The World under terror

This year I've been forced to think many times but never like this before. Whenever it use to happen my adrenaline use to rush, use always to question the one particular religion and its practices, use to always think as what make this religion or people practicing it to kill innocent people in the name of this religion, use to think the only way to save this world probably is to eradicate this religion all together. I always was a hardliner, always believing in tit for tat. But in the last 3 days what I've seen and what I've experienced I am now beginning to believe that the menace can't be handled the hard way. There are probably few people following this religion who are radical and who are ready to go to such an extreme to kill innocent people but then people with such mentality are there in every religion, what may be different here probably is a greater % of people believing in such ideas and actually go in such length to do that. But if we really want to win this war of terror, this war of hatred we need to adopt the soft way with a mix of hard way. We probably first need to go and find out about the root cause of this issue. What make people to go and do such extreme things and why? Probably we need to ask these questions to all of ourselves!

I know there are things done in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Kashmir which were not 100% right on our part. Lets accept it that we also did mistakes. But to now the question is how to correct these mistakes, how to soothe the anger of the people from each side who are now ready to take arms and fight their own battle? Do we want to go to extreme path to create more anger on both sides or do we want to take one step at a time and come to a middle ground where religion is people's choice inside their homes and not a license to kill, where people learn and co-exist happily, where people think of developing towards a more prosperous future and not towards hatred and revenge, where people ultimately love each other for their character and not for their class, creed or religion!!

The second most disturbing thing which is coming out of all this is the pathetic and most absurd behaviour from our representatives or so called leaders. I was beginning to think that probably this would be the defining moment in terms of how our politicians behave, that probably now we all will stand together and unite against all those who hate humanity, that probably now for once and all we will become one country and speak in one voice. But I was so bloody wrong when I heard height of sycophancy from Jayanti Natarajan (whose blood didn't boil a single time seeing the horror for more than 60 hrs on TV and seeing more than 200 people dead but whose blood immediately boiled when told a little negative about Sonia Gandhi), the most pathetic man to be called a leader R R Patil, DyCM of Maharashtra (who said that these small things keep happening in a big city like Mumbai) and one MNS thug (who sent SMS to one of the mediamen saying why Raj Thakery wants non-Mumbaikars to leave as it is so overcrowded that identifying normal people from terrorists has become difficult). This has probably made one thing very clear to me that our politicians will never change, they will keep looting us, they will keep making martyrs out of Army, Police and all of us but they themselves will never change, will never show a little shame, will always be singing "HUM NAHIN SUDHERENGE".

But then it bring us the question that how this state of our Indian democracy will improve. We, the people like me and you, always keep throwing dung to these politicians but we ourselves never thought of coming out of our little cocoons and start a movement to change all this system of unjustice, all this system of this sycophancy, all this system of politics where people like Raj Thakery and alike can claim to be representatives of us. I heard people saying "what can I just do", but I think each great movement started with just one "I". Lets unite in this moment of crisis and show all these politicians that we won't let these bloody, narrow minded and self benefitting politicians live in our political system anymore!

I invite all the people who are reading this blog to share their thoughts and bring our ideas and for godsake constructive ideas only so that we can move forward from here for a better and brighter future without any fear in our minds.

Life & its meaning!! Most of the times in my daily routine I don't get chance to think about this but sometimes I do and whenever I do I can't find the answer.

Just saw this video:
http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWqIrmxtcoY
and was speechless, had almost tears in my eyes & had this question again why we are doing all of these things. Not even going to anywhere outside my own country. If I just think about what we as Indians doing to our own brothers & sisters, I feel ashamed, more so of myself!

We perhaps would be wasting more money just to keep ahead of ourselves in the arms race pertaining to two of our not so friendly neighbors. According to rough estimates we spend around 2.5-3% of our GDP on our defense but if you include all the salaries & pensions given to military & para-military forces it can come more than 4% of GDP. I don't know what can be this figure after our recent pay revisions, perhaps around 5% of GDP? Even if I take a conservative figure of 4%, for more than $1 trillion economy we are looking around $40 billion!!! That's a jaw dropping figure. I again ask the same question, why? Look to our neighbors on whose name we are doing all of this. People there are starving, like us and they are spending more than 5% of their GDP on this same name, DEFENSE!!

