Incredible India!!!

India, the largest democracy in the world, a land made up of 28 states and 7 union territories, with nearly 1 billion inhabitants, India ranks second only to China among the world's most populous countries. It is not known as a Sub-Continent for nothing. Its Geography is so diverse that there is hardly any Continent in its entirety to challenge it. We have the Coldest places like the snow-capped Himalayas in the North, the driest regions like the Thar Desert in the North-West, the wettest places like the Cherrapunji receiving the highest rainfall in the North- East, Rainforests in the South and a coastline that extends over 7600 kilometers. With all this varied Topography, comes a great deal of cultural khichdi in the people of this country. There are about 22 different Languages that are officially recognized while more than a hundred that are spoken countrywide, about 6 Religions practiced and more than 90 festivals and fairs being celebrated all over the country. It has the famed history of being the World’s largest, oldest surviving civilization. Currently the world’s 12th largest economy and home to many of the world’s ever growing list of Billionaires.

Despite all this, I’m deeply saddened when I write this, and, it can be swallowed like a bitter pill that the country has gone straight to dogs!!! It appalls me when I see that so little has been achieved when much more could have been ever since India became a sovereign nation and today we get to hear about the completion of 50 glorious years of Indian Independence. In a country that has always been poverty-stricken, illiteracy ridden and facing scarcity of resources and infrastructure, I wonder whether opting to go the Democracy way was the right thing back then. Abraham Lincoln defined democracy as a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people."; but, frankly, What kind of progress can you expect out of a government that is being ruled by people whose middle names are Scams, scandals, profit, self-centered interests, mayhem and many more; very agreeably woven inside of a farcical façade of selfless service, diligence, kindness, dedicated efforts, altruism and more. There is many a reason for me to detest Democracy especially for a country like India.

Let me digress a little before I get to the details of why and how something other than democracy would have put the country in Top gear. I wouldn’t be wrong when I say that the youth of today is highly influenced by the Western Culture. A culture that is slowly but surely gaining popularity. The reason is simple……….It is too damn uncomplicated…….. It is too damn straightforward. At this stage, I’m left wondering again that if all this were true, why then did we chase the British back then, if just fifty years later, we would start to appreciate and admire their culture subduing our own. I agree that they adopted the Divide and Rule Policy which threatened the subtle harmony which we were so known to have, but, today do we stand any more unified? Many states now fight for Natural Resources, Individuality, Language superiority, Border Demarcation issues and many such other reasons. I agree that they had a policy of the Doctrine of Lapse, which stated that if the ruling Royal Family did not have a progeny; their entire assets would be automatically acceded to the British Government. I scoff at how insignificant this Policy would look today. The way the population curve is exponentially increasing, there never can arise a situation where people are ever going to run out of children. People make oodles and oodles of money, some to an extent that if their misappropriated assets were reclaimed, they could easily run the Government for months.

I believe that before having gone the Democracy way in India, we should have reached a certain milestone in social reform and economic progress. All through these following paragraphs, I shall provide some excerpts from the book titled “ Indira Gandhi, the emergency and Indian Democracy” by author P.N Dhar. The author was head of Indira Gandhi’s secretariat and one of her closest advisors through the 1970s.

In a country that performed Gheraos, bandhs, rail and rasta rokos at free will, bringing Democracy would have indeed brought in a lot of problems. As Dr. B.R Ambedkar candidly told the constituent assembly while introducing the draft constitution:- “Constitutional morality is not a natural instinct. It has to be cultivated. Democracy in India is only a top dressing on Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.” There were bound to be problems if this whole British Parliamentary System were incorporated in a single step in India. If you recall, the British system of governance had emerged in a country that had passed through a renaissance, a reformation, and an Industrial Revolution that had resulted in a large and educated middle class. The Indian decision to work a parliamentary democracy was always going to be a huge challenge.

Nehru described the entire enterprise rather sportingly as an ‘Adventure of Democracy’. His ambivalence in the matter of social discipline is obvious in his reply to a question put to him in Sweden: ‘Have you any trouble with the remains of the Satyagraha technique you adopted to gain independence?’
Nehru answered: “It is a very interesting but rather intricate question. First of all, a country which for a whole generation practiced a certain technique of opposition to the government, it is not easy to shift over to make people think differently. It may be their own government, but people still have the habit of thinking of opposing the government. Because for a whole generation they thought so .Secondly, they are apt to adopt that technique, not rightly I think, but some variation of it, just to press on some complaint or something, which is sometimes apt to be a nuisance.”

