Friday, February 17, 2006

Intolerance & Talibanization of the World

In the southern states of India, colleges have started to follow the Talibanized way of education: If something is found irritable, crush it with the fullest power. Cellphones are now banned and this is in a country, where any disaster can happen anytime, and communication is a very precious thing. Boy-Girl interaction (even a casual talk) is being frowned upon as though Humans are (the) only beasts thinking about sex. Jeans and T-Shirts are cursed objects of clothing and there are insane souls in the college who would closely watch whether you sport a beard, shape up the moustache, wear formal shoes... Though such practices are not the rule, it is starting to get adopted by more private engineering colleges (which exist for the sole sake of making money from its students) and this is pretty disturbing. A funny blog about a famous engineering college and its stupid practices can be found here

Though I was pretty harsh in the previous paragraph, I feel it is going with the greater scheme of things around the world. Muslim protestors going on riots for just some prank cartoons, Europeans getting agitated over a steel company takeover and going over huge extent to stop Turkey's bid, Western people's over-reaction against out-sourcing and liberal visa policies, Chinese filtering of words like democracy and human rights from Google searches and protests in India against Velentine's day celebrations. In many cases, intolerance can mean bloodshed as done by the Talibans, Chinese brutality against democratic protesters and religious riots in India and elsewhere.

Why is the world becomming so ugly? The increase in information flow and increased ease of travel should have integrated the cultures. But, paradoxically we are living a world with splinter groups with divisionist agendas. Racial groups have started to sprout in countries like even Britain (Germans, French and rest of continental Europe are even worser) and Bush directly addresses to his niche population - the ultra conservative central US. In India, groups like Shiv Sena opposes people movement within the same country. Muslim groups are getting even worser and value of life doesnt mean to them anymore - throats are for slashing, TV is threatening countries and humans are jus bomb carriers.

It is too scary to live in such a world. If the suave scandinavian countries can spread racial hatred, then the world is surely becoming deadlier. Unless we pay more attention to the hatred mongering groups around us, we are going to be trapped by their vicious agenda.

1 comment:

Ananth said...

I had heard second hand stories on the infamous Satyabama and insane Jeppiar. But the link in your post and further bloghops from there just left me shell shocked.

If such an engineering college exists amongst us and in-fact thrives, then its not just jeppiar and his goons who are to be blamed. Something is seriously wrong with our thinking and that of the middle class parents.

The oppresive regime of Anna University and the Deemed Colleges is just a blatant promotion of intolerance and narrow mindedness.

I am just wondering about what WE would have done if this shit had been forced upon us when we did engineering.