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Darab Farooqui

@darab_farooqui32,475 subscribers

Storyteller. Screenwriter. Freeborn.

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I genuinely want to ask this question: I grew up in India, primarily in Hindu society. I had never seen anything like this in my life. Is this blatant sexualization of Hinduism acceptable to the Indian people? This is simply uncultured, crude, and vulgar.

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I genuinely want to ask this question: I grew up in India, primarily in Hindu society. I had never seen anything like this in my life. Is this blatant sexualization of Hinduism acceptable to the Indian people? This is simply uncultured, crude, and vulgar.

109,507 görüntüleme

I'm not sure who teaches these Sanghis basic GK. 6 of the world's youngest 13-14 democracies have a majority Muslim population. 1. Nigeria. 53% Muslim. 2. Tunisia. 99% Muslim 3. Libya. 97% Muslim 4. Mali. 90% Muslim 5. Gambia. 94% Muslim 6. Maldives. 98% Muslim That is why the best Sanghis like Nitin Gadkari are just as illiterate, spiteful, and evil as the worst.

I'm not sure who teaches these Sanghis basic GK. 6 of the world's youngest 13-14 democracies have a majority Muslim population. 1. Nigeria. 53% Muslim. 2. Tunisia. 99% Muslim 3. Libya. 97% Muslim 4. Mali. 90% Muslim 5. Gambia. 94% Muslim 6. Maldives. 98% Muslim That is why the best Sanghis like Nitin Gadkari are just as illiterate, spiteful, and evil as the worst.

299,212 görüntüleme

Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you videos of Ram Bhakts possibly 'Bhakting' with public and private property on Mira Road in Mumbai. They're doing what they do best: terrorising Muslims.

Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you videos of Ram Bhakts possibly 'Bhakting' with public and private property on Mira Road in Mumbai. They're doing what they do best: terrorising Muslims.

405,058 görüntüleme

There is a word in Urdu: Andaaz. Let's start with what it is not. It's not merely being stylish. Not poise, not composure, not a certain panache, though it wears all of these lightly. And really, it's not about display at all. Andaaz is not what you show the world, it's what you refuse to show it. German may have a close parallel to it, but not exactly: Haltung, how you stand and the stand you take, both at once. But Urdu already holds it, surrounded by its own family of words. Wazadari, the constancy of keeping to your own form. Saleeqa, the grace of doing a thing properly. Tehzeeb, tameez, adab. And I don't even mean it in the traditional sense. Andaaz can be formal, casual, irreverent, rebellious and so much more. But the fundamental argument still stays the same. And why refusal? Because we decline to display precisely because we know we are flawed. Andaaz begins in an admission of your own flaws, your own ordinary humanity. You've measured yourself, failures and all, and made your peace with it. That peace is the choice. The self you present is edited, not out of vanity but out of taste. You show what you can stand behind, and you're humble enough to know how much of you is not worth displaying. This is why self worth and humility are not really opposites. They are the same thing. When you are sure of your worth, admitting a flaw costs you nothing, because your worth was never about looking perfect for anyone. And that is where all the refusing comes from. You leave things unsaid. You keep hidden whatever isn't good enough to be a part of you. You let the cheap laugh pass. Humor is the cleanest test. You know a certain reply will land. You know this quip will get you the whole room, and you let it go. Not just because it's beneath you, but because the cheap laugh almost always works by holding up someone's flaw for applause, and a person who has seen his own flaws will not attack the flaws of others. No. You draw the line. That refusal isn't the whole of Andaaz, but it's a great example of it. So this is what it comes to. Andaaz is self worth in its truest sense. The self that will not be cheapened, not for a laugh, not to be seen, because it has already made its peace with being flawed and mortal, and it doesn't need anyone's permission. India has never been short of it. Nehru and Gandhi. Ambedkar. Sarojini Naidu and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. Tagore and Amrita Pritam, Ismat Chughtai, Begum Akhtar. Indira Gandhi and Jayalalithaa. Dilip Kumar and Madhubala, Amitabh, Shahrukh. Gavaskar. Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai. The list can run into the thousands, men and women, every field, and each of them, for me, a perfect example of Andaaz. Andaaz for me has always been an artistic statement. Because deep down, each one of them was an artist. Original and creative. Which brings me to the clip attached here. It is the antonym of Andaaz. These are people who merely exist, and who can't bear to merely exist, so desperate to be seen that they'll make fools of themselves for the seeing. And they can't decline to display, because they have never admitted a single flaw. Being seen is the whole of the self, and one crack would end them. There's no line they won't cross, because they never drew one. There's no applause too cheap to chase. That's the poverty underneath the noise. Poverty is not lack of money, for me, poverty is lack of Andaaz. As my father used to say: "Ghareeb ho, lekin lagna zaroori nahin hai." It's the aesthetic of a whole politics, Sanghism as we know it, which has never understood the one thing Andaaz is built on. To be seen is not the same as to be worth seeing. Now as I finish, I am thankful to this crass video clip. I would have never written this piece otherwise.

