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.

Thursday 31 May 2012

ONE NATION, ONE NUMBER – MIDST THE TUNES OF THE DOOM

One nation, one number! Okay, no need to get into the patriotic mode.

New telecom policy dubbed National Telecom Policy 2012 was approved by the Cabinet today. Win-win situation for all? or, UPA's attempt to get a breather midst tunes of doom (if today's Bharat Bandh's is the song)?

Telecom companies’ con through roaming and broadband speed barriers to be tamed but be prepared to pay more for local calls!

But Bharat Bandh was not the only song.

Today was yet another day of crisis for the United Progressive Alliance government. It’s not just about the mixed response to the Bandh with significantly higher support in many parts against the petrol price hike (but the Bandh vandals must be punished); it was also because of the major GDP blow.

If the Bandh panicked the government and by the evening we heard the ‘rumours’ of some rollback of the price though denied later on, the GDP downslide slapped in the face of the policymaking with lowest GDP figures in nine years that came out today.

The fourth quarter GDP figures (for March) announced today stood at a poor 5.3 per cent while the GDP for the year 2011-12 has been 6.5 per cent. In the last quarter of the previous year, it was 9.2 per cent. And it has sent shivers across the industry and the community of investors and certainly, it is slated to boil down to the common man already reeling under the pressure if remains unchecked.

And experts all across the spectrum have started rightly blaming the policymaking paralysis for it. Though the GDP figures have never been a true representative of the ground realities in a country like India, they do affect the economy sentiments.

Anyway, this new telecom policy looks good. For me, it will rid me of the endless messages informing me of this roaming zone or that roaming zone while on tour as well as will check the fleecing by Airtel on its broadband connection speed. Also, allowing internet calls can help in offsetting increased call-tariff rates. For many, there will in individualized benefits.

Also, had it not been the GDP humiliation, we might have had some rollback as public sentiments do precipitate when there are important elections slated (i.e., Gujarat, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Odisha, Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, among others) one after the other before and in-the-line of the General Election 2014.

But, probably, the GDP humiliation pulled the government back to play it safe by denying any petrol price rollback though our dear financial manager said emphatically (once again) that all the factors pulling the economy back were almost ironed out. So pathetic he looked again.

A classic catch-22 situation! Isn’t it?

The only way forward is the path to reform but the chicken hearted government cannot go with it in full throttle. It is not just the coalition compulsions, but also the spineless attitude of the government on rationalizing priorities, on reducing taxes, disinvesting the public sector utilities, channeling the black money, holding price-rise even if it bleeds the economy due to electoral politics to steeply increase it later when the elections are gone, only to kill the common man then.

But the GDP humiliation came also as reprieve for the government as it was able to announce its sham austerity measures without much scrutiny as the airwaves spectrum carriers were focused on other developments like analysing the Bandh, going into overdrive on GDP humiliation and some other incidents like yet another train accident and power transition in the Indian Army. There wasn’t any detailed surgery of government’s yet another attempt to befool us in the name of austerity.

HSBC says India is a gasping elephant now. And there are valid takers for it.

Is the full-blown crisis in sight? Will tunes of the doom play the songs of the gloom?

Mr. Manmohan Singh, please do something. The hunky-dory figures of the new telecom policy or shameless crass austerity measures are nowhere near to anointing the already damaged confidence of the Indian juggernaut. 

Do something because it will be ultimately the common man feeling the brunt not you. You and your political coterie, the lords of the democracy, will remain behind the comforts of air-conditioned walls, no matter how deep becomes the crisis.

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

Wednesday 30 May 2012

EMOTIONS (OVERWHELMED)


Emotions, sometimes, they so overwhelm, 
That, every visual language goes blank, 
Yet, you feel so at home, with them..




EMOTIONS (OVERWHELMED) BY RAGINI
CATEGORY: DIGITAL PAINTING, MIX MEDIA




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

Tuesday 29 May 2012

DOCTORS!!

