Oh! Asin

Tarun Vijay

I was about to title this column "Ghaznis in Kathmandu". The holiest shrine of the Hindus, the Shiva temple of Lord Pashupatinath in the former
Hindu state of Nepal was stormed and desecrated. The chief priest was manhandled and forced to resign just because he happened to be of Indian origin.

In Nepal, there was a time when any sense of belonging to India brought glory and respect. Now, anyone with an Indian tag is insulted and humiliated. And look who is directing this hooliganism? Mr Pushpa Kamal Dahal alias Prachanda, the darling of South Block who got a red-carpet welcome from the Hindus of the right, left and centre varieties. People in Delhi who know that he "butchered" 15,000 Nepalese Hindus in the last decade of his Maoist revolution were dying to have a handshake with him. We are like this only.

So the "butcher" got all the accolades, spoke sweet one-liners, like "our relations are Ayodhya-to-Janakpur-Dham-kind, cordial and civilizational", meaning Ram (Ayodhya)-Sita (Janakpur) bonds exist between India and Nepal. Wow!

And then he smiled in his Kathmandu office. Being the patron of the Pashupatinath Temple board by virtue of his post, he ordered that the chief priest must be of Nepali origin. His army of rogues, Young Communist league, stormed the temple, broke open its main gates, humiliated the chief priest, anointed the newly brought Mr Bishnu Dahal as chief priest, and hurrah! A revolution had just begun!

It's been three days since puja was conducted at the age-old temple, which has been synonymous with the identity of Nepal. Three gates out of four have been closed. I spoke to the ousted chief priest, Mahabaleshwar Bhatt. He seemed to be terrified in his home as if under house arrest. "No sir, " he said, "I have resigned on my own, I was not feeling physically fit to perform the onerous duties of chief priest. Everything will be right, I am sure, I trust in Shiva." And he hung up. Then I spoke to the Kanchi Shankaracharya. He was sad and anguished. He said that if a new priest had to be appointed, care should have been taken not to disrupt the puja and the new priest should have been well versed in performing the duties in the service of the lord.

Hindus of this Hindustan couldn't save the honour of our revered Shankaracharya. How can we expect them to save the honour of Pashupatinath in the neighbouring country?

The media and the channels sought to play down the episode. Just imagine, if the atheist Communists had stormed the Vatican or if Mecca
was sought to be cleansed of "alien elements" by the anti-Saudi king elements, what would have been the reaction the world over?

This has happened in Nepal in spite of a Supreme Court stay against changing the priest. When the World Hindu Federation (Vishwa Hindu Mahasangh) people tried to hold a press conference in protest, it was attacked by the same Young Communist League elements. It was left to Rajnath Singh, BJP president, to speak to the president and the prime minister of Nepal conveying deep anguish of Hindus over the storming of the Pashupatinath Temple. But there are other Hindus too and they have a right to ask the PM and the super PM why they were silent. Would they have ignored an assault on a dilapidated mosque in Nepal? Or, to refresh everyone's memory, would they have remained silent if something of a similar nature had happened to non-Hindus in Denmark?

So I turned to Ghajini, the inexplicable name of a person whose last name is Dharmatma. The film is a beautiful remake of Memento. The hero, Sanjay, played by Aamir Khan, is deeply hurt and anguished because Ghajini Dharmatma, the bad, ugly villain, kills his beloved, Kalpana, played by a sparklingly charming Asin. And he takes revenge in a decisive manner, though he suffers from short-term memory loss, medically explained as '"anterograde amnesia". A handsome, wealthy, successful entrepreneur, who loves life and doesn't interfere in any other person's business, is turned into a highly disabled guy, for no fault of his. He becomes a loner and a dejected man who is left with nothing in this cruel world that would attract him. He is hurt. Hence he decides to take revenge on the person who killed his beloved.

Asin, I mean Kalpana in the movie
, trusts everyone, tries to help every distressed person, and she dies, longing to be united with his love. Sanjay suffers brutalities, yet survives with a memory loss. He even forgets who his enemy is and starts following the enemy's instructions. But he is taken to the right path by a friend, takes revenge and wins public applause.

It has taught me a lesson. We, the Hindus, suffer pathetically from short-term memory loss. We forget that the leaders we trust take us nowhere. Yet we vote for them year after year. A Pashupatinath stormed makes small news. A Shankaracharya arrested and humiliated turns into secular celebration. Temples bombed are easily forgotten and patriots turned into refugees become an accepted norm of democratic compulsions. No revenge. We have been brutalized and humiliated for centuries. Yet we love our assailants. Short-term memory loss? Revenge? That's only for movies. Good guys like us must show large-heartedness and tolerance. Tolerance, even if Kalpana is killed.

In times like this, Asin's charm helps us to keep our cool and have some hope in future. The anguish has to be reserved for the polling day.