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 17 January 2013

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.



Statues and large-sized framed photographs are the two categories of public display which attract attention of the politicians. While the photographs are domain of the common men as well, statues are the exclusive stature of politicians and great names in the history (use customized by the compulsions of the statue politics).

The in-tradition statues basically belong to the names already departed (except for few ‘fanatical’ violations like Mayawati). Statues are installed to serve the political purpose because no logic can explain how installing statues in almost every nook and corner can augment the ‘aesthetic’ sense. In fact, most of these statues are ill-kept and imposed. Do a little mental exercise during your next long drive covering a comparatively larger geographic area and realize it.

Yes, some of them do enhance the aesthetic experience but given the cost involved in doing so when most of the Indians are devoid of basic necessities of living like education and healthcare is not acceptable.

Also, just installing statues would not inculcate patriotism when teachings of the great souls departed are forgotten.

And for the folks still alive, Mayawati has certainly shown a way and we should expect more followers soon.

Photographs are the in-vogue options for the politicians to strike us hard. Also, they like to go for photographs as the common belief with statues is that they belong to the ‘dead’.

So, you can find photographs of every type, big and small politicians, young and old politicians, aspiring and career politicians, staring at you with a cosmetic smile. They pop up even from the most unexpected places like from the under-arms of subways, from the arches of architecturally impossible constructions, even from the moving extensions of objects in transit. They are all so omnipresent.

And like the statues, the huge unaccounted cost in installing photographs in and around the government installations is paid from the public exchequer, (at the cost of the basic necessities of the majority of Indians).

They bask in the glory of their manufactured presence while we gasp for the answers failing to see even an iota of logic in their silly acts. 

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