Honnasiri's Catch

Time, despite the inevitable changes, needs a few constants otherwise we lose ourselves, like manners i.e. civility, grace, respect - that age-old value that can seem really old school sometimes. The manners that maketh the man, they say. They also mark the man apart by miles from those people with lesser or, worse, none of this standard. This golden role can be offered no excuse, none at all. The problem, however, arises with the ongoing intense political age where person and politics know no boundaries. Intentional politicking usually involves supporting one side in total, including its bad parts, to avoid the fallouts of the other side(s) in total to achieve the best world possible yet. Depending on how desperate you are for that world, reason starts to fade, irrationality takes its place and you can't make out the difference between the two.  That's when you lose the manners that maketh you. Name-calling, condescending, patronizing and other collectively influenced adverse...

Sometimes it takes what seems like the wrong punch to get the right effect by an expected person - like the recent backlash by many Muslim countries about Nupur Sharma's statements on Prophet Mohammed. Just a disclaimer though: their response is not a complete defense of what many Indian Muslims go through in a stated secular country like India - whether it is by the 1976 assertion of "secular" in the Preamble or the claim that Hinduism is anyway secular making the former unnecessary. The international response is on an equal level to how many Muslims are made to face struggles at home in India. The mirror just flipped. It's all show and no substance, just with a different name.  The countries, which registered their opposition, practice a somewhat equal intolerance of beliefs other than theirs, as does the Hindutva brigade that has been on the rise in the past few months, whose words these very countries have raised an issue with. They, both, have the same cultura...