Opinions – Page 3 – Sunbyanyname

HELL IN THE JVDE (KHARGHAR) – A ‘WAR’ MOVIE IN THE MAKING!

First of all, what is JVDE (Kharghar), you are bound to ask me? Well, it stands for Jal Vayu Defence Enclave (Kharghar), an AFNHB (Air-Force Navy Housing Board) colony in Kharghar, Navi Mumbai (Please read: ‘Jal Vayu Defence Enclave Kharghar – How Can It Become The Best Colony?’).

Secondly, why do I have to write posts about this colony? It is simply because after retirement from the Indian Navy in end Feb 2010 I made this colony my home for the rest of my life and whatever happens here affects me in a huge manner.

Thirdly, why this queer title of the post: ‘Hell In The JVDE (Kharghar) – A ‘War’ Movie In The Making!’? Let me explain:

I saw this 1968 World War II film titled Hell In The Pacific (starring Lee Marvin and Toshirō Mifune, the only two actors in the entire film) in the New Empire theatre in South Bombay in a matinée show after I became a commissioned officer in the Indian Navy. The film is a story of two military men, an American pilot and a Japanese navy captain, marooned on an uninhabited Pacific island, who, in order to survive, must accept their differences and work together, despite their two countries being at war.

The film was entirely shot in the Rock Islands of Palau in the north Pacific Ocean, near the Philippines in the Philippine Sea. A curious historical factual coincidence was that somewhere near there, on an island, an American and a Japanese soldiers were actually discovered many years after the war; they kept plotting against each other many years after the World War II ended since on that island they had no means of knowing that the war had been called off.

In real life too, both actors served for their respective countries during the Pacific War. Marvin, who was in the US Marines, was wounded and received the Purple Heart during the Battle of Saipan in 1943. Mifune served in the Imperial Japanese Army Air Service.

And now, perhaps you will understand the title of the post. Retired IAF and IN personnel, despite my best efforts and those of my other well-meaning colleagues, are still at war with one another in JVDE (Kharghar) and they ain’t on a remote island! Who is to tell them that the hostilities have been called off? And that, now, they must work together for the well-being and survival of JVDE (Kharghar).

The following scene from the movie could very well be between the previous MC (Managing Committee of JVDE who were voted out last year) holding by throat the new MC (duly elected) and not allowing it to do its assigned job. What does the previous MC have to gain by it? Well, the same that the British had to gain by their crafty policy of ‘Divide and Rule’.

Last month, the previous MC guys, in a bid to prove that though they didn’t fight the (re)elections for the MC last year, they were indeed the God’s gift to JVDE during their tenure, called for a calling-attention Special General Body Meeting (SGM) of JVDE. The agenda was only one; which is, that the new MC was doing enormous harm by not following the confrontational and spy versus spy approach of the previous MC, which had successfully made disharmony as the way of life in the Society. It was a sheer wastage of time for all of us since they were hell-bent on proving by rhetoric what is against the commonsense of majority of the members.

I had broken my silence of the last few years during that SGM and reminded these members that the number one issue concerning our Society is to actually restore peace and harmony, trust and camaraderie. I was supported by an unambiguous voice vote. Undeterred, the JVDE rabble-rousers immediately after the SGM, renewed and even doubled their efforts to disrupt normal functioning of the Society. As far as they are concerned, every plan and effort of the new MC has to be somehow countered and opposed. Every issue of JVDE has to be connected with the single-point agenda of the last MC, that is, the so-called Encroachment Issue. So far, they have made all out efforts to link Fire Safety of the buildings and the Land Conveyance Deed to the Encroachment Issue. This has been done so as to justify the five years of their tenure that they dissipated on this non-issue to the exclusion of any other scheme for the welfare of the Society.

Take the case of this rabble-rouser group’s strident opposition to Rain Water Harvesting (RWH) on Terraces of the buildings. They already know that it would actually solve the rampant leakages problems in buildings for which in the five years of their tenure they were able to do nothing. They have already sensed the danger to their relevance as rabble-rousers and hence have started an all out campaign not to let it happen.

