کوئی تو ہے جو پرندوں کو بال و پر دے کر
زمین کی قید سے آزاد بھی نہیں کرتا
August 2005
Monthly Archive
Tue 30 Aug 2005
Thu 25 Aug 2005
The world believed her. India believed her. And if believing her wasn’t sufficient, Nobel Peace Prize, Congressional Gold Medal were given to her. India bestowed upon her Bharat Ratna and also State Funeral at her death.
You got that right. It’s Mother Teresa. She was hailed as only second to virgin Mary. She was a symbol of peace, love and motherhood (or so millions of people were put to believe). She must have won many hearts (I speculate that’d have included a lot many fervent zealots of different religions) when she announced abortion as “the greatest destroyer of peace today” on her Nobel acceptance speech. Sure, it raised a lot of controversy around her too. But the legend of Mother Teresa was too big to shatter. After all, her sole mission was to serve the poorest of the poor. But, that’s not all we know of her.
Irish documentary maker, Donal Macintyre gives us a great insight into the life of Mother Teresa and those dependent on her. His work was recently featured at British television. He revealed many horrifying facts shown in his documentary and writings which are supported by many other documents and writers. He writes:
I worked undercover for a week in Mother Teresa’s flagship home for disabled boys and girls to record Mother Teresa’s Legacy, a special report for Five News broadcast earlier this month. I winced at the rough handling by some of the full-time staff and Missionary sisters. I saw children with their mouths gagged open to be given medicine, their hands flaying in distress, visible testimony to the pain they were in. Tiny babies were bound with cloths at feeding time. Rough hands wrenched heads into position for feeding. Some of the children retched and coughed as rushed staff crammed food into their mouths. Boys and girls were abandoned on open toilets for up to 20 minutes at a time. Slumped, untended, some dribbling, some sleeping, they were a pathetic sight. Their treatment was an affront to their dignity, and dangerously unhygienic.
But he is not the only or the first man to challenge the legacy of Mother Teresa. The most significant challenge to the reputation of Mother Teresa came from Christopher Hitchens in 1995 in his book The Missionary Position. “Only the absence of scrutiny has allowed her to pass unchallenged as a force for pure goodness, and it is high time that this suspension of our critical faculties was itself suspended,” he wrote, questioning whether the poor in her homes were denied basic treatment in the belief that suffering brought them closer to God. Hitchens’s lonely voice also raised the issue of the order’s finances, which in 1995 (and still in July 2005 when we were filming) seemed never to reach Kolkata’s poorest.
Read his squalid truth behind the legacy of Mother Teresa
And yet, this brilliant Indian blog-post by Atanu Dey shatters many myths and her glory by showing us the naked face of abusing children by Mother Teresa.
Atanu further clarifies that:
She compounded the problem that is the root cause of many of the world’s miseries. She cynically campaigned against birth control and contraceptives and did everything that she could to make the population problem more acute. The more born in misery and hopelessness, the more souls she would be able to save and more the brownie points that she would have to win the prize in heaven (sit next to Jesus Christ) and on earth (made into a saint by the bishop of Rome.)
Thu 25 Aug 2005
