Sri Sri, Kejriwal, Modi - aur aap, the voter

The political climate in India has been highly charged in the past few months, to say the least.

There are different types of camps: of people who staunchly support one of the three top bigwigs/parties (Modi of BJP, Rahul of Congress and Kerjriwal of AAP); of those who are taking a party-specific approach irrespective of candidates--and vice versa; and those who are pulling their hair out on whom to choose for the coming elections.

The debates are fierce, the arguments and counter-arguments vehement and the tripartite mud-slinging distasteful--on social, anti-social, local, global and all types of wobbly media.

I was watching all this uproar, trying to make up my own mind as a voter (as a journalist I'm avowed not to side with any party), when I came across an eloquently written piece by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar of The Art of Living in Hindustan Times.

Before I go on, a disclaimer is in order: I have undergone the basic course of AOL and do Sudarshan Kriya regularly and have personally benefited from it in physical and mental well-being. But I have heard contradictory accounts of Sri Sri and AOL (not unlike what you hear of politicians) and I neither support nor denounce them blindly.

Like my new-found interest in politics and spirituality, I'm exploring the options. But then, I digress...

In his opinion article, which is provocatively titled "AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal has left the country choiceless," Ravi Shankar relates how AAP and Kejriwal started with the noble mission of rooting out corruption and giving voice to millions of Indians who are sick and tired of corrupt and criminally tainted politicians. And how they subsequently got consumed with political ambitions of their own and are no longer proving to be different from the political class they seek to dethrone.

He also writes that "While Gujarat may not be 100% corruption-free, I have no hesitation in saying that it is much better than what it used to be. Instead of being honest with facts, Kejriwal has chosen to put down BJP’s prime ministerial candidate and Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi on flimsy grounds," referring to Kerjriwal's high-octane four-day visit to Gujarat in which he hurled criticism at Modi at the slightest opportunity.

Talking about his own visits to the state in the 1990s and comparing them to the situation now, Ravi Shankar says the situation in the Modi-ruled state has improved visibly in infrastructure and economic terms.

Coming from someone of the stature of Sri Sri, the assessment is sure to lend credibility and godspeed to Modi's campaign and promise of taking the governance experiment in Gujarat to the national level (if he becomes PM, of course).

Personally, I have also heard contradictory views on to what extent Modi has been able to make a difference to the infrastructure as well as the people of the state in his three terms as chief minister.

All the same, I'm astonished at the apocalyptic statements issuing forth from the mouths of a whole battery of politicians, religious groups and others on what will happen if Modi does become the prime mover of a country of 1.3 billion people. They depict an inferno-like situation, riots, wholesale destruction, and what not.

It is arguable that Modi's conscience should prick more (than to the extent it has) at the loss of innocent lives in riots that happened in the aftermath of the train-burning incident in Gujarat. Court cases have gone on for long and disputes about Modi/administration's role in handling the situation are still arising. But on Modi becoming PM, to say things like "Aag lag jayegi"?!

Crazy.

When the Aam Aadmi Party initially entered the scene (following its split from the Anna Hazare anti-corruption/Lokpal movement which itself was an amazing sight to watch, though it peaked in a whimper), I could feel a sense of rejuvenation in the electorate, especially the youth and white-collar workers. To its credit, AAP and Kejriwal brought corruption to the forefront as a political issue and impressed a whole swathe of Indians with their candor, nimble thinking and swift mobilisation.

But when the ticket-giving for seats began, many of the candidates have been found to be of dubious record or get-elected-quick types who just want to ride the AAP wave.

So again, what we have is a mish-mash of (mostly) bad apples to choose from--be it AAP, BJP or Congress.

So, in a way, Ravi Shankar is right in saying that the initial promise of better choice exhibited by AAP is dissolving into a haze of disillusionment and hunger for power.

I think a lot of people will make their choice thus: since there are no best or even good choices, they might try opting for the "least bad" as per their perception, media projection and past experience or record.