Two buildings: Tulip and Daffodil (all buildings in JVDE have been named after flowers not knowing that there are people in the Society forever in love with thorny issues) are due for major repairs and hence the works committees of these buildings had approached the present MC for installation of RWH with twin aims: One, it would result in rain water harvesting, which buildings in Mumbai and Navi Mumbai are increasingly undertaking so as to get over perpetual water shortages. And two, the shed over the terraces would keep the terraces dry and prevent the perpetual leakages the top floors face due to bad design and construction. Have a look at the pictures below and remember that since the original construction of JVDE buildings and until now we have not been able to arrest the leakages in buildings; the number two issue facing the Society (the first being restoration of Peace, Harmony, Trust and Camaraderie), that the previous MC wasn’t able to do a fig about because of focus on only one issue: the so called encroachments.

Of course, there are many other measures to keep the terraces clean and dry, in addition to the above. However, the intransigence of some of the members of the previous MC (they actually want the focus to return to a single point agenda of the so-called encroachments) is keeping the present MC from implementing any of these plans.

Time has therefore come in the society whence most of us (if not all of us) must abandon the earlier path chosen by the previous MC of confrontation, mistrust, hostility and suspicion (and doing nothing else) and think in terms of being participants with the present Managing Committee for the well-being of the Society.

I am, by no means suggesting (since some of the rabble-rousers are adept at twisting every word of others) that there should be no opposition to the ideas and plans of the Managing Committee. We should debate and discuss, in civilized fashion, all significant issues of the Society. However, we should shun the highly disruptive approach adopted by some of these people who have vested interests in ensuring peace, harmony and well-being don’t ever return to JVDE.

Let us all join hands in ensuring that ‘Hell In The JVDE (Kharghar) – A ‘War’ Movie In The Making!‘ is stopped here and now and bring home to the handful of rabble-rousers that their disruptive methods are not appreciated and won’t succeed.

P.S. Please do feel free to give your comments below. When the comments on my last article were published, the rabble-rousers had this to say to me: “All favourable comments to your article are by those who have encroached upon common-spaces in the buildings”. However, I publish all comments, whether favourable to me or not, except when comments become rhetoric and even longer than the article itself!

WHAT IF ARMED FORCES WERE TO BECOME NON-UNIFORM(ED) SERVICES?

Armed forces are called uniformed services. Many uninformed (not the opposite of uniformed) people feel that they are called so only because of the uniform that they wear: olive-green for the army, white for the navy and the sky blue for the air-force. Of course, that’s right but it is only a small part of the uniformity obtained in the services. The major part is to do with the uniformity of training, operations and responses. What it then boils down to is that, a uniformed person, in dress and in every other sense, is a disciplined person with as standard or near standard responses to situations as possible.

We Indians are as far from being uniformed or disciplined as possible. We are creative in our responses and approach, which makes us destructive in our outlook. The best example to understand this is our traffic sense or more aptly: traffic non-sense. Continuing in one lane for anything more than a few seconds gets on our nerves and mars our creativity and sense of adventure. So we leave the relative safety of our lane and venture out in other lanes or in-between areas to see if we can speed up things a bit. From experience we know that it doesn’t help. But, so sure we are of our traffic skills that rather than experience teaching us, we can teach the bally experience a thing or two.

In India, therefore, we offer lip-service to the services and publicly (because of the acute sense of jingoism that we possess, something which can only be called Indianness) extol their discipline and sense-of-purpose. However, privately we hate their guts for being what they are. And that’s precisely the reason why in our country there is so much of chasm between the society and the armed forces. Any number of WhatsApp forwards, for example, tell us how abroad the politicians, bureaucrats and general public have deep respect for their armed forces; but, here in India no one gives a damn.

Here is, therefore, a fantasy (nightmare). After having made relentless abortive attempts so that some of the civilians in our country, if not the majority, would become like the uniformed armed forces, the armed forces decide to follow the dictum when in Rome do as the Romans do. Politically, it doesn’t mean to follow Sonia Gandhi; it simply means that the armed forces decide to adopt the civilian ways of doing things. Here are some of the scenarios thought of by my creative mind:

Scenario I
Kargil War II

CO: We have received orders to capture the Tiger Hill….
Officer1 (Cutting him short): I know, Sir, that Tiger is our national animal and all that. However, too much focus on one animal, to the exclusion of others, is not good. The PM has shown Lion as the prominent symbol of Make in India. Why can’t we go and capture Lion Hill?

