There is a post on the barbarindian’s blog that talks about a recent interview by Mahashweta Devi in which she said:
“I was deeply impressed to see how strong the work culture is in Gujarat. The city and village roads are well-built, even the remotest villages have electricity and drinking water. I was especially impressed with the medical facilities in the panchayats and local-level health centres. Not at all like West Bengal where, even now, villages and panchayat areas have hardly any electricity and where the Government’s so-called swasthya pariseva (healthcare service) is totally non-existent,” she said. “In West Bengal, which has been under a CPI(M)-led Left Government for 30 years, little has been achieved,” the writer said. She also alleged that starvation deaths and child mortality are “rampant” in West Bengal.
I read this in The Pioneer a few days ago and remember discussing it with Alka how such opinions don’t appear in “secular” newspapers and news channels. I’m not a big fan of Modi but his state seems to be making big strides towards economic and social progress whether people like it or not. I wanted to write about Mahashweta Devi’s comments (she is a leftist writer) that day but was really busy finishing a few projects. Good that barbarindians mentioned it today. Such issues should be highlighted in all fairness.
Technorati Tags: gujarat, modi, india
Just read a very sad account at Mridula’s IIT-K blog and I think the issue needs to be highlighted because such a rot is present everywhere in our society these days.
The canteen owner of one of the IIT halls came across a migrant laborer’s boy who had been stung or bitten by a scorpion or a snake. The canteen owner did everything he could have possibly done, but unfortunately he couldn’t save the boy. The reason: first the security guards at IIT didn’t offer any help, and when he took the boy to IIT’s health center, first the hospital refused to treat the boy because he didn’t have a health card (and they refused to accept the canteen owner’s health card) and when the canteen owner called the doctor who works at the center, she simply refused to come because the patient was a laborer’s child. In fact she screamed at the canteen owner for disturbing her. You can read the entire account on Mridula’s blog.
Since life in general has no value in our country, such incidents can only be avoided by severely punishing those who could have saved the kid but didn’t. The licence of the doctor should be revoked, she should be sacked, and then she should be arrested for causing death due to negligence. She is unnecessarily wasting a post that could have had a compassionate doctor. When you are lousy, your attitude shows everywhere — tomorrow she can easily cause death of a student or a faculty member. After all, every doctor takes the Hippocratic Oath before obtaining a degree and if he or she violates that oath, he or she doesn’t deserve that degree.
The guards should be sacked too because if they don’t have the feelings to protect a young boy, how can you expect them to protect the institute when the need arises?
Does this sound harsh? I don’t think so. The death of the laborer’s son is harsh, a death that could have so easily been avoided.
Technorati Tags: iit kanpur, criminal doctor, snake bite, scorpion sting, poison
“The only thing world-class was the price they charged,” says a resident of a UNITECH developed housing city. He has made a video of how shoddy the whole thing is and it is nothing but a big fraud in the name of providing world-class residential facilities. I got the link from Alka’s blog.
After watching the video we were discussing what a great opportunity this is for a common person to highlight his or her problems. Make a video, upload it on a service like YouTube and then spread the link around. This video was picked up by the NDTV later on.
Technorati Tags: unitech, fraud, real estate
Instead of running around like headless chicken, as aptly pointed out by Ronen Sen, BJP should join cause with Congress and make sure the country is not taken hostage by the Chinese stooges, the leftists; and the recent debate on the 123 deal is a good chance. As far as economics and foreign policy are concerned, there is not much difference in how both the parties think. They even play the religion cards with the basic difference that BJP mollycoddles the Hindus and Congress the Muslims (which is far more dangerous due to terrorism), and I think through backdoor politics such a difference can be quickly sorted out.
Even if they are power hungry they can reap the benefits of power turn by turn. Let Sonia Gandhi be the PM with Advani as the Deputy PM, and then vice versa; at least we won’t have to see the inauspicious contours of Karunanidhi, Mayawati, Mulayam, Lalu, Yechuri, Bardhan and such.
If both BJP and Congress join forces they’ll be able to formulate an indefatigable coalition and then the country won’t have to bear the looser parties like CPM and CP(I)M that despite having nil public support and sympathy, wield so much power due to the political vicissitudes of this country and wreck havoc with the countries economy and the reform movement.
