In the White Man's Trap.

It has been centuries since the white man left the shores of his native lands and went all over the globe, looking for riches that were nowhere to be found in his own.  Along the way, white man had to be resourceful - for invasion, violence, innovation, invention, and for making up things along the way, like democracy, free markets and so on - things that slowly persuade other people to follow benignly because it sounds like a good idea.

After all, how bad can "of the people, for the people, by the people" be?  Well, shit!  Pretty bad as we are learning now!  The idea of free markets has taken rampant part in exploitation, because those lands where people are being exploited do not have kings who would have slit the throats of businessmen doing anything like that.

The white man has always been about doing the dirty work out of sight, and keeping a nice, soft, benign front.  The rest of the world has been somewhat opposite to that.  If a kingdom stood for violence, you'd see dead bodies in the streets.  It won't be sending planes to bomb another faraway country while its citizens are sitting around in a coffee shop watching it on the news locally.

The millions of people that flock to the USA to live there, do so in all innocence, believing in shit like "The American Dream" while in reality, they actually strive to prop up some really huge lies, by serving the machine that white man built out of nothing.  You don't have to be very smart to do materially well in the USA - it has plenty of power to lend you money when you fuck up.  That is how it has piled up the biggest debts in history of mankind, but it doesn't matter!  The White Man is all about making us temporarily feeling good while he gets all the benefits!  All big businesses in the world - pharma, fast food, fashion, entertainment, booze, cigarettes, drugs, education, sex - are made of this simple philosophy.  Take the candy, and become a slave for life!

The same goes for the much talked about cultural invasion of ancient cultures by white man's content, on top of which stands Hollywood, and now taken over by television marquees such as "Friends".  The trap is the feel good factor.  Our children will fall for the culture of temporary feel good, as long as it never talks about consequences.  All love stories are traps.  Everything feels great when the romance peaks and ends in a commitment at the end of the movie.  Oh wow!  "Titanic" was great, but it really is about bad maritime navigation than anything else, isn't it?

There is never a story about how the romance gets fucked up just after the engagement and how this amazing idea of romancing, dating, the whole soulmate shit and all the good shit including the diamond ring and the wedding ends with rather stunning divorce rates of over 50%, and social misery, old age homes, and disjointed families.

Break ups are the release!  But you cannot sell much to someone looking forward to a break up, can you?  The boy and girl in love will buy cards, entertain themselves, buy gifts, and spend money!   The couple that come out of a breakup come out wiser, a little more discerning, and less gullible.  So, what do we do with them?

Well, there is always the next beginning!  And white man's next great idea is just around the corner.  Viagra!  Remain young forever!  For a culture based on the temporary, Viagra actually tries to keep youth permanent.

Popular romantic stories tell us that sometimes, even though we know something could be a mistake, we should make it!  What kind of moron would say something like this?  It is only by constantly building upon untruth that a bloated unreality can be maintained, which serves the selling machine.

It's the dishonesty of the "selling" culture that really bothers me.  In fact, this whole "selling" culture is based on the white man's idea of the free market and the assumed "right" to persuade someone to buy something, but there is some dharma in that, so it has a right to exist as a viewpoint.  What I find disgusting is that there is "moral science" in school, there is "physical education" and there is even "sex education" but there is no "market education".  How do we cope with shit that we are constantly sold and shit that constantly persuades us into believing untruth?

The same sort of happy, giddy, romantic progress translates into our newfound obsession with easy success.  Look at the number of idiots who fall for nonsense like converting $400 to $3100 in a month through Forex trading!  So why can't the government throw in its 300 billion of reserves into this amazing business and in a month's time, we will have trillions!  How hard can it be to conjure up some common sense?

The number of young Indian people I meet on a daily basis who believe they are smart enough to see huge success in their lives is just mind boggling.  There are simply no statistics to support that kind of success in such large numbers.  Even in the country that promises great things, the USA, 1% of the population has nearly 80% of the nation's privately held wealth!  Of course there is always the promise, the trap, the possibility, but where is the education telling us that this sort of success is going to be elusive?

Boost improves stamina three fold?  What kind of motherfucking stupid ass, demented parenting pricks will believe this and feed their little shits with this goddamned product?  Three fold?  So how come our olympic athletes aren't tanking up on Boost and coming home with all the long distance gold medals?  Surely, if our athletes can tap into the secret of Boost, they could do three times better than the Africans?!  This lie is there on TV every single day, but since this is the white man's way of doing shit, we do not question it.

If there is to be an honest message to our kids and giddy parents, here it is - "Get off your pompous asses and work hard.  Save your money, and don't buy anything you don't need.  Life is not going to be easy.  Get used to it.  Your kid has to run kilometres everyday for his or her stamina to improve even a little bit.  Your kid will not become healthier by using Lifebuoy soap, or smarter or taller or sharper by drinking Horlicks.  Make the little shit eat vegetables and stay off junk food.  Tell the bastard that s/he will grow the same kind of paunch daddy has and suffer from worse diseases if s/he is not careful.

