Dr. Moazziz Ali Beg

Sitaron Se Aage Jahan Aur Bhi Hain
Abhi Ishq Ke Imtehan Aur Bhi Hain
Tu Shaheen Hain, Parvaz Hai Kaam Tera,
Tere Samne Aasman Aur Bhi Hain.

Substance and brilliance never had a better definition than him, nor could have a journey found a better destination than his. But still, among the folds of deep wrinkles, and the glimmering depths of experienced eyes, Dr. Moazziz Ali Beg beholds unrest, a zeal, a passion to give this society more, and more.
Dr. Beg instigated his journey as a 20 year old teacher of psychology at the Aligarh Muslim University, in 1954.
Today, 52 years later, Dr.Beg is still an ambitious man. He is working for a cause which has been the bane of our times, he is working for a communally secure and riot free India. Dr. Beg has been an active speaker and writer on the concern of communalism, and his books, 'the ideological Integration of the east and the west: An inquiry concerning world peace', and 'The spiritual routes of national Integration' hold magnum opus status in the field of communal dialogue.
"Besides having been figured in esteemed journals like the Asia's who is Who; New Delhi, Who's who of contemporary achievement; USA, and International Leaders in Achievement; England, Dr. Beg has held many important posts and positions. He has been a member of the UP legislative assembly, has held the presidentship of the Urdu Academy and the chairman ship of the department of psychology at the AMU", Says His wife, Dr. Sangeeta Sharma Beg.
Dr. Beg's family history goes back to the time of the Battle of Buxar when his ascendants came to India from Iran. His grandfather Mirza Irfan Ali Beg was one of the few Indians privileged with the Companion of the Imperial Service Order. However, his father a staunch nationalist refused to serve the British. In 1947 when the partition took place, Dr. Beg unlike most of his family members, decided to stay back, it was the love for his motherland that held him back, and years later it is the same cause which has him operating on his present mission of communal integration.
"It is sad that from time to time a handful of people with selfish political motives attempt to incite us on communal grounds, and it is worse that we get carried off so easily" says Dr. Beg.
Dr. Beg's Puphijaan Roshan Jahan became the first Muslim woman to go all alone to England for higher education in 1926 and later on served as the principle of one of the well known colleges of the city. She happened to be an inspirational element in the academician that is Dr. Beg. A topper in M.A (psychology), at the Aligarh Muslim University, he has to his acclaim 60 research papers printed world wide. His work has been honored by such leaders of 20th century thought as P.A Sorokin of Havard University, F.S.C Northrop of Yale University Munford of MIT University.Besides, he has been invited for delivering lectures at globally reputed universities like University of California and University of Munich.
"I think destiny has placed with me everything I sought. To see a communally united system is my last dream, and I will pursue this dream till the end. It's a pity that our resources, our youth is wasted in such futile issues of communal base, we as Indians have a long way to go, before we rest, and we could least afford to waste ourselves in communal paradoxes". When asked about his stand on religion, he tells us that he and his wife Dr.Sangeeta are Sufis and he quotes Daag:-

Kaabey ki hai hawas, kabhi kouney buthan ki hai,
Mujhko khaber nahi meri mitti kahan ki hai.

(Sometimes I desire for Kaaba, at other times for the lane of idols,I don't know where I actually belong)
Is India listening?

