Bigotry In This Season of Goodwill

-
Christmas is supposed to be the season of goodwill and faith. Yet despite the holiday season, national politics still seems to be laced with a certain degree of bigotry. NY Times reports a story - Virgill Goode the Republican congressman from Virginia - has demonstrated his disdain for Islam, and his own Christian faith and caused an outrage by criticizing the Muslim congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesotta for his choice of Koran as the religious scripture for taking the oath of office. The whole point of holding a sacred book in ones hand is to ensure that the person takes the oath with utmost seriousness, and no text can bring this seriousness into a person that the religious text they rever the most. How does one ensure this reverence if the individual is holding a book that holds no significance to him or her? You might as well be holding Rogets Thesarus in your hand.

Beyond bigotry though, Mr. Goode has also demonstrated a lack of tolerance for the America ideal - respect for the differences of our fellow countrymen. America is a melting pot where people of all faiths, religions, social and cultural background come together to make this nation strong. Mr. Goode's words must sting like barbs to all the immigrants who come from a non-christian religious background. In Mr. Goode's eyes, we may not be welcome here if we are Hindu, or Muslim, or Buddhist.

My hope is this was just an error and we hope to hear an apology from Mr. Goode soon.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Devesh Batra, you will be missed!!

-
Image
In this day and age when life expectancy of a man is around 85 years, death of a person at the age of 54 is undoubtedly a shocking news. Unfortunately this shock came to me early this week when I received a text message stating that my friend Devesh Batra is no more. I don't remember how I first met Devesh, but I remember that when I founded ASAP, NJ (Association of South Asian Professionals) in early 2000s, Devesh and his sister Suchitra, were one of the first to join the organization. Over next weeks and months we became good friends not only because we shared the one thing that was common amongst ASAP member - that we were single and bored - but also because Devesh was a genuinely nice guy who was always there to help people. When ever I had any issue - whether it was a computer networking issue - of which I had many - or issue related to an esoteric topic like immigration, Devesh was a fountain of knowledge, always ready to help. In the early days of ASAP, we had many potlucks
Read more

Demise of An American Shoe Manufacturer - Odabo

-
WSJ recently reported on the demise of the local manufacturing of an innovative manufacturer of custom shoes, Otabo. You can read that article here , but the gist of the article is this... an executive with skills in shoe making gets the entrepreneurial bug and decides to start a shoe company in the United States. The company wins many awards, is recognized for innovation, and seems to have done well on marketing and public relations front, but in the end the idea of manufacturing shoes in the US fails, and the company is moving production to China. What went wrong? The article analyzes the situation and pins the blame squarely on "manufacturing failure". What killed his U.S. factory isn't just competition from Asia's cheap labor, he says. It is the lack of infrastructure needed to make a factory tick, a problem that has bedeviled the few remaining independent shoemakers in the U.S. Supporters of free trade will point to this and say, Mr. Shaffer had no business s
Read more

Celebrating Friendship in Style

-
Image
When Sujay invited me to a trip to Edinburgh, Scotland to celebrate a milestone birthday with some friends, I thought it would be a small group of four or five friends who would get together for a weekend of fun and golf. Well, this was hardly a boys weekend out - it was more a destination wedding-like-celebration with (what seemed like) 35-40 close friends of the Kango family invited to spend an highly choreographed weekend in Edinburgh. Hemanshu and I, at Winton Castle with Kalindi and Sujay Kango,  celebrating 30 years of their  engagement In the annals of friendship celebrations, I think this one will go down as one of the big ones. Kalindi and Sujay went extraordinarily out of their way to make this celebration a grand one. For starters, just like a wedding, every thing was choreographed to a T. So much so that for one of the events there was even a dress code announced! Of course, as is my wont, I ignored the itinerary/instructions and realized my faux pas upon landing
Read more