Monthly Archives: May 2022

NCP sees vested interest behind attack; experts say its an attempt to demolish his political credibility

NCP sees vested interest behind attack; experts say its an attempt to demolish his political credibility

From labelling him an atheist to claiming he started caste politics in Maharashtra, Opposition leaders and right-wing trolls in the State have found a common target in Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar. The attacks are not purely political; some have gone on to issue death threats, commented on his illness, age and even wished him hell.

The veteran Maharashtra politician whose stature has been acknowledged even by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who once had said in a public event that he used to take advice from him has come under a well-co-ordinated attack from the right-wing ecosystem, both online and offline.The line of attack, however, has been different while the BJP has questioned his faith, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena has accusedMr. Pawarof dividing Maharashtra along caste lines.

Last week, the Twitter handle of the Maharashtra BJP posted an edited video of Mr. Pawars public rally in Satara where he recited a verse by new-age Marathi poet Jawahar Rathod about atrocities on people from lower castes. The tweet said atheist Sharad Pawar always hated Hindu gods. The social media troll army immediately picked up the issue and targeted the NCP chief. Joining in the chorus were some BJP leaders, including party MLA Nitesh Rane, who questioned Mr. Pawars interpretation of the poem, claiming the poet did not use certain words that Mr. Pawar added to his speech.

Dismissing the controversy over the poem, Mr. Pawar said the poet had voiced the pain of labourers who sculpt idols but they are stopped from entering the temples. The poem depicts pain but if some people want to spread misinformation, they are free to do so, he said.

NCP Minister Jitendra Awhad said Maharashtra has a thousand-year-long tradition of rebellion against the manuvadi social structure, be it the saints or the kings from the region. The poem is simply a part of that tradition. Only those who support caste hierarchy will oppose Pawar, he said.

Mr. Raj Thackerays allegations made in the last two months circle around the NCP chiefs opposition to Brahmin historian late Babasaheb Purandare and support to Maratha youth organisation Sambhaji Brigade, which is known for its stand against RSS, BJP. Mr. Pawar has clarified that no matter what Mr. Thackeray thinks, he has differences with Purandares saffronisation of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.

BJP MLC Gopichand Padalkar has been accusing Mr. Pawar of neglecting the interests of the Dhangar (shepherd) community, while another BJP leader, Sadabhau Khot, has extended his support to Marathi actor Ketaki Chitale, currently in police custody for posting an objectionable message on social media against the NCP chief.

Political revenge is certainly one reason behind increased attacks on Pawar. But this is more of an attempt to demolish Pawars political credibility and humiliate him by making personal allegations against him, said Surendra Jondhale, a political commentator and former professor of political science at Mumbai University.

He said that the attacks also reflect the low levels to which the politics of the State has stooped to. The MVA government largely depends on Pawar at present. Ensuring an attack on him from all quarters affects the morale of the government and sends a message to Delhi that there is social unrest in Maharashtra against the MVA government, he said.

NCP spokesperson Clyde Castro said attacking Mr. Pawar is an easy way to gain publicity. We as a party are strong enough to answer any criticism with vested interest against our leader, said Mr. Castro.

The political attacks have also led to social media trolls making distasteful and derogatory comments against the NCP chief. While Ms. Chitale wished him death, a youth from Nasik, Nikhil Bhamre, issued a death threat with a reference to Nathuram Godse. He was later arrested for his tweet. On Saturday, a BJP functionary was allegedly beaten by NCP workers after he abused Mr. Pawar on social media.

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Pawar power: oppn., right-wing trolls find a common target - The Hindu

We need to realise that religion is a map that helps bring us to the door of spirituality; we can either open the door or wander aimlessly looking for God

Representational image. Reuters

I do not believe in religious conversion because I do not believe that a persons religious faith can decide the fate of his/her soul. Being a Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh or an atheist is not a gateway to heaven. Religions and religious interpretations are the root causes of conflicts around the world.

Religion corrupts the mind, while spirituality awakens the mind to the reality of our cohesive existence with all of Gods creations.