 The complete write-up

Aamir’s show this Sunday was on health care and health care professionals in India. And the tone was justifiably negative.

Pathetic – the one word that can define the state of affairs. There have been raging debates on the issue; there would be volume-loads of literature being written in the future, but what would be the point to begin that would bring the change, had the answer in the show itself. The answer has been all around, much debated and discussed but not able to find takers at the top-most policy-making level.

Aamir was reacting on every small fact, known to millions and already in the public domain, in a way like it was a bombshell. And this sort of attitude (unawareness) is exactly the problem.

Now don’t we all know how the many doctors are cahoots with the marketing machinery and the exacerbated human greed?

Most of the doctors in the government hospitals complete writing the prescription slip even before the patient finishes his account of the problem. Private doctors are not within reach of the majority. Those, from this lot of majority, who approach such doctors, either take loan or kill their savings.

It is next to difficult to convince most of the doctors to write medicines easily available at most of the chemist shops.

It is almost impossible to ask a doctor to let you follow the diagnostic centre that is convenient to you.

Doctors sustain lives. They are supposed to be next to the god. They why this?

Go and experience it. (I bet many of you would already have something to share.)

Recently, I had ligament tear. After trying self-healing, I approached a nearby hospital run by a charity governed by Delhi’s health minister, Ashok Walia. The doctor recommended X-ray and asked me to come with the report. The X-ray guy was probably in some other world as he clicked for wrong part of my foot. I had to get it redone. After it, when I approached the doctor, he had serious expression on his face and some heavy words ready for my problem. He explained it at length like I was having some serious fracture. He wrote three days of medicine and advised to consult again. When I tried to purchase the medicine from the shop I am regular with, I couldn’t find it there, not even at any other shop in the area. Some of the shopkeepers advised me to approach the pharmacy of the hospital. And lo! I got it.

But see what I got it. These were generic salts marketed by some unknown Delhi based company but with almost equal price tag as the branded medicines. They didn’t work on my pain and I left taking them after a day. Anyway, my problem was gone three days after visiting the doctor when I had an enjoyable 4 kilometers walk back to my home.

Now if this is the state of affairs of a charitable hospital associated with a name that is Delhi’s health minister, we can easily imagine what is happening all across.

Magnifying the problem, writing medicines not really needed, and writing highly-priced ineffective versions of medicines – indeed a crime.

I can say I have come across multiple such examples even with the famed doctors indulged in such malpractices. (And I am sure, there would be many like me.)

Another bad patch is the excessive charges being levied on. You can easily find the sky-high differences in the cost of diagnostic tests of different labs. Last year, my sister had a mild fever but the doctor at the Max hospital wrote medical tests for almost everything with bills running into Rs. 20,000 plus figures. My sister recovered after three days and had no need to follow the medicine regime advised for 15 days. Doctors get huge commission on the medical tests recommended, even at the big hospitals like Max and Fortis it seems.

And the commission system really kills. Your hard-earned money goes into nothing.

Extending the tyranny is the unaccountable costs incurred on hospitalization. When I had met the doctor for knee-cap replacement surgery of the 76-year old Mrs. Mehta, I was given a cost-estimate of Rs. 4 Lakh. The total funding generated was around Rs. 5.5 Lakh. And though it was an acclaimed hospital run as a registered charitable institution, the final bill amount crossed the Rs. 5.5 Lakh limit. Okay there might be genuine additions, but what I observed about the attitude of the support staff; it was not different as the money-soaking practices exercised by the corporate hospitals and other notorious one/two doctor nursing homes.

The focus was on maximizing the bill amount irrespective of the need.

There are good and bad people in every profession, but certain areas, owing to their emergency nature and poor access to the public in India, creates an easy ground for manipulation, and health services in India is one such area.

What aggravates the misery in India?

Almost half of the population illiterate (with even greater share of medically illiterate lot), over 65 per cent of the population below poverty line, an ever-increasing urban slum population, lower number of even the allied health professionals working in the rural areas and the restricted availability of qualified medical professionals to the large sections of the population even in the urban centers are the telling signs of the malaise. I don’t need to write the statistical base for all this. Most of us are aware of these.

