Sighs!!! *^&*^&

Sometimes I feel that it’s a curse to know or understand current affairs and politics. There are enough people in the world who don’t give a damm about politics and they live blissful life. Is it that large number of ignorant people or small band of ambitious people that makes politics is so nasty, so dumb, so counter-productive, so illogical, so irrational and worst, so bloody? I don’t know. One thing that I increasingly feel is that I wish I was ignorant.

I haven’t written any blog in all most a week. I thought about writing a blog on Jaya Bacchan’s comment that created an unnecessary controversy. The freedom of expression cannot and should not be curtailed under any circumstances. At the same time the reality that Bacchan family is heavily involved in the politics and attacks on them are results of them supporting certain political faction should not be missed either. Before I do that the blasts in Delhi happened. I was dumbfounded. I wasn’t sure how many more blogs I can write on the bomb blasts in India. The tale of a non-existent government supposedly taking care of billion people is beyond description. I was out of town for weekend and when I came back and before I formulate my thoughts to write yet another blog chronicling gigantic magnitude of ineptness and incompetence that we know as Manmohan Singh, the Wall Street nosedived. On the surface there is no link between bomb blasts in Delhi and Wall Street debacle. Sadly enough none of these two terrible events were surprising. And as I just started writing about Wall Street double whammy I came across a detailed article about Sarah Palin – the vice-presidential candidate for Mr. John McCain. She reminded me of Georgie boy and my morale took another round of clobbering.

The events I mentioned seem quite disparate in contextual spectrum. Even geographically these events took place in different time zones. But there is eerie similarity between all of them. All of the events are strangely connected to each other by the string of irrationality and chronic dumbness. All these events played as classic interaction between the ignorant majority ignorant and ambitious minority.

Jaya Bacchan is running election on Samajvadi Party ticket. The party that champions the Hindi cause appeases Muslims that borderlines treachery and they are banking on huge north-Indian population to elect them in Mumbai. These activities are obviously enraging native Marathi population and rightfully so. Obviously political attacks on Bacchan family should not surprise anyone. But majority of Marathi population i.e. Marathi people outside of Mumbai region don’t see this connection easily. That leaves us with frustrated and publicity hungry Raj Thakare to resort into anti-Democratic activities like threatening to expel North-Indians out of Mumbai or attacking Bacchan family. Unfortunately, the only winner so far is the Samajvadi Party.
It is a sad state that home minister of Indian owes his allegiance to the foreign born leader of his political party. He doesn’t give a damm that under his leadership thousands of people got killed in bomb-blasts as well as in Naxal movement. For him as public confidence in his abilities doesn’t count much. His ambition is to become Prime Minister and he knows that he can achieve that by licking feet of his Party president. This egregious behavior doesn’t affect the Indian population either. And that’s more worrisome. They aren’t demanding his resignation. That means Manmohan Singh doesn’t need to care about one more thing. I wonder what he does whole day!
The carnage on Wall Street wasn’t entirely unexpected. There were enough learned souls hollering about the housing bubble. By the time people started listening to them it was too late. The speculation leveraged trading, housing securities etc. will be studied for years to come in the Business school. What wouldn’t be studied is the insatiable greed. Actually, it should be called corruption. Everyone knew that something of this sort is coming and yet no one left the table. The last one holding the card was the sucker. Unfortunately, there were quite a few suckers this time and it will result into thousands of lost jobs, billions of equity vanishing and possibility of world economy going south. In this case though it was the ambitious tiny minority creating havoc for rather helpless majority

The article about Sarah Palin was the last straw that dumped me into depression. She is nuts’. An arrogant woman who is not only has very little experienced but whatever experience she has is in Alaska. Yeps, that’s the state with more polar bears than human population! But she has a book in her hand and she listens to higher authority. There mere mention of these two things sends chill down my bones. We have heard all this crap before and yet people are ready to entertain the same agenda again. A tiny ambitious minority and a majority that is eager to play dumb again.

There are 20 million bloggers in United States. I am one of them. The number is quite large for me to not to feel privileged enough to be member of the club. Yet the number is tiny compared to the general populace that these bloggers intend to attract. Again The ambitious yet useless minority that wants to change the world of majority that doesn’t give a squat.

The game just continues.

Democracy III

One the most celebrated aspect of democracy is freedom of choice. A person can speak anything, do anything (as long as it’s legal) and live life the way he or she wanted. So it’s quite ironic that freedom is like a rewinding coil that stops democracy from succeeding. Hallmark of any democratic institution is allowing commoners to elect the leaders. The idea to let people decide their own fate by electing the representative is quite noble in essence but for most part impractical in results. I think such problem arise because most of the people are unaware about how Democracy works or how it should work.

