The Cardinal Difference!

I think it is in a movie of Al Pacino I remember hearing a line that makes more sense for me now in a different context! “The guns doesn’t kill anyone; it is the finger that holds the trigger that kills”, said the character in that movie...; it is the mind that shelters the motive to kill which gives it the costume of a killer, and gun is just a medium.

So is religion. Religion doesn’t kill anyone; it is the mind that shelters the motive to use the religion as a medium, to employ their personal choices heedless of the tear it cause on the social fabric, that is causing divisions in our society.

In a recent training I was conducting in Chennai, I was using a metaphor of fruit salad. Fruit salad is made of mixed fruits (duh!), and that itself add to its taste while each piece of fruit still retains its own identity – grape never fearful of changing its taste as pine-apple! It works for an organization, a family... Why then is religion standing out as a bowl of fruit cuts that has to fight over the other to announce its dominance? I am shocked to have exposed recently to a particular trend in the southern city of India (Chennai) that the residences advertised as for rent are, when approached, explicitly non-rentable if you are a Muslim!!! Wow!!! These are the men and women whose living rooms are decorated with Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the latest gadgets and gizmos that announces to the world their contemporary nature of life, yet nurturing these very unhealthy belief that cracks the society right in the middle and across.

Sixteen years of being away from India, I have had the opportunity of befriending with people of different religion from different countries around the world. Never once in my experience did I have this misfortune to see any one of them through the prism of religion... Loic, Eric, Clive, Wendy, Santosh, Joseph, Simon, Sashi, Jimmy, Vasanthy, Ravi... they all had a face and heart that didn’t amplify their religion, instead their kindness to human beings; and today I am given a different experience too – the venom that runs in the arteries of India - one that’s going to stay and one which I will have to get accustomed to.

I return to my birth place to pursue a dream, a dream like anyone of you must be nurturing close to your heart. And when that dream has begun to grow larger than your size, it eclipse all the other mundane issues as this; it may cause inconvenience, it may put on my path speed breakers that might slow down the pace of my race, but, as so rightly said by Paulo Coelho in “The Alchemist”, “when you want something, and when you want it enough, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it,” – and I think God has sent me the entire ‘universe’ in the form of my wonderful business partner (who is again from a different faith!!)

Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture” echoed the same, that, we will face “brickwalls”; brickwalls are there for a reason; brickwalls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Brickwalls are there to stop the people who don’t want something enough...

I want what I want bad enough... and I am writing this tonight...

...to reinforce that feeling in me...
... to strengthen that desire in me...
... and to uphold that resolve in me...

...and I love my friends of all faith, for they are sons and daughters of mothers and fathers none different than mine...