1200 Israelis dead …

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This month my church has been having a series of sermons on racial equity and reconciliation. Dwelling on the fact that Jesus’ message cut across all nations, class and race, even 2000 years back. I know a lot has been achieved in the last half a century towards a goal of equity for everyone, but there is definitely a lot more distance to be covered. If there is one thing we have learnt above all else in these years of trying to attain equality for all men – be it their race, gender or caste- it is that the society plays a bigger role than laws.

So why am I rambling on about equality when the heading talks about 1200 Israelis being dead? Firstly, the heading is false, if there were that many dead Israelis you would have seen it on network TV 24 hours a day. Secondly this statement is true for the stateless Palestinians (the death toll was higher), but they do not warrant the same amount of network coverage or people time. No, I am neither an Israeli basher nor a Palestinian supporter. Also I am not fond of watching people die or hearing sad tales of loss. What made me think about it was that it seemed a double standard that one group of people dying would sound more terrible than another group of people.

This lethargy is not just confined to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You can see it manifest most frequently in the African nations. The fact that the western world thought that Saddam Hussain was more “bad” or “cruel” than some of the ethnic-cleansing, genocidal and baseborn dictators in the third world speaks volumes.

Closer to home I have been following the conflict in Sri Lanka, between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, with whom I share my ancestry. This conflict has been going on for decades with no solution in sight. Infact the LTTE (Liberation tigers of Tamil Elam), which is the largest armed tamil group, have the distinction of being the originators of suicide bombings. The struggle started peaceful enough with the minority Tamils wanting equal rights in all aspects of life. Soon it spread to armed struggle that got out of hand. Most people including yours truly have labeled the LTTE as terrorists – they got me on board by killing one of India’s most beloved leaders in a suicide attack. I am not likely to withdraw that label, since they killed him in my home state of Tamil Nadu(country). Lately though I have come to realise that if this were a Tamil majority and Sinhalese minority conflict the roles would have been reversed and the Sinhalese resistance group would have been called terrorists.

At the end what it all boils down to is the fact that we are all prejudiced against people who don’t look like us, don’t talk like us or even eat like us. Until we change from the inside to believe that all men are born equal and not similar, we are going to have to keep paying in blood.

I personally believe that once you have Jesus in your heart, it becomes easier to overcome such prejudices.

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Eurotrip

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I wonder if people realise that you get lazier as you get older. I have been meaning to write on my European adventure for a quite a while now even planned on making it a journal with interesting tit bits. The only accomplishment has been to write it over and over inside my head and never put it down on either physical or electronic paper. All those ideas for the journal with daily information have now been boiled down to this on post, if I can finish it. So here it is after 5300 Kilometers, 12 countries (Germany, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Austria, Italy, Monaco, France, Spain, Andorra, Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg) and countless cities in 11 days.

At the outset let me state that driving through 12 countries in less than 12 days is sheer madness and is not fun unless of course you are crazy yourself (an attribute that I can claim to an extent). It also boils down to what you want to see and what motivates you. I am not a big fan of old medieval architecture, though I do get awed by it every now and then. I wanted to just tick certain countries off my bucket list and this was a good chance for me to do it. I did want to see the Eiffel tower and the streets of venice, other than that I just wanted to add some countries to the “been there” list. Unless you are driving you wouldn’t be in Liechtenstein, Monaco, Andorra or Luxembourg. For the uninformed, those are principalities in western Europe, smaller than most large cities. Of the four Monaco is worth visiting, mostly to see the most interesting F1 track. They also tend to be cheaper compared to the rest of Europe, but not the US of A.

Driving in Europe is definitely easier than driving in the East but not as easy as in the US of A. Everything from the roads to signposts, are inferior to the US and I don’t even want to talk about the GPS. The one that came with my car only showed me the correct location of the hotel on two occasions. A couple of times even the cities that I was supposed to stay was available in the GPS. The fact that there are no street signs in most of europe is compounded by the fact that there are few people on the streets late at night, unlike India where the pedestrians are the only source of street information. It was almost a daily ritual for us to spend more than an hour trying to find the hostel each night. The worst was either Italy where we finally had to settle for a expensive hotel because the hostel was supposed to be on a mountain that did not exist or Luxembourg where we spent over two hours to find the castle hostel. Though it was these “searches” that made the trip interesting and adventurous; that and the people who refused to acknowledge English.

Driving through Europe was an experience in itself, because of all the different landscapes that we drove through. Be it the tunnel filled mountains of Austria or the coastal French Riviera along Nice and Monaco. Throw in some snow, rain and sunshine and you have all the different weather rolled into a single trip.

Switzerland
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