Officer2 (Cheerfully): Simply because there is no Lion Hill anywhere in the vicinity.
Officer1 (Not giving up so easily; no Indian ever does): That’s no excuse. What’s the use of ‘Make in India‘ campaign if we can’t even make a Lion Hill? Lets make one, Sir (this is said with the same resolve as the one employed by a passenger with the railway conductor to somehow find him a seat even though he has no reservation but merely a heavy wallet).
CO (Straightway seeing a flaw in this. Even though these days COs are elected rather than selected, he is quick to see this flaw): But, for us to capture Lion Hill, the enemy should have occupied it.
Officer3 (Dismissing this as something insignificant): That’s hardly a problem, Sir. If we can do match-fixing in cricket right in front of thousands of people sitting in the stadium, here it shouldn’t be any problem. Let me call my friend Abbas on the cellphone and ask them if they are willing to occupy a fictional Lion Hill so that we can evict them in return for our first occupying and then being evicted from the Markhor Hill.
CO (Reaching a quick decision; people in the higher echelons are adept at quick decisions): Alright guys, we shall capture Lion Hill and make a report to the HQ that Tiger Hill wasn’t occupied and hence we had no choice but to capture Lion Hill.
2nd-in-Command (Understanding his duty well and with determination; they are paid to do precisely this): I think I should get on with the citations for the gallantry awards after the successful match-fixing – sorry – successful operations.

Scenario II
Somewhere in the Arabian Sea (Renamed Bhartiya Samundra after the Modi government took up the issue at the United Nations)

Signal Communication Officer (SCO) (To CO on the Bridge of a warship): Sir, on the Tactical Primary we have just got a signal asking us to proceed on course 270 at a speed of 14 knots.
CO (with a chuckle): Splendid (the standard response of acknowledging messages by saying Very Good has been done away with long time back and now officers use all kinds of adjectives. Only the other day, on the communication circuit, instead of asking for ‘Say again your last’, someone got the brain-wave (at sea you get all kinds of waves) of using the more creative “mukarrar”. The South Indian communication operator on the other end responded to it by a safe, “Same to you, over”), I was expecting it. Can we quickly check up with the quartermaster in the wheelhouse and engineers in the engine room if they have any objection to it. I must carry everyone along.
Quartermaster in the Wheelhouse on the Conning Intercom: I overheard that, Captain Sir. I am from Delhi and must advise against this politically incorrect course. You see, Sir, probably the Fleet Commander has forgotten about the fact that today is an odd day and courses and speeds must conform with Kejriwal’s odd day directives. I would suggest steering 269 or 271 until midnight at least.
Machinery Control Room: Captain Sir, I have called a meeting of all concerned to ask we can do 14 knots and for how long. With the staggered lunch timings of between 1 to 3:30 PM, I hope to have an answer by about 4 PM. We are at it, Sir, and we shall inform you if we can proceed at 14 knots. Else, we shall suggest to you the speed that we can do.
CO: Beautiful, lovely, remarkable. What I love about this ship is the spirit. I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually get the Most Spirited Ship trophy this year. I mean, just look at it this way: it has been less than ten minutes since we were asked to steer course 270 and proceed at 14 knots and already we are about to take a decision whether we can do it or not. Many of my engine room sailors would probably have to let go of their siesta. But, for us, the country comes first, the ship next and our own welfare last. Alright, SCO, make a signal to the Fleet Commander that by about 1615 hrs today we shall let them know what course and speed we would be doing.
SCO: Never mind Sir, they have cancelled their last order and are asking for suggestions as to what course or courses the Fleet should do.

