There enters a man with a slight, grizzly beard and a dull fair skin, slightly colored (that is a very Indian way of saying not the usual black/brown colored) eyes and you instantly recognize the unmistakably Islamic look about him.
He is in formals with his work laptop slung down his shoulder and shiny shoes intact with the regular - office going joey look on. But he is on the phone and is talking in what sounds like a varied form of Hindi or, is it, wait a second now, Urdu/Arabic? Now the nagging something at the back of the minds of the post 26/11 Indian bus crowd starts to manifest into an inexplicable, obviously biased fear. IS HE...?! CUD HE BE ONE OF THEM?! You try to avert your eyes. But you do not succeed in dragging your minds away as you did your eyes. After a lot of determined efforts, you control your mind enough to just let your eyes dart back to him “occasionally” on their way to “spotting/recognizing/processing and transmitting some other visual stimuli to your brain". But the mind goes on. If you are generally not the paranoid kind it starts to lose its fear/seriousness after you have gotten comfortable with the sight of him being “harmlessly” there and it sort of becomes a joke thinking up possibilities of how “he would blow the bus up or you point your finger at the “terrorist-in-the-regular-joey-disguise” and goof up when he turns out to be a normal citizen after all. And then you proceed to laugh at the extremely hilarious Russel Peters joke that ends with the buster line “I am just listening to my instructions” with every minute detail of the expressions he accompanies the line with that adds a whole new dimension of laughter to it.
Hmm... Weird mind and its weird jokes... And oh ya, the weird and hilarious Russel Peters... ;P
PS: I am completely aware of the fact that not many people reading this blog might agree with the line of thoughts described here but well I just had to imagine... Please no offense, my islamic/pro islamic friends. I am not "Islamo-phobic". I was in fact educated in a Islamic institution and am very grateful to the community for the awesome food they provided me with then and the great set of friends not just in that school but otherwise too who I am still in contact with. This is merely a sarcastic note to all those people I have met who seem to be completely biased and even sometimes violently irrational when they need to judge a person especially when it comes to islam.
Note: Guys I wrote this one like ages back - of course post 26/11 would have conveyed it - but was just clearing up my blogs and saw this one was still a draft. Then said y not?
He is in formals with his work laptop slung down his shoulder and shiny shoes intact with the regular - office going joey look on. But he is on the phone and is talking in what sounds like a varied form of Hindi or, is it, wait a second now, Urdu/Arabic? Now the nagging something at the back of the minds of the post 26/11 Indian bus crowd starts to manifest into an inexplicable, obviously biased fear. IS HE...?! CUD HE BE ONE OF THEM?! You try to avert your eyes. But you do not succeed in dragging your minds away as you did your eyes. After a lot of determined efforts, you control your mind enough to just let your eyes dart back to him “occasionally” on their way to “spotting/recognizing/processing and transmitting some other visual stimuli to your brain". But the mind goes on. If you are generally not the paranoid kind it starts to lose its fear/seriousness after you have gotten comfortable with the sight of him being “harmlessly” there and it sort of becomes a joke thinking up possibilities of how “he would blow the bus up or you point your finger at the “terrorist-in-the-regular-joey-disguise” and goof up when he turns out to be a normal citizen after all. And then you proceed to laugh at the extremely hilarious Russel Peters joke that ends with the buster line “I am just listening to my instructions” with every minute detail of the expressions he accompanies the line with that adds a whole new dimension of laughter to it.
Hmm... Weird mind and its weird jokes... And oh ya, the weird and hilarious Russel Peters... ;P
PS: I am completely aware of the fact that not many people reading this blog might agree with the line of thoughts described here but well I just had to imagine... Please no offense, my islamic/pro islamic friends. I am not "Islamo-phobic". I was in fact educated in a Islamic institution and am very grateful to the community for the awesome food they provided me with then and the great set of friends not just in that school but otherwise too who I am still in contact with. This is merely a sarcastic note to all those people I have met who seem to be completely biased and even sometimes violently irrational when they need to judge a person especially when it comes to islam.
Note: Guys I wrote this one like ages back - of course post 26/11 would have conveyed it - but was just clearing up my blogs and saw this one was still a draft. Then said y not?
3 comments:
Interesting viewpoint..!!..i personally know a number of people with a biased approach towards people of certain religion and get suspicious when any such person are in their close proximity...!!
I've witnessed some ultra-biased over-reactions of the same kind too! Like people staring with naked suspicion at Muslim tourists at the Madurai Meenakshi temple...Coming from a village that has more than two-thirds of its population coming from households of chaste Islamic brethren, I would try some defence against such attitude, then end up being silenced-u can never beat some blind phobias...
@ablogger: I am blessed with the same kind of aquintance too...
@sindhu: Tht is so true. Silenced. Tht makes me recall another recent incident here @ blore. I was travelling a little late in the evening and by rick. Had had disgusting incidents just a few minutes bac to this account and a couple of days earlier to tht which led to "letter to the bastard" so I suppose u can imagine my state of mind when it happened again. So I was sorta venting my frustration by an angry remark on the kind of ppl and the kind of things they do on the road that the auto walla jumped in with me to complaint and express his "hate" to these "Tamilians and muslim who are the only ones that do such despicable things". This was so strong and so sense I was agitated. I remarked "even I am a tamilian" to quiet him. No wonder there is such fanatism in India and such rage...
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