CABINET CLEARS A TOOTHLESS LOKPAL: YET ANOTHER INSTITUTION TO BREED CORRUPTION?

When it was conceived to deal with corruption!

Today, the country marched ahead in getting yet another avenue of institutionalized corruption. The Union Cabinet today approved the much (MUCH) diluted and toothless version of the ‘Lokpal Bill’.

Much has been talked about the futile utility of the Lokpal that the government wants to build. The whole political class conspired to create an institution that was in no way capable enough to keep check on the erring politicians and bureaucrats.

Lokpal Bill’s history is over four decades old but every initiative was killed effectively. The recent one, that began in 2011 looks to go ahead one step further.

It is not going to kill the initiative. It is going to kill the spark left after every killed initiative in the past that had reignited the demand every time. It is going to institutionalize the Lokpal. Now, the drum-beating would begin. The propaganda machinery would focus on showing it as an achievement. The institutionalization would serve their purpose to kill the voices for Lokpal. They would say we have done it. They would ask the activists to seek ‘legal’ and ‘constitutional’ recourse if they demand changes. They would happily allow the battle to become ‘for an effective Lokpal’ from ‘for a Lokpal’. That would give them time to devise more political con to buy more time.

Almost every political party had some objection when the Bill was presented in the Parliament in 2011. Somehow, the Lok Sabha was able to pass a much diluted version as the number game helped the ruling United Progressive Alliance government. The ruling alliance members got their points in and out. The opposition members got their chance in the Rajya Sabha where the ruling coalition didn’t have the numbers. They got ball rolling in the upper house of the Parliament. The country saw the shameless display of political audacity and insensitivity when the Bill was stalled and the Rajya Sabha was adjourned sine die at the midnight of December 29, 2011.

The subsequent events since then have further diluted the Lokpal Bill. What the Union Cabinet today approved after some more amendments is nothing but a fallacy intended to continue the delirium the political class wants to keep the masses in.

They believe the half-baked products of this democracy have no political alternatives and have no intellectual depth to think over the political scheming over issues like Lokpal.

ANNA HAZARE TRIES TO RE-ORGANIZE THE ANTI-CORRUPTION MOVEMENT

Anna Hazare has, once again, tried to re-organize the disarrayed anti-corruption movement. He chose the Mahatma’s Martyrdom Day for the occasion. He announced formation of a ‘Jantantra Morcha’ during a rally held at Patna’s Gandhi Maidan today.

He categorically said certain things that if followed, may help to make elements of a logical beginning that is needed to undo the wrongs of the 2011 movement and to sustain the momentum in the long run. He said:

EVENING DISCOURSE BY GANGA

PHOTOGRAPHY

EVENING DISCOURSE BY GANGA

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

CELEBRATE ‘YOU’

My reflections on life – in quotes (XXXVIII)  

"The life force that you are

The flow of life that you are

It’s you, the colours of living

It’s you, the joy of breathing

Existence is about you

You are about existing

Exist with the ‘co-existences’

Celebrate you

Celebrate the life that you are"

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

IT’S THE HOME THAT IS ALWAYS THE CALL

Distraught and haunted

Running or wandering

Worked out and granted

Planning or following

Be it the,

The classic case of arbitrage

Be it the,

The rustic chase to hermitage

Home is where you go back

No matter,

Where do you fall

No matter,

What for you fall

It’s the home

That is always the call

Whether,

The life makes a roll

Whether,

It makes it a chaotic scroll

If all looks like a hell

If lingers a bleak spell

You should know,

You need to take a break

You must appreciate,

There is a place to go back

Yes, it’s the home, 

Always there to stand by you

No matter what, 

Comes between the life and you

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

RAHUL GANDHI’S JAIPUR SPEECH - CONTRADICTION 4 – THE CONGRESS PARTY VS THE IMPERIALIST ENGLISH

CONTRADICTIONS IN THE JAIPUR SPEECH BY THE CONGRESS PARTY VICE-PRESIDENT RAHUL GANDHI (IV)

Rahul Gandhi said while setting the tone of his speech:

In 1947 India was liberated not by arms, but by unleashing the voice of our people. Other countries fought violently.  Other countries fought with weapons.  Other countries fought with death.  India fought with non-violence and with voice. Everybody told us that it cannot be done.  Everybody told us that if you want to get id of the British you have to use violence. And the Congress Party said no, we are not going to use violence.  We are going to use non-violence.  And we defeated the biggest empire of its time and we sent them home.  This was energy behind of Freedom Movement. Voices.  Millions and millions of our voices.