Unawareness on health care rights and poor government spending on healthcare amenities by the government at the cost of promoting private enterprises coupled with the problems mentioned above create and sustain the monster.

I have been working with doctors and activists. I have come across few good doctors. They are really serious about bringing the change. But I can say I have come across more bad doctors. The condition is frightening in rural areas.

Like I wrote in the beginning of this article, the answer lies in the show itself. It doesn’t mean the show had some miraculous remedy.

It’s ‘attitude’ my dear friends.

Like Aamir was reacting, as if it was a revelation, on every bit of information already in the public domain (at least, victims do feel it all the time – and majority of the India has been victim of the miserable health care system), it is almost same with our policymakers.

The difference is Aamir is trying to do something while our politicians prefer not to do anything. One might be unaware owing to his upbringing but the other lot prefers to remain unaware. 

Unawareness that is going beyond all the acceptable limits!

Policies for the larger India – poor, battered, cursed to live in dark and silence – are framed in closed doors of granite glazed and Italian marble carpeted rooms of Delhi and the state capital cities.

And the current breed of our policymakers look awfully insane when it comes to framing policies reflecting the need of the Indian on the street, be it mapping a village or a small township or some large urban centre.

Either they are career politicians, cushioned in the Parliament for decades, who have comfortably forgotten the miseries being faced daily by an ordinary Indian; or they are the heirs of the political dynasties born with the silver-spoon; or they are rich industrialists or celebrities like Vijay Mallya or Jaya Bachchan, not in touch with the grass roots social needs; or they simply represent the increasing number of politicians loaded with criminal cases against them. The current breed has very few of the politicians who represent a self-built career on social needs and grass-roots level politics.

And health care rights are one major victim of the increasing policymaking paralysis due to the insensitive politicking most of these politicians exercise. Health care services are one of the major sources of corruption given the huge capital and deliverables involved. NRHM (National Rural Health Mission) is one of the biggest scams in the Indian administrative and political history.

And why it happens. Again the unawareness factor!

Most of the Indians even in the urban centers are not aware of their rights (owing to the various socioeconomic maladies mentioned above) resulting in the open loot by the doctors and government officials. It is an open fact that no one want to visit a government hospital to consult a doctor. Only compulsions force patients there. The misery is in calamitous proportions in rural and tribal areas. How can we forget that our great democracy incarcerated Dr. Binayak Sen for over three years for raising voice for health care rights of tribal and rural people?

Health care (like other killing issues, i.e., literacy hunger, etc.) is in shambles in India and needs an immediate swipe but, again, the million dollar question, is, HOW? Let’s see how the ground realities stack up:

A UNICEF report says one in every three malnourished children in the world lives in India. The report further says, “In India, around 46 per cent of all children below the age of three are too small for their age, 47 per cent are underweight and at least 16 per cent are wasted. Many of these children are severely malnourished.

Malnutrition in India is roughly around 46 percent. It has fallen only six percentage points since economic reforms started gaining pace in 1991 while the GDP per capita boomed by 50 percent during the same period. It clearly shows increasing social disparity with majority still living at the bottom of the pyramid.

Government of India defines coverage area of a primary health centre to be 100 villages and 100000 of population by one doctor. According to a report, 64.9 percent of community health centers report lacking specialists while 68.6 percent of PHCs function with only one or no qualified doctor. Also we can understand the negligence by the government machinery as public expenditure has stagnated at just 1 percent of GDP over the last two decades against WHO’s recommended 5 percent.

According to 2006 figures, doctor to population ratio in India was 60:100000 (.24 dcotors per 400 of the population).

Do these figures tell something? YES!

Do they buzz on the ears of our policymakers? NO!

Dear doctors, at least, you do something. Ask your brothers and sisters to be brotherly and sisterly with other fellow Indians.

I firmly believe there are many 'Dr. Binayak Sens'.

