..not just another post.

I am not just posting something today for the sake of posting alone. This is an afterthought to a bizarre incident that once occurred in the Lord Jagannath Temple, Puri, where the Temple authorities admonished a Muslim family of three(all females) for entering the Temple premises. Not only that, they said horrible things to them about Islam caste and Muslims and a lot of other undescribable things. Is God not One for all? I just don't know where does this narrow mindedness came from..!!

I remember, one day while traveling in a bus to my village, I got a seat besides a lady with a 3 -yr old cute child, who were deeply engrossed in a mother - child talk. As the bus moved further we passed a herd of cows, and the mother helped the child identify the animal - "That's a cow, see, it has two eyes like you, and two ears, one nose..". Through most of the journey(until, of course, the child fell asleep) The mother helped the kid associate with the things passing by, helping it find the similarities between it and its surroundings.

In our childhood times, we always associate with things around us by finding similarities between us and the things around us. When do we then undergo a transition and start searching for dissimilarities?

As kids we are inculcated with a basic fact of life, that despite of different forms we all are essentially the same... why else do we imagine talking animals, a face for the sun, a tree with limbs? Bcoz we associate "life" with everything around us, and believe that everything lives, feels and reacts just like us.

But in course of time, as we shed the mask of innocence, suddenly differences creep in. We begin to search for how dissimilar we are, how superior to the others! And yet when we divide ourselves, we simultaneously pursue a search for more like us.

We are not stand alone units. Like almost everything in this earth, we are a part of the "whole". We live in communities cos they offer us shelter, protection, and more than anything else companionship. we are bound by the same sense of comradeship that exists between all other species, yet we often fail to see others as similar to us. So how does it make a difference if we belong to one community or another? Why make closed communities? Why seek for more reasons to divide?

a poet had once wrote...

A child's foot doesn't know it's a foot yet
And it wants to be a butterfly or an apple
But then the rocks and pieces of glass,
the streets, the stairways
and the roads of hard earth
keep teaching the foot that it can't fly,
that it can't be a round fruit on a branch.
Then the child's foot
was defeated, it fell
in battle,
it was a prisoner,
condemned to life in a shoe..

I say, if a river can pass through 2 cities, 2 states, 2 countries and still be a river.. why cant a person belong to 2 religions, or for that matter do the rites of 2 religions, 2 castes and yet be regarded as the same person?

Please Grow Up, People.