A Bend in the River of Life Read Free

sense of civility to avoid causing inconvenience to others.
    Amit’s business was growing rapidly. The move to the big city was actually paying off. He was seriously thinking of sending Rana to the best missionary school in the region. He was also planning to buy an estate in the fashionable district of the town. He wanted to see his son among the elite of the society. So Amit’s business was flourishing and he was dreaming and planning. Rana was also dreaming of going to school soon. As if to demonstrate his readiness to go to school, he would carry his books in a school box at home from the morning till evening. He was beginning to perceive himself as a grown up. Rajani and Devika too were happy in anticipation of greater things to happen to the family. The River of Life was flowing to its brim.
    Dreaming and planning are two of the numerous attributes of God. When God created man in His own image He bestowed on him the gift of mind and intellect, which was capable enough to understand God and to dream and plan in the context of the earth, for God gave him the authority to govern His planet earth. Mind and intellect are the two greatest gifts of God to His greatest creation man. Making best use of them man can construct a zillion castles in the air; perhaps he can even build a whole new universe. But using them negatively he might also make the biggest cesspool imaginable. However, it is to be understood clearly that in the event of a disharmony between God’s dream and that of man, God’s dream will always stand supreme.

EXODUS
    W hile the plan of Amit Roy was beginning to take shape, ominous clouds appeared on the political horizon. As the price for relinquishing the colonial rule over India, the British Raj was about to declare the partition of the country along the racial divide into India and Pakistan. Since the end of the First World War serious discussions and negotiations had been taking place between the British Government and the Indian leadership with regard to the freedom of India. The then population of British India consisted of Hindus 70%, Muslims 25% and other faiths 5% approximately. The Hindu leadership demanded freedom for the entire British India as an undivided Secular India; but the Muslim leadership’s proposal was to create an Islamic Pakistan out of British India first and declare freedom to both India and Pakistan simultaneously.
    For many centuries the Hindus and Muslims lived together peacefully as neighbors, respecting each other’s religious beliefs. Even Mughal Emperor Akbar and his son Jahangir had Hindu wives. What Akbar did for the amity between his Hindu and Muslim subjects is written in gold in the scrolls of history. The tradition of unity that he built and largely followed by the successive Mughal rulers on the one hand and the Deccan Sultanates and the Hindu rulers of the rest of India on the other, was not just fake or shallow. The British Raj had a taste of that unity at the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 forged by the Hindu and Muslim leaders. Since then the British Raj tried to do everything possible to dislodge that unitywithout any noticeable success. However, at the crack of the twentieth century, when the Independence Movement started taking roots in the ground, the British Raj began sowing seeds of discord between the two largest religious communities to prolong its vicious rule. At first, it uncannily stoked the religious fire by introducing the “Divide and Rule” policy. However, when that sinister move also failed to dampen the compelling human desire for freedom, the last bait was to inject the “Divide and Free” policy in the negotiation package for independence. This scorched earth policy was thrust into the fray as an ulterior motive so that the two newly independent but racially divided countries would continue to fight between themselves long after the departure of the British Raj from the Indian sub-continent. That was the veiled