The root cause of conflict in todays world is religion because one religion wants to enforce its superiority on people of other religious faiths. I wonder if I were born not as a Christian but as a Hindu or a Muslim, how I would have been different in my thought and action. My quest to understand God and the universal consciousness would not change. I would be a seeker, irrespective of the religion I would be born into.

If most religions profess to preach unification of people, then how can religious institutions and their clerics divide people based on their religious beliefs? Such is the blind faith of people in their respective religions that they are willing to fight, and wage a war only to prove the supremacy of their religious beliefs.

Islamic radicals will go on a rampage if a cartoon is made of Prophet Mohammad. In their rage they will kill anyone seen to be standing on the other side of the religious divide. A teacher in Europe last year was brutally killed by the father of a Muslim girl, just because the young girl told him that the teacher mocked Islam and Prophet Mohammad! Upon investigations it was learned that the girl was not even in the class when she claimed the teacher mocked Islam.

Overzealous believers from the Christian community have been advocating the path of salvation being Jesus Christ alone and have arduously pursued this agenda to convert people of the Hindu and Muslim faith in India.

Priests and pastors constantly mock Hindu beliefs and gods. Many evangelicals claim that they have come to India on a mission to save the demon-worshippers and bring them to the knowledge of the true God and saviour Jesus Christ. Sometimes the allurement is education, healthcare, employment and a better life as a Christian than being a Hindu, especially for the marginalised in the social community.

Muslim preachers too have been vehemently propagating and proselytising their Islamic faith in India and around the world. In fact, Islamic radicalisation has over the years intensified globally. Most Islamic radicals want nations around the world to come under the Shariah.

To fight the onslaught of conversions in India, certain Hindu groups have initiated reconversions to bring the converted natives back to Hindu fold. I am not sure whether the person who converts and then reconverts understands the tenets of the religions he first converted to and then reconverted into.

Religion is the single most dividing factor that leads to violence and conflict around the world. I cannot come to grips with the thought that states, My God is better than your God.

Its difficult to comprehend how any sane person can kill another in the name of religion. Its difficult to fathom how one can atone for ones sins by sacrificing an innocent animal. Or, how the killing of persons from another religion will bestow you with 72 virgins in the afterlife!

The nature of God cannot be encapsulated in an image or a religion or a book or a dogma. God is an energy beyond comprehension. We come in touch with this consciousness when we empty ourselves from our religious biases and reach into the depths of our humanness or soul.

Conversion is a cruel joke on all of us, because God is within and around us. No God can be bigger or better than another God because even the religion and its institution cannot guarantee that their faith is the only true path to salvation. And seriously, what is salvation? What do we need to be saved from? If we have come into this world, we have come here with a purpose to live out our karma and do our dharma.

We need to realise that religion is a map that helps bring us to the door of spirituality; we can either open the door or wander aimlessly looking for God. We just need to open our eyes to see this truth; maybe, then, there would be peace in this world.

As Norwegian sociologist Johan Vincent Galtung once stated, Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the absence of violence in a time of conflict.

The author is the founder of GoaChronicle.com and a BJP leader. Views expressed are personal.

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In Your Face | Conversion is a primary reason for religious discord in India, must be stopped immediately - Firstpost

Dylan Godwin as Will and Matthew Amendt as Kit in 'Born With Teeth' at the Alley Theater

A few years back, computer analyses came up with a tantalizing theory: William Shakespeare may have collaborated with fellow playwright Christopher Kit Marlowe on the three Henry VI history plays. This qualified as a bombshell in the literary and dramatic worlds. Marlowe, who died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 29, is widely considered Shakespeares equal, or even superior. The possibility that they put their heads together for a cycle of plays, no matter how weak that cycle may be, is a bloody big deal.

