If you listen to fools, then the mob rules

The title of this post is a line from a song by the British Rock Band, Black Sabbath.  That seems so apt to describe the political situation in this country in general and this state (Andhra Pradesh) in particular.  Everyday the newspaper carries stories of scams of different variety where wily politicians have siphoned off thousands of crores of rupees, or about violence and bandhs and threats.  The TV channels are the same.  The sensationalism that the TV channels resort to would make one think that we are living in a war ravaged part of the world.  While that is sensational the underpinnings of what is happening in this country and Andhra Pradesh are probably portends to what might be in the future.  The Telangana imbroglio continues with no signs of any action or serious thought being given to this issue.  Everybody seems to be waiting for Sonia Gandhi to make up her mind and tell us what the future holds for us.  I cannot help but think, who is Sonia Gandhi to decide?  I am not alluding to her Italian origins when I say that.  I am only questioning as to why one individual has to be given the power and authority to decide the fate of people.

Talking of people, it is very disheartening and sad to see rabble rousing of one set of people against the other and the statements of the Osmania University Students Joint Action Committee that they will start an "Andhra Go Back" movement and throw out the "outsiders" and attack their properties are distressing, to say the least.  What kind of a country are we living in when Indian citizens are not allowed the right to live anywhere of their choice without fear and anxiety?  The beating up of various Government functionaries by TRS leaders is indication of the tendencies of fascism creeping into the so called people's movement.  Buses carrying government employees being attacked and government not being allowed to function are all indications of the fascist tendencies and measures of desperation.  Xenophobia levels are mounting and those are being further fuelled by opportunistic politicians.

I have never named people and I will continue that tradition of mine.  But what I find unbelievable is that an academician has decided to become a politician (nothing wrong with that, but he should quit academics and join politics full time and not do this thing of taking leave occasionally, signing the register and go off on jaunts to politic) and has also decided to every half an opportunity warn various sections of the population of "dire consequences" if they do not fall in line with his dictats.  The man who teaches the virtues of democracy has himself become a "Great Dictator".  Perhaps the greatest cause of sadness should be the TRS strategy of emulating the LTTE and bringing small children into the fray.  A little more than a year ago I had seen the TRS bring scores of little children to the famed Arts College in Osmania University.  I had even made a post about that.  Now in newspapers I see little children carrying Telangana flags and shouting slogans.  This hit me much harder when I saw something a few days ago.

I had been asked to travel to neighbouring Karnataka to deliver a valedictory address for a seminar organized by a government college there.  I had to travel by road to get there and the good people from the college said that I can travel by a taxi and that they would pay the fare.  I found that all along the way, there were problems.  People had parked tractors across the road.  When asked as to why they were doing this since there was no rasta roko, they said that their villages were getting erratic power supply and that they wanted the electricity staff to come to them.  They were being told by the police (who were about 2 in number at every place where this was happening) that the electricity department staff were on strike the people kept saying that is not our problem.  Long queues of traffic were forming on either side of the road and at most places ultimately it was brawls that settled matters.  In one or two places, the striking non-gazetted officers of the Government of Andhra Pradesh had pitched tents in the middle of the highway and only letting small vehicles through from one side.  Trucks were parked for kilometres on both sides and I heard some truckers pleading that they were carrying perishable cargo and that since they did not even belong to this state they should be allowed to go and these people were told that they have to endure hardships if we (the agitators) had to have our demands satisfied.  When I finally reached the venue of the seminar, the time for the valedictory was long gone and only a few students were made to sit and listen to me.  One of the people there pointedly asked me why people in Karnataka had to put up with the Telangana bull shit (his words, not mine) when they had nothing to do with it.  Apparently he was stuck there because his train to Bangalore was cancelled due to the rail roko in the Telangana region.  I can go on about these incidents but these will suffice.

If one looks at the anatomy of the problem one can see the cause of all this.  First of all we have politicians who are mainly goons and thugs and are most avaricious.  They require thousands of crores.  Elections and being elected are for them means to satisfy their hunger for power and money.  They are incapable of understanding finer things such as development, people's aspirations etc.  Then there are the upper and middle classes.  The upper classes are so rich that they will not be affected by anything.  If things take a bad turn here they will fly to some other country till such time things are conducive for their return.  The middle classes are very much like the politicians.  Full of themselves, greedy for more of everything and aspiring to be like the upper classes.  What matters to them is which fashion designer is hogging the lime light, which actor is doing what and they are constantly trying to break into the rarefied portals which are used by the glitteratti.  They are also not satisfied with the pay packets that they have.  Their pay packets already run into several lakhs of rupees but it is not enough.  Armed with this stupidity they are quite happy to declare their support to half baked people like Anna Hazare who thinks he has the magic wand to get rid of corruption from this country.  The support of the middle classes to the Hazares of the world (and the Hazares do not have enough intelligence to tell their front from their rear) is also limited to stupid posts on Facebook or the occasional jaunt to a public place where there will be a candle light vigil while a rock band belts out popular songs which have nothing to do with anything.

