jabdakhata

The point which I am trying to drive here is that if Indian media in general behaves in a non discriminatory fashion, it would be easier to establish just and fair society. However by indulging in witch hunt in some cases while deliberately ignoring others, the media is making a mockery of itself. Any form of intolerance and hatred is a curse to the civil society and media should not filter out or highlight incidents based on their own bias. Any such attempt creates more polarization and hostility because everybody can perceive unfairness and lack of objectivity in evaluating current situation. Several cases in points had been in the past that of banning of "The Vinci Code" movie in response to protests from some religious groups, banning of "Satanic Verses" and the death threat to Salman Rushdie, banning of some websites because apparently they treaded on sentiments of specific communities etc. In all such cases media at best played a passive role, at worst tried j...

I recently had an email exchange with Mr. Barun Roy, columnist in Business Standard, in response to my letter to one of his articles. Mr. Roy is one of the few columnists whose writings I greatly admire. Dear Sir, The article, A Prison for Mr. Husein by Barun Roy is a well written article and I can understand the author's anguish and also empathize with him on the prevalent situation. It is unfortunate that we have to lose a person of the stature of M.F. Husein owing to intolerance with the subject of his artwork. However with due respect, I would like to point out one dimension which is missing here. The Indian media have in the past raised issues pertaining to intolerance and gagging of artistic freedom, but some instances have either been deliberately ignored or been downplayed. One notable case here is that of Ms. Taslima Nasrin, who was driven out of India, was attacked in Hyderabad by MIM vandals, and is still under death threat from fundamentalists. In all...

Casteism is much vilified world over and rightly so and this obnoxious system is associated with only Hinduism and again rightly so, because the priestly class among Hindus usurped all privileges for themselves, ably aided by kings who in return got the favour of “god men”, misinterpreted scriptures and developed a system which only favoured their own interest and let the corrupt system continue ensuring miseries for thousands. The Hindu priestly classes were no different from priestly classes in other religions who pursued practices like burning heretics on funeral pyre or accepting Indulgence in medieval period. The power hungry priestly classes and kings (of all religions) came together depriving common people of their belief and power and keeping them poor and wretched through a system based on discrimination and fear. The caste system is a by product of thousands of years of domination by a privileged few over ignorant many, of destroying the later's self confidence and self w...

The so called very important persons in India, notably high placed Government officials and politicians are the neo feudal lords (as was discussed in one of my earlier blogs). Today the honourable Chief Justice of Andhra Pradesh's convoy passed by my car. Police had vacated the roads for his highness, but somehow I was left, so the convoy overtook me and I had to give way to his highness. Otheriwse he would probably have put me behind bars (hopefully this blog does not consititute a contempt of court as I have nothing personal against CJAP). Further downstream I had the misfortune of meeting CM's convoy. A huge police force was deployed to allow the convoy to pass (note the colossal wastage of tax payer's money) and one constable did his duty so well ( My wife quipped that he was almost lying down on the road to prevent any car from getting in the convoy's way). He probably got a pat in the back from his seniors for being so loyal. So much for the democratic India where...

How are success and satisfaction related? Is there any linkage? Are the people who are successful, really happy? These are some of the questions that come to the minds of people. The answer for this is of course, within us. First, success and satisfaction are not linked. Satisfaction here stands for “happiness”. In the epic Mahabharata, Dharma (the God of righteousness and virtue) asked king Yudhisthira, “Who is happy?” Yudhisthira’s answer was that a person who does not have any debt, who is not abroad and at the end of the day is able to get his share of meals, is happy. Now this is definitely not a modern definition of happiness as our desires and wants have grown manifold since Yudhisthira’s era. Therefore we are happy when our needs and desires are fulfilled. But are we really happy when we reach the pinnacle of success, when all our endeavors bear fruit? Are we happy when we get what we want? Of course not! Happiness, defined and measured in terms of wants and desires is as elu...

