A Night At The Airport Parking Lot

The days are fleeing fast, my friends

The days are fleeing fast

And tomorrow comes rushing to today

And fades away into the shadowed past.

But friends endure when the words fail

And the sky and earth go blind

Though Time and Space will not wait

Moments of happiness we may find.

Through dreams, which last through the hours

And the days that come anew

We can see the present in the future

And I'm glad to have sat with you.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2015

The Rising Tide of Hindunazism

I believe the time has come to take a stand.

A few days ago I’d reviewed a film called PK, which I’d pretty unambiguously trashed, and I totally stand by that trashing. But, these days, I’m finding myself forced to defend the film – against the Hindunazis.

I haven’t spoken on this site about the Hindunazis for several months, not since Modi won the elections, because I wanted to wait and see which way they’d go. And for a few months they seemed to stay relatively quiescent. I didn’t know that they were merely waiting out the hot summer months before launching their multi-pronged campaign.

Well, it’s winter now, and they seem to have cried Havoc! And let slip the dogs of sectarian war.

The demand to ban PK is pretty farcical. The film has already recovered its investment many times over, and even if it were to be banned now, it would be tantamount to looking to shut the stable door after the horse long ago departed for greener pastures. So idiotic is the ban demand that I might almost imagine the Hindunazis had been paid by the producers to create a ruckus about the film. But they’ve already made so much money out of this terrible film that they don’t need any more.

In any case, it isn’t about money. The fact is that the Hindunazis are going ape at the idea of an actor with a Muslim name (Aamir Khan) dissing religion. The fact that the film trashes all religions isn’t relevant to the Hindunazis – how dare a Muslim (or at least someone who’s officially a Muslim) say a word against “Hinduism”, even though he actually reserves his ire for a corrupt godman of the type that infests India and doesn’t really represent any religion in particular at all?

All throughout India now, the Hindunazi tide is rising steadily. In North India, the Hindunazis are conducting what they call “Ghar wapsi” programmes – literally, “homecoming” – in which Muslims are “reconverted” en masse to Hinduism. How much of this is voluntary on the part of the Muslims being “reconverted” is impossible to say. Obviously, if they converted voluntarily, they’d say so. If they converted out of fear, they’d still say they converted voluntarily. But they’re just being used as a tool.

What do I mean by that? This – even if the Hindunazis were to make an attempt to convert Muslims across India all to Hinduism, they’d still never manage it, because there are over 150 million Indian Muslims. Not even Hindunazis imagine they can convert them all.

What they actually want to do is something quite different. The number of Hindus converting to other religions – Islam, Christianity or Buddhism – is much, much higher than the number making the reverse journey, and has always been. It’s not difficult to understand, given the brutal Hindu caste system, and the discrimination the lower castes still face on a daily basis. A longstanding demand of the Hindunazis has been to ban all conversions, and in Hindunazi-ruled states it’s become difficult if not impossible to change your religion even if you want to. But there was never an all India law, and one could move over to another state, convert, and come right back again, and the Hindunazis could do nothing about it.

Now, with their “reconversion” programme, the Hindunazis have thrown a challenge down to the nation. They say openly that if the politicians don’t like what they’re doing, they should make a law banning conversions. Of course, the people who would be hit by any such law would be the Muslims, Christians and Buddhists to whom the Hindus were converting in their thousands. The tiny number of reverse conversions – a few hundred at most – would be not even a drop in that bucket.

Not that the Hindunazis are even about to make that much of a concession. According to them, the “homecoming” programmes aren’t “conversions” because they have merely brought back people who were “stolen” away. So they have in any case no intention of stopping this quite deliberately provocative activity either.

Or other provocative activity, come to that. Before a recent state election, one Hindunazi politician asked people to choose between “Ramzaadon” (children of Rama, a mythological Hindu demigod/warrior king) and “haramzaadon” (bastards). This created a ruckus in Parliament, but nothing came of it since the politician in question simply apologised. The fact that she had gone against the oath she had taken to the Indian constitution was as immaterial as the fact that the Hindunazi demand to stop conversions is also against the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom to all citizens.

And then there was Christmas, a national holiday in India. What happened on Christmas? It was declared Good Governance Day, whatever the hell that might be – and everyone was ordered to turn up at their offices or face the music. It’s so openly an attempt to sabotage Christmas that nobody seriously suggested it was anything else.

There’s a lot more to it – religious “riots”, which are actually usually carefully preplanned and prepared pogroms. There is the so-called “love jihad”, where Muslims were accused of seducing and converting innocent Hindu maidens. There is the Durga Vahini, a female Hindu jihadist group whose members are trained in combat and are taught absolute subservience to Hindu men and to be ready to give their lives for the religion. In Gujarat, Modi’s home state, which saw a vicious anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002, an “antiterrorist exercise” was conducted in which the people acting as “terrorsits” were made to chant Muslim slogans. And there is the steady rise of shrill Hindunazi voices on social networks.