It is this attitude that has been widening the gap between the rich and the poor and the properly educated and the improperly educated (and the uneducated).  It is in this gap, in this emptiness that the lumpen elements to society grow.  Profile the lumpen person.  He has no access to anything.  No education, no medicare, no comfort of a home, no comfort of a family, nothing.  It is this lumpen person who becomes the mercenary and the weapon in the hands of the politicians who are anyway thugs themselves.  This lumpen person is least bothered about the fact that children are losing education and their future (for him there is only a present, no future), that people are dying due to neglect (death is an everyday occurrence and does not move him emotionally), that the state is losing thousands of crores of rupees (he does not even understand the numbers and sees no reason to try and understand them) and that the country is suffering (so what is new in that? he would ask since that is the one thing he understands).  The self righteous, self consumed and socially irresponsible rich and middle classes have to pay this price.  When there is a fire raging it is stupid to think that it will only consume the others and not the self.  It is this inability of the afore mentioned classes to see beyond their noses that has landed this country in this quandary.  It is these classes that have proved Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill right.  Gandhi said that there was not enough for greed even though there was enough for every man's need in this world. It is the greedy and avaricious attitude of the rich and the middle classes that has made them numb to other people.  So how can they expect the others to be anything but numb to their problems?  Churchill famously said that after independence India would ultimately be ruled by scoundrels and all sorts of silly fellows.  I suppose I do not have say anything more on that.  So the fools are the rich and the middle classes and therefore the lumpen mob (which is their illegitimate heir) rules.

P.S. Short of time did not proof read.  Mistakes maybe excused.  Thank you. 

This is now an anti poor people's movement not a people's movement

I still cannot understand this continuing strategy of targetting and inconveniencing people in the name of an agitation.  This is sheer idiocy.  Crippling road transport, rail transport, rasta roko are all anti poor.  They are the ones who use State Transport buses to go to various parts of the city or to travel to other places.  With no bus services these people are worst hit.  The most shameless and barefaced of the lot or the doctors striking work.  Only emergency services will be attended to.  So the poor have to wait for their illness to become an emergency before they can get the doctors to attend on them.  I keep saying poor people, because the rich can go to private hospitals, they can travel by their own vehicles and if the destinations are far they can use air transport.  Shamefully a university teacher threatens schools and asks them to close down and yet again the first hit are the government schools where again the poor send their children to.  Pensioners are worried that they may not get their pensions on time.  Not all pensioners are rich. Many of them need their pension on the first of the month to pay their grocery bills and medical bills.  It is sickening to see 5 year old and 10 year old children being made to carry Telangana flags.  Instilling hatred from a tender age to ensure that the future generations will also fight the same filthy battles based in caste, religion, region and any other putrid rubbish that one can think of.  There is no sign of governance anywhere.  Traffic police simply turning a blind eye to people driving on the wrong side of the road, without lights....the list can go on.  Shame on the agitators and shame on the government at the centre and the state.  Using common people to settle political scores and to play games of one up man ship.  I had decided not to blog about this nonsense but each time patience is tested.  A good professor says we know how to make up for lost time.  I too know.  Give marks for anything written or unwritten.  These degree holders only need to go out into the world to know that their degrees have no value.  Maybe they already know that. This has nothing to do with people.  These are games that politicians play.  They simply use the shoulders of the people to fire guns at each other.

Communal Harmony

Its been quite a while since I last made a post on this blog.  It is not as if there have been no issues to talk about. It is just that the same issues keep cropping up again and again and my views on those are pretty much established (at least that is what I hope).  In India we have been seeing this communalism debate cropping up again thanks to the verdict of a court of law sending back issues regarding Narendra Modi's involvement in the pogrom of Gujarat.  Modi has taken that as a clean chit to him and his opponents mainly the Congress have said that it is nothing like that. Meanwhile Facebook is witnessing posting of a number of statistics. Some showing the Congress as being responsible for various communal riots and pogroms while others show even more statistics to say that the BJP is communal.  In all this I have no interest in posting about anything because in India given the pragmatism that has set in to politics and since politics have been emptied of any moral or ethical content it is more than likely that both parties have played the communal card for whatever gains that they may have seen.  I do not want to take sides here because to me being on either of the two sides means ultimately the same.  In India politics are such that there are many parties using different names but doing the same thing to either come into power or to stay in power.

