A nation of dumb devotees.

http://www.hindu.com/2009/08/30/stories/2009083057940100.htm

Ah, we've done it, again! Lives of little children sacrificed for
absolutely no gain.

A soothsayer and her husband predict the death of a certain child,
then poison the poor child to make that prediction come true! How
ingenious. The village believed it as something mystical. Even
worse, the mudering fraud soothsayer and her husband thought they
would get magical powers if they sacrificed children. What century
are we living in? Oh, wait a minute, this is India.

This should send shock waves through our nation, but it won't. It
will be forgotten and ignored as a stray incident. This exact set of
events may be stray and rare, but for all of the BJP's "India Shining"
trumpeting, and for all of us Indians who believe India will be a
"superpower" like it is our birthright - get this straight - We are a
country of dumb devotees. We're devoted to a lot of idiotic,
dogmatic, irrational nonsense in the name of culture and we've
completely lost our ability to think, be intelligent, rational and
effective in our thoughts and actions.

We are, instead, driven by absolutely insane religious hooliganism, or
why would Madhavan Nair take part in a coconut breaking ceremony
before blasting Chandrayaan to the moon? Well, the bloody thing is
now broken, isn't it? Mission over, prematurely. Shall we safely
conclude that the camphor was not lit right? Or shall we speculate
that the priest was having an extra marital affair much to the anger
of our Gods?

Why is it that we become subservient to the unseen powers even though
it is our effort that carries us forward at every step? Faith and
belief can be beautiful things if they are used to spur us on to
greater achievements, but when they become the only guiding force,
we're losing out on a great deal of capability.

Comedian Vivek famously ridiculed a lemon on a lorry in a Tamil film,
asking if it was the lemon and not the fifty thousand parts engineers
put together that made the lorry move! The wisdom of that has been
lost but the humour remains fresh. Thank God for small mercies!

This isn't an argument against the presence of God, or a profession of
the agnostic viewpoint. An athlete in peak fitness, calming his or
her nerves down with a prayer just before launching into a supreme
physical effort is a very human, natural and complete effort cycle.
Faith in God can be a good destresser, and if in knowing God is with
us we are stronger in our heart, then great. But the athlete didn't
spend more time in prayer than in hard work. That is the point being
completely missed by our masses. To a lot of us, worship is work.

The founding pillars of India are rooted in truth, not God.
"Satyameva Jayate" is on every single emblem of India. Why is it then
that we have trumpeted God much more than truth? The truth about
India is bound to hurt us. We're a nation of backward thinking,
stupendously foolish people punctuated by a few brilliant minds. So,
why are we still fiercely devoted to stupidity?

There was a ceremony of sorts at a temple in Tamilnadu a few weeks
ago, where coconuts were broken on people's heads. Some ritual this!
The government medical machinery was at hand to render first aid! How
ridiculous that the taxpayer has to bear the burden for this foolish,
religious and barbaric practice.

Why is there no fundamental drive to create a place for rational
thought in our education? There are enough and more texts about
religions, Gods, our incredible "unity in diversity" and so on. How
about some "truth" telling our children that this is the nation where
women are molested in public, coconuts are broken on our heads in the
name of God, and a huge percentage of us do not have clean water to
drink? How about starting there and presenting the idea that God
could be a belief, a construct, and a lot of very successful people do
not practise any religion?

Every now and then, we have this excuse that poor, illiterate and
downtrodden people cannot really afford education. Well, if the
government of Tamilnadu can give them rice at Re.1/kg and free
televisions, they have both money to spare and a window to the world.
Why not use the TV to present the idea of rational thought? Why not
present an idea to them that makes them wonder why they are poor in
the first place?

Last week in Bihar (where else?) there were hunger deaths because some
poor families didn't get their quota of rice, even though they paid
for it and bribed the now absconding Public Distribution System
official. Of course this event is not even on the news any more,
since Priyanka Chopra is not their spokesperson. What better way to
get rid of our poor and downtrodden? Let's starve the entire
population of poor, illiterate people to death.