Born With Teeth, Liz Duffy Adams new play that had its world premiere at the Alley Theatres Neuhaus Theatre last Wednesday, puts the two writers in the same tavern for 90 minutes and lets the speculation, much of it based in the historical record, run wild. The play is above all a showcase for a couple of heroic performances by Matthew Amendt, as Kit, and Dylan Godwin, as Will. Theyre onstage for every moment of the production, thrusting and parrying, seducing and repelling, and even, on occasion, writing. This is daunting piece of work, intellectually and emotionally, and Amendt and Godwin ace it.

It helps that the writers personalities are so different, the better to set the stakes of their collaboration. Will is a pragmatist who seeks popularity and stability; he wants nothing to do with the dangerous currents of Elizabethan England, during which time an atheist and, depending on the exact period, a Catholic, could end up with his head on a spike.

'Born With Teeth'

When: Through June 5

Where: Alley Theatre, 615 Texas

Details: $49 and up; alleytheatre.org

Marlowe, on the other hand, is a libertine, and a spy, who courts danger and thumbs his nose at bourgeois morals. As the play begins, the swaggering Kit sees Will as a middling talent and a slave to convention. Will is drawn to Kit like a puppy dog but also wary of his collaborators reckless ways. Gradually, they let down their guards. Kit praises Will for making us fall in love with villains. I cant help loving them, Will replies. Somewhere, down below, Richard III smiles.

Chasing each other (literally and figuratively) around a long rectangular table, Kit, decked out in leather and spikes, and Will, looking more like a peasant, always find themselves returning to the hazards awaiting them in the world. Kit has dangerous friends, including Sir Walter Raleigh, one of those aforementioned atheists. Another was the playwright Thomas Kyd, referred to throughout the play as Tom, who, upon being arrested and tortured, betrayed his friend Marlowe. The specter of naming names looms large throughout Born With Teeth.

This is a play of ideas but also of passions. Kit and Will bicker and boast, but they also talk of settling down together and even share an impassioned kiss. Identities are in flux here, more so for Kit, who seems bored by the idea of settling on one persona. We can see that his self-destructive impulses only lead one way; less obvious are the lessons Will gleans from his writing partner, maneuvers that might lead to his survival. In the end, we know which writer history smiled upon. Born With Teeth has a great deal of fun postulating how that might have come to be.

Chris Vognar is a Houston-based writer.

Chris Vognar is a reporter for the Houston Chronicle.

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Review: Alley Theatres Born With Teeth has a wicked bite - Houston Chronicle

A paranoid conspiracy theory has taken over parts of the Left. It has found its clearest expression in an extremely vile op-ed at the Washington Post by author and filmmaker Brian Broome.

The heart of his argument is this little pile of slander and hate: that the Buffalo shooters mindset is the same as the mindset of the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The same sort of thinking about race and birthrates now dominates the conservative Supreme Court," Broome writes. "The leaked draft opinion isnt about protecting babies. It is about protecting Whiteness. Specifically, White babies.

These two sentences are an insane fever dream with no grounding in reality. Either Broome is a liar who hopes his readers dont notice, or he is truly mad, living in a paranoid delusion in which powerful people are engaged in dark conspiracies disguised as normal politics.

To believe what Broome espouses, you first need to believe that Justices Clarence Thomas (formerly a black baby) and Amy Coney Barrett (mother of adopted black babies) dont care about black babies.

But thats not even the most absurd part of Broomes argument.

If you reduced the number of abortions, the ultimate aim of all pro-lifers, you would increase the number of black babies and the black share of the U.S. population. Black babies are three times as likely as white babies to be aborted. Hispanic babies are twice as likely as white babies to be aborted.

Anyone trying to end or curb abortions is working to make the population less white, not more. That is just statistics. And this is why white supremacist Richard Spencer is pro-abortion.

"The people who are having abortions are generally very often black or Hispanic," Spencer explains. Like Spencer, racist eugenicists have always favored abortion. Even the abortion lobby today agrees that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, peddled birth control and abortion because she wanted fewer nonwhite babies.

Nevertheless, Broome repeatedly asserts, using the fallacy or argument by assertion, that any concern about birthrates is part of the great replacement theory.