For heavens sake, your child is nothing special.  Your moron neighbour thinks just as highly about his little shit, and that moron also has medals and certificates to prove his little shit's great achievements.  Now think.  How did all of us excellent children from thirty years ago build such a mediocre nation?  By believing greatness is in our manifest destiny?  Yes, exactly.  Because we're staring at how white man built his countries and we think that is the way to do it!  Wake the fuck up!"

- BSK.

Number 1 in Number Two.

While the presidential "race" is hotting up in New Delhi, the human race seems to have little to look forward to in India.  In fact, it has plenty to look back on, literally.

http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/article3524150.ece

We are officially the #1 country for doing #2 in the open!  No shit.  Just too much of it.

The government is taking steps to curb open defecation.  Again, no shit.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/states/tamil-nadu/article3301113.ece

We still have the massive stigma of human excreta removal procedures. 

http://www.thehindu.com/health/policy-and-issues/article3524423.ece

Who the fuck ever said India is a superpower?  Make those fools do this job first.

But we're smart enough to rope in, who else apart from Sachin Tendulkar, for this campaign against shitting in your face: Shah Rukh Khan.  Perhaps from now on, instead of waving his hand with a thumbs up, he will show two fingers.

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article3329786.ece

He sells fairness cream, so I guess it must be fashionable for him to tell people not to shit in the open.  Maybe he can sell some kind of superglue that will stop people from shitting all together?

Seriously, who are the bums that will listen to Shah Rukh Khan and decide not to shit in the open?  In fact we should be grateful nobody takes a shit while listening to him.

Apparently, Sikkim has become India's first Nirmal state.  I have no idea what this non-English word means, but I reckon it must mean that despite 60% of the world's open air shitters being in India, in Sikkim you can shit indoors most of the time.

We're hoping that Kerala and Himachal Pradesh achieve this status.  A status?  Can we take aim any lower?

There are umpteen reasons we may be lagging behind and setting new standards in the negative with this enormous statistic of sixty percent of the world's open air shitting going on in India.  This is by number, and not by mass or weight, mind you, so there is scope for some optimist to come up and say patriotically, "But we don't take such big shits!"

I think the reason we take shits in the open is because we just don't give a shit.  It is an extension of the same habit of leaning on others in a queue for no reason.  It is the same attitude behind spitting paan and being loud and rude in public.  We don't care about contamination, and we don't care about sickening ourselves or others.  We are not human enough for that.

Building more toilets is only going to solve the problem to some extent.  What do we do to get Indians to use them?  What about keeping them clean?  What about water supply to those toilets, and what about accountability in maintaining them?  If it is profitable to steal the tap and sell it in the market, the Indian will do it.  If it is profitable to pull out the entire toilet and sell it, the Indian will do it.  The only way to curb this menace is to make shit profitable.  If these open air shitters could take a dump in an envelope or a box and bring it to a government office and get paid fifty rupees every day, it might work to some extent.

For sure, shit is manure.  If done in the fields, it can add some value as a fertilizer.  But it adds no bloody value if we shit all over railway tracks, beaches, river banks, and city streets.  People doing this must be punished.  It costs about Rs. 6000 to set up a toilet at home, so every ration card holder must be inspected and given a toilet if there is none at a home.  If not, the community toilet must be built and access provided.  Beyond this point, if anyone still takes a shit in the open, that person's ration card must be voided.  How hard can this be?  Agricultural labour income is now fixed at Rs.500/day, and there are plenty of vacancies, but nobody wants these jobs.  Go figure.  One month work, and toilet guaranteed, but no thanks.  We will do shitty jobs, live without hard work, and shit in the open!

With Indians, it is nothing but attitude, and we refuse to come out of low decency behaviour.  11 million people shitting on railway tracks every single day is just an unbelievable number.  I'm surprised more trains don't trip and fall because of this.

Then the cost of disease control.

There is no bigger disease than Indian attitude.

Hopefully we don't start a new festival of shit.

- BSK.

A cricket fan's tribute to Rahul Dravid.

Dear Rahul Dravid,

Today I am happy.  Happy that you retired on your own terms, from international cricket and indeed from domestic cricket.  I wish you all the very best for your future endeavours and I hope you find the peace, prosperity and contentment that you seek, with your family members and friends.

A lot has been said, and many have waxed eloquent about your many achievements, and I really cannot add to any of that.  Thank You for the years of dedication, and the many accomplishments that have embellished Indian cricket over the years.

I am not sad that yet another son of the soil, a "mannina maga" as they may say in Kannada, is trudging off into the sunset, leaving behind an eerie silence and a void that may never be filled.  In fact I am hoping the void will never be filled, for I don't want to see another stodgy wall, a sticky customer who neither left nor got on with it. 

