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.

Monday 25 June 2012

AUSTERITY HO! (II)

They: Our lords, inheriting the power corridors of Delhi and the Indian states
Us: The subjects, always taken for granted, and so treaded and trampled at will
 
Take 3:

They: Bungalows and flats of Maharashtra’s ministers are defaulting on payment of dues. A recent RTI report reveals Rs. 1.2 Crore is due on our Maharashtra lords in the name of electricity bills. While the outstanding is Rs. 1.1 Crore, the rest is the usage bill amount for May 2012. Official addresses of Governor and 20 other ministers are sitting on unpaid water bills of Rs. 30 Lakh accumulated over two years.

Yet, there is no disconnection.

A recent RTI by Subhash Agrawal reveals that our parliamentarians enjoy immunity from disconnection of their telephone lines even if the bill runs in tens of thousands of Rupees. You know these parliamentarians have a cap of 1.5 Lakh free calls per year. Even then the MTNL outstanding due on present and former parliamentarians is astounding Rs. 7 Crore.

Imagine the multiples of 1.5 Lakh free calls per month!

Our lords are free of the highs and lows that every rising and lowering commodity price tag brings to our lives every passing day.

Us: Delhi’s chief minister Sheila Dikshit said today power tariffs may be revised soon. We are again slated to be the scapegoat as Delhiites would end up paying higher for the fault of BSES, the distribution company.

Many parts of India including the Shanghai contender Delhi and India’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh are crushing their citizens against irregular or non-existent electricity and water supply.

The basic amenities, like electricity, water, sanitation, transportation, that consume the lifetime of the common man with all the possible permutations and combinations exhausted in paying and repaying the bills, are nothing but blank figures for our lords as they don’t have to pay for their king-size lifestyles.

The common men, the taxpayers, pay for their ultra-luxurious living standards while counting the every passing moment of their less-than-ordinary lives.

And they, the lords, frame policies for us.

Don’t pay your electricity bill or the phone bill on time and feel the pinch. Now, even they don’t inform and just disconnect the line. To avail the services again, make rounds to the offices. Pay under-the-table convenience fee and pay reconnection fee.

Take 4:

They: Indian states come with ministry portfolios like Homoeopathy, Ayurveda, Cattle and Livestock, Statistics, Potable Water, Irrigation Water and like that will spontaneously bring a satirist smile to any face but our lords are so high and mighty that they don’t even put and ear to it.

In order to accommodate as many of the coalition partners as ministers as possible, foolish-sounding ministry-portfolios are created and shameless waste of taxpayers’ money is wasted.  

Us: One of the measures of the austerity drives announced by our beloved next First Citizen of India was freeze on government recruitments. Now, cursed of the coalition politics compulsion and greed of being glued to chair of power at any cost, they cannot downsize the number of ministries even though some of them are absolutely rubbish.

This sort of window austerity is for the subjects, the common men, only. The common man is the victim in the finality. It is he who applies for such government openings looking for that elusive government job.

A typical class-I government employees takes home an annual sum of Rs. 5-6 Lakh when he begins his career. And our lords spend crores in fuel bills annually. Their phone bills run to so many hours that even any die-hard love-bird can’t possibly think of.

And the common man pays for that.

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