The need for something to be done is urgent. This article is not inspired by the TV show, yes but it stirred me to write on the issue. We all need to feel, and more importantly, act.

For the moment, the solution remains elusive, like the spirit of our democracy, like the soul of Mahatma’s ‘Ram-rajya’.

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

Monday 28 May 2012

DOCTORS!! (II)



Like I wrote in the beginning of this article, the answer lies in the show itself. It doesn’t mean the show had some miraculous remedy.

It’s ‘attitude’ my dear friends.

Like Aamir was reacting, as if it was a revelation, on every bit of information already in the public domain (at least, victims do feel it all the time – and majority of the India has been victim of the miserable health care system), it is almost same with our policymakers.

The difference is Aamir is trying to do something while our politicians prefer not to do anything. One might be unaware owing to his upbringing but the other lot prefers to remain unaware. 

Unawareness that is going beyond all the acceptable limits!

Policies for the larger India – poor, battered, cursed to live in dark and silence – are framed in closed doors of granite glazed and Italian marble carpeted rooms of Delhi and the state capital cities.

And the current breed of our policymakers look awfully insane when it comes to framing policies reflecting the need of the Indian on the street, be it mapping a village or a small township or some large urban centre.

Either they are career politicians, cushioned in the Parliament for decades, who have comfortably forgotten the miseries being faced daily by an ordinary Indian; or they are the heirs of the political dynasties born with the silver-spoon; or they are rich industrialists or celebrities like Vijay Mallya or Jaya Bachchan, not in touch with the grass roots social needs; or they simply represent the increasing number of politicians loaded with criminal cases against them. The current breed has very few of the politicians who represent a self-built career on social needs and grass-roots level politics.

And health care rights are one major victim of the increasing policymaking paralysis due to the insensitive politicking most of these politicians exercise. Health care services are one of the major sources of corruption given the huge capital and deliverables involved. NRHM (National Rural Health Mission) is one of the biggest scams in the Indian administrative and political history.

And why it happens. Again the unawareness factor!

Most of the Indians even in the urban centers are not aware of their rights (owing to the various socioeconomic maladies mentioned above) resulting in the open loot by the doctors and government officials. It is an open fact that no one want to visit a government hospital to consult a doctor. Only compulsions force patients there. The misery is in calamitous proportions in rural and tribal areas. How can we forget that our great democracy incarcerated Dr. Binayak Sen for over three years for raising voice for health care rights of tribal and rural people?

Health care (like other killing issues, i.e., literacy hunger, etc.) is in shambles in India and needs an immediate swipe but, again, the million dollar question, is, HOW? Let’s see how the ground realities stack up:

A UNICEF report says one in every three malnourished children in the world lives in India. The report further says, “In India, around 46 per cent of all children below the age of three are too small for their age, 47 per cent are underweight and at least 16 per cent are wasted. Many of these children are severely malnourished.

Malnutrition in India is roughly around 46 percent. It has fallen only six percentage points since economic reforms started gaining pace in 1991 while the GDP per capita boomed by 50 percent during the same period. It clearly shows increasing social disparity with majority still living at the bottom of the pyramid.

Government of India defines coverage area of a primary health centre to be 100 villages and 100000 of population by one doctor. According to a report, 64.9 percent of community health centers report lacking specialists while 68.6 percent of PHCs function with only one or no qualified doctor. Also we can understand the negligence by the government machinery as public expenditure has stagnated at just 1 percent of GDP over the last two decades against WHO’s recommended 5 percent.

According to 2006 figures, doctor to population ratio in India was 60:100000 (.24 dcotors per 400 of the population).

Do these figures tell something? YES!

Do they buzz on the ears of our policymakers? NO!

Dear doctors, at least, you do something. Ask your brothers and sisters to be brotherly and sisterly with other fellow Indians.

I firmly believe there are many 'Dr. Binayak Sens'.

The need for something to be done is urgent. This article is not inspired by the TV show, yes but it stirred me to write on the issue. We all need to feel, and more importantly, act.

