Digging for Meaning

China's vision is to dominate the world's economy with its strategic investments and past currency manipulations : It is foxily forcing indebtedness on smaller countries like Pakistan & Sri Lanka; It is retaining and leveraging technology that it gets exposed to in trade (even as India spends billions in technological purchase but doesn't insist on comparable transfer of technology. Idiots) It is is doing everything possible to remain the factory of the world - either with currency manipulation in the past or by taking control over strategic global resources (read about what it is doing to corner global supply of strategic mineral resources - lithium in australia, canada & africa ; cobalt in Congo ,etc)  ... Essentially, CHINA has a vision. However repressive and terrible for others or its own people, it has a vision to win in the new zero-sum game of global power. (It need not have been a zero-sum game. But right wing assholes across the world are hell bent...

We, the people, are gullible idiots. C'mon, admit it. We have all been bullied into bad deals by powerful charlatans at some point or another. Governments are no different. The current one is getting away with our personal data and going about distributing our public resources and monies to its favourite cronies.This is no exceptional government. This happens all the time, in all the countries - to varying degrees. The varying part is important. I would much rather be in Norway where the leeway for such giveaways against the interest of public is small, compared to Angola and Nigeria where the oil bonanza instead has become oil curse. One of the important ways for moving towards Norway and away from Nigeria is for the public to become aware and educated about power. Education is a bad word now - what India creates in not educated people, it creates literate minions. By educated, i mean people who can reason, who can think critically, who can see the world from different perspect...

When you look at the history of middle east, you realise one thing - The mess we are in today, is in REACTION to impositions of ideas alien to the natives. For example - 1. King Shah of Iran forced secularism on a people for whom their religiosity was important. The reaction was the cultural revolution that overthrew the monarch and installed in its stead a religious leader at the helm of a nation. 2. Erdogan is turning a secular state into an Islamic state in Turkey with fairly popular support. This is in reaction to Ataturk's imposition of secularism in the first half of 20th century. 3. Saudi Arabia's extremist version of Islam is propelled elsewhere, in part because people feel their religiosity is under threat from western imperialism. And obviously, the Saudi monarchs are well aware of the case of another monarch in Iran being ousted who suppressed religion. So they double down on religious fervour and have weaponised the world view. 4. and ofcourse the whole mess i...

I strongly urge you to read 'The Dictator's handbook'. It is an excellent book to understand how the world works. A lot of things India's PM is doing is textbook strategy to consolidate and maintain power. The book helps us understand him not as a despot (as understood by the left) and messiah (for right), but a power hungry leader who will stop at nothing to consolidate his fiefdom. The beauty of his strategy is in the fact that he has managed to whip up sentiments of masses that allow him to strip them of their rights and wealth, without them even complaining. That is the best kind of shakedown. The point is - it is not about BJP or congress really. Any one in power would do these things to various degrees. What makes BJP more worrisome is its comfort to use hate to divide the people. Besides its sheer incompetence at planning - look at Aadhar, GST rollout for examples. The point is - no matter who is in power, they have to be seen as the one's in po...

What's the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship? The book says, not much. India, agrees. Current political dispensation especially agrees vigorously. " Soma " of hindutva and past glory + divided impoverished amnesiac masses + legitimised attack on individual rights + tremendous wealth shared among few = brave new world of oligarchical India. Essentially, democracies/ dictatorships etc., are simply variants of the same power dynamic between the ruler, essentials, influentials and inter-changeables .   Interchangeables are the nominal selectorate - the individual voters who have nominal (or cosmetic) power to choose leader - most of us. Influentials  are the real selectorate - the guys who really choose the leader. In US recently, the electoral college famously went against the popular vote and elected a clown as their president instead. In India, theoretically, the system is a bit better in terms of a wider base of influentials - it could be rel...

[This is a  ridiculous diagnosis] Beware! A ghastly disease is on rise these days. It turns a perfectly capable adult into a challenged toddler who needs assistance. Who is at risk? It is sweeping across glass towers, big cars and countless cabins in city offices across India. Specifically, perfectly capable adults who start earning 7 figure salaries tend to be at high risk of turning into a differently-abled toddler. So the initial observations allude to it being a classist disease. Recent studies have revealed that, being wealthy is not the only determinant - it affects people who tend to make irrational choices - such as purchase of INR 35,000 for a laptop bag when one can buy another that is just as good for around INR 1,000. The irrationality alludes to it being a mental disease rather than a physical disability. Symptoms   They seem perfectly capable, healthy even, but are unable to do the most basic human action ever - of carrying one's own ...

I have been living in Gurgaon for the last 5 years. 5 years! in Gurgaon! I never thought I would end up staying this long here. In my head, it always was just a transit camp - to earn money to fund travel to Himalayas, come back and refill, go back and chill.. repeat until one figures out a way to break out of the cycle. For the first 2 odd years that reflected in my lifestyle - My house was small and barely functional, a temporary base camp to return to 'home' in the hills. That 'home' was among strangers in the farthest corners and alleys of small villages in the hills. The home was not peopled really. It had no walls. It was the crisp cool air of the hills, the majesty of Himalaya, the clarity of sun's rays, the hot vapours rising from the ginger tea and the never ending walks in the forests , up the hills, down the valleys and through gullies and alleys of small villages and towns. When I was alone, that's what home was for me: A living breathing intima...

