All I am capable of while listening to a fanatic is sit frozen and wonder about the miniaturization people can bring about in a human being in the name of 'enlightenment'. Its only more chilling when the loudest arguments come from parts where men thought the most for the nation. I think of religious fanaticism and arguments or fights based on them as arguments between two men who can read and write, yes, but don't have a mind or knowledge to think. So if you give two magazines, say India Today to one and Outlook to the other and asked them to discuss the same topic for a certain prize money, ( something about which they are hitherto blank and written using different examples, references ) it would be amusing, dismaying for some, to watch the men disagreeing and arguing over issues which never existed, quoting exclusively from the few pages of text that have been fed to them, all for the prize and without reason. What difference could you possibly find between these men and those fighting over the Koran and the Gita and the Bible?

You walk the ever barren fields in a mad state of this crazy country and the shrieks - helpless, deserted - of girls, daughters of the same fate and mother enter your ear and gets trapped in that area between your eyes, where I believe the conscience is, and never escapes. Raped, breasts lightened off from the body and then, as the final honour for being women, sent to another world. Walk a little further and you see a child crawling, struggling to stand up and walk to go find his father and mother and brother and everyone he had ever seen or touched and if the people of his beloved motherland continued to get enlightened the same way, he would not have to travel too far. Such piety, such devotion for the unseen, the Harry Potterlike characters of the myth, you stand and freeze.

As you dream of of the lines of a book never written or that unique business gambit never thought of or that last bead in the string which unified all scientific theories ever known to man, the sanctity gets destroyed when you think that dreamt under the same sky with the same unsurety of the closed eyes are dreams of erasing civilizations, religions, people, ideas. A certain group of our enlightened ones do not think favorably about a religion whom they call a minority. They want the traces of this minority ( the number which funnily enough far exceeds the population of the United Kindgdom and France put together ) to be scored out of the nation. Then proceeding to a larger scale, they want a nation to be scored out from the face of the world.

It would be helpful now to bring those two men who could read and write but with hobbling minds in. They were blank about their issues and hence the argument which ensued guaranteed that nothing could come out other than the few lines of print they could read and enlighten themselves with. And if the prize money depended on a definite conclusion, they could go on and exchange a few blows if they felt the argument was going nofuckingwhere. And then supposing there were two such men in each team and one team eventually blew the other out and after all that a meagre prize was awarded? A civil situation indeed! Iran could be an example of this team and situation.

Today, the whole concept of religion and everything coming out of it, is based on a feeling of superiority. "My religion and its teachings - holy". And the feeling of superiority, of being the elder brother, the magisterial outlook, I believe, often leads to supression, disregard and violence. If instead the prime mover was a feeling of inferiority? Levels of inferiority driven by ones literacy and intellect. I am a firm believer that a self respecting human being is not motivated in an academic environment for his own good as much by a feeling of insecurity and inferiority as by anything else. And this motivation could really not lead to violence or unreasonableness and irrationality because they in turn could only lead to your downslide in such an environment. This, on an evolutionary basis would lead to a nation whose religions would be reason and intellect and knowledge rather the ones based on shaky, unseen scruples and hence to a perfectly developed democracy and nation.