For the moment, the solution remains elusive, like the spirit of our democracy, like the soul of Mahatma’s ‘Ram-rajya’.

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

Sunday 27 May 2012

DOCTORS!! (I)

Aamir’s show today was on health care and health care professionals in India. And the tone was justifiably negative.


Pathetic – the one word that can define the state of affairs. There have been raging debates on the issue; there would be volume-loads of literature being written in the future, but what would be the point to begin that would bring the change, had the answer in the show itself. The answer has been all around, much debated and discussed but not able to find takers at the top-most policy-making level.

Aamir was reacting on every small fact, known to millions and already in the public domain, in a way like it was a bombshell. And this sort of attitude (unawareness) is exactly the problem.

Now don’t we all know how the many doctors are cahoots with the marketing machinery and the exacerbated human greed?

Most of the doctors in the government hospitals complete writing the prescription slip even before the patient finishes his account of the problem. Private doctors are not within reach of the majority. Those, from this lot of majority, who approach such doctors, either take loan or kill their savings.

It is next to difficult to convince most of the doctors to write medicines easily available at most of the chemist shops.

It is almost impossible to ask a doctor to let you follow the diagnostic centre that is convenient to you.

Doctors sustain lives. They are supposed to be next to the god. They why this?

Go and experience it. (I bet many of you would already have something to share.)

Recently, I had ligament tear. After trying self-healing, I approached a nearby hospital run by a charity governed by Delhi’s health minister, Ashok Walia. The doctor recommended X-ray and asked me to come with the report. The X-ray guy was probably in some other world as he clicked for wrong part of my foot. I had to get it redone. After it, when I approached the doctor, he had serious expression on his face and some heavy words ready for my problem. He explained it at length like I was having some serious fracture. He wrote three days of medicine and advised to consult again. When I tried to purchase the medicine from the shop I am regular with, I couldn’t find it there, not even at any other shop in the area. Some of the shopkeepers advised me to approach the pharmacy of the hospital. And lo! I got it.

But see what I got it. These were generic salts marketed by some unknown Delhi based company but with almost equal price tag as the branded medicines. They didn’t work on my pain and I left taking them after a day. Anyway, my problem was gone three days after visiting the doctor when I had an enjoyable 4 kilometers walk back to my home.

Now if this is the state of affairs of a charitable hospital associated with a name that is Delhi’s health minister, we can easily imagine what is happening all across.

Magnifying the problem, writing medicines not really needed, and writing highly-priced ineffective versions of medicines – indeed a crime.

I can say I have come across multiple such examples even with the famed doctors indulged in such malpractices. (And I am sure, there would be many like me.)

Another bad patch is the excessive charges being levied on. You can easily find the sky-high differences in the cost of diagnostic tests of different labs. Last year, my sister had a mild fever but the doctor at the Max hospital wrote medical tests for almost everything with bills running into Rs. 20,000 plus figures. My sister recovered after three days and had no need to follow the medicine regime advised for 15 days. Doctors get huge commission on the medical tests recommended, even at the big hospitals like Max and Fortis it seems.

And the commission system really kills. Your hard-earned money goes into nothing.

Extending the tyranny is the unaccountable costs incurred on hospitalization. When I had met the doctor for knee-cap replacement surgery of the 76-year old Mrs. Mehta, I was given a cost-estimate of Rs. 4 Lakh. The total funding generated was around Rs. 5.5 Lakh. And though it was an acclaimed hospital run as a registered charitable institution, the final bill amount crossed the Rs. 5.5 Lakh limit. Okay there might be genuine additions, but what I observed about the attitude of the support staff; it was not different as the money-soaking practices exercised by the corporate hospitals and other notorious one/two doctor nursing homes.

The focus was on maximizing the bill amount irrespective of the need.

There are good and bad people in every profession, but certain areas, owing to their emergency nature and poor access to the public in India, creates an easy ground for manipulation, and health services in India is one such area.

What aggravates the misery in India?

