In Defence of Ahmedinejad?!

The fall had taken its toll……

If the scars were not apparent,

It was b’cos they overlapped with the previous ones…

It required something extraordinarily outrageous to shock me back to my senses…

…….to force me back into writing…

Mahmoud Ahmedinejad might never have been someone on whose defense I could write, but for this…

India, Italy, Istanbul or Iran. ……….the fanatics across religions speak in the same perverted tone…

But can any one stoop this low?!

The only time these days, I feel like a naughty little boy is when I occasionally visit a friend’s house where my Primary School Teacher will be sitting in his easy chair on the Verandah. There, for once, I forget my manliness. In spite of the balding pate, the long beard and my social stature, I find myself being reduced to a bundle of nerves. And my Primary School Teachers are the ones who command the greatest respect as a group, if not as individuals in my life. The innumerable stories they had told us, the myriads of things that they introduced to us for the first time in our life, the excursions they had taken us to, the gifts they had bought for us on those trips spending money from their pockets, I still remember some of my class mates standing up and crying when one of our favorite Teachers was transferred.

In most countries the primary education is not yet given the due importance and the primary school Teachers are lowly paid. And their biggest satisfaction and reward is when they see their favorite students climb up in life. I had always noticed the glow in their eyes whenever I paid a visit to them to convey and share some major happy incident in my life. They seemed to me to be happier than myself at times.

And coming back to what shocked me into this post.

This morning as I lifted the news paper, I saw another stricture for the embattled Iranian President from his godfathers. This time on Teachers’ Day he committed an “indecent act” of kissing the hand of a woman in public. He didn’t stop there; he went on to embrace her!

How outrageous?!

This is for the first time in Iran’s history since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 that such an act was committed by an official of the state, let alone the President, in full public glare.

Some sympathizer of the President tries to downplay the incident by stating that the Woman, a Primary School Teacher, who is over 70, became emotional after receiving the award from her former pupil, and made the first approach bringing the President into a difficult position as he either had to reject her or give into shaking her hand.

Ahmedinejad, in spite of all his tough talk, seems to me to be emotionally unfit for Politics. And I thought the expression in his face, for once, resembled that of a little child.

If you haven’t seen the picture in The Hindu, take a look here

What would have been your reaction, if you were in the Iranian President’s shoes?