Thursday, 10 December 2015

Māyā...

Malaya 1942
There is no such thing as the 'good guy' or that good guys always wear black! Everybody does something not with the purest of thoughts but with the motive of ‘what's in for me?' lurking entrenched in his mind. This, the Asiatic peace loving natives, found out the hard way. About three-quarter of a century ago, Malayans were visited by their fellow Asiatics on bicycles. A group of Malayans were actually happy that their kind of people were coming to liberate them from the tyranny of the foreign oppressors. Little did they realise what waited for them - from the frying pan into the flaming hot fire!

In 1945, when Sukarno declared independence and proclaimed Indonesia as a sovereign nation, the British, who gave an aura of being a just army, caring for humanity and liberty, came into Indonesia. The Malayans who once looked at their colonial masters as fair soon realised that they do not care about the people of the East. They were only interested in safeguarding the political interests of their own kind, the Dutch, fellow Europeans. And on top of that, the British sent 60,000 Indian (the native's kind) to squash the Indonesian liberators but troublemakers in the eyes of the colonialists.

Peacemakers and negotiators come in various forms. Some create trouble deliberately to be offer solutions. Some divert people’s attention from the real issue. Some purposely ignore the elephant in the room. The victims sometimes fail to realise that the joke is actually on them and that the predators are laughing at them, not with them.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. It needs to be reciprocated. It cannot be that your irresistible charisma or your dire hopelessness that earned you the alms. Something gotta give!

N.B. I always wondered why the word ‘Māyā’ carries so many meanings. From illusion, magic, mystic all the way to Buddha’s mother and the Goddess of Prosperity, Lakshmi! I guess it goes to signify the magic that money can do. 

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A peek into 1960s West Bengal...