Becoming father to a little girl

It is the third year into my marriage, and I became a father on 1st of July, 2019.

From her conception to her birth, it was stressful and tough, but exciting at the same time. Now that my little girl is here, it is complete and total madness. Over and above that, I left Genpact, the company I was with since April 2017 in April of this year, and was attempting to change my line of business. Not succeeding at it has just added to the stress between me and my wife.

But at the same time, we have both grown in the last one year, and accommodate each other much more. I left my job at Genpact to work as a faculty in a coaching institute that helps students get into foreign universities, to accomodate her long standing wish for me to have a day job. It didn't work out. Then I tried to seek work in content writing and then in web development, and failed again. Her support and positivity have been crucial in me trying what I though I should, to accommodate her long standing wish of me working in a day job. Now that it hasn't worked out, she has been a pillar and kept me from getting depressed many times.

My little girl is a bundle of joy. She doesn't bother us much and is healthy, by the grace of the gods, and efforts of the doctor. I love spending time with her, but in the coming days, we will both just be sleeping at the same time, and not be playing much.

I have so many aspirations for her, but I also believe that I should allow her to spread her wings and fly. The future is not in our control. To worry over it is our folly. All we can do is plan for everything it can throw at us, that we can think of.

I surely intend to shield her from the bullying of excellence that happens in our society, and will never yield to any stupid community pressure, as I don't give two hoots for a community that has lost its way.

All I want is for her to have a great childhood that prepares her to be strong enough to dominate wherever she goes, and excel in whatever she becomes. 

Islam and Christianity vs Sanatan Dharma: Expansionism vs mutual respect and harmony

For many millenia, India was the world's leader - in science, economy, standard of living, philosophy and much more. We traded in high value goods with the world, and seekers of deep knowledge came to India, to study in our universities. The Romans have been known to worry about half their treasury being emptied in trade with India. We were the world's leader in metallurgy, textiles, handicraft, medicine, and so much more.

To the uninitiated, Christianity began over two thousand years ago, and the west was christian lands. But reality is quite different. While the Romans and Greeks had intertwined Polytheistic religions, Europe above Italy was mostly following Norse pantheon. Rome was the first to accept Christianity, with emperor Augustus, but this did not help Christianity become the accepted faith of all Europeans. In fact, a large part of Europe was forced to accept Christianity by Charlemaigne, the founder of the Carolingian dynasty of France.

Since its inception, Christianity has been an expansionist doctrine, and has aimed to destroy native cultures and practices by vilifying them, or simply forcing itself upon defeated people. Today, proselytism most works with stealth tactics, sabotaging and infiltrating the religious practices and institutions of native peoples, and vilifying their social and religious icons. When a population loses faith in its own way of life, Christian evangelists swoop in and convert them to Christianity en masse. This is a business, controlled by the Vatican.

An uglier but less polished version of the same expansionist doctrine is Islam. The doctrine of Islam is outright political, and divides the world into Dar-ul-harb and Dar-ul-Islam, telling its followers to expand the rule of Islam worldwide, by all means possible. In the initial centuries, the Islamic empire was organised as a Caliphate, but later, the Caliph became their religious figurehead, and like the pope, he gave orders to the Islamic rulers for conquest. Their conquest has never stopped, and only changed tactics after the discovery of oil in the Middle East.

In contrast to these expansionist doctrines, all native religions have been devised for the natives. No native religion gave the mandate to force the people of a state defeated by a devotee king to be made to worship the gods of the invader, anywhere in the world.

In India, Sanatan Dharma has not just been the religion we believe in, but our culture and our way of life as well. As the Islamist invaders penetrated deep into India, burned our libraries, destroyed our universities and killed uncounted millions in the name of Islam, we lost the vast guiding force that kept our society vibrant and strong against invaders, and became decadent and backward. metropolitan centers became just cities, cities became towns, and smaller settlements became basically a bunch of houses huddled together, forgetting the rules of building, the arts and sculpture slowly but steadily declining, simply because people feared any ostentatious display of wealth, lest they get robbed. The only reason Indians did not capitulate like Iranians to the swords of Islam completely, was the decentralized character of the organisation of Hinduism. Unlike the western neighbors, in India, our faith begins with a family deity, then the local deity, and then come the major centers of religious discourse or worship.

So when the large centers where our intellectual leadership was trained and certified were burned down, people still had the local leadership and family traditions intact. This is what allowed us to bear the hardships for centuries, yet only a very few gave up on their family traditions.

Christian evangelists did not come to India in large waves till the later part of the medieval ages. While some claim that minor lineages of Christians have been in Kashmir and Kerala since ancient times, the major push for Christian evangelism did not come till the British East India company had conquered large parts of India. While the company was against it, the missionaries concocted tales of imaginary barbarian practices involving human sacrifice to convince the British parliament to allow them to work in India.