Our poor and downtrodden will remain that way until we give them the
power to stand up. But do they want that power? They are so stupid,
they'd rather worship the politician who gives them rice rather than
become self sufficient. They are so slavish and subservient in their
minds, they are defeated even before any fight can begin. How do we
get them to fight for what is right? Simple answer - we cannot. They
are a blight on the face of this nation and must be dealt with the
iron fist of rationalism.

Ignore them for a few years and see how they cope. I bet they'll get
smarter. Stop giving them free anything. Let them work to survive
and figure out what it takes to survive. Let their deities and gods
take care of them if they are such good devotees. If not, we will
remain a nation of dumb devotees.

At the other end of the spectrum we have a lot of tax evaders and
criminals who dump their ill gotten money into collection boxes at
places of worship! Like God really needs their money and is willing
to persuade the nation to forgive their fraudulent, anti-national
activities. What kind of a twisted nation are we?

I wouldn't wish the lousy job of straightening out our nation on my
worst enemy. So I will leave God, at the very least my God, out of
this!

- BSK

FACING THE TRUTH - got a problem, India?

SACH KA SAAMNA!! (Please forgive the writing in English, in the
assumption that you can actually understand it in Hindi) - translates
to FACING THE TRUTH.

Apparently, a lot of people in India are indignated with this show,
especially since it is becoming fiercely popular. What a riot!!
Finally, a show to embarrass us Indians about being Indians! For all
of us who thought we were this culturally rich, morally
unquestionable, spiritually impregnable group around, now we have
something that exposes who we really are - a bunch of lying
hypocrites!

Oh, I loved seeing that respectable middle aged Indian gentleman on TV
today, bemoaning how bad this show was, and how bad its message was.
I wonder how it could have been so bad for him if he had not watched
it fully!

This program is perfect - our illusions about India need to be
eradicated, destroyed at the earliest, so we may, especially the
parenting generation may, get a grip on reality. We are the nation
where women are stripped and molested in public, bribes are paid by
people following the law, and murderers can get away if they know a
politician.

But we're sensitive about a guy voluntarily disclosing things about
his personal life for a moment of fame on TV?! COME ON!!!! We still
have elected representatives who think homosexuality is a crime, and
people who think other people's lives are their business? What is
right about this nation? We still fight over religious matters that
should never be in public domain in a secular modern democracy, we
still have dowry, and bribery and corruption, even in the armed
forces, even while buying equipment that is supposed to guard us from
destruction. We have corrupt medical infrastructure, a public health
care system that is just a bit better than being a sewer, and we're
getting sensitive about a bloody television show? WHO are these
people expressing outrage? What kind of apathy marinated coccoon are
they rolling in?

A lot of Indians suffer from the IUA syndrome. India Under Attack
Syndrome, that is. We constantly imagine we have something precious
called India and that the whole world is out to destroy it, stripping
us of our magnificent culture, denying us our moral high ground, and
cutting short our spiritual evolution. We imagine for no reason at
all that we are somehow great for sitting on our arses after being
born Indian. Even without any evidence to support this imagination,
it is contagious and constantly fuelled by us. Rampant as it may be,
imagination cannot replace factual reality.

That reality would indicate that we have one of the fastest growing
differences between rich and poor, we have one of the fastest
devastating environments, and we are one of the hardest places in the
world to do business in. In other words, there is no bloody reason
for us to reasonably hope for any one of the most important aspects of
a developed country - an equitable distribution of wealth, a
sustainable development model, or an atmosphere for growth of
opportunities. In other words, we have pretty much nothing measurable
that we can be proud of. So, what gives with this TV show? Huh?

The IUAS positive Indians imagine that all our young women are
virgins, our boys are paragons of virtue, our places of worship are
holy, and our religions make us spiritual. They also have all kinds
of reasons for our backwardness except for the one glaring truth - we
are not an uncompromising, truthful, excellence loving people. It is
amazing that we have so much self respect. God, we must set some low
standards!

