jabdakhata

It is a matter of shame that the good tourist places in India are so inaccessible from other parts of the country. Take for instance Ladakh. There is no train station. Only a few flights can go to Leh. Kudremukh in Karnataka is not connected by any train. Most of the hill stations do not have any associated train stations and it takes a lot of patience to plan for travel. Many coastal areas are inaccessible by train or flight.Again even if there are train stations, the trains are not available unless you book couple of months in advance. Roads are mostly pathetic and the operators overcharge. Therefore off the beaten tracks remain off the beaten and the few accessible ones are overcrowded, filthy and overrated. A few others suffer from non development and nonchalant attitude from administration. Most of the hill stations in India were discovered and developed by British and precious little have been done by successive Governments to develop them after independence. Is there any other c...

A certain gentleman named Robert Bhadra (bhadra implies "civil" in Sanskrit) is exempted from any security check in Kolkata airport and that is declared very proudly by airport authority of India in a written instruction in front of the security counter. This certain gentleman (replace Bhadra by "Vadra" and you'll get the sense) is the son in law of UPA chair person, the most powerful woman in India. Both the honorable madam chairperson and the gentleman Mr. Bhadra would do really well and gain some appreciation from general public if they make sure that Mr. Bhadra undergoes security check just like any other layman and do not fall pray to the VIP culture which has so engulfed the nation's political class. With due respect Mr. Vadra/Ms. Gandhi, would you dare to be a little different?

It is often said that desire is like a burning fire. When you want to satiate the desire you are merely pouring butter into it. The effect of butter is to enhance the intensity of fire which consumes everything. Similarly when you go on quenching your desire, the desire multiplies just like that all engulfing fire and you do not know where to stop. Debts get piled up, savings diminish and ultimately you are caught in a death trap. Sounds very familiar? This is situation worldwide today. We do not know where to stop, how to limit our wants, needs and greed. We think that we would be happy by getting this and that, by getting richer. Sadly however that happiness remains as elusive as ever. Ramakrishna Paramhansa in his gospels had given the example of a falcon who has a fish in its talon. It suddenly finds that all the crows are after it. It flies but crows do not leave pursuing it. The falcon then lets the fish go and perches on a treetop, and to its delight it finds that all the crows ...

Earlier I had posted an article on Indian media and their general cavalier attitude. The same was evident yet again after the recent train accident which killed 100s. From the very beginning, without any proper investigation, the Maoist hand began to do rounds, even though it is widely accepted that Maoists generally do not attack civilians deliberately (let me clarify at the onset that I am no Maoist sympathizer and personally would prefer them to rot in hell). Unlike other incidents here the Maoist leadership has not accepted its responsibility. The People’s committee against police atrocities, the local body formed in retaliation to ruthlessness of CPM cadres and police under Budhha rule, who aligned themselves with the Maoists just to save their village from becoming another Nandigram, has accused CPM cadres to mastermind the attack. Media however lapped up the story fabricated by the CID and West Bengal Government that Maoists were behind the attack. No effort to investigate the t...

Is 21st century truly a Chinese century? To answer this, you have to look into the rich and enduring history of China, which is so full of golden periods. China, no doubt is a great civilization and deserves a high pedestal in worldly affairs.Whether Tibet affair is a thorn on its global ambition it is a point which only the enlightened ones can discuss. China has a great history, except for a brief dormant period when Opium trade flourished and a large part of the population was engulfed in widespread poverty. The Great Wall is a testimony of what the Chinese can achieve if they will. China is now everywhere, Chinese immigrants are one of the most successful lot in almost every country that they are in, because they are hard working and always willing to travel that extra mile.China controls the manufacturing world, even though occasional quality problems may create embarrassment. The successful completion of Olympic games tells the world how modern China can transform and transcend. ...

Is Indian media really biased as perceived by some section? Is it truly doing an outstanding work of exposing faults in the Governance? Is it truly secular, liberal and democratic as it portrays itself to be? I know that we cannot generalize and stereotype all media and put them under same bracket. But here we are talking about a majority. You may argue that there are different types of media, like print and electronics, and even internet is a separate media, but I am talking of media in general, the category does not matter. If there is a fault which is inherent everybody needs to share the blame simply because others did not have the guts to rise above a majority and point out its faults. First, the English speaking, “secular liberal” media, to my mind, is highly partial. It is partisan not only because it highlights only the plight of specific people belonging to specific communities and ignores the need of people in general irrespective of caste, creed, and communal affiliatio...

I started this blog for East Vs. West and then I cam across the writings of Romain Rolland, the great European philosopher of early 20th century who was also an Indologist. Here are few excerpts from his book Prophets of the New India. "The age-long history of the spirit of India is the history of a countless throng marching ever to the conquest of supreme Reality. All the great peoples of the world, wittingly or unwittingly, have the same fundamental aim ; they belong to the conquerors who age by age go up to assault the Reality of which they form a part, and which lures them on to strive and climb ; sometimes they fall out exhausted, then with recovered breath they mount undaunted until they have conquered or been overcome.But each one does not see the same face of Reality. It is like a great fortified city beleaguered on different sides by different armies who are not in alliance. Each army has its own tactics and weapons to solve its own problems of attack and assault. Ou...