If the prevalent view is that Congress has ruled the country for the maximum number of years (first without and then with alliances) AND India is a messier country than it was 60 years back, most people would certainly vote against the party.

Many would not vote at all or caste their vote for nobody (not sure if the ballot allows that option).

Unfortunately, a huge mass of Indian humanity would just choose whoever was in their good books on election eve (gifts, liquor, freebies, etc.)

"Choiceless," did Sri Sri say?

Anna, Corruption and the Development Equation

We must look at the whole development structure, and not just corruption, if the mess called “India” needs to be set right


It is a dumbfounding moment for a lot of Indians. This Anna Hazare thing and the whole idea of a nation suddenly up in knots against corruption.

Most people are beginning to feel that the Jan Lokpal Bill as envisaged by Team Anna will rid India of the cancer of corruption – to a significant extent. Some feel the Sangh Parivar is ready to ride on the back of the moment – and the movement. Yet others are trying frantically to save a government from whose cupboard the skeletons of corruption just can't stop coming out.

While corruption has become a buzz word, a love-hate word, a cure-all and curse-all word, I think it might not be a bad idea to look at the whole development equation and see where corruption – and we, a nation of billion-odd people, including oddest ones – fit in.

Let me warn you: this could be a longer article than the mostly asinine tweets and cut-and-paste status updates fast gaining currency as our preferred mode of conversation rather than well-considered and longish pieces of writing. So if you are just looking for some sound bytes, scoot away now! Please.

So, what does the whole development equation look like?

This questions is directly and significantly related to corruption, so just think it over.

To my mind, to embrace development in today's fast, technologically advanced and increasingly rights-aware world is to ensure these things: people are able to feed and clothe themselves, children get to play and learn the things they find interesting, adults get to work and get paid in fair proportion to their abilities and labor, and there's a speedy and reasonably fair system of settling disputes and administering justice.

What we have in the world today is this: a huge proportion of humanity goes to sleep on a hungry stomach; each year thousands of poor people die in heat or cold waves for want of proper clothing and shelter; millions of children are malnourished, millions more are child-laborers who hardly get to play anything, let alone learn about interesting things; most people have to settle for whatever they get for the back-breaking work they do (with only a few complaining about salaries and weekends – and still fewer making noises on taxes directed at the really wealthy); and justice is either out of reach for most, too delayed or simply putty in the hands of the powerful.

When you consider these parameters of development in third-world countries like those of sub-Saharan Africa or India (not very different if you look at the bottom two-third of the pyramid), you find that the development situation is truly appalling.
And yet...

Yet there is development happening. Can't you see, there are malls sprouting all around suburbia? Didn't you read about the 20 or so Bentley cars sold in India? Haven't you seen advertisements of bathroom fittings that promise to drench your body with hundreds of liters of water in a single shower? (Okay, the ads don't say anything about how much water is needed to “enjoy water” with those fancy fittings, but you could make out, couldn't you?) And hey, didn't you hear about the new shampoos for your dogs launched by that cult multinational brand?

Truly, there must be a lot of people out there willing to bathe their doggies in exotic shampoo? Or installing a thousand-dollar shower and taking a bath themselves instead? And don't you forget all those vacations in picture-perfect locales that the papers are so aggressively promoting through ads and articles (I forget which is which these days.)

So the top one, two or five percent of an economy is full of all these people – the mega consumer-owners who keep the bulldozing engines of “modern” development going on. And they get the economists to throw a beautifully coined term at anyone who raises an objection to this resource-hungry and environment-ravaging model of development: the “trickle-down effect” that reaches the common man.

The bottom 95 percent? Most of them just manage to keep alive, a majority never having any real chance of shopping in the same mall they helped build with their own hands. And a not-so-big-as-made-out chunk, the neither-here-nor-theres of the world, the enamored middle classes, looks up dreamily at the owners-superconsumers and aspires to reach there some day. But most never do.

