A Na-Pak Nation!

INDIA THAT IS BHARAT

Satiricus is a civilised Indian. Well, at least that is what he thinks he is now. But to be honest, he wasn’t always that. In the beginning he was a backward Bharatiya. In those bad old Bharatiya days he was taught that Sanskrit was the medium of the Bharatiya civilisation, and in fact that very word sanskrit means “civilised”, as it was derived from Sanskriti, which meant Civilisation. So as a sanskrit, civilised, Bharatiya he was expected to have at least some knowledge of Sanskrit, the language of his civilisation.

But now that Satiricus has developed from a Bharatiya boor into an Indian journalist he knows that where ignorance is professional bliss, it’s a folly to be knowledgeable. So he has dutifully discarded that tremendous trifle of knowledge, according to which the land of the people called Bharata-s, known as Bharat-varsha six thousand years ago came to be also called Hindusthāna the country of Hindus, when Bharati-s or Bharatiyas came to be called Hindus four thousand years ago. However, he clung to the belief that the Sanskrit language really had this word “sthaāna”, meaning place or country, now corrupted into “stan”. Happily his moronic mind has now been disabused of this delusion by the all-knowing Englishman. For the other day Satiricus learned from an article in the British newspaper Economist that the real, original word is “stan”, that it is in two languages, Persian and Russian, and that it means “place” in Persian and “settlement” in Russian.

This precious piece of linguistic learning is contained in the paper’s article titled Don’t call me stan, according to which Kazakhstan’s president does not want his country to be either lumped together with nearby backward countries like “Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan”, nor equated with volatile stans like Pakistan and Afghanistan, and so he wants it to be renamed Kazhak Yeli, Well, well, well! Does that mean Kazakhstan does not want to be equated with Pakistan even nominally? What a na-Pak notion!—Especially because the state by name Pakistan was not established 65 years ago, as perhaps the Kazakh president wrongly supposes, but was founded 1400 years ago by Mohammed bin Kasim, as officially approved history books teach Pakistani school children.

The Dirty Name Game

Talking about names, Satiricus learns that the Saudi Arabian kingdom has very recently promulgated a list of 50 Indian names of persons that have been banned for hurting “cultural or religious sentiments” of its subjects. Among them, of course, is Rama, because it is the name of a Hindu God. An excellent idea, says secular Satiricus. In fact he regrets—why couldn’t Messrs Singh, Sachar and Shinde, the triadic torch-bearers of nominal secularism think of this first? Why did not the UPA, in power for ten long years, make short work of the communal poison injected in the body politic by the NDA regime it replaced? For Satiricus recalls that a certain BJP minister of the NDA government had indulged in the unforgivably anti-secular activity of compiling a list of MPs of all parties who had ‘Rama’ in their name—and, horror of horrors, he found 200 of them!

Having diligently done its service to secularism in name the UPA could have also formed a formidable coalition of Indian secularism and Arab secularism. It could have shown the Saudis that banning bad names in present times is not enough, they need to cleanse their profane pre-Islamic past as well. For starters, they should burn that poetry collection Sé-arul Oqul of 4000 years ago which contains a poem by poet Labi Turfa praising Hindu god Mahadeva by that very name. This would be only the beginning, for after thus purifying poetry the Saudis need to realise that there was an age-old cussed conspiracy to spread the terrible tentacles of numerous nasty names in Arabia’s pre-Islamic history. And of course this conspiracy was hatched and carried out by the scurrilous Sanskritists and lumpish lexicographers of Darul Hindu Harab. They descended to the despicable depth of saying that even Allah, the God of Islam, comes from Allā, Mother Goddess of the Hindus, they sinisterly suggest that Mecca is derived from Makha, the Hindu ‘sacrifice’, they crassly claim that Kaba is from Kavya, the name of Shukracharya, and to cap it all, they perniciously point out that in Sange Aswad, the holy Black Stone, Aswad comes from the Sanskrit A-Shweta, non-white, black. See? You ‘name’ it, it is there—the cussed communalism of the horridly Hindu pre-history of secularly Sunni Arabia.