Rambling about Choices

Over the last several days, I have been greatly preoccupied with choices one makes,and the basis for these...which pair of antonyms correctly describes one's relationship with oneself or the world around us? Good versus bad, right versus wrong, correct versus false. It appears that the choice of pair determines largely who we are and how we dictate the terms of our future. How do we judge? Can certain events, expressions, thoughts, be judged as correct, therefore right, and therefore good (and its related opposing sequence) or is it good versus right versus true? Where we step into the pairing directly measures our acknowledgment of our honesty. Needless to say, there is a vast variation due to one's history, social conditioning, and practice or interest in rational thought.

Lets take for example, the communal issue. Can we start with a premise that our humanity defines all of us, irrespective of race, religion, caste, creed, in a fraternity, a kinship of right to equal wants, right to equally desire, right to equally dream? If we accept this capacity, equally imbued within all of us, as true, then issues that separate or fracture us because of religion, color of our skin, accident of our birth, regional, communal and caste based become secondary or even wrong...these are just adjectives that seek to identify us, clothe us in distinct colors, give us our poetry, our song. Our adjectives are just our expressions of our freedom, our limited right to individuality within the confines of this fraternity, the song we were born to sing...or chose to learn later. It is the particular beauty that moves us, its how we express the same starry sky, dance to the universal rhythm that flows within all of us as without us. Can our color, words, song, dance be issues that divide us? That would be wrong according to the truth of our fraternity. And so finally, one arrives at therefore bad. In fact, one's judgment of good and bad follows from one's identification of right and wrong which in turn is governed by our premise of what is true or false.

On the other hand, let us step into the same issue from the other end- with a BJP version. Violence against minority communities is good-- violence against muslims, violence against Christians, violence against members of other caste, against tribals, against naxals, violence against women...if the propaganda for all these various violences is accepted then, there is no need to justify them, no need rationalise, to uncover truth. If however, one desires to appear rational, then one can attempt to justify each set, on a case-by-case basis, of why these instances of fracturing are good or justified.

Muslims are targeted because some of the hindu forefathers were persecuted by some of the muslim forefathers (cannot identify which ones though), and the hindu religion, or its interpretation justifies this kind of violence as 'true' and therefore 'righteous' and therefore 'good'..

Women are targeted for their choice of clothes, or the public spaces they occupy..since hindu religion demands that they wear sarees and stay at home - it also stipulates that men wear 'angrezi' clothes and leer at women, beat them, harass and harm them.

Christians are targeted because they proselytize- and hindu religion clearly states that no other religion, except itself, is allowed to take itself ultra seriously and preach to increase its tribe.

Tribals should be violated because they occupy valuable territory, and the sacred texts of course
state that the wealth, power and holdings be strictly safeguarded with the hindu members of the upper strata.

Lower castes - they seek a voice - and their numbers are large - their combined roar can drown out the upper caste, priestly and princely squeaking - so they tongues should be cut off!

Human rights activists fight for human rights, but the scriptures are clear that human rights are an exclusive domain of those that get to define our Gods and what They said and this cannot be questioned.

Now that the good violence is justified as right and righteous, an immediate corollary clearly defines truth as what Gods said was right - and each God, demi-God, semi-God has his and her own version of this - the muslim, tribal, christian version and all the other versions.

So you see, one has come up with an 'equally' viable sequencing of fractured truths, rights, and goods - even choosing backwards.

Similar arguments, choices, can be made using any trivial to most urgently necessary instance of human relationship or expression we encounter in real life...it appears vital to me that I study where I step in on every instance on unfolding life, and what is personally, really real.