MULK

Though I am the queen of procrastination, this film I had to write about. I somehow managed to catch a show with a friend before it left the theatres. It was hard hitting and poignant. I cried multiple times while watching this one ( I always cry in movies!) It is the story of a Muslim family residing in Benaras and living amicably in their cosmopolitan, (mostly Hindu) neighbourhood and enjoying good relations with everyone. One young lad from this family gets misled in the name of Jihaad (struggle or fight against injustice, as described in the film). He is involved in orchestrating a bus bomb blast and subsequently shot in an encounter. The rest of the film raises very pertinent questions while highlighting the issues faced by the family (ignorant of the lad’s terrorist involvement) to prove their innocence and patriotism and sense of belonging to the nation they chose to stay back in during partition. 

I came back with immense food for thought and also guilty of some of the prejudices we live with and that come so naturally to us because we choose to let conditioning, media and political motives influence us. And this is food for thought for all of us because we are either covert or overt about these biases. How many times have we squirmed, smirked at the norms, customs of minorities just because some from their community have become terrorists? How many times have we judged their practices and had opinions (mostly negative) because they belonged to a particular community? How many times have we showed discomfort associating with a member of such a community? How many times have we judged them just because someone else who had the same surname or belonged to the same community got themselves involved in terrorist activities? How many times have we refused to employ people from a particular community and how often have we when cancelled Ola and Uber bookings when we realised the driver was from the minority community? The fact still remains that all Muslims are not terrorists even if a majority of terrorists have belonged to the Muslim community. The terrorists don’t follow the actual tenets of Islam where these kind of anti-human activities are only condemned. If a particular person goes astray, why do we lift fingers and blame the family or the whole community?! 

I reside in a building where we have a lot of Muslim families. They are as human as anyone else and as pious as any other community. When there were riots in our city, the Muslim boys of our building stood all night guarding our gates and protecting all of us( not only their families!). They did not sleep a wink and neither did they allow any senior citizen to stay awake all night trying to protect us. Years ago, when, as a family we left for a short holiday to Lonavala, unfortunately there was a fire that broke out through our balcony and could have taken down the entire house. Once again, had it again not been for the timely aid and assistance of our Muslim neighbours who broke the door open and prevented the fire from spreading, we may have suffered enormous damage. We could not have been more grateful! Our immediate neighbour is a lovely pious Muslim lady who brought up her four children single handedly, while her husband lived and worked abroad. I have yet to come across someone as sweet and non interfering as her. She only approaches me when she has an issue with her cell phone as most of her kids are settled elsewhere. When I had a cough that was not leaving me for the longest time, this aunty taught me a particular formula to fight that cough and finally it did go. Not only that, when I recovered, she bought me a packet of dhokla(savoury) and said that now since my throat is back to normal I must be craving for some regular tasty stuff! I cannot claim this kind of thoughtfulness even from some of our near and dear ones. We always get sheer khurma on Eid and needless to say it is absolutely delicious. Had we not been vegetarians we would have also received a generous amount of Biryani. These are just some examples. I could go on and on. If we are so quick to point out negatives and dish out brickbats ( often unjustly), it is only fair that we present the positives and deliver the earned bouquets too! 

The Muslims who chose to stay back during partition did so because they felt a sense of “belonging” to this country. And we should not only respect that but also make sure that we let them ‘belong’ and not feel alienated by anything we say or do. Terrorism (once again as pointed out in the film), is a criminal act and not a communal one! It is a misled and misinformed, weak to the core individual, that commits this heinous crime and we cannot blame an entire community for it!  It is rather unfair to do that, to say the least.

There is no country in the entire world that can boast of, or show the kind of unity in diversity that we not only project but live on a day to day basis. We have been blessed and we will continue to be, if we do not allow ourselves to fall prey to false media hype or a political agenda. Crime and bad deeds have no religion. Next time when we hear some isolated incident where the perpetrator happens to belong to a particular community, we have to check ourselves when we say either outwardly in words, on in our head, “they are like this only!” Statements like these only propagate prejudices and stereotypes. For every Muslim extremist or fundamentalist, we will always have a Hindu or Catholic (or anyone from any other community) counterpart and let us never forget that. 

Let us not mock or judge either their religion or their festivals even though we cannot get our heads around it. Likewise, I am sure many non Hindus cannot get their heads around why in the name of festivals we put colour on each other, throw balloons on strangers (amounts to violence), blare music on loud speakers disturbing everyone around, light fire crackers that not only add to noise and air pollution but also sometimes burn down houses, or how we pray to an elephant God,  buy and immerse these idols in his name every year, destroying the environment and the sea life! For someone who believes in one God, I am sure it is hard for them to digest the number of Gods/ deities we worship, let alone the colourful lives and wives they had! When we point a finger at them, three fingers surely point back at us. Last but not the least, let us watch this kind of cinema and also promote it, for the content, the message and the stellar performances. It is sad to see that these films have very few shows playing only in select theatres whereas brain dead commercial cinema still rules the roost!