The reality of our country is, fortunately or unfortunately, we are not going to have a single-party majority for a long time. Congress and BJP are one of the largest parties currently and they have the power to alter the political and socio-economic scenario of the country. The other parties are mostly regional (AIADMK, etc.), caste-based (BSP, SP, etc.) or freakish (CP(I)M, etc.) and they are always going to remain on the peripheries. They needlessly become powerful, without having any power, just because the central government has to depend on their capricious support — and they cause overwhelming damage to the country. Just remember how Dayanidhi Maran was removed by Karunanidhi despite being the best Communications and IT Minister India has ever had. Just see how the communists scuttle one reform after another. Just see how fickle Mayawati is. These people don’t care for the country.
But there certainly are some ministers both in BJP and Congress that think for the larger interests. Manmohan Singh can be an exceptional PM when he is not shackled by Sonia and her cronies. As a Finance Minister he used to come to the office with a resignation letter in his pocket. There are a few others that work well despite being in Congress. The same goes for BJP; it has Yashwant Sinha, Arun Shourie, Arun Jaitley and many others. If all these people come together they can work wonders. Caste and religion are big issues for both the parties but I think if all these interests are combined a good solution can be formulated.
If nothing else, they should come together to help the country get rid of the communists that are eating the country like a cancer. They have hollowed the states they have ruled so far, and now they want to hollow the country.
Technorati Tags: communism, congress, bjp, india
I wasn’t going to write about the blasts in Hyderabad (it would have been the same old, dreary thing) but then I read this gem in a link:
Sri Prakash Jaiswal, the Union Minister of State for Home said that the blasts were the handiwork of a terrorist group, “One terrorist group or the other, which is bent on destroying the unity of the country, is certainly involved in the blasts in Hyderabad.”
How perspicacious! We are so safe in the hands of such intellectually luminous politicians.
In the meantime, it’s being said that the blasts were not an intelligence failure (it rarely is, actually) as they had known since March that large amounts of explosives were being brought into the city. This The Hindu link says:
Indian intelligence has known since March 2007 that eight kilogrammes of military-grade explosive were delivered to an HuJI operative in Hyderabad. However, for its own reasons, the Congress government in Andhra Pradesh did not allow the kinds of aggressive — and unpopular — policing that the Central Bureau of Investigation and city police felt were necessary to secure the city.
Well, precisely for this reason I didn’t want to write about it. Even a child knows how terrorism can be tamed, but those who can, won’t do it for their political reasons.
It’s no use talking to the politicians and it’s no use censoring and criticizing people who do such things. The more you criticize them, the more sense of achievement they have and more encouraged they feel. I don’t want to use such language, but they only understand the language of destruction, and nothing less can work. It’s like the nukes: they work as a deterrence — we don’t like them, but they are a necessary, ineluctable evil. Similarly, you cannot talk sense to the fundamentalists and the terrorists. They will keep on coming up with thousands of reasons to blow up innocent people. You can only stop them by eliminating them.
Technorati Tags: hyderabad blasts, blasts in india
A very happy independence day to all my readers. I know this post comes a bit late but I purposely didn’t write the day-before-yesterday because first, I thought everybody would be writing about it and second, after a long time I took a day off (this means, I didn’t open my laptop or check my email or respond to queries, etc.). Third, I’m suffering with a bad bout of tonsillitis. But I read a lot.
Our newspaper was filled with articles written by various columnists talking about what’s been achieved and what’s been lost in the past 60 years of India’s, some even called it illusory, independence. With so much misery, poverty, backwardness, corruption, fall of ethos, rampant hatred and intolerance, are we really free? Does freedom merely mean kicking out the foreign rulers? Look out in the street: doesn’t the common man look like a loser, totally defeated and devoid of dignity? Does a free nation look like this?
I agree with the thought but we are a lot better off than we were during the British, or even the Mughal rule. Whatever mess we create here, it is our own mess. We are always free to clear this mess, whether ideological, economic or social, whenever we feel like it (it’s another thing we don’t feel like it). Despite our politicians and destructive policy makers some of us have made things better. Whether one agrees or not, the working conditions are far better than what they used to be. The progress is in certain, limited quarters, but this is how progress starts — it gradually spreads.
The past always seems romantic and quixotic, but every age has its dark side. Chandan Mitra of the Pioneer in a recent article evoked the 60-year journey of the Hindi film music. We’re seeing the worst phase these days, but the golden phase of the Hindi film music survived with the backdrop of the Chinese invasion, political uncertainty, abysmal poverty, industrial strife and a slew of natural calamities. Poetic and all is fine, but if you don’t have food to eat or clothes to wear, you cannot simply survive on melodies (some did actually).
