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.

Tuesday 9 July 2013

WHY POLITICIANS LOVE A NATURAL CALAMITY!

(Politicians and the bureaucracy controlled by them!)

Be it any type of calamity – droughts, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides, cloudbursts – the scope of corruption gets magnified with the scale of the disaster – bigger a disaster, bigger is the lure for the politicians and the politicians-controlled bureaucracy to earn ‘some’ more quick money – and with changing times, this ‘some’ has changed monumentally, dramatically, to become millions and billions of Rupees.

Such is the scale of corruption in the rehabilitation projects in the aftermath of a huge natural calamity that the Asian Development Bank had to call a meeting of the representatives from the worst hit countries of the Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 26, 2004 to address the issue corruption in relief and rehabilitation efforts. India was one of the countries.

We recently saw the sorry visuals on TV channels of an Uttarakhand government official deputed for the relief exercise loading the relief material in his car for personal use. We also read how some senior ministers and politicians of the state and elsewhere misused the resources (choppers and rescue time) for their disaster-tourism to gain political mileage. Looking for such selfish gains when people are in imminent dander of losing their lives is also an unpardonable act of corruption.


It is common to read satirical pieces on how politicians and bureaucrats celebrate droughts, floods and other natural calamities. After all, to corner away the funds meant for the public use, one needs to create the outlets to siphon off the funds first. Natural calamities give them the readymade outlets.

While massive flash floods like the Uttarakhand disaster or tsunamis like the Indian Ocean tsunami or earthquakes like the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, that are chance events, are avenues of bonus earnings for the corrupt lot, droughts and floods affecting the larger parts of the country, are the regular providers, year after year, of monumental under-the-table earnings.  

Monumental yes, because a big disaster require billions in funds to work out an effective rehabilitation action plan, and so ensure better than handsome returns. Sadly, the action plan is made to look effective only on paper so as to maximize the demand for funds. A parallel development to maximize the fund value is to work out the distribution - who will get what share of the loot.

Had it not been the case, the problems in managing the droughts and floods would have been addressed decades ago because the recurrence of droughts and floods in India is also decades old. While the country witnesses large pockets of droughts and floods of large scale almost every year, sometimes, these too become epidemic in scale like the Bihar floods of 2008 or Maharashtra droughts of 1972 and 2013. Such precedents are aplenty.

The recurrence of natural calamities at bigger scale gives the ‘men concerned’ ample space to manipulate; practices that result in scams like the Rs. 70,000 crore irrigation scam of Maharashtra of the Bihar flood relief scam of 2005 or countless other scams that happen year, in every part of the country wherever a drought or a flood or any other natural calamity happens.

Huge returns with no input costs – politicians and their administrative colleagues are loving it!

Disaster Management, here, so easily, becomes the personal wealth management!

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