JNU students are not stealing money from public banks. The powerful but immoral business men and their cronies in the nation's bureaucracy are. Beef eaters are not stealing your food; subsidizing for the politicians and driving farmers to kill themselves. The culprit are the flawed policies of the apathetic government shaped in no small measure by lobbying corporate and business-politician nexus. The 'Muslims'/ 'Hindus'/ 'Flying Spaghetti Monster worshippers' are not attacking your dignity as a human being. It is the capitalist power centers who would not let you organise and rise as equals. It perpetuates inequality and dreams of 'making it big', a lottery rigged from the start. The 'Anti-nationals' are only really anti-stupor . They are not endangering your survival. Your existence is being endangered by blind corporates and corrupt bureaucrats who subvert moral responsibilities , and who prioritise profit over human life. Jats/ Dali...

The only reality is power. and the powerful will always have more leverage with tools. No matter with what intention those tools were made - internet (democratising force), judicial system (equalizing force), democracy (equal voice)... all these tools ends up serving the rich and powerful.  Take for instance the brutal massacres that Ranveer sena assholes kept on perpetrating killing hundreds of marginalised people - Dalits, Muslims, low-caste persons. A decade on, the perpetrators have been declared innocent by high court citing such intelligent reasoning - "When the killers came with intention to kill everybody, how the witnesses survived?"   The high caste judge reasoned that presence of witness is proof of the innocence! and if the killers had been efficient? then in absence of witnesses, killers would have been deemed innocent. Heads I win, Tales you loose. And the unstated rule of land will always remain 'Heads I win, tale you loose' with the r...

3 reasons why democracy as we know today is a waste of intentions, time, money and opportunity. It is a costly mistake that needs to be corrected. 1. Rule of the elite The word Democracy is an antonym of Aristocracy - the rule of an elite. Yet, the elected representative turn into elite the day he/she gets elected. For a true representative democracy, the representative must remain a representative of the constituency - socially, morally, financially... What is the point of this charade if the representative goes and sits in the capital and leads an entirely alien life to that of the constituency he represents. For a representative to be a 'representative' - he /she should share enough common traits, concerns, social condition with his/her constituency. There must be rules regarding the validity of candidature and his class & geographical mobility. For eg. if the candidate becomes x-times richer than the average enrichment of his constituency, his candidature must auto...

Its Holi time. :) The best time (for some) to be in India. It is a global party to prepare ourselves of the terrible weather that will soon turn us into homebodies - scared of stepping out in the day time 45 degree dust bowls. One last day of being out and enjoying it - beat the heat with style. Social media, the zeitgeist barometer, though indicates a different Holi to me this year. On the one hand, there are people talking about the HoliCow party - stripping holi to its most basic ritual, and turning it into a modern dance banality. And on the other, there's concerned city folks who are advocating abstention from the whole thing - save water/ "Think of the poor" - droughts across India/ natural herbal colors as replacement for the more energetic color+water combination. (Should we blame this on ACs? I have a hypothesis - Holi will be played more vigorously in towns where there is low penetration of Air-Condition machines. There is a correlation between 'for...

 

Tunisia woke up after a young man driven with frustration doused himself in fire . He cared for his dignity . People in Tunisia recognized that systematic stripping of dignity that the government was subjecting them to. Out of the flames arose the call for dignity so loud that it toppled several dictators. The pre-shocks of the Tsunami were felt at a town square where a shopkeeper could not take the abuse from the police anymore. He took up a fight on street. Quickly the whole town was baying for blood of police. Dignity had been earned back. However, Indians have given up on the very idea of dignity long back. Crimes against humanity get internalized by families as rules of the world. ('Its like that only') The idea of right and wrong is very unstable. For example, if a young couple gets hacked to death for daring to love even though being from different castes, the society will turn it into a tamasha where moral eyebrows would be raised about the character of the young cou...

Mohammad Idris is sitting next to me on bus ride to andheri station. i know his name cause i read it on a paper that he took out from his pocket. He unwinded the folds and held it in both his hands. All this while he was munching on tobacco with certain relish. He was holding the page tightly, crumpling it at its edges. He was gazing at it intently, though his eyes did not move. they were vaguely fixed somewhere on the paper. His face, was a shadow of his nonchalant resignation; which contrasted with his still resolute body. he reminded me of John Galt. The paper in his hand was a bad photocopy (or 'xerox' to be more precise) of a paper which obviously was some kind of official paper. On it was written that the citizen of India Mr. Mohammad Idris with so and so passport no. has been appointed as Machine operator in so & so company in Mauritius. The permit is for 1 year.

The original reason I thought of against efficiency was really an empirical observation, with parallel to a natural sciences maxim. Any system naturally degenerates to higher entropy. The third law of thermodynamic s says so. The only way to continuously improve (increased order…going against disorder) is to segregate the components into an efficient system apart from a degenerate one. For eg. Essentially it could translate to the increased cleanliness inside our houses at the cost of dirtier and infertile land outside. Think of the nuclear wastage in ocean beds that has killed entire species of fishes. All for our want of efficient energy. So increased efficiency here means you r screwing up something else somewhere, all the more. So in Capitalism, where a select few get more and more resources at their disposal without an iota of understanding of it's cost, a third world country is perhaps paying the price through it's deforestation, increased pollution, de humanization, infe...