So the debate is no longer about whether they are corrupt or not. It’s all about who is more corrupt. No more finger pointing games then. Let’s get our measuring scales out and start a new one. If the ruling party is X on the scale of corruption, then the opposition is X+1. Or is it the other way around? The BJP is X and the Congress is X+1. No one’s less than X when it comes to corruption. They all have something to hide. We will never run short of ingredients to weigh on the scale. What fun!!!
Look at the behaviour of both parties. Raja’s indictment of Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram is being countered by an argument that they didn’t know. Hello...we follow the parliamentary system of democracy right? We are taught in schools and colleges that this system is based on the principles of collective responsibility. One for all and all for one!
Either the Prime Minister knew or he is plain incompetent. Once again we are confronted with Hobson’s choice. Do we want a leader who is smart enough to get his kickbacks from all the underhand deals or should we be happy about one who takes a moral high ground for himself but allows others in his team to be corrupt. What a good man Manmohan Singh is...he not only provides a shining example of his integrity for the rest of us but also makes us marvel at how much shinier his integrity is compared to the evil team mates he inherited all because of Coalition ‘Dharma.’
Chalo let’s also deconstruct the word Dharma to understand how the meaning of it changes when affixed to the word Coalition. Dharma is about doing the right thing. But when it comes to Coalition politics it means just the opposite. Like the leader of the ruling party and the PM asking other parties to support them in return for turning a blind eye on the corrupt practices of the ministers they induct in the cabinet from these parties. Lesson over let’s train our guns on the Opposition now.
The people of Karnataka must be numb with shock to tolerate a chief minister like Yeddyurappa. There’s a certain category of human beings that we tend to leave well alone saying Iska kuch nahin ho sakta. When evil takes on the form of a Joker, you wince and laugh at the same time but you also understand why even the Batman finds it impossible to stop him most of the time. Yeddyurappa is that animal of Indian politics. His own party president has called him unethical but ees aadmi ke kaan mein joo bhi nahin rengi. He just continues irrespective of the accusations levelled against him. I am increasingly convinced a person called Yeddyurappa does not exist. We are living in a fictional Matrix and Yeddy is a mirror for us to comprehend how low we must have sunk to tolerate someone like him.
And that brings me to the great big dilemma. Should this measuring scale be about corruption or should it be about shame? To measure who’s X and who’s X+1 on shamelessness? Who fares better
(or is it worse?)?
Nitin Gadkari or Sonia Gandhi? Manmohan Singh or Sushma Swaraj? Arun Shourie or A Raja? Yashwant Sinha or P Chidambaram?
The difficulty with changing what the scales should weigh is that it ends up implicating all of us as well. We may not be corrupt but aren't we as a nation shameless to elect the same set of politicians year after year, term after term? How do we bail ourselves out of that one?
Tol Mol ke Bol!
Showing posts with label Manmohan Singh. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Manmohan Singh. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
The Pleasures of Judicial Activism and Blogging
The cash for votes sandal is back to haunt the UPA government. Thanks to judicial activism. Based on a PIL, the Supreme Court has swung into action and the Congress brigade is scurrying for cover. Sometimes you wonder about the timing of terror attacks in this country. The blasts happen in Mumbai, lives are lost, and the next thing you know Digvijay Singh is mouthing the usual rubbish about Hindu terror to hog headlines. The BJP is always a poor second when it comes to political machinations and one of their blithering leaders called a press conference to attack Singh. Tamasha time for politicians of all hues as usual! The silver lining is, this time the media has refused to pay ball. At least not to the extent they have in the past. The spotlight continues to be on Amar Singh and his aide who’s behind bars now, saddled with bribe allegations.
None of this augurs well for Manmohan Singh and his government. You don’t need an astrologer to tell you that with all this going on, he may not survive the full term. But the soothsayers are predicting doom for Singh in any case. So is he going to blame the stars or Sonia? Only time will tell. All we can be happy about is the culture of PILs that has come to rule the roost. It has made you and me, who don’t belong to the ‘elected representative’ groups, or the police or the armed forces or the media, powerful. The government of the day has to watch out for not just the opposition but also the aam aadmi who can get it to its knees by filing a single litigation. This augurs well for a robust democracy. The more the checks and balances, the more accountable those in power are going to be. The whistle blowers are free to join the party. Their time has finally come.
