aap hindu hain (are you a hindu)????

there was a friend's shoot today in a nearby place... it was a home of a lower middle class family... the home was a two story home with a couple of rooms in the ground floor and another couple in the first floor... we were shooting in the first floor... & thereby occupying the kitchen/dining space of the family... & intruding the family space... interestingly, someHOW these families are so damn co-operative... they help you with everything possible, & making films in NID without all these helpful gujarati people around us would have been a real pain...

also the general interest that film making arouse also helps us a LOT & hinders us a LOT too (talk about crowd control when shooting outdoors & it becomes mind boggling).. khair, getting to the point, there was this girl, studying in class 3 (i think around 7-8 years old) in this place we were shooting... she was a really sweet kid & was intrigued by what we were trying to do... so was trying to hang around where we guys were... but was very inhibited.. i thought that this initial inhibition is just the shyness that kids have... we tried talking to her and all... the first thing she asked us was "aap sab hindu hai???" (are you all hindu?)

that shocked us all, i think... after confirming that we were hindus, she went on to become more comfortable with us..talking to us openly... she went on to describe as to how "mohammadens" would take away kids in the night, how they burned down the houses (during the riots), and how they burnt down delite bakery (a muslim shop nearby... when asked why would they burn down a muslim shop only, she couldNT respond but was absolutely sure of the fact that she wanted the cake from there)... how if you go to pakistan (any place with a significant muslim population) one would get harassed and all... my own reaction to the complete day's conversation with her changed from shock to inquisitiveness to disbelief to helplessness...

its amaZing as to how we are nurturing these kids in here... as a child i remember, i did NT get the concept of hindu-muslim till very very late... & NObody was worried... here was a child of 8 yrs old who was fed up on the stuff that naZi's tried to get down the world's throat... where are we heading??? secularism toh was never there... it's like a eutopia which never eXisted but we were NOT fascists... but are we lesser NOW... by supporting, by NOT reacting are NT we getting worse than ever... in a hindu family it might be considered ok to ridicule a little about muslims, or even have one's own prejudices towards them... but caNT we see the effect it's having on the children... an 8 yr old child would talk to us only if we were hindus... of family which was just ok financially... i had heard kids trying to understand the concept of money and all before and having the compleX of being either in poor houses or rich houses but being so religion conscious??????!!!!!!?????

how can such nice & helpful people be bringing up a child with such crap in their head???? how can such an innocent kid have so much poison in them??? & what kinds of adults do we eXpect out of them???