This is, frankly, idiotic. Birthrates are falling in every country, and the United States has been in a baby bust for 16 years. The result is small towns shuttering and schools closing. Eventually, it will mean an economy with not enough people to make things and perform services needed to keep the world running.

There are a million reasons to care about falling birthrates that have nothing to do with "replacement" conspiracy theories. That's why the New York Times ran a front-page story in May 2021 warning of a demographic time bomb.

All over the world, the New York Times news story warned, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust.

Broome points out that the Buffalo shooter worried about white birthrates. Thats true the Buffalo shooter was a racist who believed in baseless conspiracy theories. Conservatives like myself who worry broadly about birthrates are not fixated on white birthrates. We are happy to see more black babies, more white babies, more Hispanic babies, more Asian babies, more Native American babies, and so on.

Im not on the same side as the murderer. Maybe Broome is. The shooter, probably like Broome, believes in human population control for environmental purposes. There is no Green future with never ending population growth, the atheist shooter wrote in his manifesto.

Broome's slanderous dishonesty comes in a piece about want[ing] the hate to stop. But Broome's entire op-ed is nothing but hate.

Because the data and facts cut against his tendentious thesis, Broome rests his entire argument on what he somehow knows to be the secret motivations of a shadowy cabal running America. The real reason Clarence Thomas opposes abortion, he surmises, is that he wants more white babies, etc. Never mind all the data!

Those secret intentions, Broome tells us, are evil, and they will result in something like genocide. Never mind that abortion has dramatically limited the nonwhite population.

Broome's argument, grounded as it is in paranoid conspiracy theories and bigotry against entire classes of people, sounds a lot more like the Buffalo shooters thinking than anything else you're going to find in print these days.

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The Washington Post just published a paranoid racist conspiracy theory - Washington Examiner

When we first meet Vishwas Pethe in his memoir, Gay Crow, he is 62 and ready to end his lifenot because hes depressed or angry but because hes tired of fighting. In 2016, the Indian-American computer engineer (he was one of the original developers of Grindr) suffered a debilitating stroke and fall. Whats more, these setbacks arrived after hed been diagnosed with AIDS in 1986 and then non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of cancer, in 2001. Thats a lot of fighting.

At the insistence of his partner of 30 years, husband Joe Hennessy, Pethe agrees to see a psychologist. The conversations between Pethe and his therapist, Carl, constitute the bulk of book. Through this unconventional Q&A format, Pethes amazing life story unfoldsgrowing up in India; coming out; surviving his first partner, who was lost to AIDS; enjoying career successes; marrying Hennessy; and much more. Along the way, Pethe and his therapist matter-of-factly explore deep philosophical questions about what constitutes a happy and healthy life. POZ spoke with Pethe, who turns 67 in June and lives in Falls Church, Virginia, via email and Zoom. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

First off, tell us about the books title.

Gay Crow is a pun on the famous Indian childhood story called Happy Crow. The gist of the story is that there was a crow living in the jungle who was always happy. A king hears about it and decides to make him unhappy. He tells his soldiers to capture the crow and put him through different punishments. But the crow finds something in each circumstance to be happy about. So finally, the king lets the crow go and says we should all be happy like the crow. My uncle called me a happy (gay) crow watching me play with others when I was a kid because I was always happy.

What were your goalsfor yourself and othersin writing the memoir?

I noticed that being happy made me forget the bad things that come by in life. I always found something to be happy about and never remembered the bad things. When I talked to the therapist, it became clear to me that it might be a secret to my survival. Then I thought, Why not document this and let others in similar situations find a way out? My memoir can help people coming out, adjusting to a different culture or dealing with health problems.

What was your rationale behind considering suicide?

The left side of my brain was gone, my right arm was not working, my right leg was not working and my speech was disabled. My last fall put my left arm in plaster, and my jaw was twisted. I was on a liquid diet. My sharp mind and intellect were gone. This is on top of the years I had spent fighting AIDS. I was tired of fighting. Thats why I was choosing suicide. What kept me from doing that was my love for my partner. I imagined what his life would be with me gone. I wanted to spare him the trouble. What changed my mind is that Carl kept up my interest in psychology and that bought time while my condition improved to the point I could manage it. At no point was I depressed.