The uniform formations of the Indian Navy 'at one time' (Pic courtesy: nausena-bharati.nic.in) — The uniform formations of the Indian Navy ‘at one time’ (Pic courtesy: nausena-bharati.nic.in)

Scenario III
Fly-Past for the Republic Day Parade

Commentator: For the last about nine and half hours we have been witnessing smart march-past by the smartly dressed soldiers, sailors and airmen. The nine and half hours were required due to jawans trickling in as and when they had time to do so. But, it is still better than last year when the 26th January parade spilled over to 27th January. The Department of Diversity and LGBT has given the first prize to a sailor who came dressed as a banana (he nearly added: the fruit that describes best the present state of our armed forces). And now we are all expecting the grand-finale of Fly-past by the IAF aircraft that would appear at the end of the Raj Path or any other path as is hereinafter mentioned. Please keep your eyes glued for the aircraft in all kinds of possible directions. It is as much a surprise for them as for you.
Commentator (after much wait): And now as you can see, one lone aircraft has appeared over the horizon. And what do we see? It is a commercial flight that has been re-routed safely over the Raj Path since the IAF planes are going all over the place. We may actually see more commercial flights over this route……ah, here is another….and hold your breath….this one is from Pakistan, which should have flown over Islamabad on 14th Aug but is competing with IAF in creativity.

How we used to enjoy these R-Day Fly-pasts until the Air-Force became non-uniform! (Pic-courtesy:

Scenario V
The Aftermath

As the modern young officers, men and women of the three services have all become more non-uniformed, independent-minded and independent-actioned, there is a small bunch of veterans sitting in the most uniformly disciplined manner and chanting slogans in unison. These are the men and women who are still protesting against the anomalies in OROP and the recommendations of the Seventh Pay Commission. An old, wrinkle-faced, former Major General of the Indian Army, raises a feeble hand high in the air and screams: Sadda haq (Our right).

And a few dozen veterans, equally feeble, respond weakly but with determination and in unison: Ithe’ rakh (Keep it here).

They are the last of the men and women who have any kind of faith and pride in being uniformed and disciplined.

An orderly conduct of an OROP Rally! Even agitation has to be done in 'disciplined manner! — An orderly conduct of an OROP Rally! Even agitation has to be done in ‘disciplined manner!

Post-Script

By the way, the Roget’s Thesaurus gave me the following antonyms of Uniform:

disorderly
flexible
pliable
pliant
soft
unmethodical
unsystematic
yielding
abnormal
broken
changeable
changing
corrupt
different
dishonest
disloyal
eccentric
imbalanced
inconsistent
inconstant
intermittent
irregular
rough
uncommon
unconventional
uneven
unfair
unfixed
unstable
unsteady
untrustworthy
unusual
variable
varying
wobbly
deviating
dissimilar
divergent
unalike
unlike
varied

God save us all. However, in keeping with the non-uniform practices, it should be gods (thousands of them) save us all.

JAL VAYU DEFENCE ENCLAVE KHARGHAR – HOW CAN IT BECOME THE BEST COLONY?

Jal Vayu (Navy, Air Force) colonies, through AFNHB (Air Force Navy Housing Board with head-office in New Delhi) are meant to provide affordable housing to officers and other ranks of IAF and Navy). Here is from the Home page of AFNHB site:

“AFNHB generally constructs two categories of dwelling units, one for the officers category and the other for airmen / sailors category of Air Force and Navy. The funding for the dwelling units is through Self Financed Schemes with an approximate of 10% of the expected price of the flat being deposited at the time of registration and balance in easy installments.

The Air Force Naval Housing Board (AFNHB) as a Service Welfare Body is committed to serve the housing needs of the Naval and Air Force community purely on ‘No Profit No Loss’ basis. This Board was registered under the Societies Registration Act 1860, with an objective to promote housing schemes in cities all over the country as per the demand of the Naval and Air Force personnel.

AFNHB can proudly claim to have a clientele of over 18,000 allottees and by the turn of the millennium, it had completed handing over of almost 14,000 dwelling units and farm units.”

JVDE Phase I, Kharghar was advertised by AFNHB as an Officers’ Colony though over a period of time it has mixed clientele of officers, other ranks and even civilians.