And what’s the reaction of the (actually elected, unlike the last one, and therefore perfectly genuine) Prime Minister? Mostly, deafening silence. Even though his own business base has reacted with concern and dismay, he’s chosen to keep his formerly strident voice totally in check. When the choice came between Big Business and Big Fascism, he’s obviously – by omission if not by commission – chosen the latter. And for someone who came to power talking of “development”, all he’s done is put incompetent morons in charge of various ministries and proclaimed – at a gathering of scientists, no less – that ancient Indians (read, Hindus) had plastic surgery and genetic engineering. Not one of the “scientists” there said a word in protest.

None of this is surprising, if you’ve read my earlier writings on this subject. I had pretty much predicted back then that these things would happen if the Hindunazis gained complete power. Unfortunately, there’s no organised political opposition worth a damn right now. The effete and corrupt Congress Party has yet to recover from its defeat at the elections seven months ago, and is disintegrating in slow motion. The less said of the various “centrist” parties, who can’t stand each other, the better. And as for the self-styled (mainstream) “Communist” parties, they’re still going through their self-inflicted and drawn-out hara-kiri.

It’s not a pretty sight, and all it’s doing is consolidating Hindunazi power.

The only avenue of dissidence remaining, it would seem, is the net, the equivalent of East European samizdat literature. But the Hindunazis are as well aware of that as anybody, and on 1^st January they banned 32 websites, including Vimeo and Internet Archive (apparently the ban has been lifted from four of them since). The excuse was that these sites were carrying “ISIS propaganda”, though some of them are sites primarily used by software programmers and have no political content at all. But YouTube, which does have a lot of jihadi propaganda, wasn’t touched, and as for ISIS, one of its main propaganda disseminators was arrested in Bangalore late last year. He used to send out ISIS tweets via Twitter. Nobody has tried to block Twitter.

Ergo, this blocking exercise has nothing to do with ISIS at all and is just a try-out for suppressing dissent. The writing is on the wall.

But the people who voted for Modi thinking he would bring in “good days” still have an awesome denial system. To them, Modi isn’t anything more than a victim of the intrigues of his colleagues, who want to undermine the poor man. They’d still look for a way to defend him if he turned up at their doorsteps, demanding they change to his kind of Hindufascism.

Yes, I did say that. The minorities are only a tool in the Hindunazi attempt to grab absolute power, Their primary target are the Hindus, who have always historically been an amorphous, disunited, heterogeneous and generally speaking highly tolerant religion. The Hindunazi project – which as I’ve said before is closely modelled on Nazism – seeks, more than anything, to force this religion, and the tolerance it’s represented, into a straitjacket where no free thought of any kind is permitted. And they’re getting away with it too.

And you know the irony? The majority of the Hindunazis – like the Zionazis, whom they also love as brothers-in-arms – are open about their personal atheism. Like the Zionazis, they do their killing in the name of a god they do not believe in.

Yes, as I said at the start of the article, the time has come to take a stand. There's no sitting on this fence. The choice is between siding with the Hindunazis, opposing them (at whatever cost to oneself), or being swept away with the tide.

You know which I've chosen.

2015 will be an interesting time.

Further Reading:

2014, The Year India Became A Hindu State

Hindunazi stormtrooper at weapons training

The Little Dragon of Medina: A Readymade Horror Story

You want to know why I’m an evil, evil person?

I’ll tell you.

Take a look at this beautiful painting. It’s called "Fellaheen Women by the Nile" and is by French orientalist painter Léon Belly, painted circa 1856.

Lovely women, aren’t they? Graceful as they stand, barefoot in the water, filling their pots.

Well, I looked at this lovely painting, and the thing that came to my mind is not that the painting is so beautiful, or that the women are so graceful, but just a couple of words:

Dracunculus medinensis.

What is Dracunculus medinensis? It’s commonly known as the Guinea worm, and is a charming animal found across tropical Africa and Asia. It’s a nematode, a relative of the roundworm you might have had while you were a kid. And like the roundworm it lives inside your body.

Only, unlike the roundworm, it doesn’t hang around inside your intestines, waiting for you to eat, and then drawing off its share of the proceeds. Dracunculus medinensis is more sophisticated than that.

How? Well, to start off with, the worm doesn’t wait for you to accidentally swallow its eggs so you infect yourself at random. No, it goes out of its way to make sure you give its babies a chance of life.

Here’s how it happens. River and lake water have all kinds of tiny, tiny creatures in them – algae, protozoa, but also several kinds of tiny crustaceans called copepods, like miniature transparent shrimp, which feed on those protozoans and algae. And some of these, Cyclops for instance, can also swallow newborn Dracunculus larvae, which are very, very small, and give them an incubator and home.

How do Dracunculus larvae get into the water for Cyclops to eat? This is my story, so let me tell it to you my way. For now, just keep in mind that the little larvae will grow through two stages inside the crustacean, instead of, you know, getting digested and assimilated. And then they lie there, ready, waiting.

