Snippet #15

“Augustine was not a believer in a personal god who would listen to your prayers. Even less did he believe that you could pray for someone else. And to have a third party, a disinterested third party, offering intercessory prayers on behalf of people they did not know, seemed outrageous to him. After all, these Masses were subdivided into thousands, since perpetual Mass cards were sold at almost every church in the world and by the minute. There would never be enough priests for even a hundredth of a Mass per soul, and the idea of asking the powers that be to consider minuscule fractions of benefit accruing to the dead seemed far more ridiculous than any other dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church.”

Jerry Pinto

(Em and the Big Hoom)

Losing Faith

I lost my faith as an hourglass loses sand, terrified of being empty. I lost my faith as an hourglass loses sand, filling myself with potential.

Cave-Girl Cookin’

You know the all-familiar feminist rhetoric? The one that all “modern” women with a life keep rapping about, how society decides their worth based on age-old patriarchal sexism and overlooks every other achievement. So jaded, right?

Wrong.

Paradigm Shift

TR and I were having an informal chat about the brouhaha surrounding the societal-induced need for generation of posterity when he mentioned that his longterm girlfriend and he had unanimously decided not to have children. Reasons ranged from cost-cutting and preservation of sanity to in-depth research on how 90% of childless elderly stand by their decision to let resting wombs be.

Adoption was still on the cards though, if ever they felt the need.

“But only girls, mind you”, said he, “there is no way I’d want a boy.”

I was surprised. Daddy’s little girl and all that aside, has our nation really turned its back on the overwhelming need for a male child?

“Don’t you read the newspapers?”, he continued. “There is a rape happening every day. There is no way I’d want to father a potential rapist!!”

I laughed and laughed, caught off-guard by his deranged line of thought. This has got to be a first, when someone decided the preferred gender of their offspring based on crime rates in the community.

Or was it?

I realised what was deranged about him was not so much the line of thought as how it culminated. In a society that feared having its daughters raped, he feared raising his son wrong.

Isn’t this the very paradigm shift that we need today? As I read somewhere once, why not let the girls roam free after midnight and lock in all the boys instead? Why not spare the women lectures on modesty and safety, and teach men how to behave instead? Why not stop fearing for your daughter’s morals and save your son’s instead?

Is that really too much to ask for?