We do not embrace reality, but constantly spread mere notions as truth
about our country. Where is the bloody evidence? Our great culture
must contribute in some way to miles of railway track becoming trash
dumps, our open rivers spewing poison into the ocean with untreated
sewage, and it must certainly inform our tourists to trash every great
manifestation of nature they visit.

Let's have much more of FACING THE TRUTH please.

Is Manmohan Singing the wrong tune?

India and Pakistan agreed yesterday that terrorism is the main threat
to both countries. Manmohan Singh is satisfied with Yusuf Raza
Gilani's commitment to bring the culprits of 26th to justice, and for
some reason, Singh has gone soft enough to agree not to bracket talks
with Pakistan's action on terror.

Now, our greatest achievement is "agreeing" to keep the "dialogue"
going. Should we congratulate Manmohan Singh? I think not.
Reporters are busy squeaking on CNN IBN that there is a "breakthrough"
in India Pakistan relationships, with the "talks back on track". What
track? A track that led us to the Mumbai terror attacks?

Singh the economist is fast turning out to be a dud when it comes to
being Singh the statesman. Does he just want to look like the good
guy to the world? He is our best option on the economic front, but if
terrorism is indeed our biggest problem, MM Singh is not the best
leader for the job.

The crook Gilani is busy saying that terrorism is not only India's
problem, and that Pakistan is also really bothered by it. Bothered?
I'd say that's the least they should be dealing with after training,
arming, supporting, and growing terrorist groups for so many years!!

Now, is terrorism India's biggest problem? Definitely not. Pakistan
is our biggest irritant, but by no means is terrorism our biggest
problem. It is stupidity. We are stupid enough to have a dialogue
with a country that doesn't deserve as much as a mention in our agenda
for progress. We're treating a failed state like it is a sovereign,
democratic, bonafide nation. Pakistan has vast regions controlled by
militant groups, a military that doesn't have its loyalties to its
government, and a history of being under military rule for 2/3rds of
its period since independence from the British.

Why're we even bothered? What would happen if we took a hawkish
stance on Pakistan, cut off all diplomatic ties, and disagreed with
everything Pakistani leadership suggests? Would anybody in the world
grudge us for doing that? We could start a trade war, really
squeezing all of Pakistan's exports by putting a straight subsidy
system in place wherever any of Pakistan's products are competing with
India's. This will cost us less than all the rubbish expenditures in
Kashmir. It will make our exporters happy and bring in revenues too.

All of Pakistan's exports could be made to suffer and when the matter
comes up in an international forum of any sort we could say, "Heck,
we're able to do nothing about your biggest export - terrorism! So
please, bear with us on this one, will you?" After all, nobody dares
question China's system of subsidizing any of its exports.

We have seen time and time again what terrorists do in a time of
ceasefire. They regroup and come back and hit us harder. That is
what is happening right now, with Pakistan doing absolutely nothing to
curb its terror infrastructure. Zardari recently accepted that
certain groups were encouraged for strategic objectives - a clear and
cold revelation that the Pakistani government is indeed much worse
than we thought it was.

For some reason we seem really happy each time the USA mentions India
without mentioning Pakistan, like we need the USA's sanction for
anything we do or do not do. We're delighted Hilary Clinton isn't
visiting Pakistan on this visit to India. It has taken the USA about
fifty years to realize India and Pakistan aren't the same country, so
congratulations. But are we to ignore the fact that Pakistan is still
getting millions in aid and military hardware from the USA?

We should go a step further and release biological agents into the
waters of the five rivers that flow from India to Pakistan, quietly
create infertility and sperm count drops. The Islamic terror movement
is dependent on numbers. Why not hit it where it really matters? I
mean, what the f**k is stopping us from doing this?

