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.

Sunday, 17 April 2016

EKNATH KHADSE’S HELIPAD AND PRIYANKA GANDHI’S BUNGALOW: THIS IS OUR POLITICS, FOLKS! (II)

If Eknath Khadse is emblematic of how crassly insensitive our politicians can become, can be, the row over Priyanka Vadras' (or Priyanka Gandhi's) house rent is equally disturbing.

The only thing is, we have forgotten 'getting disturbed' over such 'undemocratic developments'.

Not so long ago, a senior party leader of Congress, the party of Priyanka Gandhi's mother Sonia  Gandhi and her brother Rahul Gandhi, Mr. Kapil Sibal, had taken a house in the same tony location, Jor Bagh, though certainly not as posh and VVIP as Priyanka's house is, and less than half in size, for a whopping monthly rent of Rs. 1600,000 or Rs. 1.92 crore a year.

Now, let's jot down the obvious:

Priyanka Gandhi pays a 'super' subsidized rent of just Rs. 31,300 a month for her Type VI house in Lutyens' Delhi.

The house measures 2765 sqm in size and reports say that no such big house with all its natural extensions like lawns and amenities is available for rent in the area Priyanka's house is located.

If we go by the reports of sky-high rent being paid by Kapil Sibal, the minimum that Priyanka Gandhi needs to pay as rent around Rs. 35 lakh a month. And even then, the rent cannot match house's expanse and location.

Priyanka Gandhi was given this house in 1997 at a monthly rent of around Rs. 53,000. Her request for subsidized rent was accepted in 2002 and her rent was fixed at 8,888 by the then Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. Now, the person who fixed it can only tell us about this interesting combination.

The revelation here is, the loss to the public exchequer since 1997 - because even a rent of Rs. 53,000 a month for a larger than life bungalow in India's most VVIP zone in Delhi, a city where people are cursed to live in cramped houses and flats, was a jaw-opener for anyone - for its sheer meekness.

Let's go by the simple logic - that we common folks have to shell out 10% more every year on our housing rent. That makes it roughly around Rs. 350,000 a month after these 20 years - for Priyanka's Rs. 53,000 in 1997.

Her current house rent of Rs. 31,300 is more or less in line with this 'annual 10% hike' norm. So, it is a direct loss to the public exchequer - running in millions - when India's successive governments have failed to define a proper poverty line in the country  - a political class that still accepts the wisdom of expert panels that find a person above poverty line if he earns Rs. 40 a day or so (Rs. 32 rural and Rs. 47 urban) - even if Rs. 40 cannot earn a decent one time meal on the prevailing market prices.

Like the Bombay High Court said while hearing the petition on water wastage by BCCI on conducting IPL matches in Maharashtra - that it was criminal that BCCI was wasting hundreds of thousands of water in every IPL game when Maharashtra was facing the worst drought of 100 years, when people were not getting water to drink and bathe - this, too, is criminal when poverty, quality literacy, education and healthcare still need critical attention.  

How can this paltry sum be justified by anyone, let alone by the party that has been in power for some 60 years of India's 70 sovereign years?

How can Congress counter this when a simple two bedroom house less than 100 m in size in Delhi costs around Rs. 20,000 in monthly rentals and its goes up to around Rs. 50,000 or so in many upscale areas?

How can Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi justify that Priyanka Gandhi indeed needs a 'super' subsidy for her housing rent when Robert Vadra, her millionaire husband, claims that 'he always had enough and he didn't need Priyanka Gandhi to enhance his life'? 

But nothing will move folks, except some hue and cry. It will die down soon. That is the state of affairs in Indian politics. That is the standard here.

Be it BJP for Eknath Khadse or Congress for Priyanka Gandhi - the colours fade into oneness, the lines blur when it comes to 'certain' political compulsions. It was a BJP government in 2002 that had 'super' subsidized Priyanka Gandhi's housing rent. It was a BJP government that had retained Robert Vadra on 'no frisking VVIP list' at the country's airports in 2014 in spite of strong reservations. It is a BJP government in Maharashtra whose minister has made mockery of farmers' plight by wasting precious water even if his chief minister says in the Bombay High Court that the IPL matches could be taken out of the state to save water.

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