Whilst the colony (due to the focus on Societies Act, these days it is convenient to call a colony as a ‘society’) residents enjoy the facilities and privileges as planned by AFNHB, being a defence housing society, it has a responsibility of becoming an ideal society or a role model that people all around should look up to.

Regrettably, due to raging environment of animosity between the members for over five years now (ranging from strong under-currents to open fist-fighting hostilities), the ordinary members like me have suffered. I joined the scheme in 1994-5 itself and my serial number in the scheme was KHA0004 (the fourth member to have joined the scheme!) On retirement from the Indian Navy on 28th Feb 2010, I looked forward to a peaceful, officer-like atmosphere. Sadly, within no time it was made home to me that the atmosphere was more like a melee. In the Annual General-body Meets of the Society (that used to last for days and even nights), all the proceedings used to be video recorded so that in case of serious injuries due to free-for-all there would be some legal record for the police and other authorities. Everyone used to hurl something called bye-laws at one another. Everyone used to look at everyone suspiciously. People had formed various camps and the only agenda that members followed was to somehow sort out the other party/camp.

During one such melee, I got up to speak and requested everyone to behave like officers (the word, that to me, is always synonymous with gentlemen). The mike that I held was rudely snatched from my hands and the person snatching the mike spoke with ferocity, “That’s exactly what is wrong with this Society; officers think that they are the only ones staying here. We ain’t officers; we are sailors and we have every right to be here.”

That put an end to my active participation in any discussion or debate in the AGMs. I find it rather lowly to win an argument with lung power and noise. But, then we have quite a few experts in the Society who revel in noise (Please also read: ‘Noise Is The Newest Form Of Devotion’) and blasting the day-lights out of other members for them is routine).

I silently (I have always done it in this manner) pray to God to let good sense return to the JVDE, Kharghar Society.

However, for the time being, there is a major camp that is forever drilling into all of us, a la political parties style debates in the media: Yes, we did some mistakes and we were bad. But, we weren’t as bad as the new management committee that you have elected.

Then there is a camp of the new MC that is seeking to set right every wrong that was earlier done and lead the Society into better days.

And then there is a small camp (you can call it a camp but we ain’t formally organised as the other two) of people like me who wish that we would actually live in harmony and work towards making JVDE, Kharghar the best colony ever.

Lets look at some of the issues that have divided us and made us choose, sometimes unwittingly, one or the other camp. Most often people start taking sides without understanding the issues. I may not be right in the kind of legalese that has come to prevail in our colony now. However, I do know that I am factually right and have, as always, no axe to grind.