Your HIV journey has been challenging as well. In 2006, you developed resistance to HIV meds and were diagnosed with Kaposi sarcomaan AIDS-related canceruntil you got into an Isentress (raltegravir) trial, which gave you a second life. How is your HIV now?

My viral load has been undetectable since 2006. But after having a number of treatments and each having its side effects, it has taken a toll on my system. I have osteoporosis [bone loss, a potential side effect of certain HIV meds], adrenal insufficiency, hypogonadism [low testosterone], weakness in the right ankle (a result of the fall in 2001) and other age-related problems.

Is there a specific outlook or physical trait that helped you persevere?

My gay crow attitude is the thing that kept me going. As I look back on my life, I only remember what a wonderful life I had. I take notice of the negative things and deal with them, but they dont stay in my mind once they are gone.

That sounds like sthitapradnya, which you mention in the book. How would you describe this?

Sthitapradnya has various meanings. The one I go by is the state of mind that is not disturbed by good things, nor is it disturbed by bad things. You separate the mind as the inner mind and the outer mind. The outer mind reacts to good or bad things, but the inner mind stays stable. It has helped me handle the HIV and the stroke as things that happened outside but didnt affect me inside.

When I picked up your book, I expected to learn more about a Hindu view of the LGBTQ and HIV experiences, only to discover youre an atheist.

First of all, you must understand that Hinduism has nothing to do with God. You can be a God-fearing/-loving Hindu or an atheist Hindu. As someone said, Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life. Many Hindus dont believe in God. So my being a Hindu did not affect my being gay, but the societal attitudes did. I knew that society would not understand it, so I kept it my secret. Coming out was the same thing. I only came out to people that I thought could handle it, though I never lied about it.

I get the impression that youve not struggled with hang-ups and shame regarding being gay.

Yes, that is very correct. I have never met anyone that shamed me for my sexual preferences. Its surprising that not one person [I know] has any problem with the gay thing, including my extended family and friends here and in India.

Youre up-front about having open relationships with your long-term partners. Have you received any push-back about that in the age of marriage equality and heteronormative, monogamous relationships?

All men (not women, I am not qualified to analyze them) are promiscuous (in a good way). Men want security and freedom. Having a relationship gives them security, but they lose freedom. Being single gives them freedom but no security. An open relationship achieves both. I have not had any pushback from anyone. A more heteronormative, monogamous gay lifestyle is a fantasy. I dont know any gay person who follows that. In every relationship that I have seen, there is cheating. So take the cheating out of the relationship. If you find it beneficial to you and your partners to have a closed relationship, then do that. But you shouldnt keep someone else caged in marriage. If he meets and desires someone else, let him go. He was never yours anyway. I got married to receive the 1,000-plus benefitsfinancial and otherwise.

You worked on the original development team doing coding for Grindr, the gay dating app. You mention that folks thank you for that contribution to the gay community. What would you say to someone who counters that the app promotes hook-up culture and devalues face-to-face interactions?

Grindr made connecting with other gay men easier [and more normal]. It does facilitate the hook-up culture, but it does not devaluate face-to-face interaction. With these apps, you meet new people, which would have been impossible otherwise. Those who dont want them are free to avoid the apps.

Your therapist noted that you thrive when you have a challenge. For example, you took up painting at his suggestion, even when you had to use your nondominant hand because of the stroke. Whats the next project?

Dealing with the aftereffects of a stroke takes up my time. But painting gave some meaning to life. Meanwhile, since the stroke, [my husband and I] have become world travelers. And Im thinking of writing a new book.

Any last words of advice?

Dont let your HIV status get in the way of what you want to do. Being HIV positive is just a thing that you deal with, like many conditions other people deal with. Dont dwell on it. Maybe a gay crow attitude will help you.

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Advice From the Gay Crow - POZ - POZ