News on the March: Sikhs take on Jay Leno for bad jokes

“From the lawsuit filed Tuesday against NBC and Leno, obtained by EW.com: “The publication and broadcast was libelous on its face and clearly exposes the plaintiff, other Sikhs, and their religion to hatred, contempt, ridicule…”
If a comedian is sued for bad jokes every Congressman will be affected. These Congressmen are sent to the Capitol Hill and what do they do? They peddle influence or drag their feet or make tall claims of their service to the nation. They make jokes of their ability to change it. They even think they are indispensable! Their bad jokes are evident in the manner small towns are disappearing and the middle class is in danger of being listed under endangered species. Newt Gingrich does not need a team of writers to come up with jokes. He can merely rattle them impromptu. Pardon my French.
Jay Leno should have hired some Punjabi for Sardari jokes and he would have made the entire Sikh community die laughing.
To ask what is under a diaper to a Sikh is like waving a red rag before a bull. Ask a Sardar what is his beard doing under his chin? He may answer in the most serious vein that it cannot grow on his turban. They are very logical and precise people. You ask him for a joke and he probably give you the punch line and leave you to fill out the blanks. Why he would do that? Because he has already made up the joke himself so he cannot take the trouble of repeating it. Or he has filched some one else’s joke and doesn’t want to be sued.
In India the Sikh community enjoys the National Monument status.
benny

Friesland in images-Hindelopen

I am planning to hold an art exhibition and I plan this year to spend time on everyday basis for this. Let me see how far I can carry on with this project. My second work is begun. It is shown below in its preparatory stage. Hindelopen was earlier by the sea but now with afsluitdijk it fronts a lake.

Wolves in Sheep Clothes-the cult groups

Reading a news item about Glenn Close and Rose McGowan who were reared in a cult group made me think of a cult group that I had known. In the US it goes under the name The New Testament Church and it had its beginning in Sri Lanka when it was called Ceylon. The group Ceylon Pentecostal Mission was a mongrel church alright. They drew from so many sources, Armstrongism, Church of Rome to name a few. They lived and preached two different things. They accepted members who were to practice celibacy like the Catholic Church. They preached grace and yet made work as their cardinal virtue. They like pharisees made outward observance of prayers, fasts abstaining from alcohol, tobacco as proof of their holiness. They claimed they were totally separated from worldly affairs but always found members whose filthy lucre bankrolled their faith life. They insisted on their recruits full immersion baptism and speaking in tongues. The latter was the means to ensure their hook on the congregation. If anyone wanted to leave the two elders or pastors would buttonhole and ask him or her by wanting to leave they must have been speaking tongues ( not of Holy Spirit) but of devil.They knew how to control minds of their congregation in spending hours in shrieking and blabbering. They made tattle-telling a virtue and made attempts at believers to ferret out how others lived at workplace or at home. They came between husbands and wives in telling ‘the weaker vessel’ what to watch out in the other. Sunday service for example the joy of Christian spirit was the ‘holier-than- thou’ Yahooism. Let me explain what it is. Gulliver speaks of Yahoos in his travels and these were brutish in body and mind. In these Pentecostal group there were believers who made a virtue of cheeseparing and leanness in their spirit as ticket to Zion! The Mission called special meetings whenever they could and these were mind numbing sessions as waiting for the Spirit. Innocuously enough they made him/her toe the line having got control over his/her emotional and mental reserves.
In order to be counted as part of the group how members lied through their teeth before taking communion! Most of the elders were iliterate whose knowledge in the Scriptures were calculated to serve the purpose. Typical of Catholic church that they discouraged private interpretation! the Mission made the members read only passages they wanted them to know- Nothing more. How they made some pillars of the community shiver in their pants! Those who drank(social drinking) skipped it and made virtue of their lack of consideration for others by crying and making a show of tears only to repeat the same ad nauseum.
At the time of marriage I joined this group. I was a sunday school teacher and wrote hymns etc. For me reading Bible was not merely for reading. ‘Truth shall make you free’ it is said. One fine day I had enough or rather I saw their pernicious doctrine and decided to quit. The pastor asked if I was speaking in tongues under Holy Spirit or was it something else. I admitted I was mistaken and that made me get out of their hold.
I have never even come across these rascals after that day. It was as phony as my marriage which had to stop somewhere. The Pentecost Mission must be still around and never more I got entangled with the group.
benny