The result is a gaping structural deformity in development. Which means a tiny portion of people enjoy all the luxuries of the world, a significant number work blindly for money in the hope of making it big, but the astonishing majority barely scraping through life in unhygienic, depressing and impoverished conditions.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against capitalism, if that's the idea you are getting from the above views. We've seen socialism fail miserably and the days of autocracy are long numbered. So capitalism or market economy is what we are left with essentially.

What I'm just trying to get at is the root cause of corruption and the enabling environment that helps it grow and enrich a few at the cost of so many.

At the heart of such an enabling environment are three things: natural resources, power and greed. Corruption results from the unholy mix of these three ingredients. In particular, when the legal and systemic structure of a country is not designed to take care of huge structural inequalities in development, corruption seeps in, becomes a flood and starts to boil the blood of the suffering millions.

The unholy mix of corruption, in which powerful people loot the natural resources of a country to largely distribute the wealth thus generated among themselves and throw some peanuts to the milling crowds, is not a new phenomenon. Right from the old colonial masters, be they the Spaniards or the British, down to the current power-brokers and “industrialists,” this loot has been going on for ages. Nothing seems to stop it. What can be realistically expected, perhaps, is that this loot somehow lessens to a tolerable level so that people at the bottom can breathe a little fresher air.

The current upsurge in India is an acknowledgment of the huge and multiple instances of rampant loot going on in the country for the past so many years. The worst part is that almost all political parties that make the so-called democratic polity of India have been caught with their hand in the till at one time or another. Which is why “the common man” has lost faith in the democratic process itself.

If you look at the candidates who fight elections, who are they? Most of them are goons, goondas, boors, hardened criminals, apathetic profiteers and so forth. Many of them are the already rich scions of political bigwigs or their proteges. A tiny minority might be sincere and honest, but there numbers are too few to make a big difference.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the natural resources of a country are limited. That is why, after the process of economic liberalization in India has gathered pace, there is an urgency among our political and owner-superconsumer class to quickly dispense the remaining resources (mines, land, etc.) and ensure their own further enrichment. If palms need to be greased to hasten that process, so be it! If inferior material can be bought at exorbitant costs to the exchequer (read to “you, me and other tax-payers”) but at enormous profits to those giving and receiving contracts for infrastructure and other “nation-building” exercises, why not? Such is the rationale of the corrupt.

And what happens in successive elections? The party or parties that come to power blame the previous regime for all the ills of governance, including corruption, lack of financing, poor decisions, etc. – and continue to line their own pockets while mouthing blames and expressing their own helplessness. Given that almost all parties in India shelter a growing flock of bad sheep in their midst, this cycle of blame and loot just keeps on repeating every five years.

And what development do we have at the end of the day? Oh, my God, don't ask me that! We have a monstrous situation in the country. But let me first talk about a few good things: there are some spanking new, world-class malls and office buildings, a huge number of automobile beauties are available for purchase, some expensive medical facilities have come up, a few lakh educated folk have found employment and there's a cornucopia of consumer goods out there in our urban markets.

Now, get ready for the not-so-good, bad and really ugly parts. There's muck and filth all around those swish malls. Muck and filth in large parts of our cities – on the roads, along the railway lines, around our very houses. Some posh localities and gated communities aside, the sheer amount of muck and filth is mind-boggling. If one were to weigh all that garbage in, say, Mumbai, it would perhaps equal half the waters of the Arabian Sea! Maybe more.

Come to the roads now. The Merc, the Alto and the cycle-rickshaw all stand side-by-side, trying to wiggle their way out of massive traffic jams. Flyovers have turned into nice places where cars crawl bumper-to-bumper, giving their occupants an opportunity to enjoy wide-angle views of their sprawling city – except nobody seems to be enjoying. The honking and heat and smoke are just all too annoying!

There have been many reports of the five-star-type hospitals charging exorbitant money and still not being able to provide the necessary healthcare to their customers. The poor are just turned away (despite the fact that many got land from the government at concessional rates in order that a certain number of poor can also avail of their facilities).

The increasing amount of burgers, pizzas and processed foods are making more and more Indians grow – their bellies, that is. And also grow the instances of diabetes and heart disease amongst them. Why do you think they are building all those expensive hospitals? All marketers have got their projections in place and are readying for the battle to fight diseases that the very pseudo development caused in the first place!

