After being relatively upset about Parzania, I found myself at the RSS community page on Orkut. Needless to say, that was even more disturbing. It was without a certain amount of morbid horror that I looked at their polls, their organized report-as-fraud activities, their cyber-lynchings and such.

I usually don't like to deal with this sort of thing. I am complacent, cowardly and comfortable in my relative safety. It bothered me to think that if I had no fear it would be dishonest, or just plain stupid.

I happened to look at my blog and saw Star Trek and the Q next to Parzania, it struck me what the Q might say about India and the RSS. "Your species is always suffering and dying", he would say in his How-entertaining--What-do-you-expect-anyway attitude.

And indeed, what do I expect? The world has always been a barbaric place. We express surprise and shock at the slaughter of Delhi by Nadir Shah, the slaughter of the Sikhs after the assassination of Indira Ghandhi, the India-Pakistan partition riots, the Bombay bomb blasts, the Ghodhra riots, (and hardly just India) the Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia, the Rape of Nanking, the Hutu-Tutsi conflict, the occupation of Iraq, the massacre of the Algerians... and on and on and on. Just too many to list. In fact so many, that one should ask, what's the big deal? This is, after all, human nature.

People have been always mercilessly wiping out entire populations of "others" based on some definition of identity. Why are we so surprised by this? Why do we expect that in the times of our generation the world should have magically become a "civilized place"? Hardly, if you look at the evidence.

It will be a long time before we turn into a species that is not always suffering and dying. Something truly deep and fundamental has to change about us for that.

In the short term however, in a few hundred years or maybe in our own lifetimes, the vices of our day shall blow away to be replaced by other ones. To make any of them to go away, something fundamental needs to change that invalidates their cause of existence. A little like the way Frown Power and Superman destroyed the Ku Klux Klan, might there be an Indian equivalent? Prosperity? Accountability? Can we motivate such a change?

Q: Let us pray, for understanding and for compassion.
Capt. Picard: Let us do no such damn thing! What is this need of yours for costumes, Q? Have you no identity of your own?
Q: I come in search of the truth.
Capt. Picard: You come in search of what humanity is!
Q: I *forgive* your blasphemy!