Now Mr. Gandhi, how do you justify your silence on the brutal use of force by the police on the protesters against the Delhi gangrape?

Mere expressing regret on what happened wouldn’t absolve the Congress party of this anti-democratic sin. 

Sushil Kumar Shinde is not a thinking minister of independent thought process we all know that. He could not have taken this decision and that too, when the atmosphere was so tense; when every voice was a raging call against the ineffective political class demanding it to act pro-people and not pro-power.

RAHUL GANDHI’S JAIPUR SPEECH - CONTRADICTIONS – 2 & 3: CORRUPTION VS ERADICATING CORRUPTION, GENDER JUSTICE AND POLITICAL APATHY

CONTRADICTIONS IN THE JAIPUR SPEECH BY THE CONGRESS PARTY VICE-PRESIDENT RAHUL GANDHI (III)

People who are corrupt stand up and talk about eradicating corruption; and then people who disrespect women everyday of their lives talk about women rights.

What about the Robert Vadra cover-up then?

When it was done by the people sitting at the top, don’t you think the statement made by you regarding corruption squarely contradicts its pretext, if there was any?

Corruption was always there but the country has seen it touching mammoth scale since 2004 when the United Progressive Alliance government took over. All the big scams like the 2G spectrum allocation, coal-block allocation or Commonwealth Games scams or many others have seen genesis during the term of your party rule.

Instead of treating them as the warning signs and embarking on a course-correction mode, your party’s government chose to go in denial, delay probes or castigate Constitutional agencies like the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), the reports of which unearthed many scams.

What do you have to say on the corruption ombudsman, the Lokpal?

Given the fact that the Congress party has been in power most of the time in the Independent India, the formation of the Lokpal should never have lingered on for over four decades. And your party’s government, along with other political parties, has successfully derailed it even this time. Given the goings and thanks to a corrupt and alienated political class, the Lokpal is not going to be a reality anytime soon in the near future. And then there would be compulsions and clamour of the next general election burying the issue for some more time.

Do you remember your parliament speech where you spoke of making Lokpal a Constitutional body? Whatever little that the political class has agreed to empower the proposed Lokpal with is nothing but a lip-service to mislead the people.

Can corruption, that has become a chronic malaise of the Indian society, be eradicated with such a lip-serving attitude Mr. Gandhi?

You also spoke about women rights.

It’s basically about sensitivity that is not there in your government and the larger political class. You too, fall short on it. The recent context of the Delhi gangrape protests is a self-explanatory evidence.

LEADERSHIP AND CENTRALIZATION OF POWER: ELEMENTS OF CONTRADICTION IN THE JAIPUR SPEECH OF RAHUL GANDHI

Rahul Gandhi was elevated as the Vice-President of the Indian National Congress in the recently held party meeting at Jaipur. He delivered his first Vice-Presidential speech on January 20, 2013. It had all the elements of a Rahul Gandhi speech (http://severallyalone.blogspot.in/2012/12/rahul-gandhis-love-for-potato-potato_19.html).

But since it was the first one after his formal elevation (even if the elevation was just a symbolic one and he was already the part of central decision making pivot along with his mother, Sonia Gandhi, in the grand old party of India), let’s have a look on the content and contention.

The speech had many contradictory elements and the central-most was his rhetoric on ‘power centralization’ in the country and ‘no focus on leadership development’ in the Congress party.

Now there can be alternative ways to look at the contradictions in the context of this speech.

The elements of contradiction may be an indication that Rahul Gandhi realizes the pitfalls and negative elements in the functioning of the Congress party and intends to work to rectify them.

Alternatively, it was a poor speechmaking again which belied the content of the speech in the context of the history of the background.

Let’s take up contradictions* from the speech (sourced from the All India Congress Committee website**):

CONTRADICTIONS IN THE JAIPUR SPEECH BY THE CONGRESS PARTY VICE-PRESIDENT RAHUL GANDHI (II)

Since 2004, the Congress party is in government and Manmohan Singh is the prime-minister but the world knows the real power lies with Sonia Gandhi. So if we add these 8 years to the 38 years, we find that the country has been under the rule of Nehru-Gandhi family for 46 years out of its 65 years of Independence.

