The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Tuesday 20 December 2011

NAVALNY SYNDROME - “RUSSIA WITHOUT PUTIN!” – RUSSIAN BLOGGERS ROCK – ARAB SPRING IS FLOWING (II)

“Logically, Putin should make the first move, but his statements during the call-in show were counterproductive. Journalist Oleg Kashin even called his performance "self-immolation." Kashin's opinion had statistical support: The number of people who went on a Facebook site and clicked that they would attend the next demonstration Dec. 24 rose from 18,000 to 21,500 during the course of the show.” – The Moscow Times, December 19, 2011

Vladimir Putin held his 10th annual televised call-in show on December 15 and this year it lasted for more than four hours, longest in show’s history. He had to answer. He had to sound credible and sincere on the public protests on vote rigging complaints. Instead what he said bounced back on him. People who were not sure on deciding to attend the next round of protests on December 24 found reasons in Putin’s untimed raw humour especially his ‘condom expertise’ statement. He said, “To be perfectly honest, when I saw something on some people's chests, I'll be honest -- it's not quite appropriate -- but in any case, I thought that this was part of an anti-AIDS campaign, that these were, pardon me, condoms."  Incidentally, the protestors had pinned white ribbons to their coats and Putin’s way to handle public sentiments found a way to dismiss the collective gathering by treating it in lighter vein like the other day he alleged of CIA intervention and support behind these protests. And this tells us something. Underneath, he understands the problem is big. Linking it to CIA tells us. Like in  India, where most of the major problems related to the internal security are attributed to the ISI or Pakistan as the first resort to buy time to think on what the problem is, similar sentiment persists in lawmakers everywhere and since Russia’s nemesis is USA and so blame it on CIA. But given the things at the moment, no one can say if Putin has been able to gauge the mood of the nation especially it’s younger lot?

One of the striking features of the protests post December 4 parliamentary elections has been the spontaneous involvement of many who were considered politically inactive. "The most important outcome of yesterday's rally is that it not only drew people who usually come out to such events, but also those who never attend them," AFP quoted LiveJournal's most followed Russian blogger drugoi (other) about the protests immediately after the December 4 elections.

And this generation is led by bloggers like Aleksei Navalny. This generation that Putin is finding hard to placate thrives on the Internet, an Internet which is just one of the few options available to Russians to express them independently. ‘Social networking booming in Egypt, Russia, survey finds’, a story on CNN today provides some insights. The story is based on findings of the Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Project. The report finds, “In almost all the countries surveyed, the use of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter didn't change much from 2010 to 2011. Two notable exceptions were Egypt, where 28% of respondents now use social networks -- up from 18% last year -- and Russia, where social-networking use rose from 33% to 43%.” According to the Internet World Stats, Russia’s Internet penetration was 42.8 per cent of the total population in 2010. According to a comScore release, Russia overtook Germany as market with largest online audience in Europe. The Pew survey found that only 6 per cent of the Russia’s Internet population is not on the social networking sites.

The Arab Spring that spread to Russia owes much to Russia’s demographics, its social media habits and an archaic political system. Let’s see what’s on the table.  

Continued….


©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/