Dilip Simeon's blog

Friends, yeomen, countrymen, Lend me your fears. I come to bury human decency, not to praise it. The evil that left-liberalism does lives on after it, especially on social media; the good is oft interred with its bones. So, let it be with a little damn human decency. The noble Modi has told you that human decency is an outdated speed bump on the road to development and self-reliance, aka doing what he says without asking too many questions—if so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath human decency answered it.  Here, under leave of Modi and the rest—for Modi is an honourable man; so are they all, all honourable people—come I to speak at decency’s funeral. It was a founding principle baked into the Constitution, egalitarian and just to all; but Modi thinks that surprise announcements with four hours’ notice are sexier; and Modi is an honourable man.

Whenever people have gotten upset with the Modi-led NDA, Narendra Modi has told them to “be positive.” In a ‘Mann Ki Baat’ radio address, he said, “Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism to power,” and encouraged everyone to create hashtags like ‘#PositiveIndia’ and ‘#ProgressiveIndia’ (or, as he didn’t say but probably wanted to, PI-PI).  When everyone was screaming at him about the economic slowdown, he told them to “stop spreading negativity.” Asking Indians to “make positivity viral,” he constantly reinforces the message that there’s no such thing as bad policy or governance, only bad attitude... read more: https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/sickular-libtard-the-power-of-positivity-755132.html

NB : Amidst all the flames of outrage, let me add a small reminder taken from daily life: it is not merely the speaking of factual data that counts, what counts more is the manner of speech, the way in which we speak what we think is the truth. In all religious traditions, there are theories (often called myths) about the Divine, which can be spoken with reverence, with skepticism , or with contempt. Whether it is someone walking on water, flying up to heaven, making the dead come back to life etc; all miracles mean something to the believer; and can teach something to non-believers.  But when we humiliate people, especially in a charged atmosphere, we are playing with sentiment. And whereas playing with popular emotions has become the preferred mode of politics all over the world, it is behind the scenes that we need to look; where news has become propaganda and social media has become a blood sport.  The name of the game is as follows: number-crunching + policy lobbying for ...

NB:  ' The government cannot feign ignorance of the allegations as Goswami’s chats celebrate the Pulwama terrorist strike, about which he says, “with this attack we have won like crazy”. This could lead to conspiracy theories about the Pulwama terrorist strike which resulted in the death of 40 security personnel ...'   Only one question needs to be asked of the Sangh Parivar - what would you and your IT Cell and numerous trolls and spokespersons have said if the boot were on the other foot? What if a "sickular libtard" news anchor had done what your favourite mud-slinger has done? What shameless hypocrisy! But what is shame to the shameless. DS In April 2009, the chief of counter-terrorism at the UK’s Metropolitan Police was held to have compromised an anti-terrorist operation because he was photographed alighting from his car with a document titled ‘Briefing Note: Operation Pathways’. Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick was carrying it to a security briefing at the Brit...

Five short months after a big general election victory, nothing is going right for the dark lords of India. The economy is crap, nobody liked the budget, the Haryana and Maharashtra state elections were damp at best, the government’s own economists are grumbling—and one with a “totally left-leaning” mindset won the Nobel Prize. Social media is mutinous: a Twitter poll conducted by a ‘Proud Hindu’ showed that a mortifying 70% of respondents don’t think the national anthem should be played in movie halls... read more:  https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/the-little-ngo-that-couldn-t-and-other-sad-stories-772962.html

As a good sickular libtard I have taken in a huge amount of Netflix and other OTT platforms since March. That’s where the planet has not screeched to a halt, in which life does not skulk around behind masks and a six foot distance, in which the breath that keeps us alive does not kill us. But lockdown only threw the lure of a good story into sharper relief—it has always been irresistibly powerful, from the time when we huddled in caves and told stories around the fire to keep the nameless horrors of night at bay. Storytelling, dance, art, music, are atavistic human impulses. Plot, imagination, nuance, humour, beauty, wisdom, truth, that thing about someone else’s journey that finds resonance with your own, as well as that thing about someone else’s journey that you wouldn’t have known otherwise. The most powerful stories reflect some truth, perhaps challenge received wisdom, introduce you to other ways of being, move you. They push the envelope of your own thought and experience. They ...