Lal Bahadur Shastri who was prime-minister from 1964-1966 after Nehru’s death, though seen as a person of probity, was seen as a Nehru loyalist and was chosen to corner Morarji Desai. At that time, Indira Gandhi was just beginning her journey to the political centrestage of the country.  

1991-1996, when PV Narasimha Rao was the prime-minister, there was no one from the Nehru-Gandhi family to take the political centrestage of the country so we cannot say it was the internal democracy of the Congress party that chose Mr. Rao as the prime-minister of the country.

So, no true mass leader, not from the Nehru-Gandhi family or independent of the patronage of Nehru-Gandhi family, could emerge in the Congress party to reach to the political top when there was a name from the family in the active politics and ‘circumstantially’ fit to take the prime-ministerial chair.

And still, it is the same old story.

Now do we call that an element of democracy Mr. Rahul Gandhi?

It is this culture of absolutely centralized political parties in India that has marginalized the prime entity of a democracy in the country – which you, your party and your prime minister of the moment call as the ‘aam aadmi’.

The giants that you speak of like Patel, Azad were the making of the pre-Independence days. Why can’t the Congress party produce such giants in the post-Independence phase who were (and who are) not from the Nehru-Gandhi family?

How can we say it a democratic decentralization of power?

Congress party has become a family where the authority has narrowed down to the realm of the Gandhi clan (the Sonia family). Yes, everyone can become member of this family, but the person needs to follow the dictum that the ‘top’ is reserved for the Gandhi clan.

Manmohan Singh was never a prime-ministerial material and he was chosen for being a yes-man. He has performed the assignment given to him dutifully. There is no other political giant in the country from the Congress party including you.

What separates you from others in your party is your inheritance, the legacy of the Nehru-Gandhi family and the Gandhi surname.

There are many in your party and the larger political fraternity who have spent decades in politics and yet are not seen as suitable prime-ministerial material. How do you qualify with just 8 years in active politics then?

The fact is, there is no one in the Congress party qualified enough to become the prime-minister of the country at the moment. The party does need to focus on the leadership development but needs to reform the process.

When the political top is so centralized and narrowed down to very few ‘political elite’, it is foolhardy to expect that an ‘aam aadmi’ would be allowed to participated in the political process and grow in stature.

How should we read this element of contradiction in your speech Mr. Rahul Gandhi?

The need is to have its unorthodox side, away from the Congress party legacy, the upper hand but the ground reality favours the worn-out line.

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

CONTRADICTIONS IN THE JAIPUR SPEECH BY THE CONGRESS PARTY VICE-PRESIDENT RAHUL GANDHI (I)

Rahul Gandhi was elevated as the Vice-President of the Indian National Congress in the recently held party meeting at Jaipur. He delivered his first Vice-Presidential speech on January 20, 2013. It had all the elements of a Rahul Gandhi speech (http://severallyalone.blogspot.in/2012/12/rahul-gandhis-love-for-potato-potato_19.html).

But since it was the first one after his formal elevation (even if the elevation was just a symbolic one and he was already the part of central decision making pivot along with mother, Sonia Gandhi, in the grand old party of India), let’s have a look on the content and contentions. The speech had many contradictory elements.

Now there can be alternative ways to look at the contradictions in the context of this speech.

ALTRUIST AND THE PHONE-SEX SERVICE: MANIPULATION OF MOBILE VAS – A CRIMINAL ACT OF NEGLIGENCE

For some days, I have been receiving text messages from my mobile service operator about some chat service. Like any other ‘value added service’ text message, I would delete them without reading. During the course of a normal conversation, a senior informed me how such ‘friend chat’ services are being used as front for ‘phone sex rackets’.

Last November, the Noida Cyber Crime Cell had arrested four for an alleged phone-sex service. According to a report from the ‘Indian Express’, the police named Airtel along with the ‘value added services’ (VAS) company Altruist in the case. Airtel had outsourced its ‘Airtel Friendz Chat’ service to Altruist and Altruist had outsourced it to some other call-centre. The chat service was used to run a phone-sex racket. Airtel was named in the FIR for allegedly failing to monitor the service.

Among the four arrested were the General Manager of Altruist, two call-centre executives and one woman who used to speak to the people connected through the service.

SALMAN RUSHDIE, THE ‘FOUR’ AND THE JAIPUR LITERATURE FESTIVAL 2013

(This write-up is about Salman Rushdie, the ‘four’ and a knotted follow-up of JLF-2012.)