Generally people don’t appear for exams without preparing for it. If they do then they fail the exams. Now imagine that you don’t know anything about exam or the curriculum and you are expected to appear for the exams just because you are above 21. Moreover not only that you are guaranteed to pass the exam but the results of the exams will shape your destiny. Are you ready for this scenario? Well, you can’t answer No to this question because that’s what precisely happens in modern democracy. We have exams so that we have right to tell people that you are K-12 or Bachelors’ or Masters or Doctors. You have to pass the driving test to have right to drive on the road. Yet one doesn’t give any exam or acquire any knowledge before voting. We rely on so called expert opinions of Media. It’s sad that Media wields so much power lately but it’s not hard to understand why, because we as a society pretty much outsourced the ‘thinking’ part to Media. We ask them to evaluate our representative. We ask them to interview prospective representative. We get impressed with even though we know that the so called rallies or conventions is nothing but elaborate charade to create the illusion of popularity. We do all this only because we don’t have time from our busy schedule. We like to blame everything on dirty politicians but we conveniently forget that ‘we’ are the politicians. With such a scenario it all most makes sense for politicians to join hands with Media. The blurring line between two is worrisome.

The only way out of this situation is we the people start doing the job we are supposed to do towards maintain democracy. We the people should start playing our role in the democracy. Freedom doesn’t come for free. The way to fix the crumbling democracy and stopping it from turning into special interest entity is we learn about our democratic institutions. What does head of the state do? He can’t do no shit without approval of legislative body. So what exactly is legislative body? How do we put better people in the legislative body? How hold politicians and Media accoutable for their actions? Such questions are not hard to answer. At least, it shouldn’t be hard to answer.

How to make them more accountable? What are the ways to make them accountable? To attain this and it may sound little radical, how about we make people take a course on democracy and make them pass a small exam before allowing them to vote? We make people accountable for their own action, other things will follow automatically.

The trouble brewing in Orissa

The recent assassination of Swami Laxamananada in Orissa doesn’t bode well for India. The issue wasn’t properly addressed by Indian print media and as usual what ever scanty news the print media provided were obviously uninformed and biased. Swami Laxamananda was associated with VHP and he dedicated his life towards the betterment of Hindus in India. One fine morning people barged into his room and pumped bullets in his body. The motive wasn’t exactly clear immediately and the assassins were unknown. What followed were riots between Hindus and Christians in Orissa. According to Indian print media lot of churches were burnt and allegedly Christians persecuted. Now we all know how much Christian missionaries love to paint themselves as victims and persecuted souls. Considering that these missionaries have mastered the coy act of persecuting others while painting themselves as victims over last two thousand years, the news Indian print media presented weren’t surprising. What was surprising and obviously frightening was Maoist Naxalites taking responsibility of killing Swami ji.

Orissa has been hotbed for Christian missionaries to ‘harvest souls’ for quite a bit. Since the famous statement Pope made on his visit to India and as if these missionaries were waiting for official confirmation the proselytizing activities went up rapidly in last ten years or so. By luring illiterate and poor people either by money or by force these Christian missionaries funded mostly by foreign institutions are changing the demography rapidly. Obviously there is going to reaction towards such nefarious and illicit activities. Various Hindu organizations actively started re-converting the ‘faithful’ and increasing the social work to stop the Christian proselytizing activities. Swami Laxamananada was on the forefront. He made substantial gains on this front and that was obviously hurting Missionary business. He received quite a few threats but that didn’t stop his work. He paid the heavy price for that.

Now it’s fairly obvious about who killed Swami ji. Yet the issue of proselytizing business that Missionaries are engaged in wasn’t addressed by anyone. Because doing so needs use of brain for one and second, it requires hard work. Brains are absent amongst Indian media and it is far easier to blame all ills of society on Hindus. Such apathy of government and Indian media is leading our society towards dark chapters that is beginning with Swami ji’s killing. It’s an open secret that the separatists’ terrorists of North-East are funded by Christian missionaries and it seems that they have started doing that in Orissa too. Naxalities by definition are secular and atheists. In theory the class struggle that they espouse is above the differences of racial or religious differences. China for example doesn’t have any state religion and nor do Russia. The government doesn’t support any religion either. (In fact, China bans foreign Christian missionaries!) So when Naxalities took responsibility of killing Swami ji there is something more going on. They have never killed any religious figure in India before. They never talked about religion either. And suddenly they are making statements that VHP and RSS is destroying secular fabric of India! It’s strange because naxalites are hell bent on destroying the fabric called India itself. If they are merely getting money from Christian missionaries to kill people then that’s scary or if they are colluding with Christian missionaries to destabilize India then that’s worst. Either ways we are in trouble.