I am in fact, very relieved that there won't be that much blocking of a cricket ball, when the purpose really is to score runs.  But, you are a gentleman, and will no doubt take my criticism in your stride.  For that I salute you.  I also salute you for having made your mark as a gentleman in a sport that the English have reduced from being a means of fun and entertainment, into one of attrition and suffering, of Tests and survival.  I salute you for being a consummate slave to this atrocious idea with such dignity, and making it look like this is the sort of role model we should wish upon the youngsters of independent India.

Even more relieved I am, most of all, that you won't have to struggle to show us again how difficult batting is, how the art of smacking a ball with a piece of wood several times the mass of the ball is an essentially excruciating one, a terrifying prospect, especially when the motivation is, on a cold English morning, to please a smattering of warmly dressed crusty old Englishmen with steely stares.  Alas you will no longer be around to score so slowly that a talented youngster at the other end blocks his way to zero in several balls just to show you respect.

But Sir, you are a modest man!  And you will understand that times have changed, for you are fundamentally such an intelligent and articulate gent who never put a foot wrong, uttered so much as one word out of place, or scored one run more than was impossibly difficult as you would have us believe.  No Sir, you can do no wrong, for you never ventured to do anything other than right.  Any surprise you are right handed?  I apologize, that was left handed.

I did enjoy the way you whacked Allan Donald at his peak into the stands in one of those rare moments of freedom that managed to corrupt your soul, and I did enjoy that forty ball seventy you scorched in an IPL game, and I am deeply ashamed for that enjoyment.  It must have been the most corrupt moment of your soul's journey and I was, shamelessly part of it.  Alas, I am human.  No longer shall you allow yourself the temptation, and for that I am happy.

Hordes of cricket fans somehow expect cricketers to be role models, but Sir, I swear I would never put that burden on you or any of your teammates.  Hordes of women love you for being Mr. Dependable, but I swear I would never depend on you.  Many paeans of character have been heaped upon you and most of them are deserving, but some of us have secretly been oblivious to such displays of character, wrapped as we were in the simple matters of enjoyment.  We do not lurk but increasingly roam in the open, wary of discipline, wary of the straight line, and of the straight jacket.  We shamelessly tout our freedom and do not see the value of voluntary enslavement anymore.  That era, sadly has passed like a glorious brooding cloud of great mass.

We all enjoyed seeing you as Jammy, and there is yet to be discovered a single disagreement on the acceptability of Kissan Jam.  For that I thank you.  In one fell swoop, you united all that need to eat breakfast, especially those of us who had to have jam with bread or biscuits.  Truly sweet!  The jam I mean.  I mean, the jam too.  You get it.

Some of us never grew out of this notion that sport was for fun, and not for inflicting torture upon ourselves.  Some of us actually flocked the stadiums and television sets, and internet connections hoping to see the team we supported win.  We enjoyed the brashness of a contest, that rustic bristle of competition, and the sheer joy of the celebration of the human spirit.  Some of us even appreciated the crudeness of athleticism and the vile taste of watching the human form in peak performance.  Somehow, it was all about enjoyment.  How wrong we all were!  A thousand apologies for the heaps of wrong expectations from us.

For those numerous occasions on which you helped coax this nation's cricketing legions out of illusions of delirious victory, tempered us with the sweet taste of a hard fought loss, with your score sizable and the strike rate modest as only you could define it, and for teaching humility to the batsmen who followed you who thought they had it in them to score a mountain of runs in a flash, and for delaying all their successes to the point where they understood humility is a greater virtue than ambition, I thank you.  None of that would have been possible if the Kohlis and Rainas and Dhonis had been unleashed upon the opposition without the tempering influence of that bat of yours that stood in the way.

What do these modern cricketers know about being gentlemen?  They just play the game, provide enjoyment, win a lot, hate to lose, make a lot of money, bring us to the brink of our sensible existences, and inject us with joy.  Sir, you will be missed.  And what of that other stoic gentleman, the tall stallion of thy same stable, that veteran of scowling disposition whose smile may invite punishment upon the human race and hence was kept out of the sunlight?  Perhaps you will join him in apt company?  May your tribe flourish!

Truly, us simple mortals do not deserve a champion like you, Mr. Dravid.  We might choke upon the very proposition, unable to handle the magnitude of such a challenge. 

We just don't measure up against a wall.

Somehow, we will have to find a way around it.

Thank you!

- BSK

THE BREAKDOWN OF THE DEMOCRACY ILLUSION

The Protester has been named the Time Magazine's Man of The Year for 2011.  He has been a vigorous figure, taking on many avatars - Libyan, Egyptian, male, female, American, student, Syrian, fighter, Indian.  His causes have been varied, and do not indicate, as the mainstream vested interest owned media may have us believe, a shift of consciousness towards democracy.  In fact, far from it!

The two biggest democracies, USA and India have shown remarkable anger against all that democracy has achieved for both of their people by way of accumulation of power and money in too few hands, corruption and a broad feeling of unfair treatment of the common man, but they have done that using means that are very democratic - peaceful protest.  In India through the Anna Hazare led India Against Corruption movement, and in the USA, under the flagship Occupy Wall Street protests.

