No Big Deal

from The Time Of India, August 4, 2005 (Editorial)

With its appalling human rights record, Saudi Arabia is hardly a role model for other societies. However, in the case of the funeral of King Fahd, the Saudis could teach many so-called liberal democracies a thing or two about the rites of passage and how these might most appropriately be conducted. Though he had lived a flamboyant playboy’s life, often squandering a fortune during a single night of gambling, when Fahd died, he was accorded the most humble of burials. This was in keeping with the austere tenets of the Wahhabi creed which originated in Saudi Arabia as a reaction to the opulence which some elements of Islam had begun to acquire. Born in the cradle of the desert, Islam in its origins was a frugal faith. However, it gathered pomp and panoply when it reached Persia and began to assume the trappings of empire. These two strands of Islam can be seen in the Moghul dynasty in India. While Shah Jahan built the world’s most magnificent mausoleum for his wife, Aurangzeb was buried in a simple shroud. As was Fahd, for whose funeral no special state ceremonies were observed. Indeed, even the Saudi flag did not fly at half-mast; since the flag has inscribed on it words from the Qur’an, it cannot be lowered

Fahd’s funeral holds two interconnected messages. First, that death, being the final illusion of an illusion called life, is no big deal. The second, that the state’s reaction to this nonevent should reflect the irrelevance of mere mortality, be it that of a beggar or a king. This should be a salutary lesson for us in that our political class is wont to go into a frenzy of national necrophilia whenever netas, often long past the zenith of their careers, finally pass beyond. Closures are declared for schools and offices, Parliament is adjourned, the national flag is flown half-mast, large tracts of the central and state capitals are devoted to memorial edifices, floral tributes are ceremoniously made and treated as photo-ops by the publicity-hungry. Such grandiloquence awarded to death has no place either in the philosophy of secular democracy or in the Indic tradition, which includes the Jain and Hindu detachment from the ephemera called mortality.


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My thoughts - Besides fully agreeing to the article, one thing that i learned was about the saudi flag - can't be lowered cuz it has words of quran written on it. Also the new words now in my english arsenal are pomp and panoply!

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Getting Started

Lets c where we go from here!

as of now life sucks in manila. nothing to do, nowhere to go around. feels like i'm in cage. Delhigurgaon was so much better. morning jogs, open air, driving like a free birdon the roads, wonderful people, loud chatter, exciting weekends, and overall a free life. here its like i've been caged in a concrete jungle.

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