I’m right now reading a critical essay by George Orwell, and somewhere in the passage he observes:
The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is his limited outlook. He sees the world as a middle-class world, and everything outside these limits is either laughable or slightly wicked. On the one hand, he has no contact with industry or the soil; on the other, no contact with the governing classes. Anyone who has studied Wells’s novels in detail will have noticed that though he hates the aristocrat like poison, he has no particular objection to the plutocrat, and no enthusiasm for the proletarian. His most hated types, the people he believes to be responsible for all human ills, are kings, landowners, priests, nationalists, soldiers, scholars and peasants.
This brought to my mind the kinds of movies Madhur Bhandarkar makes. I think consciously or unconsciously he is always making movies for the middle-class. Anything else elicits either derision, or an observant sympathy.
For instance in Page 3 and Corporate he highlights the grotesque contrivances that go on in the upper class society and he uses the lower-class people to poke fun at the rich. In his recent movie, Traffic Signal he focuses on beggars, peddlers and petty thieves that live around a traffic signal. In another movie that I haven’t watched, he featured the dance bars.
All these themes arouse curiosity amongst the middle class audience. He takes advantage of the “them and us” factors. The middle class audience gets a voyeuristic pleasure watching the smut of the other classes. I wonder if he will ever be able to make a movie depicting the ugly aspects of the middle class and make a profit.
Except for the 10 Sikh Guru, Guru Gobind Singh, all the Sikh gurus were from sufi backgrounds and they preferred death and torture over abandoning their ways of living. Some of them were burned with burning sand and were decapitated, but they never left the path of peace.
Yasin Malik insults Sufism when he says that India forced Sufi Kashmiris to violence. There is a big difference between Sufism and ideological confusion. All the Kashmiris resorting to senseless violence have no clue of what philosophy and peaceful existence is. I’m not saying the Indian government is totally blameless, but when you kill the innocent, and when you force millions to live like refugees in their own country, you are simply a criminal, a terrorist, and not a soldier. Just imagine a sufi blowing himself or herself up in front of a school and killing small children just to drive in a point.
The Mumbai High Court has directed the BMC to make sure the city’s stray dogs are first sterilized and then relocated out of the city limits. This is far better than killing the animals like the barbarians.
The editor of The Pioneer in today’s editorial says that all those opposed to hosting the 2014 Asian Games in India suffer from a Third World mentality. He writes
It would be tempting to see Mr Aiyar’s glee at India not winning the right to what would have been its first Asian Games in 32 years as one man’s personal angularity. It is much more than that. It betrays a mindset, a Third Worldism almost, that is all too prevalent in Indian public life. This romanticises indigence and frowns upon growth and its spin off, such as urban infrastructure, as vices; it has, in the past year especially, severely constricted this Government’s capacity for economic reform.
While agreeing on the issue of economic reforms, I don’t think opposing the hosting of the games reeks of Third-Worldism. Third-Worldism would be, supporting it. Because Third-Worldism means always chasing the shadows of glory instead of aspiring for glory. Third-Worldism means aping the others’ progress while shunning progressive thinking. Third-Worldism means always going for the short-cuts (like quotas, for instance) and not working hard on development. Third-Worldism means flaunting moronic arrogance and not having any pride.
Compared to Korea’s 51 gold medals, India could only get 9 in the 2006 Doha Asian Games. In 2002 Asian Games Korea got 96 gold medals compared to India’s 10. Won’t we ever feel ashamed of our pervasive mediocrity and work to counter it instead of indulging in senseless rhetoric?
I got a link to this engaging poem via India Uncut (with its new domain). I too believe too much is made of the poor guy’s blowjob considering what politicians generally do to our countries.
One moment they were tripping over each others’ toes to cover the Abhishek-Aishwarya’s marriage procession and the next moment they were having penal discussions on the truth of Jhanvi Kapoor who claims to be the real wife of Abhishek Bachchan.
I was quietly busy doing my work when Alka called me to watch a “funny” thing on TV. Every channel showed the distraught face of the damsel. Just imagine, instead of covering the elections, most of the channels were covering the marriage (no problem with that) and now instead of covering the marriage, most of the channels were featuring the real wife of Abhishek Bachchan (actually, no problem with that too). This is media for you. And why not? For 5 minutes they showed the news and for 15 minutes they ran the ad slots. It’s like, make hay while the sun shines.
I’m not criticizing any body, I’m just observing with fascination how they show what the people want to see, and how the people get attracted to sensational things. As of now, it seems the girl is simply lying and she is in desperate need of psychiatric help, but still, people are more interested in her maniacal ramblings than in the marriage, or in other world-altering events.
When two people get married they mutually agree to spend their lives together. This phenomenon is accepted I think all over the world. Marriage is an emotional as well as a physical commitment, and there is a sanctity attached to it. But it is certainly not a bondage.