It is time to take stock.

Obama believes and acts in a way that is neither liberal nor pro-business, when he stands for punitive measures against companies that have sent "American" jobs abroad.  Before this comical and farcical standpoint, the voting citizens of the USA wanted "change" and "hope" when they voted for him.  They got change indeed, but they were too immature to realize much of that change would involve people losing their homes, jobs, and the nation its credit rating.  Now they are beginning to lose hope, as there seems to be no panacea in sight.  And yet, it is not Obama's failure.  It is the failure of American people to understand that constant addiction to debt is not a good thing.

Faced with massive charges of corruption and inefficiency, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his coterie are making noises about "India Inc." using negative language against their government, Kapil Sibal wants to police the internet, and journalists have been shot dead, not to speak of Right To Information activists too, that are constantly under threat.  In the same period that the Lokpal Bill has been a much touted solution to India's vast corruption endemic, there has been no significant increase in the number of Indian citizens using the existing channels to complain against corruption.  In other words, Indian citizens are yet to understand that the Lokpal bill is just another tool, and is not a solution against corruption if we are not willing to use whatever means exist.

In both cases, it is a failure of the people, by the people, and nothing is going to happen for the people, unless we lose our illusions.

American companies will, when threatened by government to function in a certain way inimical to their interests, ship their entire companies abroad in order to be profitable.  That is how professionally capitalistic they are.  Indian people will, under the slightest pressure, prefer to pay a bribe and escape the hazards of legal process to get the simplest things done.  Both are choices, and both are driven by selfishness.  Both are also driven by human nature.  Under pressure, we do not care about the collective.  We are as much driven by the survival of the fittest as any other species.  Democracy is about the collective, while survival is about the individual.  Herein lies the fundamental unviability of democracy as a system for all conditions.

Capitalism always tries to protect its investments.  Capitalism has invested in democracy - not in the egalitarian, flawed but noble idea of a government of the people, for the people and by the people, but in the inevitable and always available side effects of apathy, ignorance, and gullibility.  It is very easy to lie to people who are under such massive doses of illusion.  Both Indians and Americans are prime candidates for ignorance related diseases.  Every instance of corruption and looting of public wealth in both nations has taken place with impunity, purely because the threat to the common individual was always maintained at a level less than critical.

As long as the individual living in a democracy is given the opportunity to earn for himself food, water and shelter, however shallow and unfair that "opportunity" may be, and as long as there are visible examples of other individuals successfully making use of such opportunity, the urge for mutiny can be largely suppressed.  Apart from the activists who will take great offence to corrupt practices that threaten any public asset, the rest are just sheep.  And sheep are very valuable commodities to both democracy and capitalism.  How else can we be sold medicines we do not need, luxuries that are highly damaging to the environment, and ideas that can keep us lazy and rich forever, without any fundamental base of truth?

If a top sportsperson "endorses" a health drink, it is perfectly legal even if that person never tasted it for most of his or her life.  This level of lying is acceptable as an integral part of the instrumentation of capitalism.  It is also perfectly acceptable for the government to tell us partial truths about deals, conceal information about certain deals which might cause us to suspect the integrity of the people in charge, or cause them to become unpopular.  Case in point - Put money in a bank, and you have the right to monitor your money at any point in time.  Pay taxes and after that you cannot monitor how the government spends your money!

Time bound action - if you pay tax this year, why can't you get the services you paid for within a reasonable time frame?  Why can't the relationship between government, the institution and the individual be based on some kind of fairness, if indeed democracy is at the most basic, a way of providing the needy with essential protection of the collective?  All of us pay the same amount of road tax based on some percentage cost of the vehicles we own.  But some of us live in areas with terrible roads and some in areas with excellent roads.  Why this disparity?  In fact, the government provides no extra compensation for those of us suffering more repair costs due to bad roads.

If this can be forgiven, because of the inherent inability of the government to provide equitable treatment to all citizens, why can't a tax payer who is late on his payment be forgiven for a business deal that went less favourably than expected for him?  There has never been equitable respect between individual and the institution.  In other words, democratic governments have regularly breached the trust of the voting citizens and done so with impunity and indeed indemnity.  We cannot sue the government for non-performance!  Something we can take even a business to court for!

It is on this fundamentally one-sided and anti-citizen platform that the dressing up of democracy takes place - to show the complete opposite.  This dressing is called "rights".  We have the right to expression, peaceful protest and due course of law.  Expression that can be suppressed, peaceful protest up until the point when the government decides to remove protesters, and due course of law that usually means many years for justice to be delivered.  Injustice, delayed justice, inefficiency, corruption and inaction are all forms of terrorism against people.  None of us are terrorized by the possibility of a few bombs going off here and there.  We are concerned, but the thought does not occupy our mind.  But we are necessarily terrorized, certainly in India, by having to ask the government to perform efficienty and cleanly.  In fact, we go as far as we can afford, to avoid going through the arduous, treacherous and slow path of getting anything done legally, because we are terrorized by delays, inaction, inefficiency and indifference - all of which any government office can supply in abundance.