P.N Dhar writes Political culture in India has increasingly deviated from the norms of constitutional democracy over its evolution. Agitation, protest and the mobilization of public opinion on disputed issues have become more widespread than in the British Period. Protests and disagreements are now conducted as if the government is not elected but imposed. Part of the explanation for this phenomenon is that it’s a carry-over from pre-independence techniques of protest against British Rule. Ambedkar had foreseen some of the possibilities. After he had wound up the debate on the draft of the constitution, he had said: “If we wish to maintain Democracy not merely in form, but also in fact, what should we do? The first thing in my judgment we must do is to hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives…… It means that we must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non co-operation and satyagraha. When there was no way left for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the grammar of anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.”

His wise words fell on deaf ears. Some thought that he was merely attacking his old adversary, Gandhi, and nobody took his warning seriously. The disobedience of law was given a political color and interpretation. It not only carried no penalties, on the contrary it had an almost Gandhian moral aura. Gunnar Myrdal, a social democrat himself, analyzed this problem in the early 60’s and was highly critical of the Indian state for its reluctance to enforce its own laws. He called it a ‘soft-state’, which he defined as one ‘where policies decided are not enforced, if they are decided at all’, and where ‘the authorities, even when framing the policies, are reluctant to place obligations on people’. He bemoaned the fact that this reluctance is not only excused, it is also idealized.

One event that comes to my mind at this stage is the State of Emergency declared in India between June, 1975 and March, 1977 by the then President Fakruddin Ali Ahmed, upon advice by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi under Article 352 of the Indian Constitution effectively bestowing on her the power to rule by decree, suspending elections and civil liberties. During the Emergency, many opposition leaders were jailed, freedom of press was suspended and powers of the judiciary were curtailed. Although people may look at this as a form of Dictatorship, many good things happened back then which will force you to think otherwise. Here are some excerpts from the same book I was talking about earlier:-

The first impact of the emergency was in the urban areas, on people mostly of the middle class. These were impressed by the immediate gains of the emergency: No strikes, no bandhs, industrial peace, quiet on the campuses, suppression of smugglers and hoarders, stable prices and a spurt in the economic activity. The Twenty-Point programme held out hope for the alleviation of poverty for the rural poor. It included implementation of land-ceiling legislation, a big increase in the allotment of house sites for the landless, a moratorium on rural debts to give relief to small farmers, village artisans and landless farmers, and the abolition of bonded labour. All these measures provided the emergency with some legitimate political and social purpose.

Indira Gandhi felt that the results were quite satisfactory. The implementation of the land ceiling legislation, for example, yielded 19761.7 million acres for distribution among the landless as against 62,000 acres previously. Similar results were achieved in the allocation of Residential Site; over 3 million were allotted in the first year of the emergency. The 20-point economic program increased agricultural production, manufacturing activity, exports and foreign reserves. The national economy achieved high levels of growth and investment, and as strikes were non-existent, productivity increased rapidly. Communal Hindu-Muslim riots, which had re-surfaced in the 1960s and 70s, virtually ceased, and the government seemed to be working with vigor.

If such were the profound effect of an Emergency, which was like a period of Dictatorship for the two odd years it was enforced, then I start to wonder, if that should have been the way to go initially, grow and develop to satisfy the pre-requisite conditions for a successful Democracy and then make a paradigm shift toward an even brighter India Shining. Will I be able to see a novel India, the one I wanted to see twenty years ago, at least twenty years from now???

Only time will tell……

Femmè Fatalè........

Boys need Girls.Guys need Gals.Men need Women. They bring out the best in us. They are our source of inspiration and motivation. They are the impetus that we achieve feats extraordinairè. They are the reason why we dress up to look killer. They are the reason we learn to play our first guitar. They are the reason we buy Mean machines and perform mind-boggling stunts. Any whichever way you look at it, there is no way we can do without them. Let’s admit it. They are the reason we are who we are on Planet Earth.


Forget Homo Sapiens for a moment. How often have we seen that the Males of almost all fauna are the most beautiful, charming, striking and the strongest? There is a reason for all of this. Males know either through instinct or learn from experience that they have to be the best to be able to attract a befitting mate. Being excellent in any one department doesn’t earn an animal much credit. The Male has to be “Definitely Male” in the profoundest sense of the word. He has to be the best of the best in every damn conceivable attribute to be able to get himself a partner that others only yearn to get. Let’s hypothesize subtracting away the entire feminine half from the total population. What do we have??? It is not just the Male population we are going to be left with, but, a faction of creatures that will invariably be bland, lifeless and bereft of any competition among themselves. For then, whom should they have to work hard to be the best? There simply isn’t a reason for them to struggle it out. There simply isn’t any drive at all.


