Why Taimur is to India What Hitler is to Israel

When I first read the following tweet by Karan Johar about Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan’s newborn son, I was flabbergasted:

This was equivalent to an Israeli Muslim naming his or her son 'Hitler'.

How could anyone in India name their son after a man who ordered so much bloodshed in India?

Then I thought, perhaps this was just the parents liking the sound of the name and that 'Saifeena' did not know of Taimur, the genocidal maniac who not just slaughtered tens of thousands of Hindus in Delhi, but massacred countless Muslims in Iran and Turkey ending up reducing the world’s population by five percent (17 million back then). Not even Hitler came close to being such a marauding hate-mongering symbol of racial and religious fanaticism.

However, Kareena herself quashed the benefit of doubt I gave to the parents. It has been widely reported that in a candid conversation with actor Neha Dhupia, Kareena revealed the background to naming her son Taimur: “Saif is a historian and would want a traditional old school name”.

What this says is that it wasn’t some innocent affection of a nice sounding name that caught papa’s attention, but rather a well-thought out process to name his son equivalent to his own war-like name 'Saif Ali' (the sword of Prophet Mohammad’s son-in-law Ali).

Perhaps Saif overlooked the record of Taimur vis-à-vis Hindustan and Delhi, where he ordered the slaughter of 100,000 Hindus in just one night.

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