Just like us bloggers. We are influencing public opinion like never before. Not only have we caused coups and revolutions in countries with totalitarian regimes, but we have also got the media worried. Seriously worried at that! I read a column last Sunday by a journalist who was sounding very distressed about what blogs and bloggers are doing. According to her, we are all irresponsible, rude, nasty and not accountable.
Is that right? Surely no blog I have come across is as obnoxious as Arnab Goswami when he gets on to someone’s case. And as for bloggers writing reviews and reports without attending an event or watching a movie /reading a book, there is many an illustrious precedence set by media professionals.
Legend has it that the brilliant English writer Ruth Rendell who writes excellent psychological thrillers and murder mysteries became a bestselling author after being sacked from her job as a journalist. She played truant on a day she was meant to cover an event. The event was cancelled at the last minute but Rendell made up a story about it and sent it to her editor. You can well imagine what happened after that. But a happy consequence of that unfortunate incident was that Rendell discovered her story telling powers.
As a professional writer, who is regularly asked to write columns, reviews and opinion pieces for leading publications, I was dubious about blogging and kept away from it for a long time. It was while holidaying with my family in Rajasthan last year that I discovered I was being an idiot. I did a lot of surfing while there and came across some extremely interesting blogs and more importantly some very well regarded writers from all over the world blogging.
We encountered racism from the Indian staff of a five star resort in one of our stops. I was livid about the incident. Imagine paying good money only to be treated like second class citizens in your own country. I knew I couldn’t write about the incident for any of the magazines and newspapers published in India. Even if they had published that piece of mine, it would have been without the name of the resort as they wouldn’t risk losing the advertising revenue. A single, tersely worded blog post had the owner of the resort sending me an apology letter. I owe that victory to blogging.
Blogs and a blogging site have played a big role in the success of my latest book. Blogadda did an in-depth interview and I consider that to be the best interview anyone has ever done with me. They also got ten bloggers to review my book and they were all really well written pieces. Much better than the reviews carried by mainstream magazines. And I am not saying this because the reviews by the bloggers were positive. Some of them were fairly critical whereas the verdict by the magazines and the newspapers on the book have been all positive.
At a time when journalistic standards all over the world are plumbing new depths because of the Murdochs and NOTWs, a well researched blog post is a treat to read, unfettered as it is by editorial and establishment pressures. Of course media professionals would get rattled by this phenomenon as it challenges their fiefdom. But that shouldn’t worry the bloggers.
I am all for judicial activism, blogs and bloggers. So should you be if you believe in freedom of speech. And also back the idea that in a democracy, the common man is the most powerful.
Keep blogging.
None of this augurs well for Manmohan Singh and his government. You don’t need an astrologer to tell you that with all this going on, he may not survive the full term. But the soothsayers are predicting doom for Singh in any case. So is he going to blame the stars or Sonia? Only time will tell. All we can be happy about is the culture of PILs that has come to rule the roost. It has made you and me, who don’t belong to the ‘elected representative’ groups, or the police or the armed forces or the media, powerful. The government of the day has to watch out for not just the opposition but also the aam aadmi who can get it to its knees by filing a single litigation. This augurs well for a robust democracy. The more the checks and balances, the more accountable those in power are going to be. The whistle blowers are free to join the party. Their time has finally come.
Just like us bloggers. We are influencing public opinion like never before. Not only have we caused coups and revolutions in countries with totalitarian regimes, but we have also got the media worried. Seriously worried at that! I read a column last Sunday by a journalist who was sounding very distressed about what blogs and bloggers are doing. According to her, we are all irresponsible, rude, nasty and not accountable.
Is that right? Surely no blog I have come across is as obnoxious as Arnab Goswami when he gets on to someone’s case. And as for bloggers writing reviews and reports without attending an event or watching a movie /reading a book, there is many an illustrious precedence set by media professionals.
Legend has it that the brilliant English writer Ruth Rendell who writes excellent psychological thrillers and murder mysteries became a bestselling author after being sacked from her job as a journalist. She played truant on a day she was meant to cover an event. The event was cancelled at the last minute but Rendell made up a story about it and sent it to her editor. You can well imagine what happened after that. But a happy consequence of that unfortunate incident was that Rendell discovered her story telling powers.
As a professional writer, who is regularly asked to write columns, reviews and opinion pieces for leading publications, I was dubious about blogging and kept away from it for a long time. It was while holidaying with my family in Rajasthan last year that I discovered I was being an idiot. I did a lot of surfing while there and came across some extremely interesting blogs and more importantly some very well regarded writers from all over the world blogging.