None of our fundamental and constitutional rights can do anything against inefficiency.  The government can always sit behind the wall of inefficiency and mock and laugh at all the rights we have.  Therefore, in order to get the government to perform outside that wall of inefficiency, we are forced to resort to methods that are less than peaceful, attract embarrassing levels of attention, and with the support of the media, which in itself is a corrupt and biased entity.  Whenever the pressure gets too high to ignore, the government comes up with release valves in the forms of employment schemes, poverty alleviation measures, and grievance redressal camps.  Once the immediate pressure is released, protesters who are nothing but pawns, simply retreat to their normal lives with a sense of having accomplished something.  This is how democracies without consciousness are bound to perform.

India is a shining example in every sphere, of progress through competence without consciousness.  We are even being told through a very insulting advertisement for Coca Cola that while some are ignoring the environment, there are millions of trees being planted every day, and while some fight over petty things, millions drink Coca Cola, therefore we should all drink the damn thing and be happy, instead of feeling negative!  This is the most insulting kind of association therapy we should be subjected to.

No doubt some advertising genius wanted to tie in our readiness to accept any good news to the undeniable "goodness" of this nectar from heaven, and immediately, POW!  Who do we hit?  The hapless millions who have already been softened by a thousand problems, so that something like this could get under our skin and create this illusion, through images of cute children of course, that Coca Cola is an essentially good thing.  It fucking well isn't.  It's poisonous and has been banned from millions of school campuses in its country of origin.  That's the damn truth.

The government creates exactly this kind of illusion to give us a feeling of power, of purpose, of individual invincibility, giving us the feeling that each one of us counts!  Yes, we do count, but only how much we earn!  The government can simply tax what we earn, and siphon it to its own cockroaches, to various invisible places, and deny us the goods and services we paid for.  But while we can get mad at a shopkeeper for selling us substandard goods or services, we cannot question the government for wasting the wealth we generously donate year after year.

If the government can do this under the umbrella of inefficiency and deception, why can't we do it under the umbrella of cleverness and sheer practicality?  This is the exchange and the unspoken relationship between citizen and a democratic government.  Indians woke up to this a long time ago, but the Americans still live under some idealistic notions of democracy.  As far as India is concerned, it suits both perfectly - we don't mind being corrupt to further our individual causes, and the government can tolerate us as long as we throw in enough to keep its babus paid, and the looters at the top happy.  The illusion works!

What the heck, if anything, is right with this system?  Nothing gets delivered, in quality or quantity, as promised.  There are so many cases in the NREGA where the workers have received only Re.1 to Rs.11 out of the Rs.100 the scheme promises.  To start with, this NREGA scheme is fraught with pretense.  The physical work involved is so menial and so farcical, that farmers and agriculturists have lost a great deal of manpower to this useless exercise in alleviating poverty.  What this scheme has done is provide free money and foster laziness, thereby driving up the prices for manual labour in agriculture through scarcity, endanger the future of India's agricultural production, and create a whole new culture of unproductive money distribution.  In fact, it is rampant lining of the pockets of all the middlemen involved in this scheme.  Anytime cash is there to be distributed, it will not reach our common (m)asses.  Only the most distilled morons will ever believe otherwise.  But it is perfectly democratic to keep coming up with hare brained ideas that go nowhere, just to keep the pressure simmering below boiling point.

The rich-poor divide can only widen, and since India's poor are massive in number, it won't take long for this group to turn violent, for two reasons.  Firstly, the feeling of disenfranchisement which political oppositions will play up on, and dumb masses will immediately subscribe to as being something "they" did, and secondly because of the very famously Indian habit of forming mobs at the slightest provocation.  It is not surprising that there are so many armed militant groups in India, seemingly all of a sudden, and while we choose not to talk about them, or their grievances, it is not hard to see where it all comes from - the non functioning of democratic ideas and principles, and an utter failure to rule ourselves in the collective.

The fundamental truth is that democracy is about the collective, while survival is about the individual.  When survival is in question, damn the collective.  Without fairly high levels of material well being and education, democracy cannot function.  No human being is going to give up individual interests for the collective, except in extreme acts of sacrifice.

This is where the other great illusion that democracy fosters has the chance to step in - equality.  This is the most corrupt word in the vocabulary of politics.  It is the greatest lie, and the most impossible ambition.  "All citizens are equal".  What can be more tragically wrong than this, when everything is geared to test who is the best?

All the driving forces of growth depend on commerce, and with profit being a motive, competition is automatic.  Competition is all about inequality.  We Indians actively encourage competition, and while we do not give a rat's bottom about India being ranked 119 in the Human Development Index, we definitely push our children to get the "top" rank, get the "top" education, and go for the "top" job.  Are we to believe that a child going to a rural government school has any chance of being equal to his counterpart going to a modern, privately run city school?  Is there any realistic chance that the two will get to make any sort of equal contribution to society when they grow up?