There was an edit in one leading English newspaper that we need to “engage Pakistan in an innovative way.” Engaging Pakistan is a phrase which is now being used Ad Nauseum. This phrase was started by US political class, notably the friends of Pakistan among democrats (who are also responsible for bringing in Kerry Luger bill for wasting billions of dollar and putting further strain on an already strained US economy and fuelling its joblessness). Now “engaging Pakistan” had become instant hit with “secular liberals” in India. Since even they are a little tired of this oft repeated phrase, there is a new twist to this – “Engaging Pakistan in an innovative way.” Nobody knows for sure what engaging Pakistan means, nobody has even faintest idea as to how innovative could one be in dealing with a terrorist and a rogue nation which has got itself caught in a perpetual and vicious downward slope of failure and violence. Pakistan is an epitome of what intolerance stands for where religious min...

Life has many interesting dimensions. The reason why they are interesting is that you can draw so many parallels and analogies. One of the analogies is, for instance, stock market. Like stock market life has ups and downs, and the volatilities may vary from person to person and from period to period. For some periods life is drab, boring, monotonous, which means very low volatility or extreme form of stability, while at other times it is stormy, with extreme volatility, so that it gets difficult to cope with. The other aspect is that like stock market life is influenced by so many factors in the external environment – relationships, economy, weather, many of which are beyond our control. The ups and downs are temporary phases, every upswing will pave the way for a downswing and vice versa, only the period of fluctuation may vary. Like individual stocks in a portfolio, the events in a life can move in different directions at different phases. While some may move up, others may come down...

Remember Manjunath Shanmugam, the IIML graduate and IOC officer who was murdered in cold blood by a petrol pump owner because he brought on them charges of corruption? Yesterday he received another blow, this time from Indian Judicial system, a system so arcane and dismal that it cannot deliver justice in 5 years (and we all know cases normally drag on for a lifetime in Indian courts). Earlier in March 2007 district sessions judge (DSJ) Lakhimpur Kheri, S M A Abidi had given death sentence to the chief architect of the crime, Manu alias Pawan Mittal, and the rest of the gang were given life sentence. Honest people were relieved that there is still some sanity in judicial system. But now in December 2009, the Lucknow bench of Allahabad High Court felt that the crime did not belong to the “rarest of the rare cases” and therefore does not justify death sentence, they commuted it to life imprisonment. Not only that, the high court has freed two of the accused. These guys will obviously f...

History is full of ironies. The fight for separate statehood so as to gain identity, which is happening in Andhra Pradesh whereby as usual unscrupulous politicians are taking advantage of ignorance and thoughtlessness of ordinary people, is a mirror image of what happened 105 years ago in Bengal. The partition of Bengal by British had a hidden agenda, of diving and ruling a state which was leading the voice of dissent and was getting more and more vociferous in its demand for a national identity, even though the justification was administrative convenience of smaller regions. The proposed partition idea bounced back as people of Bengal found their voices, rose united against the proposed division and was largely led by great intellectuals of the stature of Rabindranath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo Ghosh (later sage Aurobindo of Auroville in Puducherry). It was a mass movement against partition which also gave a fillip to the hitherto dormant nationalist movement called “swadeshi” movement...

Ruchika Girhotra was a young promising tennis player who was molested by a high profile director general of police, S.P.S Rathore . The incident took place in 1991, 19 years earlier. The story does not end here. It was witnessed by one of the friends of the victim who promptly informed her family. The said police official (?) got panicked and left no stones unturned to intimidate and humiliate the victim’s family. As per media report her brother was tortured in police prison, the family was threatened with dire consequences, her father’s house was eventually bought off by the offender’s lawyer, rowdies were dispatched to instill fear. Eventually three years down the line the victim, unable to bear the pressure, committed suicide and her family was in ruins. But the friend’s family carried on with the fight despite all threats, abuses and attempts to retrain it from its strive for justice. 19 years later that same DGP was convicted of the crime even though he stands defiant and unre...