Is Manmohan Singh fit enough to play the roles of statesman and
politician? If he is, he will first realize that there is no point
rationalizing anything with the monkeys across the border. They are a
confused, trigger happy lot, to whom the only clear enemy is for some
reason - India. We do not have to put up with monkeys, so let's shock
them, put them in their place and hope that in the next round of
evolution, they will take a step up and realize they can't screw with
this powerful country who happens to be their neighbour.

If we imagine that the Pakistani political machinery somehow deserves
OUR support in dealing with THEIR terrorism problem, then we are
idiots, undeserving even of a lousy country like ours. We should have
been in some impoverished sub Saharan African craphole. Pakistan's
terrorists were bred by THEM, not US. So, let them get bombed, raped,
pillaged, and ruined. Why are we wasting our resources to help them
do better against a problem THEY created?

Do we need Pakistan? ABSOLUTELY NOT. So, Mr. Singh, what gives?

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad country.

Cranes topple at the Metro mishap site in New Delhi.

What is funny is that these cranes were pressed into service to pull a
girder out, after yesterday's collapse. Now these cranes, in plain
sight, on TV, were pulled up by the weight of the girder and thrown up
like toys. Apparently, one of them landed on a nearby building and
damaged it.

Clearly rank incompetence is at play here, and this is no accident either.

An accident is what happens when a completely unexpected set of events
take place that we cannot plan for. The strength of the pillar (P67)
was not tested by a meteor hitting it. It gave way under the weight
of the girder it was supposed to carry, upon which the rails would be
laid for the Metro to ply.

If the pillar wasn't strong enough to carry the load of the girder on
top, some engineer somewhere doesn't know how to calculate this simple
number. Or, s/he doesn't know how to design a pillar that can
withstand a cantilever load. This is nothing but incompetence.

India produces hundreds of thousands of "engineers" every year. Just
visit any engineering college and look at the "projects" that students
do as part of their academic curriculum. Usually, many of them get
away with copying other such "projects" from other universities,
because with all the e-governance and connectivity and modernization,
it is impossible to keep track of how the same project can be done in
a hundred different universities and lead to a thousand different
graduates!

None of our engineers are capable of solving problems outside their
books. Building a metro railway system is not experimental in any
way, and none of the technologies needed there are beyond normal
engineering capabilities of any country in the world. So, why are we
putting up a flop show?

Because our engineers are no good. I have been witness to third year
engineering students not knowing which meter indicates suction
pressure and which indicates delivery pressure in a simple water
pumping system. And this is in a well known engineering college!
Everybody got their calculations wrong and efficiency figures
competely haywire, while it took the lecturer, (another theoretical
genius) all of forty five minutes to figure out what was going wrong.
It is ridiculous how bad these fools are.

Since the invention of the aeroplane, over 90% of the world's patents
are held by citizens of the USA. The writing is on the wall - that is
where the innovations are happening. India, with three times the
population of the USA, with the most number of universities in the
world, and 16% of the world's population, doesn't hold even 2% of the
world's patents. Bottomline - we do not innovate. We do not
encourage originality and we are clueless when it comes to applying
our "knowledge" to solve our own problems. Why would we call foreign
experts to clean up the Ganges otherwise?

We produce engineering students, we produce people with paper degrees
in engineering. But we do not produce engineers. We merely produce
people who have studied some engineering texts but have no idea how
and where to apply any of what they studied. We would not have sheer
incompetence in the simplest of matters of civil engineering if we
produced real engineers. Oh, sure the IITs do a fantastic job,
feeding other countries with our few real engineers.

It is a completely different matter that companies winning contracts
on projects often hand it over to other companies. It finally comes
down to an engineering company doing its job. And ours just don't cut
it.

India hasn't updated its construction standards since pre-independence
times. Other countries have gone through several updates, and
continue to update their standards atleast once every year. So, the
arrival of new materials, techniques and technologies are being denied
to us for one simple reason - incompetence. We do not know how to use
any of the new advancements, because our "standards" are stuck in the
1940s!