What else but a sense of deprivation can creep into those classes of society not having any realistic chance to accrue wealth?  What options are open to them?  Can they give up their way of life and suddenly slip into the so called mainstream?  Absolutely not.  This class of people by the way, is often the voting class, and their votes are precious, but their lives are not.  If they become part of the middle class, then they would not vote either.  So, there is clearly every motivation for our political parties to keep the poor poor, and the rich out of the way of any uncomfortable questions.

All the periods of India's glory have been under a benevolent dictatorship - thousands of years of peace, prosperity and pride - or so our history tells us.  We have always been led by a king in those wonderful times.  Even the BJP, a prominent political party now, talks of Rama Rajya - glory be to Ram, a king, not an elected leader!  So, why're we so dumb as to subscribe to this untenable idea of democracy?

Truth is, we were sold this idea by the eminent morons of the time.  Not people who were equal to us, but people who knew we would fall in line like sheep.  We did and we bleated together, in one voice - "Of the people, for the people, by the people"!  Sure, but which people?

Now, it is time to think.

- BSK.

Shit. New Year here again!

Stupid actors dancing - it's on again, the same shit.  Holy crap it is NEW Years!  So we should celebrate it by doing the same crap we did last year, because we don't particularly feel giddy with any NEW ideas!  It's there on every damn Indian channel, and it was there on every damn channel last year.

These punks be damned, what the heck is new?

I was at a bus stand as the clock struck 12, ushering in the New Year.  Fireworks to celebrate in the sky, the stench of urine on the ground.  What the fuck were we celebrating?  You cannot go to any Indian Railway station without smelling piss and shit, usually both.  So what the fuck is new?

If we build septic tanks on trains, and didn't release the contents on the tracks in the open, we WOULD be improving, we WOULD be doing something new.  So our New Year is really nothing new, is it?  More of the same shit, literally and figuratively.

Here is my new expansion of INDIA - It Never Does Improve Anything.

Now, all this is old griping too.  Here's something new - 2012 - the year we will be destroyed, our planet coming to a bizarre end.  It won't bother us so much when we get to hell, we Indians, because we're well prepared for it right here.  Heck, hell might have clean toilets.  In fact, I'm sure the devil will torture us if we didn't keep our toilets clean.

INDIA, very much here, very much the same as before.  Nothing new.  In fact, proud of being very old.  Shit.

- BSK.

The terrible Indian internet debate.

Usually, in an argument, especially an interesting one, both sides have compelling viewpoints in great disagreement with each other.

In a high quality debate, both parties learn a bit more about each other, and walk away better informed, better educated, and perhaps better prepared for the next round, which will hopefully lead to some sort of resolution.

On the 7th of December, listening to Kapil Sibal in the press conference, after having followed his none too brilliant reasoning on a few other issues, I finally understood how an argument can completely lose its purpose, when one of the parties is not just ill informed, but also is incapable of being better informed.

Kapil Sibal wants to police the internet.  Make no mistake about it.  He wants censorship of a medium that has brought tremendous benefits at a very low cost to nation and consumer.  But he doesn't understand it.

Apparently, there is some "material" out there somewhere in cyberspace that is incendiary, communal, and potentially dangerous.  According to this article in The Hindu - http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/article2693232.ece, -- Earlier this year, the government circulated rules which made it incumbent on internet intermediaries — like Facebook and Yahoo — to exercise due diligence to block material deemed, “threatening, abusive, harassing, blasphemous, objectionable, defamatory, … or otherwise unlawful in any manner whatever.” --

What can be unlawful about an opinion in any bloody society?  The internet is a free speech zone, plain and simple.  Whoever writes whatever they write in cyberspace is not a broadcast, and it would be absurd to expect the same rules to apply to the internet content, as we could to print, television, and radio.  We're already warped in imagining all media are the same!

Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdulla has said he has had mobs throwing stones at him, when some idiot posted something nasty about his personal life on the internet.  So, he supports Kapil Sibal's grandiose ideas about curbing certain type of content on websites.  The truth is, the problem is not with the internet, it is with the mobs!  They need to grow up and join the vast majority of internet users who can easily distinguish between mischief and information.  They can easily distinguish between blasphemy and mockery, sarcasm and wit.

If I remember right, Indira Gandhi was murdered because it came on government controlled radio and television that the Golden Temple of Amritsar had been destroyed by an operation authorized by her.  If I remember right, it was also news of her assassination that was maliciously and meticulously spread by Doordarshan and AIR that caused riots, murder, rape, and looting in many parts of India.  Why was the government not intelligent enough to stop that information spread?  Bad judgment?  Then that is a case of incompetence!

If I remember right, it came on television that the Babri Masjid had been destroyed.  Why was there no media blackout of that incident that led to untold misery for the nation in the form of terrorist attacks?  When traditional media has in its own rigorous way, caused the suffering of untold millions, why try to censor the internet, which has a much better track record?  So far, not even one major incident of national shame has been sparked off by anything on the internet.

