Suneel’s Christmas Message – TfL RACE CNG Newsletter December 2025

It is time to write a Christmas message. I write this message as someone that comes from a Hindu, Guru Ravidasia and Sikh background but, as everyone knows, Christmas has become cosmopolitan in the United Kingdom, even regarded by many as a secular festival. All faiths and backgrounds sit together on Christmas day to make it an occasion for family and friends. Christmas is celebrated in different ways by all of us but we share the celebration together.

In my view, one of the themes of Christmas is a belief in dignity against a society that may take dignity away from people. Jesus is born to a poor family, in a stable, and first welcomed by shepherds—people on the margins of society. In addition, Jesus was a Jew from Galilee and Jews in 1st-century Judea were an ethno-religious minority living under Roman imperial rule, with limited political power. Within the Roman world, Jewish people were often stereotyped, taxed heavily, and at times persecuted for their customs and beliefs. So for me, the nativity story, which sees Jesus as God, returns dignity among those often overlooked.

If there was an earnest belief in dignity, I believe the work of improving society would have been done and the champions of diversity could rest. This could have happened long ago. One of the great examples of the belief in dignity is the Edict of Ashoka from the 3rd Century BCE. Reeling from the devastation of wars that he had caused, wracked by guilt, Ashoka turned to compassion and respect for all people to transform himself and his world.

In his rock and pillar edicts, Ashoka affirmed the inherent dignity of every individual, passing over divisions of ethnicity, religion, or social status. Ashoka supported religious tolerance among Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, Greeks, Persians, and other groups within the empire. He promoted equal justice and humane treatment under the law, as well as respectful dialogue between cultures rather than dominance or suppression. Ashoka wrote that honouring others’ beliefs “strengthens one’s own faith,” reflecting an early understanding that dignity and equality thrive in diverse societies.

The nativity story and Ashoka matter to us today. The belief in human dignity is not a modern invention but has deep historical roots. This belief has long been essential to peaceful coexistence in multicultural societies. I hope that we can all believe in dignity so that we can all live dignified lives. Not just at Christmas, but all the year round. My thoughts go out to the Jewish community as I write because of the recent Bondi Beach mass shooting, but also to all in this world affected by those for whom there is evidently not a belief in dignity, of the dignity of life, the dignity of choice, the dignity of difference and the dignity of diversity.

Dr. Suneel Mehmi (Lead Editor)

insults (microfiction)

07.12.2025

S: Shylock can’t take their insults. For the violence of their words, he wants the violence of the law. Because the insults are words which are a law and they are violence. The language of this society is violence. It is the law of this society. There is no concealment of it. He wants to answer them in their own tongue. With the law of revenge. The violence of justice.

A: That was then.

S: I don’t write about then. I write about now. But the worst of it? They steal Shylock’s own daughter away from him. She who he loves the most in the world. They take his love away from him. They turn his love against him. That is the ending of the play. It is the unjust that win, not the just. It is the destroyers of love that win, not the lovers. It is what the poet knows. Shylock suffers the same fate as Romeo. They separate him from his love.

A: That happened in the past to you. Will it happen now?

S: In a relationship, there are not just two people. There are others. And others intrude. That is the downfall of every relationship. Here, those that intrude are the haters. They are filled with hatred and cannot bear that anyone can be filled with love. They want to kill love and the lover. That is their stupidity. You cannot kill love. There has been love in every era in human history.

A: You are saying that love is always destroyed. And then you are saying that love cannot be destroyed. Which is it?

S: That is the question, isn’t it? Which is it? Does hate win every time? Or does love win once in a blue moon? Is it true as the literary critics say, that Romeo and Juliet are joined in death? And what about Shylock? Is his love only going to be heartbreak?

A: You don’t have the answers?

S: The answers are in my heart. Because in my heart is love. Real love. There is a Hindi song. They say do not break my heart because the heart is the house of god. She broke my heart anyway. But you cannot break the house of a god. This heart, this body, this mind. It is formed after the god of love, my namesake. I am god.

the tears of the flowers

04.11.2025

Unexpected acceptance can be found within unacceptable expectation.

The day was long. In the garden, the flowers wept. The grass lamented. The sky itself, it was filled with melancholies of grey.

A bird glided into the tree and S. watched her keenly. The birds of Da Vinci flew in his mind, the artist feverishly tracking and recording their movements. Wanting to become the bird.

A. had asked him why he saw poison. Why he thought poison. Why his life had become poison.

What else was there? When all the good things were being churned from the ocean, instead, the god Shiva had swallowed the poison. To prevent the destruction of the universe. His throat became blue with the poison’s anger. And S.? His name was blue. The blue skin of a god.

A. had asked him, how can you become a god? S. had said that in the West, to claim godliness is arrogance and the height of madness. It is folly. But in India, one modelled onself on god. They called the good people gods. It was the aim to become god upon the earth. A god was known by good deeds. The deeds of humanity. And S. tried his utmost.

‘So you are Shiva then?’ A. had asked.

S. had said that the hero is formed in adversity. The whole world, including the gods, fate itself, all had to be against the hero. It was only then that the triumph of the hero could be known and recognised. It was only then that the legends of the hero could be told and the songs could be sung.

