Scotland
After the Scottish Macbeth murders the legitimate king, he looks for probable enemies, real or imagined.
Among them, MacDuff tops his list.
Aware of the danger to his life, MacDuff goes to England, leaving his family behind.
The anarchist-fascist Macbeth nonetheless has his wife and all his children assassinated.
When this news reaches him, this is what he wonders:
“Did the heavens look on and not take their part?”
No voice returns an answer from heaven.
Gaza
How trenchantly MacDuff’s uncomprehending wonderment about the indifference of the gods has sprung to mind during the course of the unimpeded turkey-shoot slaughter of women and children in Gaza.
In the Islamic context this bafflement is particularly piquant because (as a young teacher in my audience at a lecture delivered in Kashmir University some years ago underscored to me) good Muslims believe that not a leaf stirs without god’s will.
I remember suggesting to him that his argument would mean that all of Kashmir’s problems too had god’s assent; I did not receive an answer, only a hushed surprise and chuckle down the perceptive audience.
So, who is to blame for the heart-wrenchingly unprecedented butchery in Gaza?
If not they, then where are the gods?
Afghanistan
We often think of death as the ultimate catastrophe.
But, think again.
Life-in-death may after all be the ultimate atrocity; reason why so many prefer to take their own lives rather than carry on living life-in-death?
Also read: ‘Zionism Is Not Judaism’: Lessons From Rabbi David Weiss
I am alluding to the women of Afghanistan who have now been forbidden to have their voices heard in public as per report.
All that in pursuit of “virtue” by god’s own men deputed to combat “vice”.
And no vice may ever be combated except by viciousness in the extreme.
Afghan women are of course required to produce babies, preferably all male, so god’s men can proliferate and keep the women back in life-in-death quarantine.
What makes this fate hurtful terminally is the fact that all the Afghan women one has met have far exceeded their men in intelligence and prowess.
Looking at these puzzling circumstances among people who most fear and propitiate god, those other words from the Bard spring to the uninitiated, rude mind:
“as flies to wanton boys
are we to the gods;
they kill us for their sport.”
And the gods we know are often men in unchallenged authority bolstered by the inordinate lust of dominance, cannily fuelled by corporate lucre and religious proprietorship.
I see the mangled faces and limbs of toddlers in Gaza in my dreams and all my education falls away from me like old paint from a crumbling edifice.
On this “teacher’s day” I feel more ignorant than I did affecting the act of teaching over more than four decades.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