Repeatedly in the press conference, Sibal asked, "Have you seen the material? Have you seen the material?", and nobody in the press had seen it.  So, the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology is making a fuss about something that only he has seen and considers inappropriate?  Sorry Sir, it is YOU who needs to grow up. How about making the URL public, and we'll decide for ourselves if we need to flag it down?  If the majority of the users of that intermediary flag it down, guess what?  The "material" is taken out!  You don't have to spend national resources doing this, idiot.

The internet is self-regulatory.  And of course we know no untoward incident can possibly take place by a photoshopped image of Sonia Gandhi controlling her pet monkey Manmohan Singh.  Heck I even agree with the message!  Even if I didn't, I could always counter it with Advani as a destructive chimpanzee.  Nobody would take that seriously either.

What Kapil Sibal is missing here is that the internet is a community without authority, but plenty of democracy, and that is precisely why it is trusting of itself and other members in it.  It is fully capable of allowing and regulating its own freedom, because there are clearly defined spaces within it, where the playing field is level for all players, and the extremists are treated like dirt in any forum.  This is the greatest experiment in human collaboration and so far it has been fantastically successful.  Example: Wikipedia, which is a free, editable encyclopedia, has the fewest errors of all encyclopedias in the world.

Devoid of any sort of overbearing authority, the internet is fully capable of flourishing and nourishing humanity.  Governments and leaders are not.  Here is why governments and leaders are afraid of the internet - it offers a level playing field!  If a minister tweets a stupid message and gets an intelligent retort, he is exposed immediately!  It does not TAKE a newspaper to spread that retort universally.  All it takes is a cheap cellphone and a brainwave.  This is what is threatening Kapil Sibal.  And it should.

Here is why - For getting a simple subsidy on a solar power installation, from a scheme announced by the government, it takes two and a half years, if you are not willing to bribe anyone in the ministry of renewable energy and resources.  Kapil Sibal sent notices to some intermediaries like Yahoo, Facebook and Google asking them to remove objectionable content and has not heard from them - since October!  Only three months to evolve a whole new paradigm for a phenomenon that encompasses all of humanity, but two and a half years to honour a subsidy scheme started by the government by itself?  Sounds like double standards to me!

If an intermediary should be responsible for providing the platform to a supposedly objectionable activity, (only Kapil Sibal thinks it is objectionable!), then think about this - why is the Indian Railways providing the platform for sales of illegal DVDs?  The law clearly prohibits piracy of movies, but on any train running in waking hours, bootleggers are welcomed and allowed to flourish on Indian trains.  So, Indian Railways should be shut down?  How come ISPs are not held responsible for illegal downloads of movies?

Citizens have realities, governments have excuses.  In a people vs. the government argument, for me, somehow, it is already very very hard to sympathize with inefficiency, corruption, and sheer megalomania.  Add incompetence to this mix, and it is a potent reaction from me, to what Kapil Sibal is suggesting.

For its part, the internet intermediaries do take down material which violates guidelines of decency.  These guidelines are far more fiercely enforced in the collective, by the collective, than any government could ever dream of.  If you flag something as abuse, and there are enough flags, that material goes OUT!  It happens faster than an Indian Government minister can even possibly fathom.

Almost all developments that have come about because of the internet, like online banking, shopping, and communications have helped India enormously.  The end user is in ecstasy compared to the inefficiencies of standing in line, filling out paper applications and the endless list of aimless time wastage.  There is no public outcry about how corrupt the internet is, even though pornography and other evils are rampantly on display.  The reason is simple - the internet is also incredibly personal.  It is as personal as my prayer to God.  If I pray that Sonia Gandhi die of some disease, that doesn't mean prayer should be made illegal!

Kapil Sibal wants these intermediaries to provide the government information on who posts what material, information on the physical identity of those expressions, so that he can prosecute.  But he doesn't want to restrict social media, he says!  I guess there won't be any restrictions when society has been prosecuted and imprisoned.

It should surprise none that Babudom would be under threat.  It shows our Babus that they are irrelevant.  No wonder you will never get any e mail reply from most government officials with "official" e mail addresses on badly designed government websites.  If fact, you will get delivery error reports within seconds.

On a scale of real and pressing problems, objectionable material on the internet cannot rank in the top 95% compared to killer hospitals, corrupt governments, infanticide, illegal mining, black money, graft, rape, farmer suicides, murder, terrorism, and nepotism.  Material on the internet has no bloody chance of trying to compete against any of this. 

So why this attention from Kapil Sibal?  The answer lies in ACCESS.  So far, despite all the problems and incompetence, the citizen had no equal platform to challenge viewpoints and ideas in the open.  You had to have power and money and influence to throw your voice out there.  Today you can compose a song and reach millions as the "Kolaveri" kids have shown us.

