Value of Sacrifice

Ah! It is the season of sacrifice again! Where else but in the land of sants, sawants and pirs? One is almost filled with tearful emotion choking the throat that causes difficulty in even breathing. Truly she belongs to the land and the land deserves her. The hyenas and vultures crow and cringe and make disgusting moans of satiation.

Let me tell you my friends, this narrative is utterly nonsensical. We as a nation have collectively lost the capacity to support or oppose anything without becoming mawkish.
One can only sacrifice what one truly holds in secure possession.  De Gaulle must be re-phrasing an apology for the French surrender in his grave now: France sacrificed itself to resist the Nazi onslaught.

When I went to look up the dictionary meaning of sacrifice, it is not far off from this reality. All the meanings suggest that it is necessitated by compulsion and portray either a loss or an act of expediency at its core. We in India are not particularly attuned to the true essence of the word because we associate renunciation with sacrifice because of cultural reasons. Renunciation is willful negation of a secure possession that is not under any credible threat, imminent or otherwise.

Here the vultures and hyenas had gone to the President, the impertinent EC pronounced that “the law is same for everybody”, (how dare they? Aren’t the sants above our petty temporal arrangements, deeply flawed at that?), causing the Government to contemplate a mid-night ordinance to exempt the sants from our petty laws, which prompted the vultures to threaten the President with the tarnish of partiality and when the game ended in a stalemate, there were only 2 ritual openings left . One was to let the “law” take its own course which was a steep downhill and the other was to climb up a cliff and take a plunge. If anybody wants to call that a sacrifice, they need some psychiatric help.