On top of this huge waste our country have got this huge problem of corruption and everything will be fine attitude. We don't mind paying Rs 10 to a parking lot guy so that he put our car in front, we don't mind paying Rs 10,000 to a government officer not to transfer from our preferred location, we don't mind seeing the same govt officer paying Rs 1,00,000 to a minister to do the same and we don't mind seeing the same minister paying Rs 10,00,00,000 to another MP to save his govt!! God when and how this all can end, where at the same time 60% of our people are living on below poverty line (we even came up with a nice branded acronym for it, "BPL"). All of this is there probably more because this 60% population is illiterate, because this 60% population just can't think of anything else than when they can have their next meal, that they don't really care who is writing their destinies - whether it's the so called Dalit and people's representatives like Mayawati and Lalu or in the name of religion dividing the country kind of politician like Mulayam or the real broker who is ready to sell his own mother for the money kind of people like Amar singh or in the name of saving farmers killing the industry kind of politicians like Mamta Bannerjee or in the name of secularism and saving India from nefarious designs of US but at the same time ready to gift the entire country to a communist state like China kind of politician like Prakash Karat and for that matter all damn communists!!

If you look to the greater design of these politicians of our country, their single biggest objective is to rob our country, keep one after the other un-important issues burning and on top of all of these keep people poor. Poor so that they can never think anything other than their next meal, poor so that they can never be educated and uneducated so that they can never question WHY?

I wish we get so much wisdom to think about the dying people in floods of Bihar & Assam before thinking about raising our already ballooned defense expenditure, I wish we can think of almost 60% of our population who are living on less than Rs10 a day before diverting any single penny towards war, I wish our politician going to dharna to force the government to achieve 100% literacry first before trying to close down some factory, I wish we stop electing people who are robbing our country and I wish we start demanding accountability from our all government officers, politicians and ministers!!

Lack of respect for lives and attitude of Indian media in general

One more day, few more lives!! Looks like its so much of routine in our part of the world. We are not even interested in that. Who wants to listen? Even the news reader is reading the story as fast as he/she can so that he/she can arrive to the more interesting ones! The news that sells, the news that can create TRP ratings, the news that can entice us, the news which can bring MONEY!!! Be it IPL or be it what BIG B has to say about about drinking & smoking in films & commercials or how SRK is going up or down in his quest to become BADSHAH of cricket, after bollywood ofcourse? Love it or hate it, aspire it or ridicule it; but everyone knows only two things sell in our homeland, CRICKET & BOLLYWOOD! And between all these big money talk who the hell really cares if there was one more bomb blast there in Jaipur or there was a 14 year old school girl murdered in her own apartment or there was a 11 year old got crushed under the collapsed wall after incessant rains near Gurgaon?

I am not living in my motherland right now, but I made up a point everyday to listen to what is going on there. I want to listen to some new voice, I want to listen that there is a CHANGE even in India happening at every other corner. On this quest I started to listen to CNNIBN everyday in the morning. I had lot of respect for Rajdeep Sardesai. I thought here is a guy who genuinely trying to make a difference. Before that I was kind of sick of one sided journalism of NDTV or the other 3rd grade journalism of the so called private news channel of India. When I was in India I never really watched so much of BBC or CNN but here I started. I am very proud of my country as what it has achieved over the past few years and I realised every person of this world is very proud of their homeland and it can be seen in these international news channel. And I also know that MONEY is definitely important to me and to all these news channels. That's why everyone of them goes for news of all kinds to make it more enjoyable to its viewers and basically to be profitable at the end of the day. But in this quest I found there is a huge difference between these international news channels and the same from our motherland and that difference is the VALUE of LIFE. Even a single person's life is so much important to these guys. One single death due to some unnatural disaster and they will keep persisting with it unless the government realises and acts on it. While take the case of ours!! Who bothers if there's one more death unless & until its not from my family. The girl who got murdered or the boy who got crushed was not, so who cares? In this indifference towards human life I found myself crying and bleeding from my heart. Today that girl or that boy was not from your family but if this keep happening tomorrow they would. What you will do then? Show the same indifference? Can't these IBNs and NDTVs start behaving a little more responsibly in that direction? Can't they use this great power of media to force the govt to act, to do something about this callousness? Or we will keep seeing deaths after deaths  after deaths and do nothing and will just wait for the next IPL match or the next bollywood masala!!!