ALI KIRMANI

ORKUT: The Protocol City

Back in the summers of 2004, a 28 year old Turkish software developer, unheard, unknown, was independently developing a multi interface social network.
Little had Orkut Büyükkökten known that within 2 years his innovation will over ride all predicted barriers of growth, and popularity on the big bad world of Internet?
With 25 million users worldwide and 1.5 million across India, Orkut is already a phenomenon. Lets get the inside story of this phenomenon.
If you are an average Netizen, you may already be a member of Orkut, if you are not, then you may be sitting like a stranger among a group of friends, listening to their babble-babble about Orkut, and in very near future you will find an Orkut invitation in your inbox and you too will give in.
Orkut is an Internet social network service, though the literal meaning of the Turkish word Orkut is 'A beautiful city', it has been named after its author, Google employee Orkut Büyükkökten.
Similar to its parent company's mail service gmail.com, orkut also works on an invite only basis, where in order to register on orkut you need to know someone who has already registered and can send you an invite. A multilayered marketing you may call it.
The idea behind Orkut's network is easy. You get an invite, and you join the site, after joining, you write stuff about yourself, your interests and stuff like age, sex and marital status. There are different leaflets for your social, personnel and professional details. Also, there is also an option of an album which can hold up to 12 high resolution photographs, and that of a scrap book which is used for chatting.
The point where orkut differs from other social networking assemblies is that each and every bit of the information that you put up on the canvas, is publicly viewable, i.e. anyone, anywhere on orkut can have a look at all your information, including the chat with your friends. "This does kill some privacy, but then this is where all the fun starts. Besides, you have the 'ignore user' tab which would keep an unwanted person from scrapping you." says Aviral Jain, a member. The highlight feature of Orkut is where any member can add any other member on orkut to his/her "Crush List" and both of them will be prompted about it only when both parties have added each other to their Crush List, man, isnt this exciting. Though amusing as it may seem, Orkut has millions of love lives being processed by its servers, day and night. The majority of orkut users are youngsters, and orkut has moved in with an addictive status for them.For most, Orkut is an obsession, once logged on you forget all about eating, sleeping, working, you know, there is so much to do on orkut that you never get bored, plus, having that increasing number in your friends list is a real ego booster, while if your friends list remains dormant for a long time, it is a sort of humiliation. it's all about your profile being so good that people themselves send you friendship requests.
Besides friendship requests there is a fan's list, for vending ones kudos. Once a friendship request is accepted, both the people get the opportunity to enter each others fan's list. Also, you have the privilege of rating your friend's being Trusty, Sexy, and Cool, out of five; this is shown in percentage form after the summing of the votes that he\she has received from all his friends. And then there are testimonials which could be written by friends, quite charming as they are, there are no limits for testimonials."One thing that I would like to thank orkut for is my reunion with my college friends after about 18 years," says 41 year old Zafar. He continues "besides reuniting us orkut is a good interface for us to keep in touch with each other".Orkut is equipped with the Google search engine which searches through 25 million users, and has an array of over a dozen filters, which narrow down your search such that it is impossible that an existing orkut user skips your view. Besides all, there is the firebrand feature of communities.There are about 7 lakh communities on orkut, and all are indexed under its search engine.Any user of Orkut could create a community of his own, it will be at his discretion to moderate the comments and posts on his community, and it will be at his decision that a user joins his community with or without his approval.

There are all sorts of communities, ranging from 'I hate Himesh Reshamiya' to 'I love Pani Puri' I came across one on 'Rajdeep Sardesai' and then, there are those on Schools, Colleges, Places, Movies, Sportsmen and Movie stars, there are kinds like 'Pepsi rocks' and 'Voices in my head' to 'I love babies' and the ones like 'anti-reservation' and 'Farzi Engineers' and some belonging organizations like newspapers and magazines. The list has extreme variety and absolute infinite. The popularity and number of members in your community once again depend upon the presentation of your community. Also the search engine shows the community with the maximum membership on the top as it goes descending.But as it is, Orkut has started pulling together controversies, because of some communities propagating hate and explicit content. Though the system does allow A 'report bogus' tab which is supposed to delete a community if it is reported by 200 people, but practically it is not working.So this is it, if you have in you the proficiency for enjoying and being a part of a society which is resting on a simple ribbon of 0s and 1s, just stay ready to be pulled in. BUT BEWARE!! It is addictive.

ALI KIRMANI

UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE SWORDS

FIFTY NINE years, the time which passed before I felt tired, before a pain shot in my feet, I sat down, drew a deep breath, and looked back across my protracted journey, where I had gained, and lost, where I had succeeded and failed, of the evils that I had managed to over come, and at the failures which broke down to debris, whose shards lied scattered across, one such shard lied embedded in my feet, giving me pain, excruciating pain, bending down I drew it out, and posed it against the sky, painful memories flashed across, tears swelled up in my eyes, it was yet another failure I held, it was the blood drenched brand of secularism, I AM INDIA.