There is a word in Urdu: Andaaz. Let's start with what it is not. It's not merely being stylish. Not poise, not composure, not a certain panache, though it wears all of these lightly. And really, it's not about display at all. Andaaz is not what you show the world, it's what you refuse to show it. German may have a close parallel to it, but not exactly: Haltung, how you stand and the stand you take, both at once. But Urdu already holds it, surrounded by its own family of words. Wazadari, the constancy of keeping to your own form. Saleeqa, the grace of doing a thing properly. Tehzeeb, tameez, adab. And I don't even mean it in the traditional sense. Andaaz can be formal, casual, irreverent, rebellious and so much more. But the fundamental argument still stays the same. And why refusal? Because we decline to display precisely because we know we are flawed. Andaaz begins in an admission of your own flaws, your own ordinary humanity. You've measured yourself, failures and all, and made your peace with it. That peace is the choice. The self you present is edited, not out of vanity but out of taste. You show what you can stand behind, and you're humble enough to know how much of you is not worth displaying. This is why self worth and humility are not really opposites. They are the same thing. When you are sure of your worth, admitting a flaw costs you nothing, because your worth was never about looking perfect for anyone. And that is where all the refusing comes from. You leave things unsaid. You keep hidden whatever isn't good enough to be a part of you. You let the cheap laugh pass. Humor is the cleanest test. You know a certain reply will land. You know this quip will get you the whole room, and you let it go. Not just because it's beneath you, but because the cheap laugh almost always works by holding up someone's flaw for applause, and a person who has seen his own flaws will not attack the flaws of others. No. You draw the line. That refusal isn't the whole of Andaaz, but it's a great example of it. So this is what it comes to. Andaaz is self worth in its truest sense. The self that will not be cheapened, not for a laugh, not to be seen, because it has already made its peace with being flawed and mortal, and it doesn't need anyone's permission. India has never been short of it. Nehru and Gandhi. Ambedkar. Sarojini Naidu and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. Tagore and Amrita Pritam, Ismat Chughtai, Begum Akhtar. Indira Gandhi and Jayalalithaa. Dilip Kumar and Madhubala, Amitabh, Shahrukh. Gavaskar. Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai. The list can run into the thousands, men and women, every field, and each of them, for me, a perfect example of Andaaz. Andaaz for me has always been an artistic statement. Because deep down, each one of them was an artist. Original and creative. Which brings me to the clip attached here. It is the antonym of Andaaz. These are people who merely exist, and who can't bear to merely exist, so desperate to be seen that they'll make fools of themselves for the seeing. And they can't decline to display, because they have never admitted a single flaw. Being seen is the whole of the self, and one crack would end them. There's no line they won't cross, because they never drew one. There's no applause too cheap to chase. That's the poverty underneath the noise. Poverty is not lack of money, for me, poverty is lack of Andaaz. As my father used to say: "Ghareeb ho, lekin lagna zaroori nahin hai." It's the aesthetic of a whole politics, Sanghism as we know it, which has never understood the one thing Andaaz is built on. To be seen is not the same as to be worth seeing. Now as I finish, I am thankful to this crass video clip. I would have never written this piece otherwise.