Almost half of the population illiterate (with even greater share of medically illiterate lot), over 65 per cent of the population below poverty line, an ever-increasing urban slum population, lower number of even the allied health professionals working in the rural areas and the restricted availability of qualified medical professionals to the large sections of the population even in the urban centers are the telling signs of the malaise. I don’t need to write the statistical base for all this. Most of us are aware of these.

Unawareness on health care rights and poor government spending on healthcare amenities by the government at the cost of promoting private enterprises coupled with the problems mentioned above create and sustain the monster.

I have been working with doctors and activists. I have come across few good doctors. They are really serious about bringing the change. But I can say I have come across more bad doctors. The condition is frightening in rural areas.

Continued..


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

Saturday 26 May 2012

'Life & Time' Interdependence: How it defines us..


My reflections on life – in quotes (XXI)   

“Life and time interdependence has two pivots.
Time goes by its own scale, and,
We traverse the time on our very own scale.
Balancing the two is the game we play with the existence.
How we go about it defines us.”



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

Friday 25 May 2012

WHAT MAKES COMBINATION OF GANGA AND VARANASI SO SPECIAL?

(BANARAS CALLING)


Ganga symbolizes eternal flow. Its religious sanctity owes more to its spiritual halo.

Ganga is probably the only river in the history of human existence that commands spiritual aesthetics, right from its origin in the Himalayan Mountains (the Gangotri glacier) to its final destination in the Bay of Bengal.

From Kedarnath to Ganga Sagar, if Ganga is a sustainability factor for millions of lives and evergreen religious business activities, it is also precursor to a mystical tradition of spirituality. The major religious Ganga cities, i.e., Haridwar, Allahabad, Varanasi, Mirzapur, and Kolkata, have elements of spirituality associated with the religious significance of Ganga but the spiritual halo gets its full radiance only in Varanasi, the city of illumination, as one of its ancient etymological terms, Kasa, says.

What makes combination of Ganga and Varanasi so special?

What imparts its ritualistic religiosity such a brilliant spiritual discourse?

Varanasi is as much the city of Ganga as it is synonymous with Lord Shiva, one of the three supreme Hindu deities (the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh).

Shiva creates. Shiva destroys. Shiva is a yogi and lives a life of sage at Mount Kailash, Hindu scriptures say.

Shiva brought Ganga to the Earth.

And Shiva is the other name of supreme spirituality in the Hindu tradition and mythology.


Lord Shiva, Ganga, Varanasi - The Spiritual Trinity 


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Varanasi is among the oldest continually inhabited places and its association with Shiva and Shiva’s association with Ganga was always the magnate to ensure generations of civilizations to continue.

Ritualistic religion is always susceptible to changes and attacks by time-oriented generational transformations leading to the elimination of many overtly religious centers. But association of Lord Shiva with Varanasi has given the city a continued spiritual pedigree, and this, in combination with the ‘ablution and salvation’ aspect of Ganga, has helped the ritualistic side of religion, too, to survive and thus the city. Also, the sustained spiritual quotient has helped the cultural tradition of the city assimilate the changes and get along with what the transforming moments ask for.

One basic aspect of life in Varanasi is the discourse on death. Death is something that makes one free of all bonds, a point where materialism goes into oblivion, even for a moment. It evokes spiritual vibes naturally then.

Varanasi has seen generations built around this tradition. The city has been flowing the way history has been written but has been able to sustain the course of spiritual discourse that pertains to the questions of life, ways of living and ethos of existentialism.

Like Hindu scriptures and mythology (or like in any other religion), there have been good and bad aspects; positive and negative elements, and life flows on in the spiritual capital of the world.

Lord Shiva and Ganga make the ‘Spiritual Trinity’ complete with Varanasi. 

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

Thursday 24 May 2012

IS MR. MANMOHAN SINGH STILL THE PRIME MINISTER OF INDIA?

Sources say Jaipal Reddy, the honourable Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas in the great democratic republic of India was not aware of the petrol price hike. (Is he aware that he is still an Indian minister?)