We encountered racism from the Indian staff of a five star resort in one of our stops. I was livid about the incident. Imagine paying good money only to be treated like second class citizens in your own country. I knew I couldn’t write about the incident for any of the magazines and newspapers published in India. Even if they had published that piece of mine, it would have been without the name of the resort as they wouldn’t risk losing the advertising revenue. A single, tersely worded blog post had the owner of the resort sending me an apology letter. I owe that victory to blogging.
Blogs and a blogging site have played a big role in the success of my latest book. Blogadda did an in-depth interview and I consider that to be the best interview anyone has ever done with me. They also got ten bloggers to review my book and they were all really well written pieces. Much better than the reviews carried by mainstream magazines. And I am not saying this because the reviews by the bloggers were positive. Some of them were fairly critical whereas the verdict by the magazines and the newspapers on the book have been all positive.
At a time when journalistic standards all over the world are plumbing new depths because of the Murdochs and NOTWs, a well researched blog post is a treat to read, unfettered as it is by editorial and establishment pressures. Of course media professionals would get rattled by this phenomenon as it challenges their fiefdom. But that shouldn’t worry the bloggers.
I am all for judicial activism, blogs and bloggers. So should you be if you believe in freedom of speech. And also back the idea that in a democracy, the common man is the most powerful.
Keep blogging.
Friday, July 8, 2011
The Doped Athletes, the 2G Scam and the Band of Singh and his Men
It has unfolded like a Greek tragedy. This whole scandal of the gold medals turning into dust. And for the first time the UPA government has me frightened. Narendra Modi and the NDA government used to spook me at one time especially after Godhra and what happened in Gujarat subsequently. Now I feel like that about Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi and the heir in waiting, Rahul Gandhi. The violence they have unleashed in the system is far more dangerous and potent than a riot engineered by the Hindu right wing fundamentalists.
The BJP brand of violence is explicit and we can easily condemn it...take out protest rallies, slam the party in our writings and in our films but the Congress brand of manoeuvring is far more lethal, more dangerous and when the sorry spectacle of their manipulations unfold we feel we can’t do anything about it, because unwittingly we have been party to it. Like we too cheered the athletes who won the medals in the commonwealth games last year and now it is like what right do we have to ask any of the sports officials how did the timings of the athletes improve so dramatically for the games? They can always turn around and tell us like you did, we also got carried away, and never asked them this question. See how implicit they have made us in their crime.
I am sure everyone in the system knew what was going on including the Prime Minister. We live in times when one minister is tapping the office of another so it would be foolish to believe that the PM comes to work just to read files. I am sure he is briefed on a daily basis about what is going on with his cabinet mates and he has clearly instructed his colleagues to adhere to three basic norms.
1. So long as they are contributing to his one point agenda of ‘growth’ he doesn’t care what they are doing to get there. Much like a CEO who barks ‘Get me results. I don’t care how you get them.’
2. The individual citizens are unimportant in the larger scheme of things as long as our cities look like Singapore or Hongkong with plush malls and roads that seem they will burst with all the traffic on them.
3. He wants history to record that he is the one who laid the foundation of this new affluent India and Rahul Gandhi can take off from where he left. Nothing should be allowed to taint his personal ‘brand’ or the brand of the government he heads.
No wonder Suresh Kalmadi looked so smug during the Commonwealth Games despite one scandal after another tumbling out against him. He had adhered to the brief...pumped all the athletes with steroids and uppers so that they ran, jumped and did cartwheels like they were possessed and scored more than a century when it came to the medals. He had delivered in the end, never mind the means and the only time the PM had sounded annoyed was when the venues looked as if they couldn’t be completed on time. But he had more than made up with the Indian victory laps. He was expecting to be hugged by the PM. But unfortunately for him and Singh, the Supreme Court decided to play party pooper.
Now we are given to understand that Kapil Sibal has behaved just like Kalmadi. He should have known that with all the media glare on the 2G scam, anyone who took over the telecom portfolio would be under constant scrutiny but that did not stop him from doling out all that largesse on Anil Ambani. Everyone else in the system was screaming, teach the man a lesson no Ambani will ever forget but Sibal did not listen. He must have thought he didn’t need to, as long as he was on Singh’s good books. After all Sibal took care to dress the part of the suave politician who’s equally at home air kissing in a socialite party as he is reciting bad poetry to Barkha Dutt. But once again the courts have turned into kabab mein haddi.
