hunger games

for the life of me i CANNOT understand how when one man threatens to remain hungry till 'death does him apart' for a cause that he believes to be paramount, and retain a moral high ground while doing so at the same time, people feel not just empathetic towards that cause, but a sense of shared high moral ground towards realizing that cause.

in other words, being 'hungry-till-i-die' seems to be in some rare cases, a means of generating not merely a shared empathy for a cause, but a high moral ground.

when it is said that one makes a decision to "remain hungry", it is not involuntary... it is a matter of choice. and of course this is no 'aam admi' (ordinary man)... he most certainly must be very very special, since quite obviously his 'choice' to 'remain hungry' seems to have garnered much 'national' attention (at least as far as what the media seems to be projecting), as opposed to some others in a similar situation of 'remaining hungry' for more than a decade without notice; and millions of others who die hungry, or kill themselves due to utterly helpless situations of inability to feed even one's family..

of course, he's a special 'citizen' while the others are mere populations, animals, terrorists or separatists..

but none of this matters... this one man is threatening to die, while thousands have already died, thousands are being killed, people who have been forced to death sentences.... all of whose deaths do not matter...

one man.. and his hunger... apparently the force of the nation cannot satisfy this one man's hunger... what a large appetite... indeed he must be very special...

ways of inhabiting the world

the world i inhabit is decidedly for me, divided into those who follow vegetarianism and those who follow non-vegetarianism. this has nothing to do with the simple practice of eating vegetarian food or eating non-vegetarian food. people are free to eat what they wish as a matter of choice and taste. but i believe that fundamentally, there can be no way of practicing vegetarianism and being in this world at the same time.

and to my mind, those who devoutly abide by the ideology of vegetarianism can lead their lives only through a most decrepit form of hypocrisy. there is an astronomical difference between eating vegetarian food and professing and propagating vegetarianism.

vegetarianism is puritanism in its most 'primitive', and feral form.

it boggles my mind the extent to which a belief in one's eating habits can extend to an absolutist belief in the superiority of that self and the consequent inferiority of others. vegetarianism is also product of the philosophies of the soul/mind-body divide; the kind that believes the body is the prison of the soul, as a result of which the least 'humans' can do is to preserve the purity of the body.

Foucault's brilliance can be invoked here. given the similar soul/mind-body binary with which European enlightenment worked (is it mere coincidence that most Brahmanical texts spoke the same tongue many centuries before? nah.. I am a firm believer in Said's Travelling Ideas), he wrote: the soul is the prison of the body.

i've never seen a reversal work quite so brilliantly!

imagine the horror of those who beat/ throw stones at animals, birds, why, even their wives (for aren't they beasts of reproduction for those men?); those who don't eat meat but don't mind fur coats and cosmetics laden with animal fat; those who kill rats, roaches, plants, dogs, humans... - and then proclaim vegetarianism to be clean, purifying, and superior!

is there a way of being in this world such that one does no harm to anyone/anything? yes, its called being dead.

if there's a way of coping with the horrors of humanity and life itself, non-vegetarianism is crucial and basic for survival.

non-vegetarianism for me, is a deeply honest, a deeply coeval way of inhabiting this world. it is the only way.