In a recent judgement the Rajasthan High Court said that a woman cannot be compelled to live with her husband if she wants to live with her lover. I think this is a remarkable judgement both in terms of its social ramifications and the sanctity of marriage. The judges said that an adult woman is not a commodity of the husband and hence she cannot be forcibly kept with him.
But isn’t the woman committing adultery by staying with one man while being married to another? Strangely, the court says no, and I don’t know why? The woman says she was already in love with the other man when she got married. Then why did she marry in the first place? When it comes to the Indian society many factors play their parts and you cannot simply blame the woman for that. May be she was forced to get married when she was not emotionally and intellectually strong, and now may be she is and consequently, is capable of taking the step she couldn’t take at that time. Some would say she should have divorced her husband first. Again, it’s easier said than done in our society. I think what she did was the best she could have done under the circumstances.
It is not said whether the husband was abusive or if he maltreated her. Anyway, this is irrelevant, especially in this case.
Coming from Indian judges, and especially from Rajasthan (remember the Bhanwari Devi verdict?) I think this is a very progressive verdict.
I got this Google news feed where Rahul Gandhi tells the Uttar Pradesh youth to think modern. It’s funny to read this coming from a member of a party that has no clue what the expression “modern” signifies and resorts to the most archaic and outdated modes of governing the country, the Congress I.
This party is not trapped in an ideological time warp. In fact, ideology is something arrantly foreign to these political mountebanks. Their all-time agenda is to keep the country backward and illiterate because the longer we stay backward, the longer they can rule us. So how come they came to power (because we are backward)? I think deep down somewhere we are all suicidal in this country :-). Recently Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told a UP crowd that Rahul Gandhi is the future of UP. What a gloomy future the poor chaps have. And we know now which state the Prime Minister hates the most. Any guesses?
I just now found this weird link. Since the source of this link is some “Hindu Unity” website I doubt its genuineness, but nonetheless I found it worth mentioning. It’s quite detailed. Reportedly a legal notice has been sent to the website owners. I too believe it’s untrue.
With the population of the Asiatic lions dwindling alarmingly it’s high time we woke up to the calamity and took some real steps to save the big cats from going extinct. The same poachers are suspected to be behind the large-scale poaching who are responsible for emptying Sariska of its tigers. How tragic it must be for people who have spent their entire lifetimes trying to save our wildlife heritage.
The big cats, whether they are lions or tigers or panthers shouldn’t be saved just for their majestic or esoteric value. They are at the top of the food chain and if they go, the entire food chain will collapse.
I don’t think the best way to stop poaching is to capture and punish the poachers. As long is there is a lucrative market poaching is not going to stop. You catch 10 poachers and 20 will come to take their place, and we don’t have the budget to keep armed guards for every lion or tiger. The best would be to punish those people severely that buy animal parts for making medicines, for using as aphrodisiacs and charms, or simply as decoration trophies. There should be either death sentence or life imprisonment if one is caught buying an endangered animal’s parts. This may sound harsh but once we lose these animals the entire humanity will have to pay a big price.
Another good step would be to rope-in the tribals living around the wildlife sanctuaries. They should be rewarded handsomely if they help the police catch the poachers, or if they keep the poachers out of the sanctuary. In fact there should be an overwhelming incentive to keep the poachers away.
Security too is a big problem. Most of the forest guards are untrained people who are locally hired just because they are unemployed and loitering around. They cannot even hold a rifle straight, forget about confronting the poachers who boast of the latest weaponry available in the market. Trained guards should be hired and they should be given weapons that can match the sophistry of the poachers. These guards should be appropriately sensitized towards the animals they are supposed to protect.
Conservation is a problem as serious as terrorism. It has to be tackled from many sides, at the same time. The animals need protection, and they need enough space to grow and multiply.
Yesterday when we were watching the news on Aajtak they very taste-lessly kept showing the clip where Richar Gere swirled Shilpa Shetty down and planted a kiss upon her awkward looking countenance. Agreed, it was a silly act and it looked far from natural, but there was no need to run the clip on auto-pilot and let it play again and again for umpteen times. We eventually had to switch the channel.
The Shiv Sainiks and other Hindu organizations are always a nuisance. These losers have nothing better to do in their lives, and like Islam, for them the Hindu sanskriti (culture, way of life) too is always under attack and needs to be protected sedulously. They have been burning the effigies of Shilpa Shetty. Although the secularists will jump at the opportunity and call it as “Hindu fundamentalism”, I simply term it as an annoyance and a law-and-order problem. These Shiv Sainiks should be arrested and put behind bars for a few years because otherwise they will keep finding one danger to their sanskriti or another.
In another such incident, an obscure Hindu organization called The Hindu Rashtriya Sena ransacked the Star News office in Mumbai for covering an incident the Sena found objectionable. The main problem here is the languor our police force shows. Arresting these hooligans after they have done the damage only furthers their cause and they become heroes amidst their communities. They should be tackled with before they can do any harm to the society.
Talking of society, unless such activists are treated like the outcasts instead of the culture-protectors, nothing much can be expected to happen.
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