Also, the term ‘rat- hole miners’ ought to be changed to our hero-miners! Researchers and writers ought to focus on the lives of the miners, whose work seems so very tough and risky. Unsung they live!
The year is ending on a rather dismal note. What, with violence and injustices and anarchy and brutality spreading out.
Here in our country the only positive news that came through was that the trapped miners in Uttarakhand’s Silkyara tunnel were rescued. Nah, not by any of those high tech strategies manned by the so called experts but by a team of earnest rescuers: Rat-hole miners! The rescuers, including Waqeel Hasan, Munna Qureshi, Naseem Malik, Monu Kumar, Saurabh, Jatin Kumar, Ankur, Nasir Khan, Devendra, Firoz Qureshi, Rashid Ansari, and Irshad Ansari, worked tirelessly in four shifts of six hours each. They dug approximately 12 meters in just 26-27 hours, a task that would typically take 10-15 days under normal circumstances.
These rescuers should be declared national heroes. Yes, they should be honoured, and soon.
Also, the very term ‘rat- hole miners’ ought to be changed to our hero-miners!
Researchers and writers ought to focus on the lives of the miners, whose work seems so very tough and risky. Unsung they live!
Getting back to the realities of the day!
Ground realities have worsened in the country, from the day the Babri Masjid was demolished on 6 December 1992. The Right-Wing forces, within and outside the government, sowed the poisonous seeds of polarization and deep divisions. Thereafter, there’s been little peace and much decay, in terms of our everyday co-existence.
Today, of course, elections are fought and even won on the basis of communal politics and poisonous propaganda. This lethal combination has been made to get in, right into the various segments and sections, with an aftermath that’s hard to describe.
Alas, when the realisation creeps in of the disasters linked and interlinked with this level of third class politics, it might prove to be late or let’s say too late! In fact, in Rajasthan, just a day or say hours after the BJP won in these recently held elections, there was that gruesome murder of Karni Sena chief Sukhdev Singh Gogamedi in Jaipur. And the following day one of the freshly elected BJP MLAs went around the city, ordering and threatening and rebuking all roadside vendors who were putting up carts or small shops along the roadside, selling the so-called “non-vegetarian food items”.
Making sure that hundreds of our fellow citizens stand or squat jobless and penniless and at the complete mercy of the political doles or charity or manipulative schemes! It’s a different matter altogether that within hours this freshly elected person had to eat his own words. He took a complete U-turn. In all probability, he didn’t quite realize that a very large percentage of those vendors whom he was threatening to shut shop were non-Muslims. Ignorance coupled with the communal poisoning unleashed all around is not just lethal but based on myths and misconceptions and utter lies to cause frictions and hatred for the other. One of the widely unleashed propaganda Agenda items is that only and only Muslims consume or sell non-vegetarian stuff!
Don’t know what lies ahead, what more disasters to be seen and experienced. And the worrying aspect is that anyone who dares to question or query or raise a dissenting voice is made to shut up along the various alibis.
Double standards writ large in today’s set-up. TMC’s Mahua Moitra expelled from the Parliament whereas nobody even dare question the particular BJP parliamentarian Ramesh Bidhuri, who just weeks back openly abused and taunted along the communal strain, a fellow parliamentarian, Danish Ali, right inside the Parliament…The list of double standards in the very governance is long! Who is there to pay heed to such blatant violations! The atmosphere seems ever so suffocating and stifling!
*****
As genocide continues in Gaza, leaving you leaving you with this verse of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)
Mahmoud Darwish wrote ‘Under Siege’, a collection of poems on the Israeli invasion of the West Bank, in 2002 while he was under siege himself in Ramallah:
‘Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time
Close to the gardens of broken shadows,
We do what prisoners do,
And what the jobless do:
We cultivate hope.’
