Accidental communalism?

Now road rage and drunken driving have been included in the hall of communal fame. It is beyond disgusting. A businessman rammed his car into a scooter, killing the pillion rider and grievously injuring the rider. His blood sample revealed 16 times higher than the normal limit of alcohol. Clear case of drunken driving. He is permitted bail. However, the police do not want him out and made a remand application that states:

“Not only would there be communal riots, the Muslim community shall stop believing in law.”

The reason given is that the driver is Hindu and the victim a Muslim. It is natural for the victim’s family to be angry, just as the culprit will get himself a good defence lawyer. Where do Hindu and Muslim come in here? Or are they being overly protective of the culprit?

A while ago Nooriya Haveliwalla, also drunk and reportedly on drugs, killed two people and injured four cops. She is Muslim. There was no talk about a flare-up. Salman Khan’s infamous accident killed a Muslim, so no communal tension.

The victim’s family is complaining about the culprit’s rashness, which all of us should. Anyone could have been killed, including the driver. The court has dismissed the police statement as frivolous, but it reveals the mindset that I spoke about in the article below. Are we to believe that Muslims will riot for every darn thing when they are often victims of those riots? As for the tepid afterthought about ‘stop believing in the law’ it only indicates that there is a belief that Muslims will take the matter in their own hands.

I think the police officers where this remand application has come from need to be taken to task and a case of defamation filed against them.

Mars and Venus – ecstasy or Ecstasy?

If you did not look at the fruit, you would think it was all about love. Now David Bellingham, a programme director at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, says the fruit was overlooked and so was the subversive message in Botticelli’s painting:

“This fruit is being offered to the viewer, so it is meant to be significant. Botticelli does use plants symbolically. Datura is known in America as poor man’s acid, and the symptoms of it seem to be there in the male figure. It makes you feel disinhibited and hot, so it makes you want to take your clothes off. It also makes you swoon.”

Is there another way of reading it? Mars is lost but Venus is in her senses and fully clothed. Why would the man decide to get high and feel uninhibited if there is nothing to gain? If it is for him to be put into a stupor, then again Venus gets nothing out of it.

Take one operative phrase – removal of clothes. This is also a giving up of a part of oneself, baring oneself to the other. Exposure is not without its fallout.

The National Gallery description of the painting notes: “The scene is of an adulterous liaison, as Venus was the wife of Vulcan, the God of Fire, but it contains a moral message: the conquering and civilizing power of love.”

Is this also a message of guilt? Is the seduction incomplete? Did Venus seduce him or did they get intimate and this painting is the post-coital depiction, where she is sitting dressed up and unsure?

Though many paintings do show her in splendid naked glory - was she high on drugs then? Was it loneliness and not love that drove her to it?

Can Mars pretend that he was under the influence and therefore he is unclothed? If the fruit is capable of making people go mad, then the madness could be a metaphor for losing one’s senses as sublimation.

The fruit is being offered to the viewer. Is it to tempt us? Is the precursor none other than the Garden of Eden?

The idea of drawing the viewer in is also part of the voyeuristic exercise where art itself needs an audience; the painting has other characters in the sublime love story. The satyr’s apparent insignificance – or invisibility – conveys a delightful tension that exists in relationships, among artists and interpreters as well as the person and the Self.

Of course, we can settle for a most pragmatic analysis and imagine that this was supposed to be an aphrodisiac that ended up working as a sedative. I believe it happens.

Subtraction Addiction

When Sting talked about legalisation of drugs, the poor guy had to sound like a nice guy. So he said that the money the US spends on reforming drug users and imprisoning them could be better used to tackle poverty and global warming.

I think he was high when he said that. Poverty and Global Warming are huge industries with several NGOs fighting over the spoils of being part of these movements. Drug users are jailed at random and usually when it is coupled with some petty crime. The government ought to realise that isolated cases cannot stop such consumption. One rarely hears about groups being imprisoned, when the fact is that it is often a social activity.

One is not promoting any such thing, but how many alcoholics are imprisoned or those who indulge in sexual exploitation within a closed circle?

We won’t get into a detailed study of hard versus soft drugs but many cults derive a certain identity due to some form of Ecstacy. In India sadhus (godmen) are often seen with hash and flower power had a lot to do with mind-altering substances.


Those who get into drug overdose that debilitates them or causes death are not arrested. Many of them are celebrities. They do not need legal sanction for anything. What about the poor? In Mumbai one sees them under railways bridges rolling joints. They are abused by the cops as well. Do remand homes and prisons change them?

The culture of rehab is truly about affordability. People with money enter fancy rehab centres, come out feeling good, give interviews to ‘Hello’ and ‘People’, and start snorting again.

A related, although not the same, topic is about sex addiction. It is only in the past few years one has been hearing about it. What is it? That a person has a huge propensity towards making out? Or is the problem that a person wants to make out with several people? That would be promiscuity. An addict wants to have one thing and does not seek variety. In fact, the very idea behind addiction is a kind of uni-dimensional obsession.

Michael Douglas, a known sex addict, said that he had cooled off now. Catherine Zeta Jones should sue him. How convenient it is for him as senior citizen to talk about taming the libido irrespective of whether his wife – 22 years younger – likes it or not. Same goes for Victoria Beckham. A report says she asks husband David Beckham for sex five times a day, and of course it is because she wants a daughter. (Bring on the halo.) She keeps a chart for good ovulation timings and stuff. Isn’t David the guy who couldn’t resist nannies? Then why are reports going all concerned about his exhaustion?

We won’t even get into Tiger Woods territory. It is bizarre that the media spoke about his return more as a prick rather than a golfer.

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Image courtesy