Salman Rushdie, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzru, Jeet Thayil and Ruchir Joshi – these were the five names in the eye of the ‘Salman Rushdie and Satanic Verses’ storm last year during the Jaipur Literature Festival.

Now as the radical and politically motivated elements are once again out on the street with their demand of ‘who should attend and who should not’, the responsibility of these five becomes, even if not participating, to come and participate, if not as speaker, then even as a guest to give them the ‘missing’ fitting reply.

Salman Rushdie is in India during JLF-2013 to promote the movie based on ‘Midnight's Children’. Jeet Thayil is on the list of participants. So, the ‘two’ out of five are here. Three more are needed. Could that be a possibility?

Just an afterthought!

The way these ‘five’ either retracted or ran away after the threats from the Muslim clerics last year was demeaning to the core-essence of literature – conscience.

A sentient conscience is the foremost branding element of a creative person. Such a thinking soul spontaneously reacts on excesses that not only hurt the freedom of creativity but also endanger the larger atmosphere of freedom of expression. How to express the protest is individual and varies but what matters is it must be ‘expressed’.

And that wasn’t done last year.

RAHUL GANDHI, FORMALLY, OFFICIALLY UNVEILED

Rahul Gandhi was ‘formally’ elevated today when he was made the Vice-President of the Indian National Congress (INC).

‘No body but the Gandhi family calls the shots in the grand old party of India’ is an established fact and Rahul have been deciding virtually on all the policy matters of the party in the recent past, especially in the second innings of the United Progressive Alliance government. In that sense, he was elevated much earlier. Only the official coronation came today.

There have come many moments when the ‘groups’ of the INC raised highly hysterical demands to elevate Rahul Gandhi as the prime minister of this half-baked democracy (yes half-baked, because the dynasty politics is the antithesis of the spirit of a true democracy), that we proclaim as the Republic of India; that goes in record books as the world’s largest democracy.

Anyway, Rahul Gandhi and the INC are not the only to share the blame. In fact, it has become a chronic malaise of the Indian politics and curse of the Indian democracy.

But here it is about Rahul Gandhi, so let’s be with him. What his formal elevation means:

LIFE CONNECTED MORE LIKE A RHAPSODY

That flux in my thoughts

Their verve and my nerves

You swayed,

Leaving me dismayed

I cried

Distracted and lost

It was all so dark

Confused, hopeless and stark

As if the soul was sucked

The intermezzos deserted 

The music disfigured

Life connected,

More like a rhapsody,

And not,

With the harmony of continuity

The flux of the loss

Living the pain in thoughts

You swayed

Leaving me dismayed

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

MOMENTS OF CRISIS

Moments of crisis,

They have their run

Sometimes,

They let you low

Undone

Sometimes,

They make you free

Unsung

Giving you the season

To write,

A new tune

To make,

Your own song

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

POLITICIANS - HANGING DOWN THE WALL, STANDING UP THE FLOOR

The fad of being shaped in stone or ‘carving in stone’ or hung over the wall in fabricated postures and obligated textures – what is this with the politicians (or the so-called mass leaders)?

Okay, this is a global phenomenon with a history that always goes back; here it is more about our dear politicians (the Indians of a different breed – a matter of anthropological and genetic research to understand what went wrong from Mahatma Gandhi to the likes of Suresh Kalmadi and A Raja). Apart from the luminaries from the past, politicians have been installing politicians from the past and with the recent trend, they are now installing even themselves.

It is not exaggerated to say India’s civic infrastructure like streets, roads, parks, water bodies, buildings and installations, all are inundated with countless statues and framed photographs of politicians occupying the prominent geographical spaces. These are in addition to the numerous hoardings and banners cropped up on almost every passageway. Can anyone tell how many of them are there? If anyone is ready to provide with an irrefutable answer, I am ready to commission a study for it.

PROMINENT ELEMENTS OF MANMOHAN SINGH’S ORATORY

If Manmohan Singh’s speeches are analysed on delivery and content parameters:

(Most elements given here are self-explanatory you would find after going through video-clips of Manmohan’s speeches.)

HUMAN ELEMENTS

Expressionless: speeches delivered in monotone

Almost no Emotions: even if he tried sometimes, it has backfired like the ‘theek hai’ speech given ‘after a week’ of the Delhi gangrape

Dull: being expressionless and emotionless, what else should one expect then?