This whole development equation is coalescing around the few: the owners-superconsumers. Along with the politicians and bureaucrats, they are creating these development paradigms and profiting from it at the expense of millions and millions (for whose real uplift and betterment the public money should have been spent).

I can see the objections and the barrage of questions coming: At least more people today are well-off than at any other time in history. Wouldn't some inequalities creep in given the size and scale of our country? And then, what is the way out? Should we just live in shacks in villages? Shouldn't our children aspire to work and live in modern corporations in modern buildings in modern cities? What's wrong with having so many flavors of ice-cream? And how can we root out corruption?

Let me try and answer them in the best way I can.

I'm not against modernization or capitalism. And I love to experiment with flavors in ice-cream along with my kids.

I'm against the mess we have created in the name of development. Why I write strongly about all this is because much of it could have been avoided. Corruption is part of the problem but lack of a holistic vision and poor quality of leaders are bigger causes for this mess.

Why did our leaders throw open the flood-gates of economy without proper planning and preparation? How could we not learn from the mistakes of Western countries? If we had, a monster like Gurgaon should never have come to life. Why do we seem hell bent on aping the West, mostly guzzling their beer but not imbibing their spirit of freedom and justice?

Lokpal Bill may or may not cut down on corruption. But if we do not overhaul our existing laws and labyrinthine governance systems into simpler, speedier and more equitable ones, our development equation – and corruption situation – won't change much.

Over the past few days I have seen the resolve and sacrifice of a simple-minded – though sometimes confused – man, Anna Hazare. But he's already 74 and doesn't seem to have either the experience or the intent to play a larger and more active role in running the affairs of this country. His collaborators and team members seem well-meaning people but will the current political establishment allow them center stage once Anna's ongoing fast recedes into some complicated reconciliation?

To run a country as big and diverse as India, you need at least a dozen or so best minds who can review, change and execute our existing model of development. This will require an immense effort, honesty and perseverance of an order that would make Hercules' task seem tiny in comparison.

It will also require some radical thinking and steps on development: those that do not look at development as encouraging billions to crowd the roads with raucous cars but instead put more Metro tracks and create more walking space; those that include prevention of diseases and espousing a healthy lifestyle as essential elements of a nation's healthcare planning; that take systemic measures to ensure there's bathing water for every citizen and not bother too much about pricey faucets and showers; that rationally allocate natural resources to the production process for a more justifiable and environmentally friendly dispensation...

I hope that Jan Lokpal would be a right step in that direction, but I know that so much more is needed in India to set the course right. And I will be wary of what happens next. Won't you be?

India and the Morality of Corruption

A scathing look at the state of corruption and its root causes in the world's largest de-Mock-racy

For the past few weeks, corruption has become a fashionable topic in India. Starting from Anna Hazare's fast over Lokpal Bill to Baba Ramdev's anti-black money drama, anyone who's got an opinion is voicing it stridently. There's a flood of opinions in electronic media, in the papers and on the chatter of Facebook and Twitter.

But all this brouhaha is the product of an increasingly and shamelessly corrupt nation. And it would hardly result in a major change in the way politicians and bureaucrats have been looting the country.

Before giving my reasons for saying so or suggesting any semi-cooked corruption-curing recipes of my own, let me state where my loyalties lie.

I'm neither with BJP-RSS-Sangh types nor with the Congress or its multiple splinter groups, nor with any just-for-name's-sake-group on any social networking site. I am with the proverbial and much-abused common man who, while all this media circus is going on, is busy carting a back-breaking load of supplies through our ramshackle markets.

I'm with the man who is trying to survive with meager earnings from his nondescript kiosk-shop. I'm with the girl who must hurry home if she doesn't want to be raped or teased and who hasn't got a chauffeur-driven car to take her home. I'm with the homeless beggar who is being harassed by the policeman and the gangster alike. I'm with the farmer whose irrigation water is diverted to serve five-star hotels and resorts...

