Tag: writing

Politics vs India

images

Will you imagine the world without politics?

The terminology of politics has its origin in the Greek term ‘polis’ which means city-state. A number of city-states like Athens, Sparta existed in ancient Greece where polity touched every aspect of social life is it education, occupation, organizations, culture, etc. Later on, as organized life became more complex, polity turned into a more specialized activity restricted to secular and civil affairs in western countries. Since that time, politics has begun and spread all over the world and people are caught up in the rat race of politics. in the past, there was only one political party congress, it started from 18 December 1885, and they lead the nation, and the first precedent if the congress was Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee and after that, all congresspeople make many discussion regarding the education, business, finance sector, and health sector which help people to live batter life after getting freedom from the British people.

congress lead India for 70 years and they did many frauds and scams, Several top Congress leaders have been accused of indulging in multi-crore scams with some of the corruption cases running into lakhs of crores. According to the ZEE news, congress allowed scams after scams during its rule which have resulted in the loss of a staggering amount of Rs 48,20,69,00,00,000 over the last 70 years. The jeep scandal of 1948 was one of the first major corruption case in independent India in which the Jawaharlal Nehru-led Congress government was the accused.

After that, the BJP party was announced on 6th April 1980 and the early year they try to breakdown the congress party but they could not when the Narendra Modi-led government came to power in 2014, India’s ranking on the global corruption index improved as the new regime cracked down on those accused in scams and graft cases. The country’s ranking had dipped to an all-time low of 94 during UPA reign in 2013.BJP leader Narendra Modi was done many appreciate work for the people like Goods and Service Tax The GST is the indirect tax that subsumed a variety of central and state levies and replaced a cascading and complicated tax system. infrastructure work This is the one bright spot in the government’s record. The speeding up of highway construction, the new Bharatmala and Sagarmala projects, the building or revival of regional airports and regional air connectivity, and much work on modernizing and expanding railways are all achievements that the Modi government can claim. furthermore, they also have done Flagship Programmes like Swachh Bharat, Make in India, Ujwala Millions of us gave up subsidised cylinders when Modi gave a call, Ayushman Bharat. however, if we considered the National Security the Narendra Modi never stape back he has introduced Pakistan Policy, Kashmir Policy. he has open all the scams cases like Rafale Deal and Mallya & two Modis. He also took revenge from Pakistan in the form of URI surgical strick, and give justice to the Indian soldier.

Nowadays, in the time of Coronavirus, congress never gives up to accuse the BJP party, they always see the negative side of BJP which is only 15-20% but they never update themself or support and give motivation to the citizens what to do in this kind of scenario or support BJP. whenever BJP politicians do something good, congress always ready to pull them down they never see good work done by the opposition party. in time of critical condition, all BJP candidates done a lot of good work but the congress party came out for a showing off. we also see many debates on the news channels regularly they fight like cats and dogs.

all people from India always pray that please put politics behind and do something to bring out the country in developed countries index.

 

Bama’s Karukku: A Book Review

One of the most popular Dalit woman writers, Bama Faustina Soosairaj is a teacher by profession. Many of her works got translated into English, German, French, Telugu, and Malayalam. Karukku is based on her own life, which focuses on caste structures in the Catholic Community. In her autobiography, Bama pens down her struggles with the oppression of the society, and how she comes out stronger and mightier than ever.

Karukku became a turning point in Bama’s life. She received immense applause and support for bringing up the pain she had experienced in her life. The autobiography spoke to the Dalit community in a way, no other book did. It was read by innumerable numbers of people and it paved the way to a new genre in Tamil Literature. Karukku was first published in the Tamil language by Mini Krishnan, who was then the editor of Macmillan India. After the publication of Karukku in Tamil, it was translated by Lakshmi Holmström into English. The autobiography has won the Crossword Award, which brought the book into the limelight. Now, it has been read by several numbers of students worldwide. Karukku has been translated into languages other than English and Tamil. It is published in Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam. It has gone on to become a part of the University curriculum for many disciplines likes Feminist Literature, Dalit Literature, Subaltern Literature, and others. After the success of Karukku, many Dalit woman writers came out of their cocoons and published excellent pieces of literature.

Karukku has proved to be a timeless autobiographical novel. It has worked as medicine for all those victims who have suffered due to caste discrimination, oppression, poverty, and such. Karukku brings out not only the real struggles of the Dalit community but also, the pain that every Dalit women go through in their lives. It has provided strength to the readers to speak up, protest, fight back, and not remain as the oppressed class of the society. Bama’s honest words have healed many wounds that were left unnoticed for years. Karukku becomes the pathway to the movement of the oppressed classes.

Karukku is a tale of the brave-hearted, of the courageous soul and has been very open and direct from the very first line of the book. The book shows not only the struggles of a Tamil Dalit Christian woman, but also how she fights back, how she survives, and how she rises from the ashes. Bama has asked innumerable questions which have shaken the pillars of the society. She questions the oppression and the pain she has faced in her life. She questions about the caste oppression she has faced all her life, and the struggles she had to go through just because she was born a Dalit. She questions her identity as a woman, as a Christian and as a Dalit.