Encroachments. These were made into such a huge issue. At one time it was made to look like that the very existence of JVDE was dependent upon removing the so called encroachments. Anyone listening to the term and the ensuing heated discussions and fist-fights would have thought that somehow members of JVDE had become so unlawful that they thought of nothing but encroaching upon what was called as common areas. Basically, if my memory serves me right, the issue first came up in an SGM of 2012 when an agency called MM Consultants were asked by the then MC to carry out a survey to establish the extent and nature of encroachments. Two internal committees were constituted too; one of them to see if any structural concerns were there. Meanwhile, it appeared to most people that people were targeted (this approach of putting the other party in its place became a way of life). Whilst it was said that CIDCO had pointedly objected to such encroachments, it later came out that we ourselves went to CIDCO repeatedly with the list of encroachments until they’d take notice. This aa-bail-mujhe-maar (Come-bull-hit-me) approach finally divided the entire community. Curiously, it came out that two opposite flats being combined together was done by AFNHB themselves in their show-case flats and AFNHB itself sought from CIDCO regularisation of the same. However, some 18 members who emulated AFNHB were made to feel like worms and repeatedly and publicly humiliated. With this issue, with each of the two major camps relentlessly approaching CIDCO and AFNHB, it was amply demonstrated that we had no vision towards a harmonious, ideal, and happy society, but that, we considered ego and prestige issues above the welfare of everyone. This non-issue also kept us away from discussing issues that we should have been discussing to make ours as the best colony.
Fire-Safety. Having divided the community squarely on the above issue of Encroachments, the next thing was to scare the hell out of all of us by combining the issue of encroachments with that of Fire-Safety. I have been a keen listener during the heated discussions (having been shut-up by absolutely rude conduct by some of the other members). It was repeatedly told, in the anti-people approach that was perfected, that the Maharashtra Fire Safety Rules were flouted by members indiscriminately by encroachments and that our Fire Insurance of Rupees 17 Lakhs was wasted because of the self-serving approach of these members. Flower-pots, shoe racks, foot-mats were all targeted. It finally came out that what stood in the way of Fire Insurance wasn’t so much as these items but the deficiencies that were to be made up in the Fire-equipment. Somehow, in the prevailing spy versus spy atmosphere that prevailed, the significant issues were put under the carpet. Take for example the fact that MSEB had taken a complete transformer sub-station and we were not bothered to get it back, which would have ensured that every two buildings had a transformer instead of at that time four buildings per transformer. However, we were fighting amongst ourselves in our holier-than-thou attitude.
Water Shortages. In relentless attempt to divide the society and hence prove that the earlier camp of the MC was a better proposition, this issue came in handy. The timing of this was perfect; most acute water shortages were noticed when the transition took place last year. Passions were so strong that no one wanted to go into the reasons for it but spew his/her venom with impunity. In the midst of constant din and vitriol, the problem was sorted out by resorting to firstly, overall cleaning and upkeep of the pump-house; secondly, upgrading the water treatment plant; and lastly, replacement of about 75 metres of pipeline from CIDCO pipe to our pump-house.
Conveyance Deed. Everyone is concerned about the fact that the Conveyance Deed of the Land and the Buildings hasn’t yet taken place between the AFNHB and the JVDE Society. This is a little complex issue than meets the eye. During the period 1996-99, there is an unregistered agreement between AFNHB and CIDCO (for a 60 years lease deed) and it should always have been AFNHB’s intention to pass it on to us when the society would be registered. However, it seems that between Dec 2010 and Jul 2011, some change of thought-process has taken place. Also, the CIDCO project accounts were finalised only in 2012. AFNHB has been, in the meantime, earning money on resale of flats and it is estimated that it has made some Rupees 14 Lakhs so far (for each resale of flat, the JVDE and AFNHB get Rupees 20000 each and CIDCO gets Rupees 10000). Meanwhile, two other issues have made the matter a little more complicated: One, that AFNHB has written to CIDCO to regularise the alterations to flats (some of which was being touted heatedly as Encroachment issue) that it did at that time. And two, residents of Gulab building took HCC, AFNHB, and Architect Kukreja to Consumer Court and won an award of Rupees 8.59 Lakhs to compensate them for poor construction. This money cannot be paid out of Society funds as it is discriminatory against those who haven’t gone to the court (all the other buildings) though they too face issues of similar poor construction. Now that AFNHB has been caught on the wrong foot on a number of these issues, there is quite a bit of softening of their earlier stand. We must, therefore, get the best deal in favour of the society from both AFNHB and CIDCO.

It can thus be seen that the issues that engage our attention most of the times, at present, are really not the issues that we should dissipate extensive time and energy on unless it is a viable argument that an eye for an eye and one-upmanship are the correct approach for the Society.

Here are some of the issues that should really be worthy of our consideration in order that JVDE should become an ideal society:

Water re-cycling.
Rainwater harvesting.
Waste management leading to composting and zero waste.
Long term structural issues of buildings.
Roofs over terraces of all buildings in the manner of Tulip and Daffodil.

Flogging dead horses is a hobby fit for those who want to win popularity contests and let ego rule over everything. On the other hand, time has come for all of us to abandon camps and one-upmanship and truly become participants in the management of our society and lead it to become the best colony anywhere.

Our colony is really very beautiful with its central lawn and landscaping, thanks to all those earlier and now who have managed the affairs of our colony. Lets all pull together and focus on positives rather than being constantly surrounded by negatives all the while and pull in different directions.

Jai Hind.

EXPERTS, ULTRACREPIDARIANS AND CHARLATANS

The intent of this essay is to start a healthy debate on the subject of expert versus common knowledge, the pros and cons, that is, of each.