I think the present is the best time to live, whether in India (I’m talking about the functioning, civilized world, and not about communities that are still living in the 700 AD world) or anywhere else. We are at the threshold of a civilizational shift. Technology and new thinking is helping us do things better, faster, and it is also wrecking havoc on our environment, which needs to be tackled with the greatest urgency. The poverty is galling, but we have the means, but not enough will, to eradicate it. We have conquered most of the diseases and ailments (at least those who can afford) and the natural disasters become untenable only because as a society, as a nation, we don’t prepare for them, or we create ripe ground for them by exploiting the ecology and the environment indiscriminately. For example, the floods in Bihar are being caused due to large-scale deforestation.
I don’t prefer the past because the reins of our destiny were not in our hands. Today they are. We can steer our own paths and the opportunities allude only those who don’t seek them sincerely. All around me I see people wallowing in miseries but in 99.99% of the cases it’s their own doing. The India of today is in the driving seat. If we don’t have the roads, we have the ability to lay them. This is the greatest difference between the past and the present.
Technorati Tags: india, independence days, indian independence day
Can you be booked by the police for being attacked by a maniacal mob? If your answer is no, then perhaps you don’t know a marvel called India because here you can be. This happened to none other than Taslima Nasreen whose name never appears in the Indian media without the “controversial” epithet.
Recently Taslima Nasreen was attacked by a mob of Muslim zealots when she had gone to Hyderabad to release the Telugu version of her book Sokhe at the press club. The NDTV link above says there were 30 activists but in fact there were more than 100 blood-thirsty hooligans vying for her blood and she escaped unhurt only because of the intervention of the organizers and the journalists present there. They attacked her because she reveals Islam to the world. She tells the world what lousy deal the Muslim women get and with what disdain the fundamentalist Muslims treat people from other religions. But this topic’s been beaten to pulp by now.
The absurdity is that the Hyderabad police has booked Taslima Nasreen for promoting enmity between different groups. This can get her a two-year jail term if proven. People who threatened her, attacked her, are roaming free and issuing more threats with greater enthusiasm. It’s rightly stated that
Why the police filed a case against Taslima by taking MIM’s contention seriously appears to be politically driven — the ruling Congress needs the Muslim group’s support.
The Congress, it goes without saying, is as evil a party as it gets. To get votes and remain in power this pathetic party will stoop to any low, even to an extent of acting insane and chaotic.
It’s incidents like these that make it embarrassing to be an Indian and being a part of this conglomeration of the ludicrous. Happy Independence Day.
Incidentally, the guardians of freedom of expression are mum over the issue. Oh yes, I forget. Freedom of expression is only threatened when some non-Muslim group protests against a painter or a writer. I wonder why we always forget this. Our prime minister lost a whole night’s sleep when a terrorist suspect was caught in Australia; I wonder how he must be feeling about the attack on a woman by a crowd of men.
In this case there are not going to be any protest marches by writers, painters and journalists. Long articles and columns won’t appear defending Taslima’s right to write whatever she wants to write. The secular bloggers are not going to write apoplectic posts lamenting the barbaric attack. Why? Because she doesn’t target Hindu gods or some other religions. She targets Islam. Speaking for her is not politically right; it is not fashionable.
Ignoring Islamic reactions to writers and other artists and fuming over other religions’ intolerance has turned into a secularist mass masturbation exercise where they are always pleasing each other.
And even if there are some reactions, they are more stupid than no reaction at all. This is what Kamal Farooqui, the chairperson of the Delhi Minorities Commission had to say about the incident:
This event and the participation of three MLAs of in this activity is not acceptable. But the government should also ensure that Nasreen is not allowed to do or write anything which hurts the sentiments of Muslims. The government should immediately cancel her visa and make her go out of the country. She should realise that this is not Bangladesh or Pakistan, but India where the sentiments of all communities are respected.
See the irony?
The pusillanimous Indian government is already contemplating canceling her visa.
Swapna Gupta in the Pioneer gives a nice account and history of MIM (members of this organization attacked Taslima Nasreen). See the video footage of the attack.
More links on attack Taslima Nasreen:
Technorati Tags: taslima nasreen, taslima nasreen attacked, mim
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