15,982 görüntüleme

Watch These Three Videos. In the first, the Chief Minister of Assam calls a Congress politician a Gan*u. On camera. In public. Without apology. In the second, teenage girls dance to "Unki maa ka bhos*a" with hip thrusts that mime rape. In the third, a religious procession moves, thousands of men watching while women perform explicitly sexual acts while dancing on a truck (in the name of God). If you think these three things are unrelated, you haven't understood what Hindutva actually is. This is not crudeness. This is not a culture war about manners or etiquettes. This is a deliberate project, the systematic sexualization of Indian political and religious life, where the female body becomes spectacle and territory, where the language of violation becomes the language of faith and victory, where a Chief Minister and a religious procession share the same vocabulary. And it is thought out. I grew up in India, in a Hindu society. I never saw anything like this. This is not what Hinduism is. Whether you like it or not, Hinduism is part of every Indian's life. We grew up on Sunday morning Ramayan at 9 AM. The festivals of Diwali and Holi. The idea that good wins over evil. And so much more. It was simple. It was moral. It was universal. It belonged to all of us, even those of us who weren't Hindu. We had our own religions, our own prayers, but that moral code was shared. It was in the air we breathed. This is what is being hollowed out. Not just a religion, a common inheritance. That Sunday morning feeling. The idea that there is such a thing as good, and that it wins. Hindutva has taken that and replaced it with a truck, thousands of men, and women performing a sexual dance. This is Hindutva's deep perversion. It has taken a civilization's religious life and turned it into a mob spectacle. It has taken its political language and soaked it in rape. It has handed teenage girls a rape anthem and called it a dance. The slur is not a slip. The procession is not spontaneous. The choreography is not innocent. What is being built, across platforms, campaign rallies, and now religious processions is a political vocabulary where your opponent is not defeated but penetrated, where the enemy is not wrong but he is a Gan*u. When language and ritual are both sexualized to this degree, something specific happens to the people inside it: they stop seeing clearly. The violence stops feeling like violence. The degradation stops feeling like degradation. The opponent becomes pest. The procession becomes devotion. The rape joke becomes a rally cry. This is what the normalization is for. The filth is the mechanism. Run it long enough, from the Chief Minister's mouth to the temple truck to the religious procession, and an entire society quietly crosses a threshold it can never name, only feel. This is not Hinduism. This is Hindutva in it's ugliest form. And it's all connected.

Watch These Three Videos. In the first, the Chief Minister of Assam calls a Congress politician a Gan*u. On camera. In public. Without apology. In the second, teenage girls dance to "Unki maa ka bhos*a" with hip thrusts that mime rape. In the third, a religious procession moves, thousands of men watching while women perform explicitly sexual acts while dancing on a truck (in the name of God). If you think these three things are unrelated, you haven't understood what Hindutva actually is. This is not crudeness. This is not a culture war about manners or etiquettes. This is a deliberate project, the systematic sexualization of Indian political and religious life, where the female body becomes spectacle and territory, where the language of violation becomes the language of faith and victory, where a Chief Minister and a religious procession share the same vocabulary. And it is thought out. I grew up in India, in a Hindu society. I never saw anything like this. This is not what Hinduism is. Whether you like it or not, Hinduism is part of every Indian's life. We grew up on Sunday morning Ramayan at 9 AM. The festivals of Diwali and Holi. The idea that good wins over evil. And so much more. It was simple. It was moral. It was universal. It belonged to all of us, even those of us who weren't Hindu. We had our own religions, our own prayers, but that moral code was shared. It was in the air we breathed. This is what is being hollowed out. Not just a religion, a common inheritance. That Sunday morning feeling. The idea that there is such a thing as good, and that it wins. Hindutva has taken that and replaced it with a truck, thousands of men, and women performing a sexual dance. This is Hindutva's deep perversion. It has taken a civilization's religious life and turned it into a mob spectacle. It has taken its political language and soaked it in rape. It has handed teenage girls a rape anthem and called it a dance. The slur is not a slip. The procession is not spontaneous. The choreography is not innocent. What is being built, across platforms, campaign rallies, and now religious processions is a political vocabulary where your opponent is not defeated but penetrated, where the enemy is not wrong but he is a Gan*u. When language and ritual are both sexualized to this degree, something specific happens to the people inside it: they stop seeing clearly. The violence stops feeling like violence. The degradation stops feeling like degradation. The opponent becomes pest. The procession becomes devotion. The rape joke becomes a rally cry. This is what the normalization is for. The filth is the mechanism. Run it long enough, from the Chief Minister's mouth to the temple truck to the religious procession, and an entire society quietly crosses a threshold it can never name, only feel. This is not Hinduism. This is Hindutva in it's ugliest form. And it's all connected.

37,260 görüntüleme

Here's another story of a Muslim hero: A native Kashmiri guy saves a young boy from blazing gunshots and gunfire in Pahalgam's Baisaran area. But you'll never know his name, and the media will never talk about him.