In fact, I'm with about 700 million poor people of India who never understood the meaning of Shining India and probably never will.

Let me take you a little back in time. I'm not sure how many of you would appreciate it, but I grew up on an ample dose of all-round prosperity shown on Krishi Darshan (a government TV program). It was also taught in school books and preached through a state-controlled media.

I was under the impression that the founding fathers of this nation had done a great job by putting together a wonderful Constitution. And by following in the footsteps of our erstwhile rulers (the British), they kept a gargantuan bureaucracy as well-oiled as you would find in a spanking factory.

How was I to know that all that oil was actually grease, exchanging millions of palms for the enrichment of their owners alone? How was I to know that while our leaders threw out the tyrant rule of the British, they wittingly or unwittingly installed a draconian regime that thrived on abusing power?

I wouldn't bore you with all the details of a newly Independent, proud India with great leaders having a great vision for our great nation. But the bottomline is this: our population control measures have failed. Our aging infrastructure (much of it bequeathed to us by the British) is deteriorating. The sub-standard products made by our 'license raj' industrialists have mostly failed to stand against global competition (do a count of how many products we buy come from China and elsewhere). Our socialistic mutlipoint programs and hare-brained schemes have failed to give social security to the poor...

The list of failures just goes on and on.

But yes, we have succeeded in creating a vicious, greedy, bloated and extremely corrupt 'governance' system. And at the tentacled head of this system sits that obsequiously dynastic, shamelessly appeasing and pathetically spineless 'grand old party' – with a foreigner madame and a stooge of a man currently at the helm.

This otherwise useless party seemed to have done a good thing when it opened up the Indian economy in the early nineties. But, alas, it all came a cropper!

While the license raj was being disbanded, a new band of robbers and looters emerged – and they were of all forms and persuasions, comprising politicians, bureaucrats, land grabbers, deal brokers, thugs and curmudgeons.

This band set out in earnest to divvy up the natural and other resources of the country. They did it largely among themselves, but threw away some bits and pieces off and on for the rising middle, lower middle, lowest middle and god-knows-how-even-lower middle classes.

Some crazy statistics were rustled up about the benefits of all this 'wealth creation' trickling down to the lowest rungs of society. Never mind that the trickle has been nothing but a stinky obnoxious drain.

If you are stats oriented, chew these: more than 75% of Indian population has a purchasing power of less than Rs20 a day. Nearly half of Indian children are malnourished. About 110 million agricultural workers found employment for only 209 days in 2004-05 compared to 220 days in 1999-2000. Around 150 of India's 607 districts are engulfed in Naxalite movement. And while the much-touted GDP growth races ahead in the 7-9% range, employment growth has been a meager 1%...

In these twenty or so years of liberalization, one of the most 'liberalized' things in India has become honesty and integrity. While the slogan of India's freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose was “Tum mujhe khoon do, main tumhein azadi doonga” (You give me blood, and I'll give you freedom), the prevalent leitmotif in an increasingly corrupt India has become “Tum mujhe ghoos do, kyonki main kisi aur ko doonga!” (You better give me bribe, coz I gotta give it to somebody else.)

Mera Bharat mahaan, indeed! (My India is great.)

It is this ghooskhor or bribe-infested culture that seems to have captured the absconding imagination of a few lakh people (a handful in the colossus of India) all of a sudden.

Ask any businessman – from the local chaiwalla to the global Ambani – about the number of times they have to bribe the multiple power brokers in order to survive (in Ambani's case, thrive).

Ask the owners of the buildings in any Indian city (most of which are truly ugly and urgently in need of fresh air) whether they could have erected those eyesores without making “the authorities” turn a blind eye to their multi-storied plans?

Hell, ask yourself, would you be able to survive the daily horrors of getting a gas connection, registering a property, obtaining a government stamp of approval, securing school admission for your child and innumerable such “tasks” without paying any bribes to someone?

So, in a broader view of things, almost all of us are corrupt.