I have in the past posted a link sent by one Elizabeth Potter who said that they wanted all religious and ethnic groups in America living in harmony and without mutual suspicion. I posted that link then because I believe that we are all ultimately one people (human beings) and we have this one planet called Earth which is our home.  My views have not changed.  I believe that there is a necessity for us to collectively look inside ourselves and find that humanity in us all.  Elizabeth Potter has sent me yet another link and wants me to post that on this blog.  I am doing that because like I said we should all learn to live in harmony.  Her cause seems to be consistent with my own out look to harmony.  But like I said the last time, I do not know who she is or what her organization does beyond making these documentaries.  If there are Americans reading this post I request you to come to your conclusions about Ms. Potter and the work she and her friends are doing.

Here is the link she wanted me to share with you all.

http://myfellowamerican.us/

Please see this and decide for yourself.  On the face of it, it seems like a genuine thing but as I said I do not know her personally at all.  Please use your discretion about this.  Thank you.

Hazare, Roy and Thorat - A glimpse into how we Indians think

In response to my previous post about Babu Rao Hazare and the Government of India, one of the readers commented to me that there was no reason for me to think that the right that Hazare has to protest about something is invalid.  So let me just state that I did not and do not intend to take away Hazare's democratic and constitutional rights.  The intent of my post was how Hazare's team is not representative of the desires of the Indian society at large and how the man could not subvert democratic institutions which are manned by elected representatives of the people.  I was posing a rather troublesome question which is "what can we do if our elected representatives have all formed into a cartel and have decided to become corrupt"?  One the one hand the corrupt people are those who have found their place in the parliament through an electoral process and therefore have a right to be where they are but on the other hand they are perpetrating something which is not morally-ethically sustainable.  So the situation is challenging to say the least and Hazare and his team have found a rather easy solution to the problem; create a draconian office called the Lok Janpal and make constitutional institutions such as the judiciary and the parliament subservient to this person.  The powers of the Lok Janpal have been decided not in consultation with any broad consultations with social groups but by a handful of people.

I have been arguing again and again that this is no method of tackling a problem that is so serious that he has consequences for constitutional institutions and constitutional democratic practices.  Here let me quote Hazare's hero Mahatma Gandhi.  Gandhi was trained in legalities and had talked about Satyagraha and Civil Disobedience in the context of unjust or unfair laws in the first place.  He did not advocate either of the two strategies to be taken up on a whim and that is what Hazare is doing.  I have already said that the Government of India's sloppy handling of the situation lent credence to Hazare and a number of sceptics also became believers in his cause and methods once the Government cracked down on him as a preemptive strike.  Suddenly the unreasonable stubbornness of the man seemed like the most appropriate strategy to take on a government that was not serious about doing anything about corruption. Popular thinking rarely goes into the nittie-gritties of constitutional issues and other such technicalities and the government's arrest of Hazare led to people suddenly empathizing with the man.  The government was seen as fascist and I find that accusation hilarious because the subsequent acts of the government proved that it was weak willed and weak kneed and folded up in front of the demands of Team Hazare.  The government was trying to be fascist, I suppose one can say that even to be something like a fascist there needs to be strength and this government which is already beleaguered on many fronts is anything but that.

These happenings should be the ideal catalyst for people who do not support the Government or Team Hazare to exercise their minds and take to people the seriousness and the multifarious ramifications of the actions of both the Government and Team Hazare to the people.  I am one of the people who fall into this category.  I have not been able to suggest any remedies to the situation except that there should be greater deliberation on this issue and more and more people should be involved in the process of finding solutions to make the government act.  But I am no activist.  I have been sitting in front of a computer and typing away my views without any effort to convert them into action and that is certainly a failing in me, and a very big failing at that.  I think I do not want to inconvenience myself too much over something and therefore just prefer to write and do nothing more.  Not the ideal strategy to deal with situations such as these.  But what of Arundhathi Roy?  She is an activist and is "supposedly" an intellectual. But as always she chose to firmly put her foot into her mouth.  Let me clarify.  Ms. Roy has the uncanny ability of attracting controversy out of nowhere.  First of all she sat in a dharna fighting against Capital Punishment at a time when Afzal Guru who had master minded the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament had been sentenced to death.  Surely he was not the first person to be sentenced to death but Ms. Roy preferred to let her views on crime and punishment known at this awkward time.  Then of course she went to Kashmir and said something to the effect of Jammu and Kashmir never being an integral part of India.  

