Sometimes little things strike you, makes you wonder why is it that life is so full of irony…!!
Incident 1:
Around two in the afternoon today, my bus was stuck at a signal. Kolkata roads, too many people, too humid and I wasn’t in my best of moods! Looking down at the road I saw a little boy of around five trying to cross the road. Small kid, fair and cute , wearing a white kurta and a cap. A Muslim cap, the white netted ones. While trying to take small steps towards the road, the traffic went green. He looked apprehensive at the lurching traffic.And then I saw someone leaping out of the bus I was sitting in. He went straight to the kid, took hold of his hand, made him cross the road and then came back to the bus. He was the conductor. Falling from his sleeve was his Brahminical identity-the Sacred Thread.
Incident 2:
Big banners of the movie New York floating in front of my eyes. Faces of John Abraham, Neil Nitin Mukesh, Irrfan Khan and Katrina Kaif. Good looking faces, truly! An ensemble cast. But looking behind the scenes, how many have thought how diverse it is?? Abraham, born to a Christian father and a Parsi mother, Mukesh comes from a Hindu family and Irrfan from a Muslim one. Katrina has a Kashmiri Muslim father and British mother. If this is not potpourri of cultural diversity, then what is?? And to top it all is that the movie is directed by a Muslim, Kabir Khan!!
I looked at the shop beside the pavement. The name of the street suddenly struck me- Mahatma Gandhi Road. North Calcutta streets which had once been ravaged by the August communal riots of 1946, the flame of the communal hatred which once threatened to engulf the entire city after Partition…the hatred finally held in check by Gandhi. His peace message might have been lost through generations, but the name Gandhi still stood as a witness today in the afternoon, where a man, and only a man, neither a Hindu nor a Muslim, stood by another man-on the street, in the poster. Some irony huuh??!…
…But we still believe in communalism, we still persist in ostracising the Other and when things go wrong, we never hesitate to chop off the hand which we once held to help the other one cross the road.
