Making sense of the world.
Archive for February, 2010
Inconsiderate Neighbours
Feb 16th
The clock shows two hours past midnight. Sleep has been driven away by the incredibly intrusive noise coming in as though an insane, riotous crowd is screaming and yelling, inches away from my ears. Sounds like a bunch of crazed men with some kind of drum, high on alcohol or some other crazy stuff, screaming into a microphone with the amplifier full on. How can this happen in a civilized country? How can good, cultured human beings behave like this? Is there no law, no regulation?
Earlier, the entire day had exploded with loud banging, screeching power tools and rumbling construction machinery. A residential building takes shape inches away from my balcony. There’s no room to spare. No space nor time is sacrosanct. Everything can and is violated, mostly in the name of God, whom men have reduced to a rubber stamp to justify their evil.
I read that a court ruled that silence constitutes cruelty in marriage. What about this? Maybe there are spouses who are similarly insensitive, loud and aggressive. Maybe there is nothing there to say? What can you say to people like this? What about God’s cruel silence in the face of all the filth being done in his name? Some would say we need to realise the divine spark within. What if the inside is full of crap? We have been trying to realise that divine self for thousands of years and still remain pretty much near the bottom of the heap on human behavioral indicators.
Change Your Stripe
Feb 9th
What do you think? We have PhDs managing the country. We have endless news coverage and talking heads. We have more institutions of learning now than at any other time in history. We have MBAs and MTechs running our businesses and factories. We have achieved unprecedented economic growth, and a place in the limelight. We cry ourselves hoarse about how wonderful we are, and how our ancient culture is overflowing with spirituality and gurus and what nots. And that a glorious future belongs to us, as a glorious past supposedly did.
Time to take a reality check.
We have found water on the moon, but are unable to accurately assess the extent of poverty in the country, or maybe we don’t want to.[i] Too inconvenient and embarrassing.
India spends less than five percent of the annual budget on children.[i] Try spreading that over 447 million people below 18. More than half a century after Independence, the percentage of underweight children under 3 is still high, at 46 per cent. An estimated 50 per cent of our children are malnourished. Recent news indicates that we have managed to push our children to the brink of despair, with 26 juvenile suicides reported in four weeks in Mumbai. All this and much much more, inspite of having good policies and schemes in place. Thing is, these are useless without good people.
Compare that with the military budget of a country that was led to independence by the apostle of ahimsa.