The time to reveal what I am so excited about is finally here. Okay, the reason is I am adding a new page to my blog, and just not any new page but a new page with buttons to grab. Yes, buttons for you to grab, and post on your blog. (Provided you like and believe in them off course). This new page means a lot to me for several reasons.
It was April 15, 2013, two bombs exploded in Boston at a marathon, killing three and injuring several hundreds. I know that it is not the first of its kind, and will not be the last but it was the first one I paid close attention too. I was always busy with studying for medical school and got my information second hand. This time it was different. I somehow found myself following the news on the entire incident, starting from the explosions to FBI talking with the dead bombers widow. I do not know how you felt about the whole incident but all I could feel was sadness. I felt sad for the victims, first responders, law enforcement, bombers, and their families. Do not get me wrong I do not support what the bombers did but at the end it was all waste of human life. It could have been different only if ideas like these were not planted in their heads by the society. If only they did not feel that, they have to kill for their cause there would have been little less sorrow in this world. What baffle me most are the people who think they have to defend their God /faith, (no matter what their faith is). Isn’t God all-powerful? Then, why should you, anyone, or I defend him? More than that, why should we kill his creations to defend him? I personally do not think God wants us to kill anyone.
Then, there are the people that think what they believe is only true, and what everyone believes is false. That is okay as long as you keep this belief to yourself but when you try to enforce, what you believe in, on everyone it is not right. I have no clue why some people keep thinking that everyone should be like them, and if they are not, then they are “the enemy”. These thoughts made me want to know more, and I did a little research on Christianity and Islam, what I found shocked me. I am giving the example of Christianity and Islam because they are the two faiths that were involved in the Boston bombing. I am not trying to take a jab on any faith. In addition, my knowledge on Islam is very little; I have not got to reading the Quran yet, let me know if I make a wrong statements. I read some Bible but not all, did not get to reading Gita too. I want to read all the holy books at some point in my life. Christians believe that Jesus came, preached, healed, sacrificed His life to pay for our sins, resurrected , taken to heaven and will come back to take His followers/godly people to heaven at the end of the world. Muslims believe that Jesus/Isa/Messaih is precursor to Muhammad and will return to earth on judgment day, to defeat anti-Christ and restore justice. Christians believe that Jesus is Son of God who preached God’s word, while Muslims believe that He is a mortal human being chosen to spread God’s message. I also read that in Quran the name of Isa/Jesus/Messiah was mentioned 25 times, while the name of Muhammad 5 times, (Muhammad 4 times and Ahmad 1 time). Jesus is a figure of respect and divinity in both the faiths with little difference in who they think He is. Are these little differences worth killing thousands and thousands of people every year? I feel the answer is “no” even if I am missing a bigger difference here; no difference is worth taking a life. The greatest gift God has ever given us is life, and taking that life to defend Him does not make sense. I think it is actually disrespecting God.
Then there are people who are suckers for discrimination and division. They love, (I cannot stress more on the word love here,) creating a new division, if it helps them to get what they want. I think people like this created all the divisions in the world today thinking it would help them to be superior to rest of us. They follow all the societal divisions like nationality, religion, caste, color and so on and so forth. Personally, I hate with the core of me anything that creates a division. That may be because of my personal experience with my parents. I love my parents, I love D, I cannot give up on either, but I do not understand all the societal norms my parents put forth. If we did not put these divisions up in first place, we could have saved so much time and energy fighting them. I believe that we all came from the same ancestor, (no matter who that ancestor is,) then aren’t we all related? That is one reason why the word “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” is so close to my heart, and the reason why I named my blog “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam”.
The above two reasons were inspiration to me. Instead of sitting and worrying about why the world is such a bad place, I decided that I want to do something about it. I wanted to act but the question was what do I do? I have a different career that in no way, shape, or form is related to my cause. Does that mean me, as several other people should just go about my job? The answer was a simple “no.” My conscience does not allow that so, I made a deal with myself. The deal is I will carry on with my academic career at the same time, work for my cause. May be in the beginning I cannot do much but once I get an opportunity to do more, I will hop on to it. Therefore, “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam“ came into existence. It is not only a place where I share our intercultural relationship good and bad but also where I share my thoughts on the social issues I believe. It is a start up blog for my cause and the cause is “STOP DIVIDING AND START UNITING.” This blog will remain as a mixed bag because I cannot find time right now to maintain two separate blogs so, readers please bear with me on this, and the posts might not always be what you want them to be.
How does making buttons fit into all this? My buttons fall under different categories like fun, attitude, and social cause. The ones with quotes related to social causes come from my heart. I am not expecting miracles to happen but what I wish is, at least few of the viewers would grab some of my social cause buttons and spread the message. There are not a lot of them but it is a start, and it is what I can do for the time being to spread the message I believe in. Also, I know the world is not a perfect place and will never be. I am not trying to make the world a perfect place, I am only trying to be a better person and do the right thing for future generations.
I am also a sucker for buttons as you can see my blog has a lot of them. I register with different blog networks so I can have their badge 
. Then one day I was reading a blog and saw a cute “I love comments” button. It was so beautiful and I clicked on it, it directed me to a website where there were many free buttons. I went crazy as you can see from the results on my blog. I thought it was difficult to design them. Couple of days later, I was reading another blog and was surprised to see the comments, there were some very rude comments. Don’t get me wrong, I am not against opinions or critic but personal attacks are not right. We do not know this person on a personal level then how can we make personal attacks. There is a very faint line between critic and personal attack and we should take care not to cross that line. That, day I was thinking maybe I can get a button which says that and so, I searched everywhere on the web but couldn’t find one. Therefore, I decided to look into making my own and researched on how to? I learnt that it was not that hard and many bloggers gave a code where you can just insert your site URL, image URL, site title, and use the code in the text widget. I tried it and it worked but only for buttons that do not have a “grab my button” box. I wanted to have “grab my button” box too so, my readers can get the button if they like. Then, I made a search for “code for grab my button” and found a code generator. It is free, fast, simple, automatic, and user friendly. (DISCLAIMER: I am not being paid in any way to say this). You can find it here if you are interested in making some buttons yourself. There might be more sites like this out there but I stopped looking into it after I found this. I do not know why those bloggers did not mention about this. They all talked about manually writing the code. Anyway, that gave me the idea to make buttons for my readers and the first quote I thought about was “Opinions welcome, personal attacks not so much…”
Finally, yet importantly making buttons makes me happy because it satisfies the creative side of me. I think about something I put it on a button and lo and behold emerges a masterpiece. 
Okay, no more talking, go ahead and look at my babies and grab some if you like or believe in the cause. Do not feel obligated to grab, if you do not like them, no heart feelings. It is also a page to show off my work so, I see it is a winner either way. Comment down below and let me know what you think. Also, ideas are welcome for future buttons. I will probably make post on how I make my buttons for anyone who is interested.
-R.
P.S. You can find the buttons page here or on my menu bar.