Christian missionaries recognised the glue that held together our cultural integrity, and started campaigning against everything Hindus looked up to, and exploiting the fault lines that had developed because of the corruption of Dharma under Islamist rule.

Both Islam and Christianity are committed to their cause of conquering the world, and Hinduism stands in front of them as the biggest hindrance.

This makes it imperative for Hindus to learn about their scripture and traditions, and be ready to give deep rooted answers to evangelists of both these proselytizing creeds. Even more so, it is necessary for Hindus to learn about the texts of these doctrines, to unravel them in front of those who denounce the path of Sanatan Dharma.

Why Gandhi matters today

Lawyer, human rights activist, and then, one of the most revered political figures of the 20th century. This was, in a nutshell, the life journey of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Since the beginning of the age of globalization, we have asked this question many a time: Why does MK Gandhi matter today?

A visionary conqueror of minds

Since the time he assumed a pioneering role in the Indian National Congress, he turned the organisation to a common man's movement from a group of the social and intellectual elite. However, as we acknowledge today, he was not without his faults, as far as leadership of the independence movement was concerned, as well as other facets of organisational leadership.

As we uncover more and more of the history that was buried by the mental slaves of the British who ruled India for many decades after the transfer of power form the British crown to the Government of India, and some of whom are still maintaining a stronghold on a lot of our institutions, we realize the real face of the god-like personality that was presented to us of the man we called Mahatma. 

He was in fact the progenitor of the cult of personality seen in the INC today. He was the reason for Jinnah's removal from the INC, and protested the presidency of the INC being given to Subhash Chandra Bose tooth and nail.

Father of the Nation?

Among other things, he blindly supported Muslims in every dastardly riotous act they pursued during his time, while condemning every small act, even of self-defense, taken up by Hindus. He was, in fact, instrumental in scaling up the Khilafat movement, which had absolutely nothing to do with India's freedom. It was a movement to re-instate the Islamic State of the Khalifa or Caliph in Turkey.

Not just this, he called the killer of Swami Shraddhananda his brother. Swami Shraddhananda was a mentor to him, and one of the first people to call him 'Mahatma'.

He betrayed his words and lied to Hindus when he said that India will not be partitioned while he lived and breathed. He sacrificed his basic value of  'Truth and non-Violence' in his vain pursuit of becoming the leaders of the Muslims, while taking the veneration given to him by the Hindus for granted. He imposed Jawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister on an India that wanted Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel as their leader. 

To rub salt on the wounds of the losses during partition, in the monsoon of 1948, he ordered Nehru to get all refugees evicted from empty mosques in Delhi, and left them to live in horrid conditions on the northern border of the city.

The list of the horrible acts that can be attributed to the 'Mahatma' does not end there, but I believe the above mentioned are enough to make my point clear. He lead countless men and women of the country into a movement, rejuvenated among them a sense of Identity. At the same time, he cultivated a personality cult, the followers of which did everything to bury the contributions of every other leader of the country, and finally captured a stronghold on power, only to concentrate it among themselves, and choke the growth and development of Bharat's political, economic, and cultural spheres.

Gandhi did not get us our freedom. 

The then British PM Clement Atlee categorically denied his movement having any impact at all on the decision to leave India. He attributed the decision solely as a reaction to Subhash Chandra Bose and his Indian National Army, which liberated the Northeast, and his government of India was recognized by 11 countries, the USSR being one of them.

After this act, when the second world war ended, over 2 million soldiers of the British Indian Army returned to the homeland, the British were under great economic duress, and holding India was a constraint already. After the Naval Mutiny of 1946, they lost the confidence that they could use the army to hold the territory.

These two acts were solely responsible for throwing away the yoke of British Rule. 

When true history nullifies his contributions to the freedom struggle, why is he relevant today?

Why is Gandhi relevant today?

Gandhi's methods of non-violent protest assumed that the fight was against a benevolent state, authorized by the citizens of the state to govern. This was not the case with the British Empire, which was the face of evil incarnate in India.

As the whole world got closer to self-determination and governments as well as large business organisations transformed into entities sensitive to the voice of the people, Gandhi's methods found the correct audience.

Today's governments and business powers are in no position to be insensitive, and ignore the voice of the people. His methods are the standard for protest on today's platform, as they fit right within the political and economic systems of democracies worldwide.

Ironic as it may be, in the time to come, while Gandhi will lose his aura of 'Father' of the nation for India, his methods will become the modus operandi for Fourth Generation Warfare.