Bama focuses on the experiences she has faced because of being a Catholic. She brings to light the rules and regulations that the Catholic community has to follow, as ordered by the Church. She talks about her day to day life of being both a Catholic and a Dalit. She brings forth the workings of the Catholic Church and how her days were dictated by the Church. From the very beginning of her life, she has faced the oppression of the Catholic Church. Her entire childhood was directed by the orders of the Church. There was no escape for her, as she was born in the Catholic community and her struggle for equality, for love, for justice has been emphasized throughout the autobiography. Karukku tells about the pain she has faced in her daily life, even after she becomes a nun. She wanted to work for the people of her oppressed community, to bring equality, to bring justice for the people who have struggled all their lives. But, only she couldn’t. She was not supported by the Church and also, the convent she was a part of. She couldn’t fulfill her wish to liberate her community from the clutches of oppression. She couldn’t liberate her soul from the pain of daily oppression.

Karukku is the struggle between her self and the community she belongs from. It is the constant struggle of escaping the Catholic community, to free herself from oppression. It is the constant struggle of being a part of the Dalit community, only. It is the struggle to leave her life of oppression and pain behind, to achieve her freedom, to achieve her identity. The use of language, used by Bama, is simple and it is written for the people of Dalit community to understand and feel her pain, to be a part of her struggle. Her use of language is not at all complex, and that’s why it has spoken on deeper levels to the readers across the world.

To conclude, Bama has written her heart and soul into her autobiography. She has successfully shown the true colors of the Catholic community and how she has struggled to come out of the oppression. To read Karukku, you have to open up your mind and feel the pain that Bama has experienced. You have to wear her shoes and be a witness to her life, to her quest to find the self free of oppression, to her protest to not be a part of the community she was born into. Karukku opens up the bitter truth of the experiences and lives of the people of the Catholic community. It is a must-read, and it has the potentiality to change your perception towards the political scenario of their lives. The novel would urge you to consider the importance of equality, love, and respect for each other. It doesn’t matter if you belong to another community or caste. It doesn’t matter where you are born. The only thing that matters is one’s own identity, one’s own aspirations, and every individual has the right to live free of oppression. Every individual has the right to act the way they want to act.

More about my family

When I composed yesterday’s post, I got so excited sharing the history of my family that I forgot part of what I wanted to say. Here it is:

This month I have been posting historic family pictures on FaceBook each day. Sometimes it’s a single picture, sometimes it’s two or three pictures. I’ve been getting good reactions from family—including cousins I almost never see anymore—as well as from other friends.

Why am I doing this? Well, as a historian and an archivist, I want to promote the business. Especially those weeks that I had to work from home, trying to do the same things I would be doing at work, I knew that I had to do the full job of an archivist—not merely to preserve and to organize, but also to share. Archivists don’t digitize the entire collection and put it online—we digitize a small amount of material that is interesting or informative. Real researchers don’t stop at surfing the internet; when they find something of interest, they identify where it is located and come to that place to look at the rest of the collection.

Beyond that, I have gotten major fatigue scrolling through FaceBook and other social media. It feels like a game of dodgeball back in junior high school, trying to avoid all the mentions of disease and politics and the intersection of the two. So I thought I’d change the subject—give myself and other people something different to talk about and think about. And that has worked.

It has worked so well that my sister and some of my cousins commented over the weekend that I ought to take all this family information I’ve been gathering and write a book. I’ve handled books written by genealogists. They tend to be dry as dust—recording vital information, but often omitting the interesting and unusual family stories about these various individuals.

So I’m considering a book on the Salvageable family. The first question is: how much of the family do I want to cover? Am I writing for my children and their descendants—do I want to include my wife’s side of the family? Do I want to focus on me and my ancestors? Or do I want to stick to my mother’s side of the family, which contains most of the interesting stories that have come to light thus far. (And includes those cousins who are suggesting that I write a book.)

Even though that matter is not settled, I have made two other decisions. If I write this book, I will start each family line with the immigrant who came to the United States. Where I know names and dates for ancestors who remained in Europe, I might include them in an appendix or sidebar, but I want this to be an account of the Salvageables in America. Also, rather than focusing on one line at a time, with chapters relating to different streams that entered the river, I want to make the book chronological. I would like to write a chapter for each decade, describing where the various ancestors were during that decade and what they were doing.

Moreover, I want to include some historic context in each chapter. Think how much fun the 1860s will be—men fighting each other in the Civil War (and I have ancestors who fought for the Union and ancestors who fought for the Confederacy). Wouldn’t it be cool to find two great-great grandfathers involved in the same battle, shooting each other? (And, if either of them had been a better soldier, I would never have been born.)

I can only guess how long it will take to complete the family research and begin writing. This project likely will be years in the making. And it will not be lucrative—we’re not talking Roots here. I don’t care to dabble in historical fiction, creating conversations that may have happened. I want to include verifiable facts, along with family stories and mysteries.

And this is much more fun than slogging through the current international crisis and thinking only about it night and day. J.