This time too Arundhathi Roy lost no time in coming to the forefront with her unorthodox views and this time it is a greater tragedy.  I say that because when I read the article that she wrote in the Hindu dated 22-8-2011 I thought she made great sense when she attacked Hazare (the freshly minted Saint as she called him) and his methods.  Then she lapsed into her old ways.  She started attacking the support base of Hazare's movement.  She talked at length about how people who were joining his protests were employing means that were very similar to the ones employed during the stir against reservations.  She then wanted to know why it is that only certain kinds of issues get support while others don't and wanted to know why the same enthusiasm is not shown to issues of tribal people and the loss of their livelihoods.  I think the point that she made here should be taken well and I must say that what she said is akin to my belief that this movement has suddenly found support of the normally apathetic middle class because in some way they believe that it is their money that the politicians were siphoning of.  However my disagreement with her is that her mention of means that resembled anti-reservation movements could have been avoided for that takes the focus away from the issue on hand to reservations and who is in the right and wrong about reservations.  It becomes a diversion that takes away any serious debate about the rightness or wrongness of Hazare's team's action.  She also attacked Kabir - the organization fronted by Arvind Kejriwal and claimed that it was being funded by Coca Cola and some other multinationals.  She also mentioned Hazare's RSS/BJP links and his admiration of Narendra Modi and by extension the pogrom that the man had unleashed in Gujarat in 2001-2002.  Then she mentioned that in Ralegan Siddhi the native place of Hazare there is a practicing of caste system and a lack of a Gram Sabha.  By doing this she sounded like Manish Tiwari the Congress spokesman who made the exact same allegations. That is why I said she put her foot in her mouth by sounding like she was using the same methods of diversion that the Government was trying to use.  You could not be faulted if you thought she was doing this on behalf of the UPA and the Congress.

Today I read in the Hindu (23-8-2011) a piece written by Prof. Sukhdeo Thorat the former Chairman of the University Grants Commission and present Professor in the Centre for Studies in Regional Development at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.  He too attacked Hazare from a perspective given by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar where he quoted the great man as having said that Satyagraha and Civil Disobedience had to be given up in an independent India which was having its own constitution and therefore not unjust laws of another country.  I wholeheartedly agree with that.  There is no need for Satyagraha and Civil Disobedience when you are looking at issues being generated in your own country where the rule of law is to be supreme.  The sad thing however, is that the good Professor Thorat used this opportunity to take pot shots at Gandhi and his methods and how they have ultimately undermined the welfare of Dalits in India due to their not having separate electorates, a suggestion of Dr. Ambedkar over which Gandhi disagreed and fasted.  He also dissected the concept of "Bhakti" and talked of it as hero worship (which is an unfortunate and terrible translation of that term) and used this yet again to take swipes at Hazare and Gandhi. He was cautioning that Ambedkar had said that hero worship is bad.  (One question to him which is an aside; Is Dr. Ambedkar not worshipped in India?).  Now all of these maybe valid questions to debate about but to put out all these at this time would only take away the focus from the issue on hand.  Both Ms. Roy and Prof. Thorat raised valid points and in the case of the latter even raised a point about constitutionality of actions and these to me were diluted in other points which seemed to take the focus away from what they were saying.

This whole thing was very much akin to what I had seen on TV.  The day Hazare was arrested NDTV was doing the usual discussions where the whole thing boiled down to a slanging match.  Sanjay Nirupam of the Congress and Rajiv Pratap Rudy of the BJP.  While Sanjay Nirupam was struggling to defend the government and its actions, Rudy tried to score some cheap brownie points by saying that the UPA Government allowed a hunger strike by the Hurriyat groups in Delhi.  One Nivedita Rao who was apparently brought in as a legal expert since she was a Delhi High Court lawyer joined the slanging by dragging Yedyurappa into it.  In doing so she looked like she had been planted there by the government.  Even if she was planted there, there were enough legal points to be discussed without having to fall into this useless talk.  That seems to our problem.  We do not focus on the issue at hand.  We need to talk about everything under the sun including our pet peeves when we would do rather well to only focus on a certain issue.  When I look at people who are called "intellectuals" and they do this global tourism (a phrase often used by my teacher Prof. Harshe to describe the lack of intellectual discipline) I am tempted to share Noam Chomsky's scathing dislike for people who like to think of themselves thus.  The biggest irony in India right now is to be seen in the actions of 26 MLAs (24 from the Congress and 2 from the Telugu Desam Party) who have resigned in support of YS Jaganmohan Reddy who is being prosecuted for corruption and against the CBI mentioning his father the late Dr. YS Rajashekhar Reddy as an accessory to and facilitator of his son's corruption.  On the one side there is an anti-corruption "movement" happening and on the other side there is a pro-corruption attitude from elected representatives of the people.  But again, stranger things are known to have happened.