Here's another story of a Muslim hero: A native Kashmiri guy saves a young boy from blazing gunshots and gunfire in Pahalgam's Baisaran area. But you'll never know his name, and the media will never talk about him.

86,577 görüntüleme

Liberal/Soft Sanghis: What's the problem with Muslims allowing the survey of the Masjid? The Survey: Vishnu Shakar Jain enters with the Survey team, screaming JSR, accompanied by police armed with automatic weapons.

Liberal/Soft Sanghis: What's the problem with Muslims allowing the survey of the Masjid? The Survey: Vishnu Shakar Jain enters with the Survey team, screaming JSR, accompanied by police armed with automatic weapons.

55,417 görüntüleme

Videos

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Watch this clip carefully. Three people. Two Hindus, one Muslim. A comedy show called 'Teen Taal'. Khan Chacha, through his self-deprecating humor, describes his dip at Har Ki Pauri. And he makes two observations, almost in passing, that should make you stop. One: He removed his taweez before entering the water. *"What if someone objects... the way things are now."* Two: He paid via UPI. What if his Muslim name showed up. The room laughed. He hid his identity. Twice. At a river. To bathe. The thing that gets me is, he's done this dip before. Many times. He never had to think about any of this before. That's the new thing. Not the river. Not Khan Chacha. Just this quiet new math he does now before stepping in. Amulet off. Name hidden. Don't give anyone a reason. And the way he tells it, light, funny, unbothered on the surface, you can tell, maybe he's made peace with it. Which is somehow worse. Now, I get the room. I get the affection. I get that comedy has its own language and you don't stop every joke to make a point. But here's what I can't get past. He is the powerless one in this story. And he is the one making fun of himself. He is doing the work of making everyone comfortable with his own discomfort. Packaging it so nicely that the room can laugh and move on. And the two Hindu men, who clearly love him, I'm not questioning that, they just... laughed along. Warmly. And moved on. Just one line. That's all. "Yaar, Ganga kab se sirf hinduon ki ho gayi? Ganga-Jamuni mein bhi aadhi Ganga hai." Or anything, really. Any small moment where the joke turns outward instead of inward. Where it pokes at the thing creating the discomfort instead of just cushioning it. One funny, throwaway, irreverent line that tells the Muslim man watching at home: Haan yaar, this is wrong, you shouldn't have to do this. That's it. That's all I'm asking for. Because somewhere a Muslim watched this clip and recognized every single beat. The taweez coming off. The half-second before the UPI payment. The quiet calculation, am I too visible right now? He laughed, because Khan Chacha is funny and warm and the joke lands. And then the clip ended. Maybe it's too much to ask. Maybe in this climate even a throwaway joke feels like a risk. Maybe I'm romanticizing what comedy can do. But I also think, what is the point of humor between friends, on a public platform, if it doesn't do this one small thing? If it can't, just once, say I see what's happening to you, and it's not okay? Khan Chacha made it funny. He did the hard part. All they had to do was to put the hand of humor on his shoulder.

Darab Farooqui

290,289 görüntüleme • 4 ay önce

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Let me tell you something very cool about this video. Look at Rahul Gandhi's straight dive in the first few seconds. An effortless, elegant dive. Now let me make a point. First, it shows he knows how to swim well. The kind of swimming where you could actually save someone else's life. Now a point more political in nature. It also shows the man developed other skill sets in life. He has a rounded personality. A politician with other skills, other life skills. The mark of a life that was curious, enterprising, but above all a life that was looking to grow and challenge itself. Now look at the top BJP politicians. We've seen them in Ganga snan. Pudgy, fat, out of shape. If they slip, they'll need someone like Rahul Gandhi to save them. We've seen Modi float like an inflated tube, clumsy, trying to look comfortable in water and failing. These are not men who ever pushed their bodies, minds or souls or much else. Now you may ask what this has to do with governance. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. I prefer politicians with additional life skills. Skills that tell me you challenged yourself in life. The whole BJP top brass looks like it has spent its life sitting on benches and khatiyas in RSS shakhas. These people may be good at winning elections, which they are. But governance is a different ball game. It's art more than science. It needs people who are innovative, intuitive, imaginative. But above all, people who challenge themselves.

Darab Farooqui

80,626 görüntüleme • 3 ay önce