It is an age old wisdom of Hinduism and Buddhism that desire gives rise to anger, anger gives rise to hatred and violence and therefore downfall of the person. Therefore desire is the root cause of all evil, including suffering in life and the best recourse is to do your duty respectfully without desire for results. Hitler had a desire, he wanted to the ruler of this world. He thought Jews were responsible for all the problems that Germany faced. His anger and hatred for Jews resulted in a catastrophic world war, which ultimately brought down Europe and imperialism. Upanishads give a beautiful parable. You are on a journey, embarked on a chariot, which is your body. The fives senses are five horses which are pulling you in different directions. The harness is your mind to control your senses, the charioteer is the wisdom who can take you to your destination. Question is, whom do you trust and give control? If you give control to your senses, you'll run amok, directionless, and...

An Agatha Christie whodunit is a sheer pleasure for anybody who loves mystery stories. It reduces stress appreciably as it leaves you less time to ponder on your present woes and miseries and problems. Be it a cold winter morning or a windy day, a warm summer evening or a rain washed afternoon, you can always recline in your easy-chair or sofa or even sit outside in the porch drinking tea or coffee, or smoking your favorite brand of cigar, and read the exploits of the Belgian detective with his little grey cells, egg shaped head and characteristic mustache. Agatha Christie in one of her books rued the fact (through her another famous character Ariadne Oliver) that once you have put up a character you cannot change the same, as readers who have taken to that character will never accept any change. Therefore Poirot cannot come out of his idiosyncrasies. What can Poirot, the eccentric Belgian teach us? Of course, apart from his unique ways of detection of solution to a problem, sitting i...

Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. This natural law is also true of civilizations. In distant past different civilizations flourished in the east and then gradually those civilizations faded away. The dawn of awakening happened in West and East went into deep slumber under the covers of dark night. But sun is now leaning towards horizon and once again east is seeing faint lights of dawn. It will have to wake up, get out of its slumber and be active, once again. Once again the beautiful chants should fill in the crisp air of dawn. East and West share a unique relationship. When Jesus was born, three wise men from the East visited the Lord. They saw in the stars the sign of a great man with a mission. By then East was at the peak of its glory, with so many civilizations in so many countries flourishing and fading away - Indus Valley, Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, India, China, all extending their great influence all over the world. Then faint dawn showed in...

How do we account for the differences in culture, religion and ethnicity? It seems that like a great river which orginates from a snow clad mountain and then distributes itself into many tributaries and distributaries, this great ocean of humanity has divided itself again and again and has permeated many different civilizations, just like rivers and rivulets do. Just as all the tributaries and distributaries of the great river meets at sea, so will this vast ocean of humanity converge somewhere, despite all the differences, despite all intolerance and hatred and violence. It will converge in a vast ocean of supreme consciousness, of grand unification, therein lies its destiny. What is Difference? What is the meaning of religion and cultural difference? On a larger scale, it is nothing. Ramakrishna Paramhansa described this difference using a beautiful parable - Imagine a big sweet water pond, having several steps in various directions. On one side somebody is drinking water and is cal...

I saw the plight of thousands of passengers stranded owing to the volcanic eruption in Iceland and was saddened. However this is an instance which is denoted as "Act of God" or "force majeure", airlines cannot be blamed for this. But what if passengers are stranded owing the problems of the airlines? They are supposed to compensate, but do they? I recount one of my own experiences here in this context. While returning from Toronto, I had a connecting KLM flight from Amsterdam. Because my original KLM flight got delayed I missed this connection in Amsterdam. The lady at the counter could not help. No hotel accomodation was provided, only a meal voucher of Euro 10 was handed (poor beggar, he won't need more than this!), no upgrade was provided despite plenty of miles on my flying blue card to justify one, and I was given two straight choices, either spend the night in the airport and board the next day's flight, or get yourself rebooked in another flight which...

NREGA (National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme for the uninitiated) is another mammoth instrument of corruption in the hands of the political class. This scheme, which ensures a minimum wage to the rural labor, is flawed because it has no output, direct tangible benefit in the form of asset creation. It just disburses tax payers’ money to rural daily wage earners. But given the pathetic condition of our delivery mechanism, only a pittance of the billions of dollars actually reaches the rural masses. Rest of the money is conveniently pocketed by political parties who have floated the scheme, and their middlemen. This scheme is supposed to have contributed in insulating Indian economy from global financial crisis by creating demand and purchasing power at the bottom of the pyramid. Even if this is considered true, isn’t the Government encouraging reckless spending through this scheme? Given the fact that rarely the benefits of savings and investments reach the rural people who actuall...

Is the evolution over or has it just begun? According to sage Aurobindo we are on an eternal voyage of spiritual evolution, transforming ourselves from a human with limited consciousness to a super human with super consciousness. The physical evolution from pisces to birds to reptiles to mammals and higher form like human beings was the basic layer of evolution. If the goal of human journey is to identify oneself with the vast oneness (what is refered to as divinity, Brahman, God or cosmic energy in various contexts), how close are we to achieve that goal in this strife ridden world? However one point is that even though strives and tensions are ways of human lives, they have considerably reduced from the past and we are talking about historical ages, viz. the middle ages when we used to have warfare at the drop of a hat. So does that mean world is now a better place?, I am not sure, because one thing is that weapons are now deadlier than ever and war mongerers are very much the...

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...