Sunday, December 25, 2011

Christmas – The Pan-religious Festival Meant For The Entire World

Officially Christmas may be just a religious festival of a certain religious community. But in reality it is a pan-religious festival, widely popular with and enthusiastically celebrated by people of all religions across the world.

Why is it so? Well, the reason lies in the pan-religious appeal of Christmas. The festival represents the eternal virtues of the human society – Love, Friendship, Unity, Harmony and Bonding. These are the virtues which serve as the basic components of the lifeblood of the society, and have thus always held a special position in our heart. We find the reflections of these virtues in Christmas, and this in turn explains why people of all faiths identify themselves with this beautiful festival.

In fact, it will be an understatement to refer to Christmas as just a festival. It is rather the personification of a philosophy of life, which teaches us how to make our beautiful world more beautiful, by just turning ourselves into better human beings.

Within few days there will be New Year, which will witness us making colourful New Year Resolutions (most of which we will not follow). Let us make a resolution today, on this auspicious occasion of Christmas, that we will collectively try our best to reduce hatred, malice and hostility in this world, thus doing more justice to the “civilized” tag that we use to describe ourselves.

Why should we hope for a Heaven after death? Why don’t we try to convert this world itself into a Heaven?

A bagful of love and wishes from me and my family to every reader of this small piece.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Lesson For India – UK Aims At Empowering Voters To Recall MPs With Questionable Activities

It is a development that offers a lesson and inspiration for all parliamentary democracies of the world, including India.

The UK Parliament (also called the British parliament) has moved a bill that aims at empowering the British voters with the right to recall an MP elected by them, if the latter is found to be engaged in questionable activities.

If the bill gets passed by the British Parliament, then it will give the voters from a constituency to force a by election if they feel that their elected representative has got engaged in serious wrongdoings. The only condition is that the petition moved to that effect must be signed by at least 10 per cent of the constituents.

I feel everybody will agree that it is a very significant step, likely to play a very effective role in purifying electoral system and curbing malpractices by elected representatives.

I eagerly wait for the day when the Indian parliament will show the courage to come up with one such bill. And I also appeal to the Election Commission of India to study the said bill, and check whether the same can be replicated in India (with necessary modifications, if any).