WRT: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/48400
Dear Dr Irfani,
While I am absolutely against the Hindu fundamentalists who have been trying t inflict their Naziesque ideology upon India, there is an aspect to M F Hussain that is being ignored by the Indian media in its defense of his art. We lived on Montieth Road in Madras when I was in school, just half a block away from Montieth Lane where Mr Hussain's daughter lived at the time and where he spent many months every year through the 1970s and 80s. We would wait to see him in the evenings when he went on his walk every day (Madras was not yet Chennai as it is called now and it was nowhere near the polluted and overcrowded ghetto that it has become these days) to laugh at his habit of wearing different footwear on each of his feet. He would wear a formal shoe on one foot and a sneaker or a sandal on the other or occasionally wear one item of footwear on one foot and walk with the other one barefoot for some reason.
But those were also years during which he began to actively court controversy. In one of his paintings, he painted a donkey standing before the Ka'aba. He got away with doing this during a time when India was a vastly more secular nation than it is now though I remember a television interview on Doordarshan, the national TV channel, where he was grilled for having painted this and could not respond to the interviewer's questions in any satisfactory way. Many years later, Rajiv Gandhi opened the Pandora's Box of religious fundamentalism in India by first allowing TV serials on the Hindu epics to be shown in an interpretation that was clearly aimed at demonizing the Muslim and Christian minorities and he then went on to reverse the judgement in the Shah Bano case and tried to use Salman Rushdie's insipid books to make him a scapegoat by being the first national leader in the world to ban his book, "The Satanic Verses".
Mr Hussain's equally silly stunts have put his life in danger now because this time he has a determined Hindu fundamentalist group out baying for his blood in the country of his birth and where he has been a resident for most of his life.
As an atheist who does not follow any faith though he still enjoys religious music and art, I find people like M F Hussain and Salman Rushdie's attempts at poking fun of people's beliefs silly and unbecoming of people with their talent. This is NOT to condone those who have made it their life's duty to try to victimize them but I do believe that these very intelligent people could have been less offensive than they have chosen to be.
Best wishes,
Mehul Kamdar
�
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
- The Riddle of Epicurus
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