Sometimes, I thank the person sitting upstairs that he gave only limited understanding capabilities to almost all creatures……… Perhaps, he has created them with only enough knowledge so their existence answers the question “What do you as a creature need to survive??? Take care of your basic needs….Food and Reproduction.” If on the contrary, he had created them in such a way that the intelligence levels of all creatures would have been on par with the Humans, then the kind of unreasonable problems that we face today with the Human kind would have extended to all creatures. One such issue that we face today with people is a Skewed Sex Ratio of Males to Females in the Country. Sex-Selective Abortions happen to be one of the several problems that a Girl-child faces and what more than for this to happen even before she is born.


Nowadays with the kind of Technological Advancement we have, it is very easy for expecting parents to know the sex of their to-be-new-born. All they have to do is to go to a Hospital or a Private Nursing Home which is equipped with a state-of-the-art Ultrasound scanning machine and a shameless, immoral doctor. That is all there is to it really. Technology as you all know is a Double-Edged sword. Let’s use it to benefit ourselves by trying to know about say, how the foetus is doing, whether it is receiving the proper nourishment, what posture needs to be adopted to a maximum extent so that the foetus doesn’t receive shocks and such. Hell, when our mothers gave birth to us, they dint know a thing or rather they didn't have a choice to know something. It was only after we came into this world that we knew of our strengths and weaknesses and molded ourselves accordingly to come out on tops. Let’s please not use this technology to know the sex of the child that would be. Let’s not kill the anxiety and patience built up over a period of 9 months in under a minute by yielding to the temptation of using a machine whose intended purpose was totally different.


A bigger challenge lies in fighting something that is deeply rooted in the tradition of this Nation……Son-Preference. Indeed, there can be none better than our people at far-sightedness. Even before the child is born, we are already thinking of his/her marriage, what kinda money will come/leave the family, whose name will stay, what his/her education will be like, what line should (S)he follow? Hello people??? :-O…….The answers will unfold over a period of time. Let us not fast forward through life in 10x speed. It is almost as though, we want to live and see the 20 years of the kid’s life in like 20 mins. It is not as though we are just another class of animals brought into this world from the Land of Narnia who can Talk n Jabber. We are Social-Animals whose scientific name reads Homo-Sapiens. It is in our names to be “homogenously sapient” in this regard at least. Let us accept Nature the way it reveals the mystery.


Modernity and Economic progress don’t seem to have done much to help the situation either. People still have superstitious beliefs that if the Son-child performs the last rites once they have passed away, they will obtain Moksha or Salvation.It is only by seeing beyond all this that we may see the end of this Social-Evil.Targeting the right audience in urban and rural areas alike where there is a skewed Sex-Ratio or cases of female infanticide reported would make for a good beginning. Bringing the guillotine down on those who determine and reveal the sex of the child, invariably the doctors themselves, would provide the much needed boost to curb such heinous acts of Sex- Selective Abortions. Remember people that the girl-child could be a responsible and mature elder sister or a caring and adorable younger sister to someone.She is on par with anybody else and is certain to excel in the journey called Life. Sex-Determination of the Foetus is a crime. We may not know what the future holds for us, but, it is this very uncertainty that makes life worth living.

Nature: The Ultimate Redeemer

Snap back in time to 10,000 B.C. If you have seen the movie by the same name, you don’t even have to strain your imagination. Did you observe how sparsely populated the world was back then. And, if you have read recent reports about the calamity that struck China "Death toll from China quake nears 20,000" you will realize how insignificant this would have been back then. If the Technical advancement were to have been the same as now back then, the Headlines would probably have read “Quake hits uninhabited portion of China. No loss to property or life.”
Too much of anything is bad. This is most applicable to Population. Have we ever realized that by keeping population to an abysmally low number, there is hardly anything to lose, but, there is much to be lost by going overboard? Any animal specie reproduces in large numbers, because it knows for a fact or has an instinct that by the time its offspring grows up to a stage when it can further reproduce, its population would have dwindled to such small numbers that it pretty much evens out and its sustenance will be kept constant. What do we fear that we are propagating in the billions? We give every offspring a chance to live. Whether it is perfectly normal children or children born with deformities of all kinds from having a heart with a hole to Siamese Twins to those with brain disorders, all get an opportunity to live and almost everyone lives till a ripe old age without ever breaking a sweat. At least for Humans, it is no more a wretched world out there. Everyone has a fair chance. Mankind will never go extinct, unless Judgment Day befalls us or some Comet/Meteor happily moving light years away from Earth suddenly decides to alter its course and strike us.

Population Explosion is a bane of the society. That’s why it is referred to as an “EXPLOSION” ………there is a sudden increase in lots of things, problems mainly. Some of the things I can think of would include scarcity of natural resources, food and shelter; increase in Industrialization leading to excessive Pollution manifesting itself as Global Warming, spoiling the sanctity of Air, Water and Soil, putting added pressure on the Earth, which, ultimately vents out its fury in the form of Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Hurricanes and Storms causing destruction to Life and Property indiscriminately. As you can see it all comes back to us. What goes around comes around.....

