The enlightened call a person wise when all his undertakings are free from anxiety about results.

— Krishna in The Gita

The mind is everything. What you think you become.
— Buddha



Showing posts with label Nik Gowing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nik Gowing. Show all posts

Thursday, 27 January 2011

Stranger than fiction

Three totally unrelated events/issues, but they sure highlight the complexities of human life and psychology. These incidents are known to all, this post is just about my perspective.
1). The Talwars—Dr Rajesh Talwar and his wife, Nupur—who, according to the CBI are suspects in their own daughter Aroushi’s murder. Dr Rajesh has also spent some time behind the bars and was brutally attacked recently by a young man who resented his “fame”. The CBI insists he's the prime suspect, but so far no charge has been brought against him for lack of evidence. I’m as confused as the next person. But just imagine for a second that he’s innocent, as his wife so passionately insists—they lost their only child, reputation and all semblance of a normal life, and the murderer is still at large. Just seeing the Talwars on the TV is enough for me to lose my sleep.
2). This one is courtesy the BBC. A young American woman, now 23, was abducted when she was an infant by a woman who brought her up as her daughter. Her (foster) mother’s inability to produce any birth certificate made the young woman suspicious and she eventually found her photo as a baby on the Missing and Exploited Children's website. “Mother and daughter are finally reunited and the abductor faces the police,” Nik Gowing said something to the effect on BBC’s The Hub.
What should be a happy ending, set me thinking. 23 years…isn’t that a lifetime! What if the abductor had really loved the girl like her own daughter? And will she, the girl, able to forget the 23 years that she spent with a woman who was the most important person in her life? I’m not denying that it was the cruellest crime in the world—to take a child away from her mother is an unthinkably vile act. Having said that, I still see shades of grey in the story than just black and white.
3). This is a happy one. It turned out that Oprah Winfrey has a half-sister, Patricia, she never knew of. Patricia was given by her mother (a housemaid then) for adoption when Oprah was nine.
On Oprah Winfrey Show, Patricia said she started thinking that Oprah might be her sister when she saw an interview with Vernita Lee (Oprah’s mother) on television. She eventually tracked down Vernita, but was told by the adoption centre that the mother did not want to get in touch with her. Patricia managed to reach Oprah's niece and DNA tests showed that they were indeed related.
We thought we knew almost everything about Oprah’s life—the soul-numbing poverty and abuse, and the subsequent rags-to-reaches rise. But looks like wonders never cease in her life. Out of nowhere pops a half-sister who she never heard of. And from Patricia’s point of view, just imagine waking up one fine morning and discovering Oprah Winfrey is your sister!
Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. But the best part of the story, as I see it, is that she never tried to sell her story and make some quick buck.