The wrong altar

The problem with us modern humans, is that we have, for the last few hundred years, chosen to worship at the altar of Intelligence than that of Wisdom!

Sad. And it is proving disastrous for the world.

And there's Hope....

Barack Obama's election as U.S President could well be a turning point, not just for that nation, but for the entire world as well. I have to emphasize the word could, because of the possibilities that now exist to finding a solution for the world's climate change problems, provided it is not just empty rhetoric of another smooth-talking politician. I honestly think that this man means what he says most of the time, but you never know. And I have been wrong before! :-(

From a President who didn't believe climate change existed to one who has already articulated his views emphatically, is a significant and huge transformation waiting to happen, since a lot hinges on how the largest economy and the biggest polluting nation tackles emissions and leads the way to making this planet greener and cleaner. Here's keeping fingers crossed.

The Art of Losing!

The art of losing is something all true winners know about. John McCain, in his wonderfully gracious and moving speech, demonstrated just that. Even if one was a Barack Obama supporter, it would have been hard not to salute this man for the way he has conducted himself so far after losing a bitterly fought presidential election.

In the end, despite the crushing defeat, John McCain proved himself to be a worthy opponent for a man whom the world is already calling a once-in-a-generation leader. Nice too, to see the respect these two men have for each other's achievements despite their political differences, and their common belief that their country comes first.

Wish we could see more of that in Indian politics!

A great way to commute....

I took the MRTS for the first time 10 days ago. I've been wanting to do this for a few years, but didn't get around to it. So a couple of Sundays ago, I took the train from Kasturba Nagar/Madhya Kailash Station to Park Town (Central Station). Took me all of 17 minutes to get to the destination!! Fantastic! Especially knowing it takes me an hour these days to travel by car from T.Nagar to Besant Nagar in peak hour traffic!

I clicked some pictures. Interesting view of the city from an elevated platform....

View from Kotturpuram. The Adyar Bridge can be seen.

A flute-seller in one of the stations.

Passing through Mylapore...

The train travels right behind the Marina Grounds, a popular venue for cricket matches.

View of the Chepauk Palace (?)

The Cooum River....the Napier Bridge can be seen in the distance.

Probably, the most famous landmark in Chennai!!

Am amazed that the government is not doing enough to promote MRTS....this is definitely the future! The badly maintained, tourist-and-traveller-unfriendly stations hardly inspire confidence for a city that is supposed to be the gateway to the South.

Neverthless, I recommend a trip for all those who haven't tried it so far!

There's no such thing as Society!

I was no great fan of Margaret Thatcher, but I agree with her views expressed sometime in the late 1980s, that I chanced upon to read. So very relevant to India which is ruled right now by the most unscrupulous, near-sighted bunch of politicians that form this unholy alliance called the UPA. But the people get the kind of rulers they deserve, I guess.

This is what Thatcher said back then:

"I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand "I have a problem, it is the Government's job to cope with it!" or "I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!" "I am homeless, the Government must house me!" and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations.."

A very bold thing to say, for a Prime Minister of a country. That too for a democratically elected one. I can't imagine a single politician in India to have the guts to say something of this nature in public.

The problem with socialism, if it is not checked, is the growth of (more often than not) the apathetic, irresponsible individual. Consider this:
- A man loses his money that he unwisely, against all conventional wisdom, invested in a dubious firm. He then organizes protests, dharnas and the like along with similarly affected people demanding that the government intervene and help get the money back.
- A man takes up a dangerous assignment in a war-torn country like Afghanistan, Iraq etc., knowing fully well the risks involved. No sooner does he get abducted by militants, than do his family appeal to the government (usually with the help of a paparazzi-like media) to get him released. If he gets killed, the families even demand compensation, as if the man died serving the armed forces! And to make things worse, the government even pays them using tax-payer's money.

All too familiar happenings in this country. Of course, I do know that people do take up jobs of this nature because of they badly need the money, but why should the government (actually tax-payers!!) pay for an individual's folly?

This over-dependence on government results, like it has right now in India, in producing a "robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul" brand of politics. This, is then extended by political parties to offer free-power, free-TV sets etc., to bribe people into letting them remain in power, so they can loot more, which in turn allows them to become more powerful and these policies, till the country is run-down completely. Sort of like the Story of Ten Men....

Politicians will not change policies, only their colours to suit the circumstances, so they can survive and hold on to power. It is the people who need to take the required responsibility of running their lives (and that of their families) and let the politicians do what is expected of them in a good democracy. To govern. Take care of law and order, justice, education and healthcare. Nothing else.