Ayatollah Uran-i-Um-cartoon

Iran's next Ayatollah: enriched uranium

News on the March- Indian Ill-literacy Week

JAIPUR, India (AP) — An Indian literary festival canceled a video conference with author Salman Rushdie days after he called off a personal appearance due to protests and threats.
“Festival organizers decided to cancel the video address to avoid violence by Muslim activists gathered at the Jaipur Literary Festival, an organizer, Sanjoy Roy, said.
“We have been pushed to the wall. … Earlier today, a number of organisations came to us and threatened violence,” Roy said.
Rushdie said he called off his trip after police told him of a possible assassination threat. He planned a video conference instead, but Roy said the organizers had been threatened with violence if they went ahead with the video link.
Rushdie’s works include the Booker Prize-winning “Midnight’s Children” and “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous.
Scores of protesters crowded the tent where hundreds of festival participants had gathered for the video conference.
The controversy over Rushdie’s attendance cast its shadow over the five-day festival, which was attended by tens of thousands of people who came to this city to see Oprah Winfrey and literary stars, such as Michael Ondaatje, Tom Stoppard and Tiger Mom Amy Chua.”
If India cannot appreciate freedom of speech or writers who have drawn their sap from the soil and who dare to break the narrow mold of do’s and don’t set down by some illiterate monkeys, shut down all the schools and spend the money to sing bhajans from temple grounds. If these anger the Muslim sentiments let the powers- that- be appease them with half the money. Fine example of secular India where the finest article of a free man to be shortchanged thus. Mind you these busybodies are those who take their orders from their masters in Saudi Arabia or in Tehran. If some Mad Ayatollah issue a fatwa they think archangel Gabriel had spoken and crush the man as a beetle!
I am ashamed at this cowardly appeasement. First it was MF Hussain and now it is Rushdie. This kind of cowardly spirit that makes Congress pretend as though it is a small matter( Demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992 to them was something of this sort)and during the hijacking of IC 184 from Nepal to Kandahar it was the BJP government(1999) who showed their yellow streak. Political parties serve their own compulsions of the hour and blow whichever way the wind blows. No wonder India shows it time and time again.
Tailpiece: China and India both aspire to the future. How different are they? China may tread on the corns of human dignity and say the Party has no need to apologize to anyone. The other Asian ‘giant’ kisses the feet of the man many times and praises him sky high even as the ground under his feet is cut off.
benny

Noarderleech, Friesland-finished work

Sumo Wrestler and His Manager-cartoon

Freddie Mac: My Baggage is Here!

Some Arab Spring!-cartoon

Camel driver: “Can’t you just get up from this fundamentalist mess and go?”

Love and Friendship

These days have been trying for me. A good friend of mine of some 50 years standing lost his only son. He was 38 years and suffered from autism, – a severe case at that,and was put in a group home which he seemed to like. Weekends he would come home and splurge on things he had a yen for. I know how his disability put demands on the entire family and my friend was life long concerned for his well being. He is devastated and in this it has affected me as well. I know he shall pull through from his bereavement but till he is able to give a place in his heart for the loss he will have to deal with it as a father losing his only son. Love means the ability to suffer and if it is a good thing or bad thing I do not know. It is a sign of our strength and also our humanity that we are not proof to shocks and taunts of our mortality. Friendship also is bare and vulnerable.
benny

Art and Life

It was Oscar Wilde who set out to show purpose of art and life are entirely different things. Art according to him has no moral duty to make life nobler or meaningful anymore than life lived in a certain manner can redeem artists to create masterpieces . Far from art imitating life Wilde holds that art sets the aesthetic principles by which people perceive life. What is found in life and nature is not what is really there, but is that which artists have taught people to find there, through art. “there may have been fogs for centuries in London”, people have only “seen” the “wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas lamps and turning houses into shadows” because “poets and painters have taught [people] the loveliness of such effects”. “They did not exist”, asserts Wilde, “till Art had invented them.( Decay of Lying )” Do we not conjure up the starry sky of Van Gogh when we see the night sky? Emotional impact of the Dutch artist is a supreme example of art that can extend our vision and for me it is a good thing to accept every day life seen at an altered state, as it were. It does not make my aches and pains any less than that are, a natural ageing body heir to. I can at least console myself that I live among the greatest, the best and loveliest tokens of the feast of life though being dyspeptic I may not touch anything other than dry bread and lentil soup.
This evening I listened to Puccini’s Tosca and I could not help thinking how the music could transport me as easily to an altered state as though I was hearing it for the first time! It is a tale of revenge and lust in which Baron Scarpia lusts for Tosca and in the heart of intrigue is the lover of Tosca who is condemned to die before a firing squad. The hapless man looking at the stars fading off one by one as the dawn breaks, sings an exquisite aria E lustevan stele. It brought me memories of a film Le Jour sa Leve that had moved me intensely. Gabin a working class hero is cornered in his claustrophobic room in which every object takes on a special significance. The cigarette and smoke spiral that goes up is harbinger of doom. It is only matter of hours before the police are going to shoot him dead. Whenever I see it in my mind’s eye I recall the music from opera as though it belongs there.
Aesthetics of art has ability to alter the tenor of life where man’s responses to his environment can be made more intense since his resources are drawn from secret recesses to which reality has no clue whatsoever.
Benny