ഈശോ…
നൂറ്റൊന്നു സുകൃത ജപങ്ങള്
ദിവസങ്ങളോളം ഉരുക്കഴിച്ചു കൊണ്ടുണ്ടാക്കിയ
പിച്ചള വളയുമണിഞ്ഞു
എല്.പി.സ്കൂളിന്റെ മുറ്റത്തു സ്ഥാപിച്ച
ചില്ല് കൂട്ടിനുള്ളില് നിന്ന് ചിരിക്കുന്ന കുട്ടി.
യേശു…
അമ്മയുടെ ശുഷ്കിച്ച വിരലുകള്ക്കിടയിലൂടെ
ഊര്ന്നിറങ്ങുന്ന കൊന്ത മണികള്ക്കൊടുവില്
തൂങ്ങിയാടുന്ന ദൈവപുത്രന്.
ജീസസ്…
ഭാഷാ വരത്തിന്റെ അലര്ച്ചയിലും,
ഉപദേശിയുടെ കറുത്ത ചട്ടയിട്ട ബൈബിളിലും നിന്ന്
സുമുഖനായ അമേരിക്കന് ദൈവത്തിന്റെ മുഖം മൂടി മാറ്റി
ഇറങ്ങിയോടാന് വെമ്പുന്ന ഒരു ജൂത വിപ്ലവകാരി.
“daa, did you read the newspaper today?“, I heard my mother asking. “Yes, why?” “Who is this Steve Jobs? What did he do?” The Malayalam daily had carried the headline of Steve Jobs’s demise and my mother was wondering how come this name that she had never heard of before occupies the prime space of the local newspaper. She was even more curious to read that this man was the founder of ‘Apple’. When I heard this innocent, curious question from my mom, I thought, what do all these obituaries praising Steve Jobs as a man who has made a difference in the everyday life of people really mean to a country like India and it’s people?
Until the recent past, Steve Jobs (or Mac) was a name or rather some sort of elite, exclusive knowledge for the techies in India that they would occassionally use to exhibit their knowledge of the world of computers. It is like when a group of people talks about Micheal Jackson and then someone in the group tells them, “MJ is crap, you should hear < the-name-the-majority-of-people-in-the-group-has-never-heard-of >” and rest of the group would think, “wow, this guy must know a great deal of western music“. Ironically, this elite exclusivity (and I am speaking from an Indian context) is also the core of the line of products that made Steve Jobs popular.
I had not seen a Mac machine until I stepped into the studio of Chetana Film Academy in Thrissur. Mac, in those days, was the most expensive computer I had heard of. Someone told me that the Mac I saw in the studio, even the low-end ones, was prized at around one lakh Indian rupees. Then came iPod that had many models to choose from according to your budget. The music experience of iPod was of course good, but I don’t know what special did iPod do in a market of MP3 players that Sony’s Walkman did not do in a market of audio cassette players (and I like the audio quality of Microsoft’s Zune compared to iPod but that product seems to have failed miserably). Then the iPhone, that forces you to choose a cellular operator of Apple’s choice (speaking legally, I’m aware of the ‘unlock option’), and the version 4 costs about 45,000 Indian rupees. iPad followed shortly after which is yet another upper middle-class toy.
So what significance does Steve Jobs have in a country like India? Is it for those fancy gadgets that has not made any change in the life of people here except, of course, for the business class and upper middle-class? No. It is his journey of life that stays inspirational to many people. The story of an adopted kid, the college drop-out who followed his dream to become one of the most famous and successful entrepreneurs in the world. The man who stayed hungry and foolish. It is for his life that he will be remembered best.
As for me, other than his life story, I thank him for Pixar that continues to give us the best animated feature films of our times.
When they hear about a group of people beating someone to death for petty crimes, Malayalees would take pride that it did not happen in their home state. ‘Must be Bihar‘, they would say. ‘Or some other illiterate state in India‘, they would comment. But when they got a chance, they proved themselves to be the most hypocritical society in India. And note that the victim here was not a thief, but a complete innocent.
Raghu, a native of Palakkad, was traveling to Perumbavoor in a bus with some money that he borrowed from gold loan. That is when two people got into a fight with him and started beating him. When people had noticed, they accused Raghu of pick-pocketing. It is only when Raghu got sick of the beating and fell down on the ground that the KSRTC employees kept the two culprits in their custody and informed the police. But Raghu had died before the police could reach the taluk hospital with him.
One one hand there is Raghu, a father of two, who took a gold loan of Rs. 19,000 from the local co-operative bank to help his wife’s grandmother’s family in Tamil Nadu. On the other, there are two people – one of them a gunman, a cop, to a Member of Parliament (K Sudhakaran) which gives him ‘special privileges’. Then there is police, who refused to give details of the questioning of the culprits and prevented the media from taking photos of them. They said it was an ‘order from the top’.
Then there is me and you – the Malayali common men who seems to believe that beating someone to death is justified if the victim is a pick-pocket. That is probably why nobody stopped the two culprits – the gunman and his friend – when they said the money that Raghu carrying was pick-pocketed. It is the same Malayali mindset that would justify the men who slapped a woman for traveling with a friend at night with a comment that ‘she deserved it‘, because she was traveling with her friend to drop her at her place after a night shift job. The same Malayali men who would justify the flesh trade pimping minor girls with a comment ‘why did that girl go with that man in the first place?‘, ‘she must have been craving for sex‘.
I think more than these people who abuse their power and positions, it is on us to take the blame. For being the silent spectators that we have turned out to be.
