SOME people carry a big chip on their shoulders and are always protesting too much. Shah Rukh Khan, the actor, is one of them. He is always whining about this and that, how he is held up at US airports – as if he owns them – and questioned for hours like a criminal, how they are always trying to link him with Pakistan, and so on. And the more he cries, the more foolish he sounds.
Actually, for a man who has nothing special about him, neither height nor looks, nor any particularly great quality as an actor, he has done very well for himself. He is making and has made a lot of money, built for himself a posh house near the sea, and is the toast of the chi-chi crowd that always hangs around song-and-dance men. And he has done all this because he is an Indian and works in India and 99.9 per cent of his fans are Indians. He would not have done half as well had he lived in Pakistan, and he would probably be working at a petrol pump, if he were in America.
He says the Americans are always after him and always detain him at airports whenever they find him. I don’t blame the Americans at all at going red in the face at the sight of a diminutive little Khan in their midst. After all the men who rammed planes into their towers and were heading towards the White House on September 11, 2001, were all Khans in all but name. The film actor may argue that he maybe a Muslim, and he may be a Khan, but he is not a terrorist. This is a specious argument. The men from Saudi Arabia who killed thousands of innocent Americans, and the men from Pakistan who slaughtered hundreds of equally innocent Indians in Mumbai a few years later didn’t say they were terrorists. But they were all Muslims, and they killed Americans and Indians because the latter were not Muslims. You put two and two together, and can you really blame Americans – and Indians – for treating all people who call themselves Khan as potential terrorists?
If you are mauled by a tiger, and the beast then escapes into the jungle, and some time later you encounter another tiger, you don’t go and ask him whether he is the same tiger who nearly killed him a few days earlier. A tiger is after all a tiger and you don’t think twice before killing him. A Khan is after all a Khan, and if one Khan can blow-up your place, where is the guarantee that another one won’t? You can’t blame him for being careful.
And all this talk about terrorists not having religion is bunkum. Muslim terrorists kill because they are Muslims first and terrorists afterwards, and they kill non-Muslims because they are non-Muslims. How can you blame people for being careful when confronted by someone who goes by the name, a well known Muslim name, like Khan?
Let me now come back to our Khan. What is his problem and why does he make so much noise, whenever he is detained at American airports or elsewhere? That he is discriminated against and victimised? Nonsense. He has the best of everything. He is always on TV advertising this and that and making pots of money. I really don’t understand what he is complaining about. Nobody would say he is a great actor, certainly not on par with someone like Amitabh Bachchan or Dilip Kumar. Bachchan has gone through a lot and at one time was nearly bankrupt. But he persevered and never cried, nor abused others. He sat down and worked out his problems and proceeded to do what wise men do – put his affairs in order. He didn’t make a great deal of fuss about his situation, and didn’t go blaming people. He behaved like a gentleman, which is why he is a highly respected person.
Why are Muslims so different from Hindus or Christians, or Jews, though Muslims and Jews come from the same line of ancestors? I think the Muslims suffer from an inferiority complex, not only vis-à-vis Hindus, but all other races. They believe the world in against them and has passed them by. There is no evidence whatsoever that the world is against them. Like our filmy Khan, they suspect that the rest of the world looks down on them and will simply not let them prosper.
This is, of course, nonsense. The world is not against anybody, nor is it for anybody. You are always on your own, and you make the most of what you have. For a long while, in fact, for centuries, the Jews were actively discriminated against, and forced to live in ghettoes, and were barred from certain professions. There were periodic pogroms in which they were slaughtered and forced to flee their homes. Anti-semitism was rampant, particularly in Europe, so much so that when Adolf Hitler used it to persecute Jews and destroy them, very few European nations raised their voice against his heinous policies and programmes.
Hitler started killing Jews from day one, after assuming power as chancellor in 1933. He went on doing it systematically and built up a huge network of concentration camps and gas chambers where Jewish families were exterminated along with other undesirable communities. His government was killing them right up to the last day of the war, since even though Hitler had committed suicide and the Nazi government ceased to exit, orders for killing had not been officially withdrawn. In fact, a thousand Jews were killed in gas chambers on the very day Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin. When some of us visited Berlin in the summer of 1946, a year after the end of the war, the bunker was still open to visitors, though the stink was so overpowering, none of us dared go inside.
But the Jews did not sit down on their haunches after the war, blaming the world at large for their fate. They fought for a country of their own and when they succeeded, they made Israel into a booming nation right in the midst of Muslim neighbourhoods, all of them hostile to their presence. There are less then 15 million Jews in Israel, and maybe as many more outside Israel, but they are a tremendous success story everywhere, which the Arabs – and Muslims – cannot match despite their huge populations – a hundred times more than Jews – and despite the prodigious quantities of crude oil, of which they have a virtual monopoly.
The world’s 1,600 million (160 crore) Muslims have produced only two Nobel laureates, one in physics and another in chemistry (apart from a third one in literature). Both left the countries of their birth for work in Europe and the United States. In contrast, the Jews, though numbering only a hundredth of the number of Muslims, have produced 79 Nobel laureates. Einstein was a Jew, Fermi was a Jew, and so was Oppenheimer who produced the first atomic device. Most of them were forced out of their own countires, but that was no handicap. And many of them were German Jews who would have ended up in gas chambers had they not fled Germany.
Why Jews? Look at Hindus. We have been under one foreign domination after another for the last one thousand years – just like Jews – but we have always survived and asserted ourselves. We fought the Moghuls and we fought the Britishers, and ultimately we triumphed. When the Britishers left, we had virtually no industry worth the name, no great universities, only clerks and police constables. In sixty years, we Hindus have turned India into a vibrant economic power, and we have done it more or less entirely on our own, without much help from outside. We have produced great industrialists and great scientists, great economists and great centres of learning, and we are only just starting. In another fifty years, India, Hindu India, will become one of the top two or three nations of the world, and we would have done it all on our own.
My advice to cry babies like Shah Rukh Khan and other Khans, is : For God’s sake, stop weeping. The world is not against you; it is you who have set your face against the world. The world owes you nothing. You are what you make of yourselves. Stop ramming planes into skyscrapers and stop sneaking into harbours and cities, killing innocent people. And for God’s sake, remember you are Indian first, and everything else after wards, as we Hindus are.
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