Waiting for what? For you, of course.

Suppose you get thirsty, and there’s no Evian in your fancy water bottle. So you drink water from the river or lake, just like that. If you do, you might swallow one or more Cyclops – you wouldn’t know it, they’re fairly small. And it’s just too bad if you’re a vegan, you just broke your vow.

Anyway, so you’ve drunk river water with a family of Cyclops. It’s not totally impossible that some of those Cyclops have larvae waiting inside them. And the Cyclops are now inside your stomach, where your enzymes, you know, digest the poor things alive.

You sadist.

Now this is what the larvae have been eagerly waiting for. Set at liberty from the copepod-shaped prison, they crawl into your intestines, bore through the wall – not a very difficult job, because at this stage they’re only about as thick as a hair – and find their way to your muscles. And there they rest, feed on your juices, and grow, and grow, and grow.

Boy, do they grow.

Now, the two sexes of Dracunculus look rather different. The male worms are only about four centimetres long at the most, but the females grow more than twenty times larger. That might give you guys with giantess fetishes a boost, but not the poor male Dracunculus, whose only purpose in life is to fertilise his immensely elongated girlfriend, after which she dumps him and he dies of a broken heart.

OK, OK, she moves off to fulfil the next step of her life cycle, and he dies. Fine?

Now, this sex they’re having is happening in the muscles of the body, as I said. You know, your body. The newly pregnant Ms Worm crawls off towards the skin, but not any skin. No, she’s not interested in your face or upper arm or back. Instead, she crawls down towards the lowest parts of your body – your calves, your shins, your feet. And once she arrives at her destination, she begins to fulfil her existence.

And this is how she does it – she bores a hole in your skin with her head end. Not unnaturally, having a hole in your skin hurts a little. No, make that it hurts a lot.  And the worm, by secreting chemicals which cause ulceration and intense inflammation, makes sure it hurts like all the fires of hell.

Hey, you know what Dracunculus medinensis means? The Little Dragon of Medina, that’s what.

So what’s the only way to get rid of this terrible pain? It’s to dunk the affected limb in cool, soothing water. Like, you know, the convenient river or lake nearby. And as soon as you do that, sighing with relief, your friendly neighbourhood parasite sticks her head end through that hole. Almost all her long length of body, all eighty centimetres of it, is basically one enormous uterus, and while she’s been crawling down to your ankle the uterus has been filling up with thousands upon thousands of babies. Now’s the time to set them free.

Yes, each time you soak your agonised feet in water, the larvae swim out in their thousands, doing the breast stroke and hoping to be found and eaten by some copepod. Most won’t succeed, of course, but they won’t need to. If only ten or fifteen of every hundred thousand manage to be eaten, and if only three or four of every thousand of those end up being swallowed with water, the life cycle continues, and the worm family lives happily ever after, amen.

Only it’s not so happy for you now, is it? Dracunculus can’t even be killed by anti-worm medication. You can’t yank the lady out either without her long body breaking, whereupon she’ll flood you with chemicals which might go and kill you with anaphylactic shock. No, that’s right out.

The only way to get rid of the worm is to undergo the same treatment as humanity has been following for thousands of years: Gently wrap the front end of Ms Dragon round a stick (a matchstick will do just fine) and, over a period of many, many days, twist her round and round the matchstick until all her nearly one metre comes right out. Exciting, isn’t it?

You bet it is.

So, it’s easier and better to try and stop the worm from infecting someone rather than cure the infection when it happens. Of course, if people would only drink purified mineral water priced at rates that touch the mountains they allegedly come from, nothing would happen. Or, you know, if they’d only boil the water they drank. But a huge number of people worldwide can’t find even firewood to cook food on, let alone spare it for boiling water. For them, some other solution is necessary.

Some other solution has been found. The WHO has launched a (highly successful - between 2009 and 2012 it caused a 96% drop in infections; what was that about socialised medicine being inefficient again?) scheme involving filters you can attach to the pots with which you gather water from the river. The copepods can’t get into the pots, which means their lives are spared, which is good news for them, and you can’t get the worm, which is good news for you. The only ones losing out are the worms, and yah boo sucks to them.

So – what has any of this got to do with this painting?

Look at this detail from it:

The women are standing with bare feet in the water, and drawing pots of it, presumably to drink. This was in 1856, long before the water filters, before the life cycle of Dracunculus had even been discovered. In fact, back then some “scientists” even refused to believe the creature was a worm (vide Parasite Rex, Carl Zimmer), calling it a lymphatic vessel. So, unboiled water from copepod-rich rivers at a time and place in history where Dracunculus was endemic.  

I’m kind of glad the painter didn’t put any more detail in the paintings. The last thing I’d want to see is all the worm heads poking out of their dainty little ankles.

Oh, so I’m a sadist who’s ruined your enjoyment of this work of art? 

Good.