Call any leading contractor doing a job for the government. Nothing
complicated, just someone laying roads. Ask him what the standard
curvature and height for a speedbreaker is. He won't know. He
wouldn't even have heard of any such thing as a "standard". Who cares
if your car scrapes on the hump when you are getting humped in so many
different ways? This is India. Jai Ho!

- BSK

What is worth fighting for?

At the same time in the news -

1. A Union Minister calls a High Court judge applying influence
towards a certain outcome in a murder case.

2. An Andhra Pradesh MLA is found guilty of molesting women enrolled
in an institution he owns.

3. Four policemen in Shopian, Kashmir are under trial for the rape and
murder of two women. A commission finds the press guilty of
distorting facts, completely misrepresenting events, and inventing
twists to a tale that led to the worst street level violence in J&K.

4. The Indian Army is now taking the rap for having siphoned off a
large amount of money from critical schemes to buying golf carts.

5. Parents of a nine year old child are forced to spend Rs. 70,000 to
cure fever, thanks to a diabolic level of unnecessary treatments and
tests by the hospital.

What the fuck is going on?

I mean, seriously, bad language is hardly enough to express outrage at
these incidents that have come to define our fucking country. If we
can't trust the military, the police, and the politicians, the press
and are guaranteed to be raped by hospitals, who is left to trust?
The judiciary? Wouldn't they be toothless without the rest pulling
their weight to implement some semblance of civilised life?

Are we that bankrupt? Why are we sliding shamelessly to a horrendous
abyss of corruption, inefficiency, incompetence, and outrageous
apathy?

It isn't two days since I asked why our MIGs are crashing in fairly
alarming numbers. I wouldn't put it beyond sub standard spares going
into ageing aircraft for being the reason, but beyond that, I'd put
all my money on sub standard human beings being given a chance to ruin
the well being of our Air Force. That's what I have always had a
problem with - sub standard human beings.

Sure they exist in every country in the world. But in India, you have
to bribe people to get something done that is totally legitimate!
That is where we completely lose all our claims to be a decent
country. Forget about the "great country" claims, please - that is a
bloody joke. How can we tolerate this total degradation of values,
without turning to dramatically irrational reactions?

From personal experience, I have been very close to wringing the necks
of a few unscrupulous elements, but stopped short since I wasn't
directly affected. In other words, if we stand up, we can get what we
want, starting with justice. This country is also full of cowards, so
don't worry about asking a loud question the next time you are in a
government office, trying to get something sorted out - "Okay, you
don't want any bribes, right?". See the look of shock on people's
faces, pull out your cell phone and continue, "I have no problem
calling the Vigilance Department if you even suggest that I will have
to bribe one of you idiots to get my job done". Helter skelter they
will run like the fucking rats they are. Motherfuckers.

The corrupt, inefficient, fuckfaces that work in the government
machinery must all be roasted over a slow fire and tortured till the
fat in their bodies oozes into the fire, every last drip of it. Short
of that, they can certainly use the most abrasive, offensive, foul
mouthed ill treatment at the hands of honest people. Nothing wrong
with that at all. So, dish it out.

It isn't really worth living in a country that encourages corruption
in all its institutions, so I completely endorse this as a cause for
breeding terrorism. It won't take long for some of our people to get
sensitive about things, to really start noticing that we are being
screwed. If justice has to come through killing, maybe some of us see
it as the only way justice can be procured.

Enough already about keeping faith in our institutions. If we let
this slide, there is no end to how low we will go. We are being
screwed and right now, we're taking it quietly.

I do not have faith in India. Faith is for fools and those who have
no access to knowledge. I'd rather stick with knowledge. Everything
in my knowledge suggests that Indians are not to be trusted. If you
cannot walk into a hospital without exposing yourself to being screwed
by fearmongering uncouth doctors who force you into needless expenses,
this country needs to be radically overturned.