THE ASCETIC

PHOTOGRAPHY

THE ASCETIC

(A Ganga Ascetic on the road to the Dasaswamedh Ghat, Varanasi, asking for alms)  

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

MR. PAWAN BANSAL! TRUE ITS MOBOCRACY, BUT AT THE POLITICAL TOP

What is a mob?

A simple googling throws up these definitions:

(Noun) A large crowd of people, esp. one that is disorderly and intent on causing trouble or violence

(Verb) Crowd around (someone) in an unruly and excitable way in order to admire or attack them

Wikipedia defines it as: Mob commonly refers to a crowd of people (from Latin mobile vulgus, meaning "fickle commoners").

The online Oxford dictionary defines it as: (noun) a large crowd of people, especially one that is disorderly and intent on causing trouble or violence

Now they need to learn a lesson or two from Mr. Pawan Kumar Bansal. Did you say who this Mr. Pawan Kumar Bansal is? Okay, for the knowledge of those who have updated the above-mentioned four definitions, he is the Minister of Railways in the Indian government.

Mr. Bansal strongly believes that the huge number of the spontaneously gathered protesters during the recent two civil protest movements was mobocracy at play.

He said in an interview to a news channel that the massive protests in the aftermath of the Delhi gangrape were a mob-driven anarchy. Let’s quote a weblink report here quoting Mr. Bansal:

READING SWAMIJI IS STILL ABOUT THE ‘PROCESS’..

He was regular with reading since an early age. He had no particular choice of what he would pick to read. Some magazines and newspapers were in routine. For others, a careful scan of the ‘print’ would make for his decision. Once, into the written work, if it clicked, he went to finish it with full joy of reading.

Now, as he reflects back, he sees it as one of the formative processes of his being, for it inspired him to think independently of what he read and write his thoughts on the issues he thought over; he thinks over.

In the process, when he was still in college, he picked up a magazine on Osho, found it interesting, and went on reading it. The reading of magazines pushed him to read more on Osho. Along with the magazine, he found some books. The Osho reading went on almost for a year.

A MAN BECAME THE MAN OF TIME (SWAMI VIVEKANANDA'S 150TH BIRTH ANNIVERSARY)

Words cannot define Him yet I am trying here to organize my feelings in few words for the best known Spiritual Soul of the recent history – Swami Vivekananda

A tribute on his 150^th birth anniversary on January 12, 2013

January 12, a day we celebrate as the National Youth Day to remember the eternally relevant message of the Young Monk with an unparalleled wisdom 

A man became,

The Man of Time

Came to be

The Eternal Divine

Who He didn't Follow the God

Became God’s front for the Cause

A faith,

Has not to be blind

His never,

Had Him entwined

Practicing God for Him was evolved

His teachings, realized, lived and achieved

Having lived the logic

He had felt the sublime magic

Guided by the Saint of the Temple

He became the Spirited Miracle

The Man of Ideal

The Sage of Vedanta

The Voice of the Conscience

The monk of Advaita

The Call of India

The Voice of its Strength

A Life beyond worldly

An existence so radiant

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

MANIKARNIKA GHAT – WHERE DEATH ENLIGHTENS

PHOTOGRAPHY

WHERE DEATH ENLIGHTENS

MANIKARNIKA GHAT AT EVENING AT GANGA IN VARANASI  

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

WHOM THE DEATH SUSTAINS

PHOTOGRAPHY

WHOM THE DEATH SUSTAINS

(A cremation-worker at the Harishchandra Ghat, Varanasi)

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

IN A STATE OF THOUGHTLESSNESS..

The state of thoughtlessness is sometimes the most thought-provoking state of mind when we all of a sudden come across to the keys to the answers we were seeking for long.

There are questions in life the answers of which are already with us, lying somewhere in the conscious.

The solutions to those answers do navigate in our subconscious thought process. But in a state of inundated thoughts, the extensions, the thought elements of different aspects of our lives, intertwine to make the clarity intermittently indistinct at the level of conscious, preventing us to feel the separation and dependence of one aspect of life from the other; preventing us to see one answer from the other.

And consequently the answers to the problems (or the questions) acquire multi-dimensional character creating a sort of inertia where we increasingly look for the solution, a way out anyhow, and fail to question us for the answer that we needed.

Problems create questions. The lives we live make them multi-character and hence unclear or vaguely clear. When questions persist over a period of time, we start demonizing them and seek to run away from when what we need is the ‘answer’ and not a ‘compromised solution’.