But the way in which the high and mighty are corrupt – and the way they engender this culture of corruption all around them – calls for special discussion.

Imagine a unit of society in which the head of that unit is corrupt. The unit could be a family, a resident welfare association, a local governing body, a state government or the central ruling formation. This head goes about lining their pockets at the expense of others, asks and permits others to do as they please so long as all those “involved” get their “cuts”, and generally remains unaffected by the misery of those way down below in the hierarchy. How do you think one can cure this unit of the curse of corruption?

By asking those at the bottom of the ladder to not pay bribes? By just complaining about the situation and the whole machinery? By pressing the Like button on someone's anti-corruption page?

No, dear reader, of course, not. And that's precisely what we the people of India seem to be doing. From the above example, I'm sure you would agree that the most effective way of making the unit corruption-free is to remove the head of the unit and replace him or her with an honest, caring one.

And that's where the biggest challenge for India lies. My question is, who do you install in place of the current corruption-laden ruling parties in India? Which national-level party today is without the stains of corruption?

A bigger and related question: Do we have any leader of the stature who can clear up the mess in our heritage-rich but idea-poor country? Can anyone take India to the social, economic and scientific heights achieved by the likes of US and Japan (or by its own people centuries ago)?

Is there anyone who can ensure that calling India a superpower in the making is not a laughing matter but a matter of progressive achievement? (For one, I laugh out loud at such peasant-like thinking, given the way things are going.)

Who is going to be that person? That leader?

Anna Hazare? Hmmm, perhaps, but let me think...

Sonia Gandhi? I was so happy that she refused to be Prime Minister (PM) – only to be much angry later when she installed that puppet-puppy PM...and we all know how many corruption scandals have erupted. Why, you are reading this article because of that!

LK Advani? Gadkari? Narendra Modi? No way!

Baba Ramdev? He doesn't see himself in politics – and neither do I!

Rahul Baba? He has neither the credentials nor the credibility (what he has is the Gandhi dynasty and a boatload of sycophants)...

You? Me? What are we talking about!

Alas, my dear reader, no one. To my eyes, there is NOT A SINGLE human being (as far as that weary eye can see) with the moral courage, impeccable integrity, caring humanity and a wide support base who can lift India out of the abyss of corruption and then take it to the greatness we are so fond of remembering.

And so? So we keep on trying (or pretend to), while the millions keep on dying. Sorry, CK Prahalad, despite your philanthropic economic advice, when it comes to India, there's only misfortune at the bottom of the pyramid.

The India of My Screams

I was looking for something to write on India's Independence Day today, when this idea just struck me...

In many schools in India students are often asked to write an essay on 'The India of My Dreams.' Having done my own share of such juvenile writing in school days, I just thought it might be time for me to put out a little writeup with a slightly twisted but perhaps more realistic title, 'The India of My Screams.' So here it goes...

We used to be a sort of sleeping giant before liberalization began in the early nineties. But ever since we've 'woken up,' we don't seem to stop screaming - for one reason or the other.

First of all, none of our geriatric leaders had the vision about how to really go about liberalizing a country as vast as ours - so they took a patchwork approach to it, doing a little here or a little there, but never enough anywhere! And I feel sorry to say that even to this day, we don't have a single leader who can pull the country out of the morass it is in (And even if there were, he or she would find it difficult to steer things their own way in the midst of coalition politics).

So while the incumbent Congress government won on the promise of doing something for the aam admi (common man), nobody knows what it is they've done. And the common man? He's screaming to be heard against rising cost of basic necessities.

Our infrastructure - be it roads, power, water, electricity or sewage - is screaming, creaking and, as we've seen during recent rains in Delhi, weeping too. We have made it a fine art of always allowing infrastructure to lag behind current needs. Lag not in number of months or a couple of years, but lag in decades - perhaps centuries! Has any of our rulers heard of the term 'town planning'? I seriously doubt it. Have they wondered at the mess they have been able to create in and around what many call the Millennium City (Gurgaon)? I have. At least one person wouldn't be complaining (Mr KP Singh of DLF, the biggest builder in the area and the country as well)! The so-called builders of modern India have 'malled' our cities but, in the process, also 'mauled' its infrastructure, the environment and, often, the local inhabitants and the underprivileged...