Now it is like Barack Obama saying he wasn’t aware of the Navy Seals operation that killed Osama bin-Laden.

Now it is like Manmohan Singh asking where the 7-Race Course Road is. (Though, Manmohanji can ask it, in all his wisdom; the way he was faking ill-deeds of his government as windfalls for the ‘aam aadmi’ on May 22, on completion of three pathetic years of the United Progressive Alliance -2 government.)

Now it is like Digvijay Singh asking if he really speaks too much of a trash.

Now it is like Mamata Banarjee asking who the current railway minister of India is.

Now it is like the BJP asking what led to its political downfall in Uttar Pradesh, the state that gave it the political ground to begin.  

Now it is like the Indian media saying it was not aware of the name of the new member of Amitabh Bachchan’s family.

Now it is like Rajinikanth saying he isn’t aware if his stunts are performed by body doubles or magnified by special effects.

It is like Mr. Jaipal Reddy asking if Mr. Manmohan Singh is still the prime minister of India.

It can happen only in India.

Mr. Manmohan Singh has one grand tagline – his government is not able to check the negative trends – prices and so on (obviously sighting variegated reasons, from coalition compulsions to foreign government hands in anti-Kudankulum nuclear plant protests.)

The steepest rise in petrol prices came on a day when the global crude oil prices were at 7-month low. We all know it were factors like elections or Budget Session that led the government to keep on postponing the price hike, but only to make a bigger dent in our pockets later.

But don’t we deserve even the cushion to absorb the shocks – like hikes in intervals and not in one go?

Many politicians currently ruling us are shamelessly shameless and audaciously baseless. They said government didn’t control oil prices though it did not allow the prices to go up for 6 months. Government’s lie was nailed today when the oil marketing companies told had they got the government support, the prices wouldn’t have gone up. One major oil marketer said government does intervene in oil pricing.

What is the logic except the silly political interests in holding up the prices and raising it on ‘whims and fancies’? Yes, what else can we say that ‘whims and fancies’ after last day’s price rise when there were causative conditions existing for six months?

Now don’t we know all this! Yes all of us know it like ever-increasing price rise figures in our democracy the Mahatma had once envisioned being a ‘Ram-rajya’.

It tells us one thing.

Politicians who had already become insensitive to the needs of the country but were somewhat shy of letting the public know of their schemes are now a brazenly ruthless lot.

They don’t care about what the democracy would think; how the common man would adjust with the means already beyond his reach.

And so they come with audaciously shameless justifications for their unwarranted bravados most visible in statements like Mr. Jaipal Reddy being not aware that the petrol marketing companies were going to hike the price.

Mr. Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India is supposed to be an efficient executive leading the country of over billion people to the future of growth and prosperity and not just be the favourite outlet for satirists and jokes.

Unfortunately the later prospect looks to have gained the ground now.

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

Wednesday 23 May 2012

Oh, that expression..

Oh, that expression of anger
Those moments of admonition
They are so dear to me, now,
That I look back to see what,
I have lost, what I crave for

That fresh air in life created,
Set of emotions I had never felt,
Before I met you, though I feel,
Sorry sometimes if I made you,
Angry though I never intended

In my privileged life built on,
The perception of being the,
Perfect-one, you brought me,
The emotion that made me feel,
At one with the rhyme of creation

How much I miss it I cannot tell
But I know there is nothing else,
To foretell, just the reminder of,
My longing for the moments gone
But eternally imprinted on my soul..

May 23, 2012
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey


EMOTIONS (THE CARING ANGER) BY RAGINI
CATEGORY: DIGITAL PAINTING
 
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/

Tuesday 22 May 2012

THAT 42-HOUR JOURNEY..

LIFE - COLORES INFINITUM (6)

First journey down south. A whole wild month that began with an interesting train journey. 15 years ago.

AC-2 compartment of the train to Chennai. The thrill to be alone on a journey began soaking the soul as soon as he stepped out of the house. Pure joy – the air was so fresh that even the luggage load looked so charming.