As for Dayanidhi Maran, I feel sorry for him. His rotund frame and a rounder face make him look like a character from a Charles Dickens novel but that may be only be for the well read Singh. For the rest of us he looks like a man who loves his thair sadam. From what we have read and heard, Tihar serves only North Indian food like roti and dal. How will our man survive there? Besides with Raja also present in Tihar, Maran will have to constantly watch his back.
With all this going on, a friend has found time to share a morphed picture of Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi on FB with the caption ‘Hep Couple.’ Singh is in a psychedelic T Shirt and jeans and Gandhi is wearing a mini-skirt. He may have meant it as a joke but like every piece of fiction this too may have its roots in reality. They say Nero fiddled while Rome burnt. So what’s wrong if Singh and Gandhi party while all this havoc is being wrecked on the nation? I have only one question. What does Rahul Baba throw a tantrum about when he joins the party?
Does he demand they dance only to the songs of Justin Bieber?
The BJP brand of violence is explicit and we can easily condemn it...take out protest rallies, slam the party in our writings and in our films but the Congress brand of manoeuvring is far more lethal, more dangerous and when the sorry spectacle of their manipulations unfold we feel we can’t do anything about it, because unwittingly we have been party to it. Like we too cheered the athletes who won the medals in the commonwealth games last year and now it is like what right do we have to ask any of the sports officials how did the timings of the athletes improve so dramatically for the games? They can always turn around and tell us like you did, we also got carried away, and never asked them this question. See how implicit they have made us in their crime.
I am sure everyone in the system knew what was going on including the Prime Minister. We live in times when one minister is tapping the office of another so it would be foolish to believe that the PM comes to work just to read files. I am sure he is briefed on a daily basis about what is going on with his cabinet mates and he has clearly instructed his colleagues to adhere to three basic norms.
1. So long as they are contributing to his one point agenda of ‘growth’ he doesn’t care what they are doing to get there. Much like a CEO who barks ‘Get me results. I don’t care how you get them.’
2. The individual citizens are unimportant in the larger scheme of things as long as our cities look like Singapore or Hongkong with plush malls and roads that seem they will burst with all the traffic on them.
3. He wants history to record that he is the one who laid the foundation of this new affluent India and Rahul Gandhi can take off from where he left. Nothing should be allowed to taint his personal ‘brand’ or the brand of the government he heads.
No wonder Suresh Kalmadi looked so smug during the Commonwealth Games despite one scandal after another tumbling out against him. He had adhered to the brief...pumped all the athletes with steroids and uppers so that they ran, jumped and did cartwheels like they were possessed and scored more than a century when it came to the medals. He had delivered in the end, never mind the means and the only time the PM had sounded annoyed was when the venues looked as if they couldn’t be completed on time. But he had more than made up with the Indian victory laps. He was expecting to be hugged by the PM. But unfortunately for him and Singh, the Supreme Court decided to play party pooper.
Now we are given to understand that Kapil Sibal has behaved just like Kalmadi. He should have known that with all the media glare on the 2G scam, anyone who took over the telecom portfolio would be under constant scrutiny but that did not stop him from doling out all that largesse on Anil Ambani. Everyone else in the system was screaming, teach the man a lesson no Ambani will ever forget but Sibal did not listen. He must have thought he didn’t need to, as long as he was on Singh’s good books. After all Sibal took care to dress the part of the suave politician who’s equally at home air kissing in a socialite party as he is reciting bad poetry to Barkha Dutt. But once again the courts have turned into kabab mein haddi.
As for Dayanidhi Maran, I feel sorry for him. His rotund frame and a rounder face make him look like a character from a Charles Dickens novel but that may be only be for the well read Singh. For the rest of us he looks like a man who loves his thair sadam. From what we have read and heard, Tihar serves only North Indian food like roti and dal. How will our man survive there? Besides with Raja also present in Tihar, Maran will have to constantly watch his back.
With all this going on, a friend has found time to share a morphed picture of Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi on FB with the caption ‘Hep Couple.’ Singh is in a psychedelic T Shirt and jeans and Gandhi is wearing a mini-skirt. He may have meant it as a joke but like every piece of fiction this too may have its roots in reality. They say Nero fiddled while Rome burnt. So what’s wrong if Singh and Gandhi party while all this havoc is being wrecked on the nation? I have only one question. What does Rahul Baba throw a tantrum about when he joins the party?
Does he demand they dance only to the songs of Justin Bieber?
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