P.S: Written in great hurry and no time to proof read so please excuse the errors.

Anna Hazare vs the Govt of India: A story that is going all wrong

This is probably one of the most difficult posts that I am attempting to make.  To most that would seem ridiculous.  What is the difficulty all about?  The Government of India is being Fascist and denying the people the right to protest.  So where is the difficulty? Well I wish the issue was as simple as that, but the truth is that it isn't. One clarification before I proceed further.  I am NOT a supporter of what the Government and the Congress Party are doing.  Now that this particular thing is out of the way let me just get on with it.  Those of you who are familiar with my blog I have always argued that Team Hazare does not constitute Civil Society.  I will not repeat that here except for one crucial point which may figure further in the post.  Hazare and his team have not taken into consideration or consultation a really wide cross section of the people to qualify to be called the torch bearers of Indian society.  It has been an esoteric group of less than ten people who have drafted the Jan Lokpal Bill and the main instruments of the drafting have been Shanthi Bhushan and Prashant Bhushan and I am not fully convinced of their intentions. The same goes for Ramdev who sidles with this group for his own sake.  While Arvind Kejriwal may have been a successful activist who was involved in the movement that led to the passage of the Right to Information Act, we all know that it has already been rendered toothless.  As an aside let me tell you that Pakistan passed the Right to Information Act, before India did and that too during the regime of Parvez Musharaf.  

My reference to the Right to Information Act is to point out that movements can demand something, find it and then see it lose its teeth over a period of time.  In one of my earlier posts I had written that why are we assuming that the Lokpal will be immune to things like corruption.  Is it that all other offices have been created with the intention of ultimately making them corrupt?  The Lokpal is an ombudsman and offices of ombudsman in different spheres of public activity.  Banking, insurance claims, content of newspapers have all got ombudsmen overseeing their functioning.  But very rarely does anyone know what can be an issue that can be taken to an ombudsman and how to go about doing it.  There are two issues that are facilitating corruption in India. First is the nature of the politics of the country and the second is nature of the bureaucracy.  This may seem like an irrelevant interlude in my discussion of the Lokpal, but the fact is that they are most crucial to understanding why I say that movements see changes that become impotent very soon.

First let us deal with nature of politics.  The first thing that we must understand is that all Indian politics is now money and muscle.  The latter facilitates the acquisition of the former.  How many people who have neither can make any impact on Indian politics?  Politicians need henchmen who will execute things for them.  The execution can sometimes be literal as it happened yesterday in the case of lady Right to Information activist in Bhopal when she was on her way to protest against corruption. There are threats of literal execution if someone becomes a thorn in someone else's flesh.  The Lok Satta Party in Andhra Pradesh which was launched with fanfare in Andhra Pradesh as a credible alternative to the Congress and Telugu Desam Party has sunk without a trace except for its high profile chief Dr. Jaiprakash Narayan who makes noises every once in a while.  He too gets some media attention due to his having derived some clout and identity of having been an IAS officer before he resigned and took a plunge into politics.

And that brings me to the bureaucracy.  Red tape perhaps is an understatement.  Several times in my life I have seen people not helping someone even when they have no work to do.  The Indian psyche is strange.  People do not help others when they can and that is most evident in the bureaucracy.  People in the bureaucracy have a different understanding of the expression public servant.  It is to be understood normally as a government functionary who serves the people.  In India though a public servant is one who is served by the public.  People join the bureaucracy with the intention of wielding power and minting money.  All offices of government are misused for that purpose.  This bureaucracy is the interface between the people and the government.  The interface and the end are out of the reach of people.  What makes politicians, bureaucrats and film stars one class of people is the fact that they are there because of the people but yet are inaccessible to those very people.  So what can you expect from a system that is constructed solidly on moral corruption.  Can one fight economic corruption when the whole system and its fabric is tainted by moral corruption.

