Digging for Meaning

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...

Reasonable people are a rare species. very rare. The world overwhelmingly is unreasonable, always has been. 20th century was a great experiment in trying to institutionalise reasonableness. But alas, we failed in that experiment. and what that messy utopia of rationality has spewed out is a 21st century that is dangerously globalised, unipolar and susceptible to selfishness of a few. If by chance, i meet someone who is, i feel like hugging him/her and somehow ensuring that the person remains a part of my life in some measure through conversations, ideas or projects together.

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...

I am a salmon. It's been a decade away from my hometown, and yet my dreams refuse to relocate along with me. When sleep hasn't claimed me yet, but neither am I awake, you may find me in Nasik. My senses fall back into their default states of Nasik when in-between. The space is of my home in Nasik, the sight is of the things around it. I might be hungry and thinking of eating a laddoo and my hands reach out for the steel dabba stacked on an elevated wooden cupboard stuck on the left wall of kitchen. In my mind's eye, I grope for the dabba momentarily as the search yields nothing - poof. the image disintegrates. I am snapped back to reality with a mild jolt. My mind reminds me of the layout in my own kitchen. There is no airborne shelf, there is no steel container, there is no laddoo. It says, go back to sleep. and I do. _____ I shifted 3.5k km for a less polluted and less dangerous city a year ago. And all was good. I get to walk and how I love to walk. I am truly ...

In the middle of the maelstrom, the saffron vortex of hatred, The man stands battered, by swirling dust of ignorance eyes stinging from all that wide-eyed and yet blind outraging ashamed by his smallness ready to lash out impotently against his own interest against his own people.  ___ Flag bearers must be blind for if they had eyes, they would desert to join the throng at the sidelines screaming to stop the madness. But how can they stop anything without getting sucked into the vicious vortex? unfortunately the only thing the blind understand is the remorseless fist. and the ones with open eyes at the sidelines can't close their palms into fists without succumbing to that old human malady - remorse and guilt. ___ Who with open eyes will take up the challenge of raising and raining fists in-spite of the remorse and the guilt against the hate engineers, the profiteers of commotion, the instigators of dust storms?

I laugh at Anthony Scaramucci's exit. I get worried at US's implosion with the well written analyses . I know more about the dialysis infrastructure of US than that of India. I see daily show, last week tonight and Stephen Colbert and see their sharp criticism of their governments and I despair. Not for US. But for India. Even when US has armed militias, its liberals are not silenced. If at all, they are more dogged in their determination to shine light on shady deals, powerful incompetence, racial subjugation, and so many other things that matter to US's citizen. But our continent sized and a multiverse wide nation isn't as sharp in its defense against incompetent tyrant's plans. The liberal media in US is so good that people outside of US also start to see the world from American perspective. Recently I saw a senior professor posting about 'our national security' while the article he was sharing was about US. He didn't even realise that he was pa...