In a state of thoughtlessness, when most of the thoughts are killed temporarily and the intertwined extensions lose their character and dissolve, we have the opportunity to realize the clarity when the answers unravel the keys to them. 

In a state of thoughtlessness, in some undefined, abrupt moments, our thoughts are provoked by one dominant aspect of that moment when other persons in us recruit to take a backseat.

But, getting to the state of thoughtlessness is a craft seldom mastered at. 

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

SRI SRI MOHAN BHAGWATJI – THE OBSERVATIONAL LEARNER

Now there is absolutely no point in all the senseless muckraking against the respected Sri Sri Mohan Bhagwat ji. We, the idiots, who are not able to comprehend his immense wisdom that goes beyond even the Sun in elaborating the institution of marriage according to the practiced Indian standards, are, once again, trying to malign a patriotic soul, like we have been doing on the deeply-felt words of some of the politicians, other leaders and godmen over the Delhi gangrape case.

And lo! Some of the idiots like you and me are calling them the spineless creatures. Shouldn’t we introspect on getting so harsh on our hardworking politicians who work overtime so that we can find the trendsetters in them, to look further, to grow up? Isn’t it ferociously negative to say that such spineless politicians, leaders and godmen are a plenty.

Don’t we see the hardwork and the mental exercise that many of the politicians, leaders and godmen are putting in spreading the knowledge of their expertise with illuminated reactions on the Delhi gangrape?

SOCIAL MEDIA INITIATED PROTESTS MATURING IN INDIA: FROM ANTI-CORRUPTION MOVEMENT TO THE DELHI GANGRAPE PROTESTS

2012 was a year that showed us all that all the talks about the ‘immature social media hype creating the anti-corruption protests of 2011’ were so utterly misplaced.

Indeed the trend on social media last year qualitatively refuted this assumption.

Agreed, it was not anywhere near to the groundbreaking role social media played in the Arab Spring or in the ‘Occupy’ protests, but the elements here do established that they could act serious and responsive when needed and the future is going to see more uniformity in the response.

Given the Indian demographics and the related sociological patterns, the frivolous use of social media is bound to take a larger share in the country. The youth forms the majority of the Indian population. The median age of Indian population is 25.1 years. Majority of them are half-baked and alienated. And they are not to blame for it. It is their socioeconomic condition, a poor education infrastructure and the psychological stress to earn anyhow, that does them in.

Ideally, the major concern of this half-baked majority is bread and butter. Obviously, the call to fight for change would come later on for them. Whatever the time they get away from the daily routine of work to earn, would naturally go to the recreation stuff, be it the traditional media or the social media, if they are using it.

But the 2012 told us we are in the transition mode towards the increasing clout of the socially-responsible social media use. The response to two public uprisings tells us this.

The anti-corruption movement launched by Anna Hazare in 2011 had its initial surge in the social media response. The traditional media came subsequently. Later on, the movement failed due to the internal design flaws of the umbrella group ‘India Against Corruption’. It’s a well known fact by now. There were many flip-flops on the commitment to the core issue of ‘corruption’. Add to it the personal bickering among the group members and display of personal agenda in the public and we had a perfect recipe for disaster. That too, reflected in the social media trends.

INDIAN POLITICS HAS STARTED STINKING AND NO REDEMPTION IS IN SIGHT

That the Indian politics has become debased was a well-known fact, but, now it has started stinking. And the developments say it is slipping beyond the point of redemption. Now when we say such hopeless words about something?

Such a point of despair comes when we find that any possible hope of redemption is fading. And that is happening in India. We are staring at a void of honest, moral and upright politicians who could be the change-agents for reform.

The way the Indian politics has handled and is handling the horror of the Delhi gangrape, now a globally discussed issue, tells us that the rot is across the political spectrum.

No political party can claim to be sincere and pro-people given the way they have acted. Even if we don’t go by assessing their day-to-day attitude summary after the gangrape, a simple effort to gauge their sensitivity by the statements made by some of the politicians clearly tells us how brazen and indifferent they have become.

LOST IN INTROSPECTION

LOST IN INTROSPECTION 

A human emotions painting by Ragini 

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

AWAKENING & ENLIGHTENMENT

My reflections on life – in quotes (XXXVII)  

“The process of

‘awakening and enlightenment’

is like learning and is

never complete.

There is always more to it.

And there is always the ‘moment’ for it.”

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