That is why I am sceptical of Hazare and his team's efforts.  Why are they targetting only economic corruption?  Why are they not trying to cleanse politics first?  Why are they not launching grass root level movements and target panchayat and district level officials and politicians?  It is true what the Prime Minister said about not having a magic wand to cleanse the system at one ago.  But why is the government behaving like a fascist one by denying Hazare the right to protest?  In fact, the government by arresting Hazare made him a hero and suddenly elevated his status.  The means adopted fall in line with what I have said here.  Intimidation and threats.  First they tried to say that the man was corrupt himself.  Then they used police force. There must be better ways of dealing with a man who is being unreasonable and stubborn.   This has now become a battle between two parties both of which claim to represent people, while in reality people are just bystanders.  Even when members of Team Hazare visit various parts of the country, they behave like superstars.  Therefore I am not convinced of them or their intent.  But I am convinced about the government.  It is obviously senseless.  Yesterday's events have proved that much.  That it is also shielding corruption is perhaps the world's worst kept secret.  Here there is no denying its transparency.  Otherwise how else will one explain Kapil Sibal's blatant statement of zero sum situation when the 2G scam broke out in the country?  My only certain conclusion is this: the country will not change until and unless there is a reform more fundamental than the one that is being suggested by Team Hazare.  Irrespective of what happens to the Hazare movement, you can be sure that the fruits of that will be available only to other politicians and their support structure. The common people will see and feel no difference, for in their lives there will be none.

P.S.  I wrote this in a bit of a rush.  I have also not proof read it.  Please excuse all the errors that you encounter, except the sensical ones.  Thank you.

Time to renew some pledges and discard feelings of antipathy to fellow countrymen

It is India's 64th Independence Day today and I take this opportunity to wish all Indians living in India or abroad a very happy Independence Day.  While you celebrate, also look back over your shoulder and see what the last 100+ years have been for India.  Please see the sacrifices upon which the nation and the country have been built. Please pay homage to those martyrs who gave up their lives so that we their progeny can leave in freedom, peace and happiness.  Please realize the importance of freedom and peace that we as people of this country enjoy and don't take them for granted.  These were not always available to the people of this great nation.  I know I am sounding pontifical but there is a reason behind that.

When I was a student of B.A at the Nizam College in the 1980s, one of the subject I studied was English Literature.  In those days the first year of B.A had poetry as the paper to be studied and one of the poems that we were supposed to study was "Lines written a few miles above the Tintern Abbey" by Wordsworth.  I am not quoting this to get into an argument of the quality of Wordsworth's writing but to illustrate a poignant point he made in this poem.  We have always been taught that William Wordsworth was Romantic who wrote poems about nature.  It took me many years to realize the true import of the word Romanticism and the meanings that it threw up.  It was then that I understood what exactly the great poet meant when he wrote "behind all this beauty, I can hear the still sad music of humanity".  Brilliant man this Wordsworth.  He describes the beauty of nature as seen from a few miles over the Tintern Abbey, but tells us that behind the beauty is a sadness.

Today when I look at my beloved country I have very similar feeling.  It is undoubtedly a great country with an enviable past, a country that gave a form of mathematics that defies imagination; I see a country that saw many great cultures flourish due to its openness and ability to embrace anything and everything.  The other day I read a piece written by an Chief Justice of the Indian Supreme Court in the Hindu.  Please treat the other day as a Hyderabadi would.  It could be anything from the day before yesterday to the year before last.  This must have been some months ago.  I apologize for not remembering the name of the said person but he was someone from the not so recent past as far as Chief Justices of the Indian Supreme Court go. After his retirement this man had taken it upon himself to research deeply into India's past and he came up with the conclusion that India centuries ago was what America is today.  I humbly request you to not jump to the conclusion that I am arguing that India is better than America since it was many centuries ago what the latter is today. This conclusion is simply this.  America is today home to so many people of different cultural backgrounds and is still the destination of many people the world over, Indians included (I do not think the downgrading of America's creditworthiness by Standard and Poor will change the aspirations of going and living there, especially for Indians and people from Andhra Pradesh).  What the writer was saying is that people from all over the world came to India and made it their home and even more remarkably they forgot their original homes.  The Parsis in India and the Muslims are a prime example of this.

Now look at the identity called Indian.  When someone says I am Indian we don't know what his/her religion is straightaway, we do not know what language is her/his mother tongue, we do not know which region of the country she/he belong to.  What we know is that this person is Indian even if she/he speaks a language, or practices a religion which is different from what many others do. That is truly the most remarkable thing about India and being Indian.  I know some cynics will chip in with an argument that you can make out a person's region, language and religion on the basis of their features and their attire.  That maybe true in some instances but not in all.  Take me for example. I am today a Telugu speaking Indian from Hyderabad.  Yet at one time the family on my father's side were Kannada speaking people who came to the Warangal region more than a century ago and today very few people in my extended family speak Kannada.  My mother's family were originally Kannada speaking people who later became Marathi speaking people and finally Telugu speaking people. When people look at my dad, they say they cannot make out which region he is from or what his native tongue is.  When people look at me they see a Punjabi and are usually shocked to learn that I am a Telugu.  My wife is half Bengali (father) and half British (mother).  When people look at her they think that she is Malayalee, some have thought that she is Muslim, others just say she does not look like anyone in particular.  But when her parentage is revealed people are surprised; they say she does not look either like a Bengali or like a Britisher.  The point is while some can be identified as what they are, others cannot be.  In either case the identity which is primary is Indian.