Bhopal gas tragedy enters into its 25th anniversary. A lot has been written on it. Suffice to say that nothing will alleviate the pain, misery and horrendous suffering of people caused by Union Carbide (now Dow Chemicals). The disaster left around 4000 dead and another 500,000 badly affected. They are dying a slow death everyday. The ground water has been polluted by the incident to such an extent that people are drinking toxic water for the past 25 years. Governments and political parties have done nothing, except taking advantage. People of India have not shrunk in horror at the extent of the calamity, they have just accepted it as another ill fate. But the most unholy response came from Dow. The paltry amount given to every injured was around INR 25000 and to every dead person's kin it was INR 62000. As if Indian lives are so cheap. It seems that there was also a statement from Dow that the "amount would be sufficient for Indians". Now isn't that called arrogance...

People are angry. Students are angry. They are calling strikes on flimsy grounds, burning buses, breaking glasses. They don't know the real cause of anger, all political causes are just hogwash. They just want to give a vent to their frustration, with everything, the civic apathy, administrative failure, corruption, poverty, joblessness. These are commonplace in India and so are the expressions of anger. People will say, give it sometime and the tide of bitterness will subside. This may go, but they will begin again with renewed vigour elsewhere, for apparently some other cause. Remember the mushal parva in Mahabharata! People were generally angry and fighting without any reason among themselves and a stoic lord Krishna was watching. The lord did nothing to save his own clan. He said that this was inevitable. Hope this is not the same case with us.

This week marked the 20th anniversary of Berlin wall fall which tore asunder the iron curtain. Ironically the same week saw the communists in India seeing their last bastions crumbling and falling. The communists lost in all elections in West Bengal and Kerala, considered as their fortresses. The top brass of Indian communists were busy holidaying in Europe and Brazil, travelling in business class and sipping cognac ('course all in the name of poor and underprivileged, they were drinking the health of poor peasants who just booted them out). In West Bengal they have managed to wrest one seat from poor Congress, other wise the TMC juggernaut seems invinsible and Mamata is going from triumph to triumph and she is wisely consolidating her gains. Atta girl! Therefore communists are finally restricted to a small territory called Tripura, and there is still North Korea. China has ceased to be a communist state 30 years back and they are retaining the name only to keep democracy at bay. C...

I was going through letters of Swami Vivekananda and was pleasantly surprised to see the depth of his thought process in management principles. We need to understand that we are talking about 19th century end, when scientific management principles were still at the stage of infancy. And nobody in India was aware of principles of modern management, let alone practice them. Here are some exerpts from Vivekananda's letter to Swami Brahmanand written on 1st August 1898 from Srinagar- No job can be learnt without practical experience, theory itself is not sufficient ->we all know how important practical experience is nowadays There should always be backups, if somebody goes away, others should be ready to take his work up -> its a perfect example of risk management Nobody works unless there is interest and motivation. Everybody should be given work which would interest him/her. With interest comes dedication.->This is the cornerstone of Herzberg's theory of motivation which...

No, I am not talking about the dictionery definition. I am simply talking about the inability to accpet a different point of view - be it in religion, politics or in any sphere of life. Intolerance is a great divider, it creates an insurmountable barrier. A greater degree of intolerance is called fanaticism, whereby human beings forget all rational logical thoughts and call it ego or brainwash, that takes over senses completely. Under such a circumstance man can kill, steal or do anything to establish his idea's superiority over others. We are all intolerant, to a greater or lesser extent, racism is a form of intolerance. Come to think of it, even marital discords are nothing but intolerance. We create enemies because we are intolerant. Office politics is nothing but intolerance - of perhaps the success of a colleague. Now what is tolerance? Tolerance is the ability to see other points of view, to accept facts as facts and discard dogmas, to acquire the wisdom to understand that ...

