 years old and a guy who would be no older than 21 years. They were in college somewhere from northern Orissa. The guy belonged to an Oriya family and the girl was from a Marwadi family (people of Rajasthan). They were madly in love with each other and wanted to have a lifetime of togetherness. The manager of the hotel ,where the guy and the girl had checked into a week earlier and had stated their purpose of visit as honeymoon , described the girl as pretty and short and the guy as handsome who still had the childlike innocence on his face. They were full of life and seemed like a normal newly and  happily married couple. During their stay they had even made a few friends like the owners of the fast food centers where they would have most of their meals , the local guides and photographers , the guy in the PCO booth which they used regularly to make calls. One night after a week's stay , they strolled out of their rooms as usual for dinner at their regular fast food center. After dinner they informed the owner of the fast food center that they would take a walk on the beach and be back to collect their bags and pay the bills. After so many meals at his fast food center , the owner trusted these customers enough to let them go without any doubts. He waited long past his closing time for the return of the customers , less worried about his payment and more worried about the handbag that the girl had left behind. After all , their room key would be in that bag, they would need it to get into their room for the night . But returning for the bags or to their rooms was not what the young married couple had in mind.

The next morning the fishermen who went in early to go fishing , found two bodies on the shore , dead. The police was called. The address the guy had entered in the hotel register was contacted. The parents of the guy and the girl were informed. It was learnt that both the guy and the girl were the only kids of their parents. The girl's family had fixed her marriage to a rich  NRI  and the marriage was just a month later. But that is when the young couple in love planned to elope. The families searched for them but couldn't trace them. And then the night when the couple committed suicide, they both had made calls to their parents and had asked them to come and pick them up from Gopalpur the next day. Both the parents were angry with their kids and both had refused and their kids had promised them that they would be meeting them the next day. What the parents did not know was that they would be seeing the lifeless bodies of their beloved kids the next day. 

The boy's parents were shattered and could not contain their sorrow. From the girl's family only her dad turned up and he was so angry that sorrow did not find an expression . He dumped her body in the ambulance all the time muttering about the disgrace she had brought upon the family.  

The incident rocked the peaceful town. People spoke about it for months. Many of the locals had seen the couple loitering on the beaches. No one had known the despair they had in their hearts. All one talked about in the following days were the foolishness the couple had committed . They were young, they had their entire life reckoning them but they chose to turn away and escape into nothingness. They could have started a new life , at a new place but they lost hopes too soon. They accepted defeat even before the battle had begun. They just quit. Now all is fair in love and war but quitting is definitely not accepted, neither in war nor in love .