Time for me to tell you why I feel like Wordsworth did when he wrote the poem Tintern Abbey. Just as he heard the sad music of humanity behind all the natural beauty that he was seeing, I too hear a sad music when I see what my country is today.  The beauty, grandeur and openness are all there but there is that sad music too.  Perhaps if we had heeded what the great Mahatma Gandhi said, this country would have been a better place.  India lives in its villages, said the great man.  He wanted Indians to lead a life of simplicity, austerity so that everyone could share everything.  He called that Trusteeship.  After the attainment of Independence we killed the great man and along with him his ideals and wisdom.  The same man that was venerated the world over is now seen as a joke by his own country people.  The very people who were recipients of his services today disown him.  We killed him and his legacy.  With the vanishing of the great freedom fighting generation, we have seen the waning of the great emotions and philosophy that were espoused by that generation.

That generation wanted us to be united and live in freedom, peace and prosperity.  But what do we do today? We divide ourselves on every possible lines. North vs South, East vs West, Hindi vs Non Hindi, Hindu vs Muslim, Aryan vs Dravidian, Fair skin vs Dark skin, Upper Caste vs Lower Caste, Sub caste vs Sub caste, and any other thing that one can think of.  We are nation that is increasingly seeing cracks and schisms appearing among us.  Some of them have already become fragments.  Why is this happening?  This has everything to do with our politicians.  Wily, greedy and with the motive to serve themselves at any cost they have and continue to play with the emotions of the people.  In one of my previous posts I have said that the British probably did not divide us.  We were divided already, they just exploited the divisions. During the freedom movement great people like the Mahatma bridged the divides but once the event was over we are lapsing back to our divisive ways.  

The caste system in India is one of the main reasons behind why the nation is always so ready to divide itself.  The caste system is not a product of the ancient order that the cosmology of many thousands of years ago.  It is the chicanery of Brahmins who perpetuated this for purposes of power.  Gandhi was right when he said what "Sanatana Dharma" stood for was different from what he called "Brahminical Religion".  From this schism emanate every other schisms.  Caste system has now found its way into Sikhism, Islam and Christianity.  Our politicians have exploited these divisions to their advantages.  They have also carefully created and are still creating newer schisms to ensure that they remain relevant.  Political leadership now strategises politics as companies would markets. The other very important thing is the uneven distribution of primary social goods (I have borrowed that phrase from John Rawls).  Primary social goods are access to good and quality education, nutritious food, a comfortable and clean environment and hygiene.  These are not properly distributed leading to the dis-empowering of entire communities.  India today does not have the problem of unemployment.  It has the problem of unemployability.  There are legions of people who are armed with useless degrees. Useless, because while the student has been given a degree she/he has been taught nothing.  The academic mafiosi have for years concealed their incompetence by routinely passing students who did not deserve to pass. India has jobs and people looking for jobs but not having the competencies that those jobs require.  We are creating paradoxes such as these.  

The middle classes are quite happy and contented to ape the West.  Reality for them is the number of outlets of Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonalds in their city, the number of pubs that are there for spending their disposable incomes, the number of stores that sell Levis, Lee and Wrangler jeans, and the number of posh hotels like Westin, Novotel and the Marriot.  Some friends have created their own index of development. A city's development and haute culture are to be measured in terms of the number of women who are willing to expose their skin.  The Indian middle class has been irresponsible.  It has forgotten to see the number of people who are going without education, nutrition and hygienic environment.  We are creating enclaves of prosperity that are surrounded by slums caught in abject poverty.  This if not remedied through appropriate measures will in conjunction with the schisms originally created by Brahminical Religion will bring down the nation.  It is for the middle classes and the rich to right the wrongs.  It is time to share the primary social goods and lend a helping him to those who need it.  It is time to remember what Gandhi said. There is enough in this world for every man's need but not for every man's greed.  Let us understand the divisive strategies of our politicians and discard them, for they build feeling of antipathy towards our own countrymen. Let us pledge to throw out that teacher who is uneducated, throw out the corrupt and dirty politician, throw out the casteist, throw out all those who foment religious intolerance and hatred; let us forge a nation yet again built on equality, solidarity, love, compassion and humanity. Jai Hind.  

P.S:  Have not proof read.  Please excuse errors of syntax, semantics and spelling.  They are inadvertent. 