One girl stood steadfastly against her assailants, dreaded Lashkar e Taiba militants who are either revered or feared by most in India, more so in Jammu and Kashmir. Her name is Rukshana and she is only 18 years old. She attacked the AK47 totting terrorists (atleast three of them including their commander, a notorious terrorist), with an axe. She and her brother together managed to snatch away the guns and kill one of the terrorists, and injuring others. No human rights organization (who so painstakingly defend any terrorist killed), came to her aid. No so called Kashmiri organization came forward in her support. She is now living in constant fear, away from her home and village, of brutal revenge, and her home was attacked only yesterday. LeT, grow up, we are not afraid of bastards like you. We know that deep down you guys are nothing but a bunch of cowards who just rely on bombs and AK47 to get their "heaven". And Indian Government, learn from this teeage girl how to combat...

Alfred Nobel must be turning in his grave. The Nobel peace prize is gotten by who? The president of a country which is engaged in warfare in many corners of the world, who talks about disarmament for other countries but holds a huge stockpile of nuclear himself, who has so far only tall talks and nice speeches to offer to the world. Ok, the justification is, unlike his predecessor, he has offered possibilities of peace in some corners of the world whose names his average countrymen cannot even pronounce properly. Big Deal! May be I am judging this person too harshly, may be he has willingness and ability and also sincerity, but shouldn't a person first deliver and then get recognition? Well, lets not forget his humanitarian gesture of 3 billion USD aid to a country which is the epicentre of terrorism and which has a history of proliferation as well as well known for its treachery and duplicity, not to say about using the external funds to forment terror attacks against its neighbou...

The second story goes like this - In a town there lived a small time businessman who was doing poorly in business and therefore was in dire financial strait. That businessman prayed to the God and that night he had a dream that a monk had come to visit his house, but instead of entertaining his guest, he took a stick and hit the monk on the head. Immediately the monk fell down and got converted to a heap of gold. In the morning when he woke up he was still deliberating on the significance of his dream when his barber came for his daily shave. Just then there was a knock on the door and when the person opened the door, a monk came inside. Just then he remembered about his dream, took a rod and hit the monk on head. The monk fell flat and immediately there was a heap of gold coins in his place. The businessman gave his barber some gold and sworn him to secrecy. But this incident dishevelled the barber. He too went hom and began thinking, if by hitting a monk he gets so many gold coins, I...

In this series I am going to tell a story from ancient literature and draw the learnings in our professional and personal lives from the same. These stories are mostly taken from Panchatantra or "5 lessons" and Hitopadesha or "Good Advices". The first story (from Panchatantra) goes like this- In a large pond there used to live four fishes among others. These four fishes had some peculiarities. The first one was capable of sniffing, scanning and monitoring the environment and forecast and analyze trends based on changes in the environment. We will call this fish the "Astute Observer". The second one lacked the talent of scanning and forecasting, but he had a wonderful ability to scurry into action whenever a need arose. He used to devise a strategic plan and immediately acted on the plan. We will call him the "Intelligent Actor". The third one was neither an analyst like the first nor as intelligent and active as the second. However, he was extrem...

The rebranding exercise at the cost of tax payers for department of post is going on for quite some times. They have revamped some of their post offices from dilapidated shacks to decent looking outposts in association with Deutsche Post. But more things change, more they remain same. Has anything changed at the service level? simply nothing. Indian bureaucracy is one of the most inefficient and most corrupt, esp. at the lower levels and India Post is a very symbol of the same. I had speed posted one RTI application to income tax department twice, based on pin codes given for their Hyderabad office in their associated websites. Every Tom Dick and Harry knows the location of Income tax office, but not India post. The speed posts came back twice, after roaming around the city for a few days, the reason cited was "insufficient address". The post offices whose stamp was marked on the envelope were stones throw away from the Income Tax office and yet they did not know the address....