First of all, those of you who don’t know the meaning of the second word, here it is from Wikipedia:

“Ultracrepidarianism is the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge.

The term ultracrepidarian was first publicly recorded in 1819 by the essayist William Hazlitt in an open Letter to William Gifford, the editor of the Quarterly Review: “You have been well called an Ultra-Crepidarian critic.” It was used again four years later in 1823, in the satire by Hazlitt’s friend Leigh Hunt, Ultra-Crepidarius: a Satire on William Gifford.

The term draws from a famous comment purportedly made by Apelles, a famous Greek artist, to a shoemaker who presumed to criticise his painting. The Latin phrase “Sutor, ne ultra crepidam“, as set down by Pliny and later altered by other Latin writers to “Ne ultra crepidam judicaret“, can be taken to mean that a shoemaker ought not to judge beyond his own soles. That is to say, critics should only comment on things they know something about. The saying remains popular in several languages, as in the English, “A cobbler should stick to his last”.

A charlatan, we all know, is a person falsely claiming to have special knowledge or skill.

In ancient India, we had the Hindu Varna system or a classification of all society into four varnas or classes:

the Brahmins: priests, scholars and teachers.
the Kshatriyas: rulers, warriors and administrators.
the Vaishyas: cattle herders, agriculturists, artisans and merchants.
the Shudras: labourers and service providers.

A Shudra, for example, was not supposed to fight battles like a Kshatriya and was not expected to even enter the temples like a Brahmin. The Varna system ensured that the son of a Vaishya would become a Vaishya and so on. This wasn’t the caste system or the Jati system. It was simply vocation based classification.

Gradually, as knowledge became more widely and evenly spread, people started learning skills beyond the Varna system. Basically, all professions became open to everyone on merit and reservation was only for the backward classes. Hence, we did away with the elitist Varna system and in order to ensure that a Shudra family could also produce an engineer or a doctor, we provided anti-elitist reservation (affirmation) to the Shudras to catch up with the rest. However, since records of professions (Varnas) were not so easily available as those of Jati (Caste), the political classes thought of combining Scheduled Castes with Scheduled Tribes rather than with Varnas.

The present day reversal of pyramid notwithstanding, it is a fact that those that belonged to higher Jati and Varna resisted the encroachments into their Jati and Varna by the lower classes and castes. How could, they reasoned, anyone mar their exclusivity? We are all aware of the havoc caused in our society by, for example, the practice of untouchability.

There were experts all along and then there were those who guarded their exclusive turf. Those who learnt or tried to learn skills by themselves were looked down upon, jeered, made to feel miserable and in the case of Eklavya of Mahabharata, had his arching thumb cut as a guru-dakshina (Offering to the Teacher) for Dronacharya since he learnt archery keeping a clay model of Drona when the latter declined to take him up as his disciple.

Eklavya made to cut off his arching thumb by Drona as 'Guru Dakshina' (Pic courtesy: mug.shainsingh.com) — Eklavya made to cut off his arching thumb by Drona as ‘Guru Dakshina’ (Pic courtesy: mug.shainsingh.com)

And now cut to the modern age of free-knowledge and free-skills availability everywhere especially on the Internet. The Varna system has collapsed in many ways though vested interests want to keep the Jati or Caste system alive to perpetuate . You could be selling tea and yet you could lead the country as a Prime Minister. You could, as Indra Nooyi, be born in a Tamil speaking family in Madras and yet make it to be the CEO of PepsiCo, the second largest food and beverage business in the world.

And yet, the turf-guarders are always on their guard. They would tell you that you need more and more experts to solve problems, to repair, to rectify, to manage, to control, to heal, to do anything and everything. The lawyers, for example, make sure that they make legalese and court procedures so complicated and complex that the average citizen would have no choice but to call them to save his or her soul; in a repeat of the popular 1975 movie Sholay’s dialogue by the evil dacoit: Gabbar se tumhen ek hi aadmi bacha sakta hai, woh hai Gabbar khud (Only one man can protect you from Gabbar and that is Gabbar himself). The doctors circulate any number of videos on social-media mocking all those who learn about their ailments from the net. Most of the videos cleverly mix human skills with expert knowledge of ailments and cures making the so called ultracrepidarians look like buffoons, doing immense damage to themselves through their half-baked knowledge. They do forget the fact that the most difficult and responsible medical skill in the world – of being a parent – is learnt by most of us on the job and that for every failed unskilled parent there is a failed expert parent.

