Johnny Depp has signed Pirates of the Caribbean 5 for 60 million pound, the highest ever in the world cinema history. Back home, in Indian currency that corresponds to around Rs. 500 Crore, and still we gloat about some Indian movies earning Rs. 200 or 300 Crore.
Now you would be thinking why I am gloating about this silly comparison. I accept there is no valid parameter-dependent base to this hypothesis, even if I am given the liberty to use the term here.
You can dismiss it as some whim of my thought process but what has been happening on the wonderland of the yore is full of vagaries of whims and impulses of those who come to impose and exercise their will on over a billion of democratic deaths.
Chief-minister of one of India
A report by the Gujarat government last March pointed out that 40 per cent of the children up to 5 years of age in the state were malnourished. Registrar General of India says Life Expectancy in Gujarat is two years shorter than the national average of 66.1 years.
A senior and respectable person like Asha Bhonsle said today she had respect for Raj Thackeray and she could (easily?) tolerate Thackeray’s ‘scolds’. Thackeray’s political outfit Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) is targeting Asha for being judge on a TV show that hosts artists from Pakistan
What I mentioned while beginning this write up should in fact be a slap making us realize our position and ambitions to become a global force to reckon with.
We might have become the world’s 4th largest Economy but our social and economic indicators that affect the day to day lives of the majority are nothing better than even some of the worst performing countries.
And in place of working to rectify this anomaly of big mouth but small morsel, they find silly, ridiculous, outrageous and blasphemous-to-human-existence reasons to show us that everything is fine and on the way to take us to the developed league of the nations.
Sometimes, in doing so, they cross the limit of verbal assurances to land in the realm of practical executions. But here lies the catch.
They do work incessantly to bring prosperity, but this growth is highly targeted to the very few, inhabiting the corridors of India India
But as the size of the Economy has swelled up to such a great extent giving more than enough for the political and the bureaucratic class (read the largest neo-rich class of the Indian society) to grab shamelessly from the both hands, both feet, in fact, with whole body, that, sometimes, aberrations do happen. In such cases, efficiency norms get a slip here and there letting the information come out in the public domain.
It results in eureka-moment revelations on scams like the CWG Commonwealth Games (CWG), 2G Spectrum, Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL), Coal blocks allocation (read Coalgate), National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) and many more. Listed here some of the biggest unearthed yet. They account for almost Rs. 7-8 Lakh Crore. Black Money is said to be in the scale of hundreds of thousands of crores. Then there are innumerable smaller scams.
Such huge figures could single handedly life hundreds of millions out of poverty. But the political class would never allow it to happen. At least it can be said with the present breed. Parliament is not functioning at all. Everyone is busy defending respective goalposts with shameless audacity.
Theaters are being drawn and redrawn. Big mouth, small mouths, polished mouths, gentle mouths, slappy mouths, cracky mouths, whammy mouths, slammy mouths, all are getting full exposure to demonstrate the copious flow of their wisdom.
So top on the agenda becomes all the concerns of the celebrity world, then comes the highly verbose and dramatic political sham, below that comes the ever-green guns and roses balustrade. That is all.
Did you say social responsibility? Go get some fresh air, if you can still find.
Johnny Depp might well sign some other movie for 200 million pounds and our theaters might well gloat about an Indian movie touching Rs. 400 Crore threshold in the near future, but the Indian synonymous with India still looks far from the road to the glory of being human.
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/