Does anybody remember who Nevil Chamberlain was? Oh yes! He is synonymous with a foreign policy of appeasement and weakness. To the uninitiated Chamberlain was a former British priminister, who signed the Munich agreement in Germany in 1938 conceding Sudetenland to Hitler, overlooking and overruling the concerns of Czechoslovakia republic. He praised Hitler and Musolini and was too anxious to buy peace with Germany, even at the expense of Czechs and Austrians. Probably he was handicapped by his domestic problems, probably he had a wishful thinking that by placating Germany and Hitler a war could be avoided, or probably he truly believed that Hitler and Musolini were gentlemen who did break agreements and Sudetenland would be the end to Germany's ambitions in Europe. Well, history shows that whatever his intentions were, however good a man he was, he was wrong. Similarly we have a good man at our helm, who is anxious to buy peace with Pakistan and China, to placate the "wounded...

You think Feudalism was in vogue only in Europe during the dark ages and in the early medieval period? well, you are mistaken. Feudalism is back with a vengeance in today's India, the modern India, an India which competes with China and other tiger economies and aspire to become a world leader. This feudlism does not have explicit feudal lords and serfs, but have a class of patricians and plebians like that of ancient Rome. The patricians are the privileged classes, while plebians are not so privileged. Now who are these patricians? In modern Indian context they are the politicians in power, the ministers, the bureaucrats or the adminstrative services guys, the big businessmen and corporate honchos, the big media men and of course, the celebrities - film actors, cricket gods etc. These feudal lords, though they belong to diverse sections of the society and may have different backgrounds and circumstances, share a common thread, their disdain for the prosaic, mundane common men and ...

Tagore had traveled all around Europe, middle East, America, Russia, Japan, South America, in short, almost the whole world in the 20s, and 30s of last century. He has written lucid accounts of his travels and perspectives. We need to remember that during this time Europe was going through a major crisis. Communism was taking its root and Stalin's iron hand was almost established in East Europe. First world war was just over and Europe was still struggling to get out of the mess. In Italy and Germany fascists were fast gaining grounds. Persecution of Jews had taken legitimacy in many parts of Europe. British Empire was getting increasingly shaken, esp. in India by a thin, lean shrewd ascetic called Gandhi. Middle East was probably flourishing, Palestine crisis not yet created fully, Shahs were ruling Persia with a mighty fist and secularism was at its height there. Turkey had newly tasted democracy with Ottoman empire lying in pieces and Mustafa Kemal having established his authori...

It is the worst of time, an epoch of incredulity, age of foolishness, season of darkness, winter of despair...as far as new LPG connection is concerned. I always thought that getting a gas connection would be a cakewalk. That was my expereince in 2003, when I walked into the nearby Hindustan Petroleum dealership which had opened recently in Madhapur, and got a connection. The mistake I did was returning this connection before I went abroad. After coming back to India in 2007, well, it proved to be a herculean effort to get a new connection. Almot all dealers I approached - HP, Indane, BPCL, told me that the minimum wait period to get a new connection is 1 year after enlisting. Some even refused to enlist my name saying plainly that its of no use. I had to take up a private connetion from Shakti gas at a much higher price, but the service proved to be unreliable. So I finally gave it up. Private gas players are mostly out of business owing to absence of any level playing field. Therefor...

Universal education is a concept fairly close to my heart. Of late, there has been a lot of deliberation from various quarters on universal education access. The major problem is the access to quality education. Not every institute or school has great faculty or infrastructure. Second thing to ponder upon is whether we are doing it right. Education in today's world is career oriented which creates competition and when the demand for few lucrative careers outstrips supply there is bound to be a fierce competition at various levels, resulting in rat race. These factors, competition, fear of failure, lack of proper education and of course the affordability part of it results in large scale school dropout, suicidal tendencies and building up of stress in the society. Also a large number of people do not have proper access to education. I think the access problem is easier to solve than anything else, leveraging technology. Esp. since mobile phones are now ubiquitous, once 3G comes thro...