It appalls me to see the way we try to reform Smokers and Drunkards into complete teetotalers throwing warnings at them, showing them the consequences and even implementing taboos against these social evils being shown in movies and such. What are we trying to do here people??? :-O There are more things at stake than trying to transform a section of the population who wouldn’t abstain from smoking and drinking even in their after-lives. They would stop at nothing to satisfy their urges. You can bring in New year Resolutions, Gandhi Jayanthi’s, increase taxes 200% and much more, and it still would all be in vain. That’s a certainty. If we paid attention to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution which he talked about in his Treatise “The Origin of Species”, he talks about something called “Survival of the Fittest”. Although in Animals, the term ‘Fit’ would mean Physical strength and endurance, in case of us Humans, it could mean lots of things starting off with the archetypical meaning of being fit in body and mind to having lotsa Political influence to being born with a Silver-Spoon.If you compare with the past few centuries, average Life expectancy seems to have increased by a big margin while mortality rates have reduced to an all time low. People will generally live long and if there are some who would like to spend their money on their own downfall and in the process ‘enjoy’ their life which others seem to look upon as ‘suffering’, I see no harm in allowing them to continue on their journey. The Fit survive while the Unfit perish. It’s a very simple philosophy yet an undisputed reality of Life.


It is indeed high time that in India at least, something be done about Population. The way we are growing, we are sure to beat China in no time at all despite us having less than half their surface area in terms of inhabitable land. This seems to be the only aspect in which we are taking a keen interest to lead the world. :-P There are so many Orphanages and Adoption Homes where kids are crying out loud for a new life. If all you want is somebody to take care of you when you are old or if you want to feel responsible enough while in a relationship and that seems to be coming to you with a kid being around, go right ahead and pick’em up. Hone them to become Masters of their Destinies and Captains of their Souls. There is certainly nothing more gratifying than the sense of achievement you derive whilst doing this. You will know at the end of it all that the juice was worth the squeeze.

The Mahatma once said that the World has enough for everybody’s need but not for everybody’s greed. Beyond a certain population baseline it is only natural for Nature to look at even everyone’s basic need as Greed. The Demand is always Sky- Rocketing while Supply is hitting Rock-Bottom. The way we are growing, eating up the entire Animal and Plant Kingdom, encroaching their habitats in Sanctuaries and National Parks for either rehabilitation, farming or even Multi-Million $$$ Projects we fail to realize that we are slowly but surely moving towards being a very Lonely Planet. It won’t be long before the Third Rock from the Sun will be inhabited by only Human Kind while traces of the existence of Flora and Fauna on the Planet will be confined only to Museums and Encyclopedias.

Of all the creatures to ever grace the surface of Mother Earth, Man is the most meanest, deadly, brutal and obstinate of all who will stop at nothing to ensure that he survives……. he lives on. Man is fast growing to being Godlike. He is omnipresent, close to being omniscient and closest to be being omnipotent. It would be in the best interest of all if he would use this gift for the benefit of all life on Earth and realized that there is a fine line between equilibrium and imbalance. The slightest trace of imbalance will call forth somebody to restore balance and Mother Nature is only happy to do it for you. If you don’t know what balance is, I know what is....... whispers Mother Nature.

Sound Off!!!

A small article I wrote for the Hindu back in 2005 lashing out at some of the most common problems as Hindu rightly described the section as "SOUND OFF"!!!

Date:28/03/2005 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mp/2005/03/28/stories/2005032801600100.htm

Precious Drops
What stops us from doing a simple, sensible thing like placing a bottle under that leaking tap, asks Kiran A. Nayaknur

Kiran: `Can't we do something to see that the future generations enjoy at least a part of the benefits we're enjoying?'

I was struck by a hoarding in the city that says: "The air, water and soil are not gifts from our parents, but loans from our children."
I recall this line every time I read a headline in the newspapers about rise in oil prices, shortage of water, or rise in the city's temperature. Why are we frittering away our resources so carelessly? Can't we do something to see that the future generations can enjoy at least a part of the benefits we're enjoying?
Just consider these: why not place an empty water bottle under that leaky water filter of yours, which would, in the course of a day, collect enough water to satisfy the drinking water needs of a person for a whole day? Why invest crores of rupees to build a super flyover on Hosur Road to ease traffic congestion, while imposing a simple rule that each car should carry a minimum of four persons can drastically reduce traffic build-up over a period of time? Instead of spending crores on settling water disputes, why not build desalination plants in coastal areas?
I had plans of buying a bike. But the recent news of further hike in fuel prices, coupled with the knowledge that it is a diminishing resource, made me reconsider my decision. Could there come a day when you may need to reconsider your decision about buying a bottle of mineral water or worse still, catch a breath of fresh air only in oxygen parlours?