There is going to be no "reform" either. We need action, and we need
it now. People must be shot dead not for their petty little crimes of
rape and murder and pillaging others who don't have a choice, but for
undermining our faith in the collective that is INDIA. If people
think this country must exist to serve every one of their greedy
objectives through whatever loopholes exist, then that myth must be
shattered at the earliest, and with extreme prejudice.

Get out of your apathy. Know that this country is not just mediocre,
it is low. Know that as long as you are here, you contribute to this,
by not doing anything. If you have half the intelligence of a goat,
you should know very well that it is your bloody responsibility to
act.

The least we can do is stand up. The next time you are confronted
with a damning situation, stand up. Do the right thing. Ensure the
system is flexed and woken out of its slumber to function like it
should. Don't ever let any fuckhead tell you that your efforts to
lead a righteous life will be futile. Tell that bastard to look at
what is written, even on his money. If you didn't already know, it is
"Satyameva Jayate". Totally worth fighting for.

Why are our MIGs crashing?

It's been a while since we were rocked by the Bofors scandal, involving Rajiv Gandhi. Eventually nothing came out of it, and the Bofors guns more than proved their worth in the Kargil conflict, silencing many critics.

However, it would be naive to believe even for a moment, that the Ministry of Defence is in charge of a very corrupt, very damaging, and incredibly expensive machine called the Indian Military. Ask any industry that supplies anything to the Indian Armed Forces and they will tell you how corrupt their dealings invariably are.

From little individual contractors who build websites, to those who manufacture mission critical components, everybody has a tale or two about paying kickbacks, and who ever questions the outflow of the Indian military?

It was distressing enough for me to see an Army officer siphon petrol from his official green Ambassador and fill up his Maruti van, and it doesn't help knowing it is pretty routine for military officers to be "entertained" by private manufacturing firms chasing their decisions for lucrative contracts. It doesn't help knowing first hand that some very good looking Russian women are patriotic enough to show up to canvass for Russian contracts.

"A total number of 22 MIG Aircraft of the Indian Air Force has crashed from April 01, 2006 till date. There were three casualties in these crashes," Defence Minister Mr. A.K. Antony said today. (http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20090708/808/tnl-air-force-to-have-230-sukhoi-30-mki.html)

It has been a while since Indian manufacturers have filled in for Russian spares for the MIGs. It won't be long before the Sukhois go this route, all in the name of reducing foreign exchange burden. How many Sukhois have to crash and burn, and how many Indians will have to die before we get to the bottom of the problem?

As a nation, we should be ashamed that the bulletproof vests handed out to Mumbai policemen were found not to be bulletproof when the bullets fired by Pakistani terrorists actually hit them. Apparently, the police have even lost that file, indeed with the same impunity that comes with a mass acceptance of corruption and a morass of moral ineptitude that have come to define who we are as Indians.

We set such low standards that we don't really care that a MIG that should be thundering at forty five thousand feet has hit the ground, in all probability due to a technical snag, caused by nothing short of a corrupt supplier. The investigations will drag to a point where it can never be conclusively proved in a court of law that this is the case. With 22 MIGs crashing in three years, we really should be paying this a lot of attention.

But, we won't. We're probably uncaring enough in our apathy to worry about that one sincere pilot whose dream it was to fly a fighter plane in his country's uniform. We're not going to do anything about that policeman who gave his life in vain, for he took a chance upon his trust in his country to have given him a genuinely bulletproof vest.

That is the part that hurts, our inability to trust anything Indian. We fail all too easily. We are spineless and we are dirty in our collective Karma. That is what is depressing about living in this goddamn country. Everything is corruptible. Everything is suspect. Everything is defective. Most of all, we punish those amongst us who care to be uncompromising, and we beat them into submission.

What could possibly go wrong if we changed?

We Indians are racist!

Look! That's what NDTV tells us!





Now, people with Padma Sri awards can do no wrong, can they?