On September 11^th when a bunch of - not militants but - terrorists committed the gruesome and inhuman acts of destruction, which rocked this nation and the rest of the world. I was upset and could not work that day, so I returned home, when all of a sudden the mundane had no significance. My guess about who did it, was as good as anybody’s.

Couple of days later, in one of the newsgroup I subscribe to, Shyam mailed with feelings of happiness over the incidents of that Tuesday. Not happy because so many lives were lost, but happy that this would lead to the extermination of all Muslims on this earth and especially in India.

A day later I got a personal mail from Bhaskar, who had replied earlier to Shyam’s email on the group disagreeing with his statements and expressing his views. Bhaskar’s personal email went something like this.

I was embarrassed seeing Shyam’s email. Please don’t mind. If it’s okay, I want a favor from you. I also want to be a Muslim. I would like to learn more about Islam. If you want to discuss, pour out your thoughts, that would be neat. I don’t have anyone else who could share their thoughts. I believe a perfect Muslim is also a perfect Hindu in many ways. What do you think?

And this is what I had to say to him.

Dear Bhaskar,

Regarding your earlier mail to the group, you had a good point there. Hatred breeds Hatred. One more good point you said in your mail was that we are always trying to find errors in others so that we can feel good about ourselves. Which is true many times, but it is not expected of a common man to be a Gandhi. This world can survive and prolong its existence only if we understand to accept and love each other. But there are many ills in today’s world that have to be gotten rid of.

As for as your personal email to me, I understand your feelings and appreciate your concern for me. First of all I would like to let you know that I was not embarrassed seeing Shyam’s email. I have seen and read more venomous and hateful messages. I am pretty sure Shyam does not mean harm to many. He was just overtaken by his emotions. But I do believe in this- fundamentalism and hate crimes no matter which religion they belong to, have to be fought and the perpetrators should be brought to justice.

I believe as long as ideas are only assessed upon by considering the minority of the people who commit wrong, there will be resentment among many. Be it religion or politics or principles. Any idea however sound and good it might seem to you, there will always be people who won’t like it. Any idea can be proved to be either good or bad, it only depends which side of the line you are. You could easily debate this by considering Capitalism as ideal, Hindu religion as good, Islam as bad, Globalisation, Death penalty etc.

People are always trying to find a larger meaning in insignificant things, like in the current circumstances, the purpose and rationale in a person following the religion of Islam. We will always be wrong if we judge a religion based on the crimes committed by a handful of people who belong to that religion, even if they commit those crimes in the name of religion. If a man is stripped of his worldly possessions, all he is left with is his belief in his God and the land he was born into. Any person when he has nothing else to fall back will most probably fall back on God to guide him, it does not matter which.

Islam as any other religion has its good and bad, what is needed is not the extermination of all the people who believe in this religion but a conscious effort to amend the ills. Islam is still in an infant stage of evolution, mostly because of the lack of visionaries and people of strength. But abandoning the idea of religion or a particular religion because there were some miscreants who followed that religion will not solve the problem.

I would like to use the epic of Mahabharatha to try and convey this in another manner. When Arjuna was reluctant to fire his arms and fight his own brothers, Lord Krishna had to enlighten him that it was not his brothers he was fighting but the injustice and immorality that they were supporting. As we know today what Lord Krishna told Arjuna is the Bhagavad Gita which is a sacred book of Hinduism: the Hinduism which was also a part of Duryodhan and the Kauravs. Lord Krishna could have denounced the religion of the Kauravs to form an altogether different religion, but he did not do that. And we today should not do the same thing. What the Islamic fundamentalists or any other fundamentalists represent and do are unjust and wrong. We have to fight them even if it means fighting our own brothers. For as long as there will be injustice there will be violence.

As long as there is good on this earth there will be evil. What we can do is embrace the good and fight the evil. If we look at history or for that matter just the past 100 years of affairs around the world we can point out culprits in every religion, who have used their religions at one time or the other to commit atrocities. If we were to judge religions based upon their extremist and minority followers and convert, the whole world will be in turmoil.

The Hindus would have to convert whenever a Graham Staines is killed in Orissa or when Nuns are raped, or when Dalits were burned alive. Muslims have to convert whenever there are inhuman acts like those in NY or terrorist attacks in Kashmir. Christians would have to convert whenever there was a terrorist attack by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) or the Christian Insurgents in North East India. Sikhs would have to convert when there were atrocities committed in the name of Khalistan and so on. The list will go on. We should not make the mistake of considering the culprits who commit these crimes Hindu, Muslim, Christian etc first and criminal second; they are criminal first and anything else later.

As you and I have read the reports of crimes committed against innocent Sikhs and Indians in America, it has only reiterated that hatred has no color or religion. What I am trying to say is this; a majority cannot and should not be assessed based on a minority.

I would like to quote from the diary of Anne Frank (She was a Jewish teenager in hiding with her family in Netherlands during the WWII when the Nazis were capturing all the Jews and sending them to concentration camps in Germany. She along with her family were safe in a office building for about two years. They were found by the Nazis and sent to the camps where she later died. Her diary, during the last couple of her years, is a good book.) She wrote.

"What one Christian does is his own responsibility

What one Jew does reflects on all Jews"

This can be easily applied to any minority in any nation and will hold true. The Index of measuring goodness seem to be different for minorities and majorities.The worst of a minority becomes the benchmark for that minority, but the worst of a majority becomes a meager aberration. Whenever such ghastly incidents as what happened in New York that Tuesday occur, people will chastize the religions, nations, and cultures of the minority who committed them. People like you and me can do more good by reminding people not to judge a majority based upon a miscreant minority. We should not jump to conclusions trying desperately to ascertain blame for such incidents.

I for practical purposes can be called an Atheist. Not because I don’t like Islam or any other religion. But because I consider the God-idea in conventional terms unattractive to me. But I do have respect for all the religions on this earth and would try to be a good Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist etc. And as long as you believe in love and peace you will be a good Hindu, a good Muslim, and a good Christian.

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