Yogendra Yadav: Devanoora Mahadeva fills the silence An iconic Kannada literary figure, a towering public intellectual and a revered political activist in Karnataka. Shy and self-effacing to a point that you begin to wonder why he is in public life. He has a knack of disappearing from any public attention. As you suddenly notice his absence from the dais, someone helpfully explains: he may have stepped out for a smoke. Invariably and annoyingly late, even by my standards, Mahadeva is always a little out of sorts, a bit disheveled. His is not a carefully designed carelessness of a bohemian poet. It is just that his life has a different rhythm and radically different set of priorities than you would imagine a famous man to have. Oh, I forgot to say, he is Dalit. But now don’t rush to call him a Dalit writer or a Dalit activist. That would be a serious misrecognition, a category mistake. We don’t describe Shekhar Gupta as a bania intellectual, notwithstanding his touching, unadulterated f...

Riyaz Attari, the man who filmed himself brutally murdering a tailor in Udaipur named Kanhaiyal this week to avenge an alleged insult to the Prophet, was described by a local Bharatiya Janata Party and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leader as a “dedicated worker of the BJP” in a Facebook post less than two years ago. Irshad Chainwala and Mohammad Tahir are influential members of the Rajasthan State BJP Minority Morcha and the RSS-promoted Muslim Rashtriya Manch and their Facebook timelines have photographs of  Attari posing next to the BJP’s leader in the Rajasthan assembly Gulab Chand Kataria  and senior Udaipur BJP leader Ravindra Shrimali ( see below ). Other posts show Attari attending BJP events wearing a party scarf and being garlanded by Chainwala and Tahir... https://thewire.in/security/as-photos-emerge-of-udaipur-killers-links-to-bjp-leaders-party-moves-to-damage-control-mode Bharat Bhu shan: New Bharatiya Janata Party's troubled road ahead / Sickular Libtard: Nupurgate ...

The PMO’s legitimisation of corruption through electoral bonds is an assault on our right to political transparency. Its slyness in Maharashtra is an assault on our intelligence. The creepy story set in Maharashtra began like all badly written books: It was a dark and smarmy night.  It was well past midnight when Governor Koshyari developed a keen interest in forming a government. But the jack-in-the-box alliance between the BJP and Ajit Pawar had been invited to form government before the sun came up. Prime Minister Modi’s brea kfast-time tweet congratulating Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis made us spill tea all over our newspaper headlines about Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray.  It was the most amazing nonsense in the name of the people - a power grab carried out by a hu bris-addled Prime Minister in collusion with his old pal the Governor, and his grateful appointee, the President of India. It made the land’s highest office-bearers look like thieves in the night. ...

never before in independent India has there been such impunity for those connected to the establishment. If you are a member of the ruling party or support the government’s political agenda, you can advocate violence and even carry it out, spread hatred against religious minorities, humiliate and abuse the poor, without worrying about being asked to render account in a court of law To understand what Narendra Modi has done to India in the first year of his second term as prime minister, I want you to consider the contrasting fate of two young people, Amulya Leona and Anurag Thakur. Leona, still in her teens, has been in jail for three months now, charged with sedition and other serious crimes  for simply shouting ‘Long Live Pakistan’ and ‘Long Live India’  from the stage of a public event in Bangalore. If Leona spoke about living, Thakur, who is junior minister of finance in Modi’s government, spoke about killing. From the stage of a public event in Delhi, he exhort...

NB : To this timely statement I will add just one observation directed at all those groups and individuals who seem to derive their meaning of life via abuse, hatred, machismo and what in north India we call rangdaari . I have commented on this useless controversy here  - read it if you can still engage in rational conversation. Can all spokespersons of the ruling party and its allies - not to mention other devotees of the Almighty - please try and get pleasure out of the small things in life? Eat some mangoes, or ice cream. Enjoy the company of friends and loved ones, unless they too have gone over the cliff-edge of communal lunacy.  Ladies and gentlemen, you are a pathetic disgrace. If this is your religion, your patriotism, your nationalism, all I can say is God help us. Put a lid on it. DS IMSD support free speech; condemn hate speech, death threats Indian Muslims for Secular Democracy (IMSD) deplores the divisive and hate-driven politics behind the statements made by the ...