10 minutes into the ride – he was comfortably in the 64-passenger coach. There were around a dozen who had come to drop the fellow who had his first solo movie outing to a theatre during his +2 schooling days.

Do this, don’t do that. Keep straight out of experimenting with language. Don’t speak much. Take loads of snapped moments. Don’t be extravagant. Eat and sleep sincerely. All the blessings, every variety of advice and soon it was time to leave.

It took some minutes for the train to leave the platform for the 42-hour journey. He was there, at the compartment’s entry; they were there, at the platform, till they could see the waving hands.

Sensed with the feeling of being away from home for so long and fueled with the curiosity of exploring a far region, he settled back to his seat, the lower berth. A passage walkthrough told him the coach was almost filled with South Indian passengers except the coupe he was in. The other three passengers in the coupe were members of a North Indian family settled in Bangalore.

Luck was smiling. It was really a good beginning, for he had a North Indian family from Varanasi with over three decades of life in a major South Indian city. No language problem in the immediate neighbourhood. 42 hours of time to go - mobile phones were not in vogue. The family head was a businessman who had migrated to that part of country in his 20’s and had come to Varanasi to take his daughter-in-law with him. There was another one with them, an assistant.

Though he was reserved in talking, the long hours of journey had good enough sessions of conversation, especially with the family head. Given the age-difference and realization that it was his first visit to the South India, the major focus of the conversation was do’s and don’t for a North Indian in South Indian cities. It was mostly fatherly advices that helped him a lot in the next 30 days. There were occasional sharing of eatables, music records and books and magazines.

If he was attentive to the advices of the North Indian family head, the pantry car vendors were the typical elements of noise. The call to ‘Pongal Vada’ (made from ground pulses) that began soon after the Varanasi station continued till Chennai. The old man had advised against it and his own experience affirmed it. Also, the trademark coconut oil cooking was just pathetic (anyway Indian Railway pantries seldom serve human meal). During his whole visit, he tried to steer clear of the coconut oil South Indian delicacies.

The old man had advised him not to use words like ‘Pagal’ (mad) or other North Indian slangs popularized by the Hindi movies (Hindi movies is the reason many South Indians can understand Hindi even if vaguely).  he also said of keeping it to simple English. He could see later on during his visit to different places why the old man had advised him on it.

The old man had said commuting between Chennai and Bangalore was like mapping Varanasi to Allahabad and for many it was a routine thing. The old man had said regional rail network and road transport were far more efficient in South India. All, that he could feel later on.

But what he enjoyed most was sitting at the door-steps of the coach for hours lost in the amazing beauty of the landscape. What he says virgin natural beauty of the areas of Andhra Pradesh and Nagpur region of Maharashtra on the train route are still fresh in his memory. It was amazingly imprinting – the curves and turns of the hilly, sandy, sparsely green red corridors of uninhabited miles.

The one highlight event of the 42-hour journey was the ‘lost and found’ event of his wallet. Incidentally, he had left his wallet on the wash basin of the washroom and had forgotten about it. After around half-an-hour, someone in his late 20’s came looking for him. The gentleman could locate him by the reservation ticket in the wallet. It was a shockingly welcome development for his wallet held the key to the next leg of his journey. The wallet had important documents like driving license, reservation tickets and a sum of over Rs. 2000 and then the wallet itself. It could have been really tempting. But the luck smiled once again. He had simply no words to thank the person.

The next good thing in the beginning of the 30-day journey was the train arrived in time in Chennai though delayed for over four hours till the 60 per cent of the train-route. It solved what could have been a Chennai riddle for him in the days to come. After exchange of courtesies, they said goodbye. The old man invited him to his place in Bangalore.

The North Indian family boarded the train to Bangalore while he stepped out of the Chennai railway station. The air breezed still fresh. The luggage load still felt so light.
First journey down south. And thus ended the 42-hour beginning to the next leg of his 30-day journey.
 
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/