I sometimes wonder...

• Why do I feel my mom is being unduly superstitious in going to a temple and praying for good health for the family, while I don’t feel superstitious in investing in the stock market and hoping for a profit? After all, both of us are anticipating good things, and asking it from entities we neither understand nor control.
• Why do some parents feel it is completely within their right to determine the career and marital choices of their kids (thank god mine are liberal enough), while arguing for the merits of a referendum in Kashmir? Shouldn’t free choice apply to one’s family before it applies to a whole state?
• Why, after every terrorist attack, is there a call for ‘moderate Muslims’ to speak out and denounce the attacks, while no one asks me (a decidedly non-violent Hindu) to speak out and denounce the attacks on churches in Orissa/Karnataka, and no one asks my Maharashtrian friends to come out and denounce Raj T? After all, if silence in the face of atrocities is also a crime, shouldn’t it apply to everyone?
• Why do some people claim that reservations are bad since “caste doesn’t matter in modern India”, and then happily allow their parents to specifically narrow the search for a marital partner within the same caste?
• Why do I support market economics and free trade, and oppose Mamata’s agitation at Singur? After all, laissez faire should mean that the Tatas negotiate with the farmers and the Mamatas of the world, with the state as an impartial observer.
• Why does it feel completely natural to me to support free trade and laissez faire, after having been through 12 years of subsidized education? Why do I fail to consider that in a laissez faire economy, I might have passed out of school with a debt much larger than the one I have on my head now?
• Why do some people of my caste have no qualms in slapping a mosquito dead and spraying ‘Hit’ on a cockroach, while turning up their noses on hearing that I ate chicken for dinner? After all, you personally killed the mosquito and the cockroach, while I just happened to eat a chicken that was already dead.
• Why does the thought of wife-beating seem so detestable to me (no, I am not saying this just to impress my lady readers, promise), but the concept of ‘disciplining’ a child with a pat across his cheek seems ok to me? Shouldn’t I be treating all violence as bad?
• Why do people who claim to be open minded and liberal stop recognizing the freedom of others to be close minded? Aren't the people who demand that others be open minded behaving in the same totalitarian manner as the society they seek to ‘reform’?
• Why do I write such random nonsensical blog posts rather than sticking to my PJs and limericks?