The repercussions of a controversial email..

Today I got a forwarded email to my gmail id from a friend of mine. This friend is a Muslim, and he sent me some interesting stuff. The mail contains some real incidents were the Muslims were being postered as cruel and dangerous people. Infact it had some news snippets from different sites mostly about murdering/terrorist events. It actually compared the way in which the news was reported in various sites when the murder was committed by a Muslim, and when a similar kind of murder was done by a non-muslim.

The examples that were there was actually shocking. When a murder was committed by a Muslim, the headlines read like "Muslim youth raped and killed a girl", but when the same crime was committed by a non-muslim, it read differently, without the religious tag in it. And the thing is that it was not just one or two examples, there were like 15-20 solid instances - I counted them.

I dont know if this was done intentionally or otherwise. Whatever be the case, it is really bad. The world is now trying to poster Muslims as the bad guys.The main reason i thought of writing this down is the repercussions that happened when I forwarded this mail to my friends (non-muslims). And moreover, the original mail was sent to a group (which included me).

One of my friend even came out and protested to me about this. He was saying that these kind of mail should not be forwarded to groups, because it was religious in nature. One of my other friend told me that whatever I send him, his attitude towards Muslim is not going to change (he dont like Muslims, by the way).

I couldnt digest the attitude of my friends. Me being in this 21st centuary generation, I thought we were all really having innovative thoughts and opinions about these matters. I am wrong and the fact is really bad. We are no different.That attitude - "If he is a Muslim, keep away from him, he might be dangerous" is slowly growing. It is slowly being injected into our minds by the media, from our friends, from our parents - it is just out there.

Let me tell you another incident which happened very recently. I know a cousin of a friend of mine (a muslim). He is passing out of a reputed engineering college in Kerala this year, and he got job offer from a very prestigious software company. This happened before the recent serial blasts took place in different cities in India. A few days back he got a rejection letter from the company with no explanation. My friend forwarded his resume to me to help him out. I have done what I can from my side - Now only God can help him get somewhere.

One thing we all should know is that, bad people are there everywhere - these people want to kill and cause harm to everyone, they dont care. They should be tagged as the bad ones, or evil ones or terrorists, but never should be prefixed with any religion.
When people associate a religion with mass terror, people start to fear them, organizations start to fear them, nations start to fear them, and eventually everyone.

From my diary - Engineering Days...

This is an extract from my diary dated 16 August 2002...

"Everyone is thinking that there is 'something' between me and her. And today Khalandhar and Aswith came to me to squeeze things out of me. And I repeated the same thing - We are good friends. And I always think, why this has happened.. Do I really like her? And did i start to love her? I.. dont know, really, I dont know.. I sometimes sit thinking about her.. I purposefully make situations to talk to her.. Is this love? I dont know .. No it is not... It's just because we're good friends.. this is just a male -female attracation.. infatuation...? that's all. I know she is gonna be upset hearing all this.. She always reminds me that I'm her loving brother (even though I hate being her brother).. and that I should take care to keep this friendship, and I should never cheat the relation... I should keep my mind clean, with no dirt of love.. but with the fragrance of love.."

That was 5 years ago... Things have changed a lot since then... It is really funny thinking about the whole thing...

I guess this will will be fair enough for the first blog.. :)