Ever wondered what is actually happening when you converse with someone who does not belong to your religion, caste or creed, is it a simple communication-taking place between two human beings, two sets of breathing tissues, two people who work, study or live together. No. The conversation taking place between two such human beings is a dialogue between two different teachings, different ethics, different ideologies, different principals, different cultures, different means, IT IS A DIALOGUE BETWEEN TWO CIVILIZATIONS.
The republic of India is home to many such humans, home to people who have entered this land at different eras of human history, have entered with the promise of money, pastures, survival, who survived and changed under the colonial powers, and continued to live through the age of depression, ascended together under the banner of a economically struggling middle class, ran together to catch the bus to office, spewed paan on the same walls, watched chitrhaar, sitting in the same room. But, as it is, they differed. Ignorance of each other's faiths and difference of godhead was always a dangerous combination, and so it did prove here. This combination led each Indian to be commercialized, commercialized for the political arena. Hatred was instilled, lines were drawn, history was remodeled, The Harijans, became the Dalits of political India, and calls like that of "Maharastra only for Maharastrians", started resonating, with this, the secular fabric of our nation caught fire. Millie, Hashimpura, Punjab, Babri, 1992 bombing, Gujarat, Staines, Akshardham, and the shrieks of the common Indian, they all happened, and then got buried under the weight of probing committees.
What did we do, we covered our faces, and managed to find excuses, blaming people like Modi, and Dawood Ibrahim. What we failed to understand is that Modi's and Gandhi's, and Dawood's all co. exist; it is we the people of India who give them the chance. We change our mode of thought, and the Modi's and Dawood's disappear.
Today 59 years after partition, the Muslim and the so-called lower caste Hindu Dalits are still not a part of the mainstream India. Why?, The Muslim, partly due to the alienated view received from the Hindus, and mostly due to their confinement to their own culture, because of the seclusion they are living in, and saying too little. Living in seclusion is a sign of non-cooperation; sort of a danger to the family next-door, Saying too little is a marks the presence of contentment, it tempts the rage of the extremists. The need is for the Muslims to come out of the cocoon, be wise, be moderate and travel with the mainstream India, to make their Hindu counter part aware of his presence as a responsible citizen of India, to be the first one to protest when a terror bomb goes off somewhere inside the lap of India, killing innocent Hindus, to be present in those games of cricket being played in the urban by lanes of India. As of the Hindu lower caste, they still face discrimination in work places, educational institutions, and public
transport systems, land ownership, and access to water sources and in all
imaginable public motion, to have their woes simply exploited by the political India. The BSP, and the SP duo came to the forefront, in Uttar Pradesh, exploiting the issue to the ground, taking advantage of it to the fullest. The UPA coalition rode upon the reservation issue, further promoting the dislike for the backward classes, in the eyes of a common Indian, Laloo, Mulayam, Mayawati they all participated in the game, while the backward classes were not sympathized for being backward, but the forward classes were criticized for being forward. While this went on, the Harijans lingered to be the Dalits of India. Here the need is to bring change on a grass root level, we got to hack the roots at the rural level, where people are made to believe in the caste dissimilarity, and this could be done only with the upcoming of reasoning, of logic, of literacy.
Today, all school history text books manage to find space for the atrocities done on Hindus by the Muslim king and the pre independence Jalianwala Bagh killings, but all fail to speak of the co-operation that existed between Muslim kings and their Hindu subjects for centuries, or failed to have a word of the Hashimpura killings that happened 40 years after independence. Just because the people who were killed, had not power, to assert there better stand. This was unjust, less because it failed in terms of justice to the Muslims, but more because it deceived the Hindu child, into hating that Musalmaan on the adjacent desk, and for the coming years, in office, at residing localities, and in society.
Just the other day I was speculating. How much the so-called Jihadis and the fascist rulings of India differ at their ideological pedestal, and at the same time how much they depend on each other. How simple the formula of hate is. Demolish the Babri, kill some Muslims, and the Jehadis extend their hand across the borders to tug at the sleeve of the Indian Musalmaan, and tell him 'look the Hindu killed you, now let us plant a bomb in their courtyard', next, there goes off a series of bomb blast, Hindus are killed, and the grounds for next Muslim killing is ready on a justifiable opinion of the Indian Fascist. The cycle goes on. While the wolves sitting on both side of the LoC, grin, we Indians live and die under the shadow of swords.
The un-secular state of India is not limited to religious lines; it is carried over to the extremes of caste, class, and state origins. The Tamils hate Andhras and Andhras hate Tamils, Andhras in Hyderabad hate Maharashtrian's and Maharashtrians hate Andhras Gujaratis hate Maharashtrians and Maharashtrians hate Gujaratis. Why ? The answer is simple. It is not because there is any accepted disgust between the two. It is because there are cracks of differences between them, and the axe of political intentions is driven in those cracks, in camouflage of other issues. The birth of 'Shiv Sena' and the 'Bhumiputra' strategy of Bal Thackery, which believed in exuding all non Maharashtrians from Maharastra, was in it self a scar, on the so called secular fabric of India.
The Indian brain which has always been made to consider communal, and sectarian cacophony of the governments as yard sticks to their credibility, never got a chance to think beyond BJP and Congress, we have through and through been puppets at their hands. However, the selection was of the best among the worst. Both the parties, one openly un secular, and the other declared secular, but actually pseudo-secular, have been equally evil at their designs. The BJP played at Babri and Gujarat, but so did the Congress with hundreds of innocent Sikh souls in Punjab, 1984, and countless other stances. There is blood on every hand. And the affect, is seen not in the corridors of the Parliament, but in the by lanes of the Urban and Rural India, where mothers tell their children not to befriend someone, because he\ she is not one of there people.
All this needs a change.
The very definition of secularism needs a change; secularism is all in all a very non-materialistic thing, which includes religious secularism, just as it does, economic secularism, or gender secularism. But, in our nation, the definition of secularism is limited to frame all but communal secularism; our brains fail to think beyond it.
The change that we, as common Indians are capable to bring around is not about Babri, and Godhra, it is about little thing, things which start in a class room, get carried on to befriend that family living next to your flat, it is about extending your hand to help pull in that old, bearded man with a skull cap into the compartment of a departing local train, it is about being the one to protest the most when a few fanatics of your religion gear out a evil design of terror. It is about being logical and sane to critism. We may then be what we should be, Indian citizens. Simple, isn't it.

ALI KIRMANI