Life had to be poison. Otherwise, heroism was dead.

A. had smiled. The Buddha’s smile was known. It was the sign of his wisdom. The smile delighted the hearts of his followers.

Falsity (microfiction)

07.08.2025

‘Most people lie,’ was all the comment that Alfonso made.

I had just finished venting about a particularly preposterous lie that I heard. I had been looking into the eyes of this liar and they had not even flinched. Was it possible that they even believed their own lies? Or were they completely shameless?

‘I don’t lie.’

‘That is why you do not have much,’ said Alfonso. ‘People don’t welcome the truth with open arms. In fact, they loathe it and will do anything in their power to destroy it.’

‘It is not the truth,’ I said tiredly. ‘It is a truth. One of many.’

‘You believe that hogwash?’ asked Alfonso incredulously. ‘You have told me yourself that you are the truth.’

‘Although not everything that passes as truth is the truth,’ I elaborated, ‘still there has to be some room for manouevre. You don’t want a rigid and totalitarian framework. Which is what knowledge passes as in this society of twits. Their fascism is supposedly knowledge.’

I thought again of this liar and the lie. I had heard some good ones in my time. Some of them had even fooled me. It was obvious why these people lied. Because the truth was too dangerous, because they wanted to cover up their own guilt, because perhaps their intellects were so unsound that they could actually believe the paper thin story they were trying to wrap events in. They were so skilled at lying to your face. And then they would call it ‘civilisation’, their false narrative.

‘Don’t let it bother you,’ said Alfonso, sensing what I was thinking about. ‘You live in a society of liars. I am surprised that you still haven’t gotten used to it.’

‘Only a coward accepts injustice,’ I said firmly.

‘Yet what do you do about people lying to you? Nothing.’

‘What can you do? As you said, they will not accept the truth. It is not worth wasting time on them.’

‘And if the lie is an injustice?’

‘If I had my way,’ I told Alfonso, ‘There would be no lying and there would be justice. This world has never been ready for that in its entire history. Why would it be ready for that now or in the future?’

‘So why do you exist then?’ asked Alfonso. He sneered at me, one of his trademark sneers. ‘I thought you told me that you fought for truth and justice.’

‘Yes, by telling the truth myself. Just like you can’t make someone love difference when they are prejudiced, just like you can’t make someone choose fairness when they are biased, just like you can’t reason with a bigot, so you cannot stop a liar from lying. They have a psychological problem and they need therapy. They are just compulsive liars.’

‘I keep telling you, don’t be upset. Forget everything.’

‘I will, I told Alfonso. I will go to sleep now.’

Alfonso clasped my hand. ‘If you are the truth,’ he said, ‘show us the freedom and the wildness of The Tiger.’ He knew what was in my dreams.

Jesus, The Man of Difference and the Revolution

25.12.2021

Today, the world celebrates the birthday of Jesus Christ. When we look back at thousands of years of Christianity, it is easy to reduce all the complexity of that system of thought and the identity of its founder. One almost automatically thinks of how the religion was tied to war, imperialism, racism and the state in modern times. One thinks of the immorality and authoritarianism of organised religion and the Church. The feminist arguments against patriarchal monotheistic religions come to mind too. In this view, Jesus becomes the origin of oppression and conservatism. Because of such ideas, and the relentless march of a scientific reason which denigrates religion, I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say the hostility to religion in general, and to Christianity and Christ in particular, has almost become insurmountable.

However, let us try to be just to Christ. Historically, Jesus was a revolutionary. In many ways, the early version of Christianity was the religion of resistance. Christ went against the Roman state, the biggest superpower in the Western world at the time. This was his achievement, his badge of valour and the reason he holds the place in the minds of men that he has today. Today, this is how I choose to remember him. In many ways, Jesus is the model for the revolutionary consciousness. Against the state, which held the monopoly of power, wealth and men, which monopolised thought and being, Jesus and his small band offered an alternative world. This was a world in which success did not mean territorial expansion, being rich and subjugating other populations. Christ’s world was not an empire. This was an independent and non-materialistic world, a completely different form of organisation which required a completely different identity and character.

Jesus was a model for the revolutionary because he had nothing to offer against a dominant power than an idea. The idea was of a different form of being, living and thinking. Jesus was a world-builder and a builder of the human mind. Throughout the ages, this is how resistance against the superpowers has played out. There is one man or a small group that has that precious, world breaking and making commodity, difference. Jesus was the origin of difference.

Indeed, what marks Jesus and his origin is difference. He was born out of wedlock, the standard model for conception. He went against not only the Roman state, but also the Jewish religion. He aimed to break free of power wherever he found it.

Today, when the state is ever more ascendant and has thoroughly co-opted Christianity for its iniquitous purposes, when the conservatives and blind conformism have taken over society, when a new form of cultural imperialism is at its height, the birthday of Jesus stands as a model for the revolutionary and for the transforming consciousness. Yes, I am not a Christian. Yes, I do not follow the teachings of the Bible. But I judge Christ not as a god, but as a man. The inspiring, pioneering, matchless Man of Difference. And like others, I wait, ever so patiently, to see another coming of this difference into the world.