The Education Conundrum

There have been a great many debates about the purpose of education, and its relevance, in today's world. Education as we see it in conventional schools and colleges in the western world and in those nations elsewhere where the western style of education has found root. Like in India, for instance. A system loved and encouraged by most upwardly mobile families the world over.

Martin Luther King said that the purpose of education should be moral and not just utilitarian. He said, "To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction." How true! There are many other scholars, philosophers, thinkers who have warned about the dangers that declining standards of education can have on society, and indeed the world at large. The struggle to save this planet from destruction is basically a fight against a kind of thinking (influenced by a certain kind of education) that has caused/still causing the mess in the first place.

Sadly education has been reduced wholly to ONLY satisfy a practical need. Which is to gain economic prosperity and to do little else. This bull-in-a-china-shop approach towards gaining wealth that modern man seems to have has ensured we are already paying the price for going down the wrong road for the last couple of hundred or so years. Probably from around the time of industrial revolution. Yes, there were many benefits as a result of industrialization, but unfortunately man's arrogance led to hitherto unexpected levels of exploitation of the planet by force that he now had gained. I talked briefly about the role of religion in this in one of my earlier blogs.

Most academic institutions today seem to be successful only in mass-producing low-thinking, selfish, mind-numbed individuals incapable of having any foresight or vision. To have a vision for the future one has to be a leader. To produce leaders we need education that, like Martin Luther King said, should be both utilitarian and moral. One that will build character and culture. One that will lead not to just knowledge and intelligence, but to Wisdom. So there.

Eleanor Roosevelt said, "A nation must have leaders, men who have the power to see a little farther, to imagine a little better life than the present. But if this vision is to be fulfilled, it must also have a vast army of men and women capable of understanding and following these leaders intelligently. These citizens must understand their government from the smallest election district to the highest administrative office. It must be no closed book to them, and each one must carry his own particular responsibility or the whole army will lag."

This is without doubt most relevant for all of us who continually lament about the quality of politicians we end up electing and yet choose to send our children through a system of education that excels in producing precisely those kind of individuals.

Good culture is a result of good education and good values. Good culture protects and heals all that is considered sacred, and in turn automatically protects the world around it. Something that ancient cultures were extremely successful with; a legacy that is getting rapidly eroded by us today.


(Click here to read a brilliant speech on the same subject by David Orr, an environmental educator in 1990!)

Balkanization of India?

Gandhi was a remarkable man, a truly once-in-millennium human being. I say so, not because he led a successful freedom struggle against the British, but for uniting a totally disparate group of people who live in this land we call India, a land with such unparallelled diversity of cultures, customs, races, languages.

Yeah well, we have all read this in history books alright. But the above fact has never hit me as hard as it has in the recent months. Have no idea exactly why, but maybe I can blame it on a heightened level of awareness (that I hitherto did not possess) in perceiving what's going on in this country.

The concept of India as a nation cannot have happened but for Gandhi, because it must have been an audacious thought to even imagine such a diverse bunch of people could decide to be citizens of the same country! It was his legacy (and a few of his followers') that India managed to stay as one nation, although one could see cracks developing on the walls all these years.

Today, in 2008, one just has to survey the political scene in this country to see how fragmented things have become. The last decade or so, has shown that the days of the single-party rule is over and smaller and smaller groups have started wielding power. The rise of regional parties with distinctly regional interests such as the BSP, the SP, the Telugu Desam, the BJD, the PMK etc., have shown that the national identity is fast being replaced by a regional one. And the regional identities are getting smaller and smaller as has been shown by groups such as TRS in Andhra Pradesh that is demanding a separate statehood for the region.

Could this be the start of the balkanization of India? A few years earlier, I would have laughed if someone had ventured to suggest the idea that India, on the cusp of an unparalleled economic boom, faced a threat to it sovereignty. But today am not so sure. Heck, it is scary to think that this might even happen in my lifetime!

When the two of major news headlines I read today happened to be about...
a) the shameless overtures made by the UPA and the NDA to criminals and
b) the communist party's senior leader proclaiming Mayawati as a possible future PM if the UPA government falls
....I have a empty feeling in my stomach.

It is too easy to blame our politicians for the mess like so many of us do simply because we just hate being accountable. It's easier to have a bogeyman, a whipping boy, to fix the blame on and go on living our lives showing just the right amount of self-righteousness and indignation whenever it is required socially. The rot is too deep and the blame lies on all of us who have chosen to each time put self over the nation and think it is somebody else's job to govern and rule.

The wrong kind of people get to the top in politics because they are allowed to by an electorate that is either ignorant or ill-informed or selfishly-motivated and narrow-minded. When a society elects its leaders for all the wrong reasons, what hope can there be for its survival.

When there is rotting carcass for dinner, expect the vultures not butterflies.