The Lord resides in every being

When was the last time you made fun of someone���s accent or background? Remember the movie Padosan and the absolutely priceless antics of aiee-aiee-yo Mehmood and Jare Kaga Kishorda? Now did one ever feel like shooting either of them down with a high-powered assault rifle for injuring one���s regional sensitivities or ruffling their sense of political correctness? Of course not! Yakka Chatur Nar kara ke singaar is just from the movies. And it���s an all-time classic, one of the great glories of Hindi cinema.

But real life can be vastly different. And art does mirror life. For instance, your correspondent remembers a lovely, bubbly actually, Sikh colleague back from the mists of time. She used to be constantly addressed to as balle balle by the editor���s geriatric secretary. The spirited Sikhni had no hesitation in giving it back to him by calling out, in a perfect Malayalee accent: Yessji Mallooji? Waat is eet?���

Now just imagine if one, or both of them, had packed in a Walther PPK (James Bond���s favourite terminator toy) or a Glock Pistol (favoured by Rajiv Gandhi���s Black Cats) along with their tiffin containing dosai or paranthe or whatever it is that Malloos and Balles eat during their office lunchtime! For one thing, like all those hapless victims shot dead in the New York town of Binghampton by the allegedly linguistically challenged Vietnamese immigrant, your columnist too might not have been around to tell that sad sad story.

But this is not really about linguistic chauvinism. Nor is it about chee chee clubs that love to hate the barbarians at their gates. (We owe the word barbarian to the Greeks, from bar-bar arising out of chaotic sounds of speech that one cannot understand, whether from Indians, Etruscans or Persians. Curiously, the Sanskrit Barbara also means both ���stammering��� and alien or ���curly-haired���, still reflected in our collective obsession with long silky hair plastered all over those TV ads!)

The Binghampton shooting is a particularly appalling example of victimhood and blame culture. It might have been averted with some empathy and compassion, with the all-inclusive love and recognition born out of the notion that the Lord resides in every being.

This is what the Bhagvad Gita enjoins us to practise in our lives daily, without the slightest whiff of clannishness. That���s the real way to the hearts, not through stomachs as the wag said.