The meaning of life ...

A friend is heading to Amritsar, to the Golden Temple.

"Will you go to Jallianwalla Bagh?" I asked.

"Of course, yes."

"Thanks. Include me when you observe a moment of silence there for the tremendous sacrifice they made so that we can now enjoy this life" I said.

"I am getting goosebumps thinking about it."

"I hope to make it there someday" I said.  I meant it.

The afternoon at Jallianwalla Bagh almost a hundred years ago was one of the darkest of the darkest moments of the British Raj, when civilians who had gathered at the park were mercilessly gunned down.  And to escape from the bullets, some--men, women, and children--even jumped into the open well there and died.



When watching Gandhi, the movie, thirty years ago, it was not his assassination that made me emotional, but the awful events of Jallianwalla Bagh and the protest at the salt works, where they line up to get beaten by the police, and the injured then rejoin the line after getting first-aid treatment.

If you want to see a grown man cry, just play these two scenes for me, when I feel even slightly vulnerable.



Those events were not fiction. They were powerful events, propelled by non-violence and non-cooperation. Even now it seems unbelievable that the Raj was defeated not with guns but by Indians getting beaten up and killed and jailed.

I know I owe all those people big time. In my atheist framework, it is not the gods that I thank but real people like the ones at Jallianwalla Bagh.  To think that they made that kind of an ultimate sacrifice makes me feel guilty sometimes wondering if the life I lead now does even a little bit of justice.

After that interaction regarding Amritsar, I have been flipping through the e-pages of Gandhi's autobiography and, yet again, I am reminded of Einstein's homage:

Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth

During the sabbatical weeks in India, I did go to visit the Gandhi Memorial in New Delhi. As I neared it, after a rather tiring walking around, a police officer stopped me and said that the memorial was closed to the public.

It seemed rather odd that a memorial to Gandhi would not be open to the public.  So, of course, I had to ask him for the reason.  In retrospect, I would have been better off not knowing why.  I, and a few others, could not go near that memorial because a foreign dignitary was scheduled to visit and pay respects.

I viewed from a distance and wondered at the tragic irony.  That is life!

Obama chickens out: The Golden Temple fiasco

In the emotional response after 9/11, a Sikh was shot dead in Arizona--the turban that he wore, like many Sikhs who do for religious reasons, made the assailant think the Sikh was one of Osama's followers.  That ignorance about Sikhism as a religion cost an innocent Sikh man his life.

That was almost ten years ago. 

Now, it is not an uninformed person but the president of the United States who is apparently falling into that same ignorant trap.  The NY Times reports that Obama's people don't want the president to visit the Golden Temple because a few ignoramuses might then conclude that Obama visited an Islamic shrine because he is really a Muslim:

Mr. Obama was expected to visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, next month, but there were questions about how he would cover his head. Sikh tradition requires that men tie a piece of cloth on their heads before entering the spiritual center. The president, who is Christian, has fought the perception that he is Muslim. Sikhs are regularly mistaken for Muslims.
“There’s a xenophobic trend in this country, where some people are calling him Muslim,” said Jasjit Singh, associate director of the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a Washington-based civil rights group. “If he gives in to this trend then effectively he’s emboldening them.”

It will be unfortunate if such stupid politics make a chicken out of the allegedly most powerful man on the planet.

Now, as even the same news item indicates, there are plenty of security reasons for the President to avoid going there.  Amritsar, which is the city where the Golden Temple is located, is not too far away from the Pakistan border.  Lahore, in Pakistan, is just about twenty miles from Amritsar.  It is all that close. 

But, how come this administration seems so hell bent on messing things up, as if the South Asian situation is not crisis enough? :(