...and our memories hear that man in parliament on that midnight hour when India fulfilled its tryst with destiny. O what a long hard march this has been! We have broken away from the passion of the founding years and the hatred of partition to finally found a nation; a binding pact with each other. Let my countrymen rejoice, for a moment that does come but rarely in history has come again! The shackles of caste and creed; of differences among cultures and classes have finally been cleansed away, not wholly but in substantial measure.
This country, my brethren! This country that makes one cry in ecstasy and in pain, all at once! This country!
Alive is my heart again with the hope of tomorrows when we will awaken with our hopes untrammeled and dreams almost realized.
We will hear ditties written about how the common man voted for secularism and decent democracy and some of us will believe them. Bully for them!
I know why we voted the government back into power. It has to do with that “vision thing”; the one the Republicans in the USA completely forgot about after Mr. Bush the elder. What vision does Ms. Mayawati bring to the table other than good old caste politics? What does the left bring other than old beat-up tomes by Lenin and, even worse, by Stalin? What does the saffron brigade bring other than the desire for a Ram Rajya that Lord Ram would recoil from?
There is another little thing; it’s the idea once again gaining currency that we need to provide for all of us to be able to “India Shining”. A few millionaires do not a nation make! The particular devotion of the Congress to at least attempt to address the folks in the rapidly diminishing subsistence agriculture industry is heartening.
In these perilous times, we need stable slightly-soiled-dhoti based governance. Mr. Singh is a man of great decency and dignity apart from being one of the greatest economists of our age. We also have another man of destiny showing us that the genes of Nehru are rather potent and will skip a generation here and there but will come good eventually. The young bucks, the starry-eyed idealists, are in the Congress, not in any of the new regional parties. I can’t believe that this has happened. Not in our wildest had we imagined this tantalizing a state of affairs.
We should have known that this would happen when we braced ourselves for the usual communal violence after 26/11 and our world did not erupt in blood. We should have known when we saw the “squaring of the shoulders-get back to work” attitude when the economy was in some disarray. After hundreds of years and many tyrants, we have got our mojo back!

We have often heard the refrain that goes like this "let them come to power and then they will become more lenient/tolerant/inclusive....". It is mostly true on past evidence, however the baying of hounds can never be really quelled. Please read this article.

I do understand that the NY times is a leftie rag but the point is well made. The fact that black supremacists took over the civil rights agenda has hurt this society very much. Perhaps not as much as the KKK but the difference is merely of degree, not of kind.

If Maharashtra and Mumbai in particular, lets Messrs. Thackeray and other divisive groups continue to set the agenda, the 1000 point drop in the market today will seem pleasant in comparison to the loss of social structure and camaraderie among the various different folk that make Mumbai tick. As Indians, all we have really is the "idea" that is India. Sing the national anthem to yourself and you will get a similar perspective. Yes, we belong to an ancient and very powerful( in terms of moulding us together) Hindu culture, but it takes but a few bombs, a dozen epithets, a few lynchings to destroy decades of civility and decency.

Some would even argue that we first need to build up some acceptable organic social fabric before we talk of the damage to the same. We have been too taken with the idea of mutual "tolerance". I hate this word with a passion because today's tolerance is tomorrow's genocide. We need to build among us, pockets of affection, slowly, sometimes painfully, one person at a time.

This Diwali, I feel scared that some would seek to disrupt the festive spirit by sowing more discord and dissent among us. I pray that we can all dedicate ourselves to the ultimate triumph of Good over evil. I do not mean in a violent way. Look upon it as the forming of a pearl in an oyster. It takes decades but the intruding piece of garbage is moulded to a beautiful and precious thing. Let us hope that our disagreements are like that and that we like each other for our values rather than in spite of them.

Have a Blessed Diwali!!