Of games of war and the loss of innocent lives

Surprising as it may seem, I usually have some idea of where I am going with my blog posts.  I must say that today I have no clue how or where this post of mine would end.  But I know what has brought it on.  Today The Hindu carried a story, a very poignant one.  It involves an email sent by an ex Pakistan Air Force officer by the name of Qais M Hussain to the Farida Singh the daughter of Jahangir Engineer whose airplane that the Pakistani officer shot down during the 1965 war fought between India and Pakistan.  The email tells the story of how Mr. Qais was forced by his superiors to shoot down the unarmed 5 seater plane being flown by Jahangir Engineer, that had strayed into the Rann of Kutch on the Pakistan side.  Mr. Qais tells the story of how he was forced to shoot the said plane despite Mr. Engineer flapping the wings of his aircraft indicating that he was asking for mercy.  Though Mr. Qais carried out the orders given to him, he could not live peacefully with what had happened.  For years he tried to contact the families of the people who had lost their lives due to the unarmed aircraft being shot down.  Due to the efforts from officers on the Indian and the Pakistani side Mr. Qais Hussain was finally able to track down the family of Mr. Jahangir Engineer.  Mr. Engineer's wife had passed away in the interregnum between the incident and now and his elder daughter who is apparently blind lives in the USA.  The other daughter Mrs. Farida had married a pilot who went by the name of Mr. Singh.  Mr. Qais Hussain wrote this email explaining what had actually transpired and how sorry he was about it.  Needless to say this was an act of great moral courage on Mr. Qais' part.

Equally poignant or perhaps more is the reply written by Mrs. Farida Singh.  She said "we are but pawns in this game of war" and accepted with great grace and dignity the apology offered by Mr. Qais.  But what really caught my attention was the last line of her reply where she said "we were after all at one time one nation".  This exchange got me thinking about something that a nephew of mine who served in the Indian Army once told me.  He was posted at the border of India and Pakistan somewhere in Kashmir and there was a small stream flowing between two small hills and on either side of the flowing stream on each of the hills were the Indian and Pakistani camps.  The source of water for both sides was the flowing stream.  Therefore there was an understanding that at a certain given time of the day, both sides would come out with white flags and make their way to the stream to fill up whatever whatever they required.  This was a time when there was an exchange of pleasantries and the soldiers addressed each other as "Saathi" (friend).  My nephew told me that one day he was told by a Pakistani soldier that the two sides were like a family since they had only each other for company.  After the exchange of such talk, both sides would go back to their respective stations and raise a red flag and commence hostilities immediately.  My nephew kept saying that apart from the usual jingoism between the armed forces on both sides, there was no real understanding about the pointless shelling and infiltration.

I once again draw your attention to what Mrs. Farida Singh wrote in her reply to Mr. Qais Hussain when she alludes to the fact that both sides were one at a time in the not so distant past.  I have believed in that myself. When I once made a post about how Indian and Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims had more in common with each other than they had with Saudi Arabia or Indonesia one friend said that that may have been the case at the time of partition but now there is nothing in common.  When I once argued that people irrespective of religion spoke Punjabi in some parts of Pakistan and India and Bengali in West Bengal and Bangladesh another friend drew my attention to the difference in dialects (he specifically cited Mirpuri). Political haranguing and rabble rousing on both sides have made cultures different but there was a time when all people across the Western side and the Eastern side of India lived together, peacefully.  Acts of war were perpetrated by the various kings and sultans who ruled the land.  But most people crave peace, not war.  Anyone who disagrees with this argument stand to hover dangerously close to endorsing the idea that Hitler and Mussolini represented the true desires of their people and therefore all Germans and Italians were Nazis and Fascists.

Political leaderships when taken in totality the world over have done more harm than good to the world.  They have conquered, plundered and driven wedges between people all over the world.  The politician thrives in that space between two human beings by simply first converting that space into a difference and then building a wall so that the more gentle and civic humanity that is their in every human being is rendered impotent and aggression legitimated.  Hardliners who call themselves realists have successfully brainwashed the world into believing that we should all divide ourselves on any basis that we can.  Colour of skin, eyes, hair, and language.  In dividing ourselves we have also divided lands and always remain ready to fight each other.  The sad thing is that it is the army that bears the brunt of this.  So I remember this wonderful line from the song Us and Them by Pink Floyd whose lyrics were written by Roger Waters.  "Forward he cried, from the rear, and the front ranks died, the Generals sat and the lines on the map moved from side to side".  It is because that people like Roger Waters, John Lennon and the great and peerless Mahatma Gandhi who have dared to challenge the realist and dared to dream of a benign world order that there is still some sanity left in this world. Take such people away, and there are many of them, the dreams will die and along with them humanity and the world itself.

P.S: Not proof read.  Please bear with me.  Thank you.