Our people, especially those ensconced in cars, keep on screaming, too, and they often use the machines they sit inside for several hours each day for screaming. It's called honking and it's a favorite pastime of drivers in most places in India. Never mind that the guy ahead of you is not in a position to move in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, let's honk! Or so goes the popular mood amongst motorati.

Even within the malls, people just cannot help screaming. On most Saturdays and Sundays, they shout their throats hoarse, trying to catch the attention of the cashier at the food court. Then they go to each 'cuisine' counter (the cuisine often being industrially made formula food) and again scream to be heard and served. When they have had 'a good time' hopping from counter to counter for food and are ready to head home, there's a long line of vehicles waiting impatiently to get out of the mall's cavernous clutches and onto the crowded roads. Of course, there's plenty of scope and opportunity for honking and screaming, and most people find it hard to give it a miss.

The situation is no better for those who don't - rather, cannot - go to the malls. They often wait in queues for the water tankers to come. Meanwhile, they scream at each other for breaking the queue or putting two buckets instead of one in their 'occupied' position. On other occasions, they gherao (surround a place for a demonstration) the local power distribution center, demanding that they have had enough going without electricity for the past 10 or 15 hours. There is a lot of screaming going on here, too...

That's not to say that our leaders and rulers are immune to shouting and screaming. But they are much used to it - there's so much screaming and blaming going on in the Parliament and in state legislative assemblies that nobody notices any longer. Many of our leaders are often seen sleeping or snoring amid all this din - most probably dreaming of their multi-million dollars stashed away in Swiss accounts. After all, foreign education of kids, separate lucrative businesses for kith and kin, and other desirables in life come for a cost - and a lot of screaming, apparently...

Mera Bharat Mahaan! (it's a customary salutation in India to show respect and appreciation for your country - the countrymen be damned!)

Punishing the Powerful

Just read a news item about a "sitting MLA" getting jail for committing murder during riots in Kandhamal in Orissa. The report says he has been sentenced to seven years' imprisonment by a fast-track court.

This is a rare type of news, especially in a corruption-infested country like India, where justice is not only routinely delayed (Bhopal gas leak is a case in point), it is in such a shambles that the corrupt and the powerful are actually 'encouraged' to perpetrate more crimes and excesses.

It made me wonder: what would happen to India's polity if there were a way to accentuate such 'fast-track' courts and punishing verdicts against the high and mighty? It will be nothing short of an all-body cleanser, a transformation of sorts, a miracle...alas, miracles seem to happen only in the movies!

Bombay Burns...Again

So we had another terror attack - perhaps the maddest one this time, with terrorists going berserk in the city's landmark hotels (Taj and Oberoi) plus several other places in southern Mumbai.

How many terror attacks will it take for our wily politicians to do something about the security of innocent civilians?

As I watched the stupefied media coverage on TV (with anchors and reporters blabbering on and on without giving much information, filling airtime with nonsensical commentary), I realized that in a day or two everything will be back to "normal" - with normal people and normal politicians and normal media going back to their normal routines.

I don't have a .32 like Mr Bachchan (and don't support a US-style gun culture), but I must say that technology-driven surveillance and a trained police force are essential to avoid repeated terror attacks in India. I'm afraid people will start taking things with a pinch of salt like they do in the Middle East.

One of our biggest problems (besides scheming and self-serving politicos): rampant corruption amongst policemen across ranks. (Most of us are also guilty by taking the easy way out of a situation in our daily lives through greasing their palms.)

I acknowledge and honor the courage and honesty of those who laid down their lives in saving people. At the same time, I (and every other Indian citizen) must question the manner in which the attacks in Mumbai were carried out. Either we were extremely stupid or extremely corrupt - or a bit of both.

Terror's ugly face is irrevocably masked with the filth of corruption.