It is this same ACCESS that prevents internet content from causing riots on the streets.  If you show a picture of my God having sex with a crocodile, I can bloody well post a picture of your God being raped by my dog!  Who takes this kind of crap seriously when you can hit back in EQUAL measure?  That is what this access provides us!  That is what other media do not provide us with!  If MF Hussain showed his work ONLY on the internet, there would be no repercussions on the street, because if he paints my goddess nude, I can.... you get the point.  There is no need to seek out the person in the real world, because we can hit back right there!

Even the case of the Danish cartoonist who is suffering the fatwa against him for the depiction of Mohammed the Prophet in poor taste, took on those dimensions only because a newspaper was involved.  It is hard for the common world citizen to stand equal to a newspaper in ANY geography.  But if it had been a purely online contest, chances are his stupid depiction would have been flagged down by users as blasphemous and that would have been the end of that.

Truth is, the internet has spawned a global mindset where we fundamentally see and respect one another as humans.  We know certain things are sensitive to certain people and netiquette is far ahead of cultural etiquette in many ways.  Even typing in capitals is considered rude in cyberspace, but these parliamentarians have no problem admitting murderers, rapists, and criminals of varied hues into hallowed spaces of national governance, who beat each other up while on duty representing us!  Where is the damn comparison?

With the proliferation of cameras and cellphones and the internet, images of rank incompetence quickly reach a vast majority of us who would react and make noise.  Traditional media could pick and choose what was appropriate for our consumption.  The internet doesn't care!  Everything for everybody!  And it has worked beautifully so far.

If something works beautifully, the only thing that can stop it from flourishing is authority.  That is what Kapil Sibal is trying to provide us.  It is time to kick his honourable rump out of office along with the bunch of cronies that don't understand the first thing about community.  They don't understand the first thing about many other things, either.

But this is what I am most irked by - If our great Indian civilization is capable of taking so much pride in itself, then why do we fear our own freedom so much?  Do we need political punks to even tell us how to behave with one another?  I really do not need Kapil Sibal, the fool who thinks the country lost no money on the 2G scam to tell me how to express myself on the internet.  Decency be damned!  Clear your desk and get the *#&@% out of the way, fool.  You are just rank incompetent for this debate.

- BSK.

Can the Lokpal cure us of our apathy?

Anna Hazare has made some great noises and started a great process.  The government has buckled under the pressure to offer us the passage of the Lokpal Bill, which, when it comes into law, will allow us to prosecute the corrupt, rather quickly, and effectively, depending upon the final draft that comes into force.

This doesn't mean we will suddenly see corruption go away.  It means, if we want, we can prosecute without the usual hindrances.  It will still take considerable effort to use the Lokpal to put away corrupt individuals.

The urban middle class of India is the most politically inactive but fashionably righteousness conscious demographic of this country.  It is a mindset, indeed, and we are mad about a lot of things, but unwilling to unleash that anger on anything that will get something done.  We are candle vigilantes and nothing more.

So, how about including a small clause in the Lokpal bill that makes it a crime to notice a crime and not report it?  After all, corruption, as we call it is a bloody crime.  It is thievery, blackmail, denial of rights to people coming through the fair competition route, and anti-national to the core.  So, let's bring in a healthy dose of the words "crime" and "criminal" into this revolution!  In other words, if you pay a bribe, you're a bloody criminal as much as the pig who takes bribe - for whatever reason!

Unless we, the people of India are under threat of being prosecuted for a criminal offence, we will not report crime like we should.  So, how about making this Lokpal Bill include us and our brothers and sisters across the expanse of this nation of India not just responsible but actually culpable to the crime of corruption?  Should it not be our duty to report crime?  How about enforcing this duty as well?

Blackmail is a crime, and bribery more often than not, is blackmail, when demanded for a legal procedure.  If the procedure is illegal - well, that is already a crime!  We seem to treat corruption as some kind of common cold, while murder, rape and other more spectacular deeds are more like heart attacks!  This must change.  If it is illegal, it is a crime against the nation's rightful progress, and a bloody crime against the nation.

Why do we suddenly want more laws?  The Lokpal Bill is just another law coming into effect, isn't it?  We already have plenty of mechanisms that we have eroded, ignored, or abused, like the Vigilance Commission.  Why is the Lokpal going to be any different?  Legislation is not going to solve any problem we face in India.  Enforcement can.  We are not good at this.  The first step to enforcing any law or prevent the escape of those breaking the law is reporting.  We need at the very minimum, a robust reporting mechanism, that should not be reserved for spectacular crimes.

Can we please let the Lokpal drafting committee know that it should be legally incumbent and binding upon the citizenry to report crime?  After all we are, by virtue of half the members of this committee being from civil society, absolutely responsible for making it work, whether the government does its part or not!  Also, when the government would love to prosecute its citizens for not reporting, it would have to acknowledge the crime as having taken place, and will have to prosecute the other side as well!  What a beautifully binding marriage this!

The most spectacular crime, by the sheer scale of practice, that most Indians participate in, is apathy.  If we support the Lokpal Bill's passage, we should have no problem accepting an anti-apathy clause as well.  What do you say, flag wavers?  Ready to do some real work?

- BSK.