The Internet indeed is a great equalizer in a world wherein institutionalised training has been brought to its knees by the self-learners. One of the most spectacular examples of this is something that we grudgingly acknowledge: that is, how the most powerful armed forces have found their equal in self-trained terrorists; in many cases the latter having an edge over the former. We can have a debate about the means and the intent of the latter as opposed to the armies. But, the fact is that the Eklavyas of today, such as they are, don’t lose their thumbs in Guru-Dakshina but demand the heads of the elite trainers.

Last year I wrote a piece titled ‘All Photographers And Writers, No Viewers And Readers’. Just a few decades earlier, photographers and writers were an elite lot. Now everyone is one or the other. Everyone has an opinion and the Apelles of the world ridiculing shoemakers for expressing opinions about works of art have been simply outnumbered.

Lets look at the case of doctors predicting dire consequences for those who self-diagnose and self-medicate their ailments. There are counter views of course; the least of them is that doctors are known to fleece you and make your ailment really big and complex (requiring MRIs and other expensive tests) if you have no knowledge of your ailment.

Also, why only doctors? If we have to let only the experts do their job, then how come, these days:

Everybody is a national security expert.
Everybody knows how to run the country.
Other than the 13 cricketers in the field, everybody knows how to play.
Everyone knows how to get rid of terrorists.
Everybody knows how to act on screen or stage.
Everybody is a scientist.
Many people know how to make a bomb from the net.

We used to have a funny anecdote of an Engineer and the Captain of the ship exchanging their jobs, if only to win a bet. After an hour of this exchange, the Captain-turned-Engineer called the Bridge on the Intercom and said, “I am afraid the engines have stopped turning.” At this the Engineer-turned-Captain responded, “Oh, that’s alright since we just ran aground.”

Getting into non-expert fields is fraught with great risk. And yet, the most powerful navy in the world – the US Navy, that is – follows Line Officer Concept or Officer of the Line Concept.

What then is the answer? Do we require experts or not? What about the charlatans pretending to possess skills that they do not actually possess? In my last job in India’s largest corporate, we had a great and practical industrial security expert leading a proud team of officers, men and women in the best industrial security organisation in the country. However, his communication and image-building skills were just average. The management, therefore, brought in a person who had these skills in abundance but little knowledge of practical industrial security. Within a year the complete edifice that was painstakingly built in last twenty years crumbled. However, great sounding talks, write-ups and power-point presentations proliferated.

To build up the answer to the questions whether we require experts or not, and how to deal with ultracrepidarians and charlatans, I think intent is the key. If by acquiring common and free knowledge, one is thinking of doing away with the expert when his services become indispensable, then there is something wrong. Also, if the intent is to expose the expert to ridicule just as the expert holds the half-baked-knowledge ignoramuses in ridicule, then too it is wrong. However, if the intent is to assist in making a more detailed examination which would have perhaps escaped the attention of the expert; or to fore-arm yourself whilst being fore-warned, then perhaps it makes sense.

I dealt with ultracrepidarians and charlatans in my ‘One Good Advice Deserves Another’ soon after I started this blog on 02 Mar 10. Admittedly, I didn’t even know that such a word as ultracrepidarian existed (I learnt about the word on WhatsApp only recently) and admittedly the piece is merely on the humorous side; however, I hasten to add that sometimes the advice of the non-experts throws open a perspective that was hitherto missed. I invite you to read an interesting bit I brought out in my ‘Being Non-Sensical May Be Far Sighted’.

There are no easy answers. Little knowledge is a dangerous thing is to be carefully balanced against Ignorance is bliss. As I mentioned in the beginning of this essay, the intent here is to start a debate about the pros and cons of expertise versus common knowledge. Please do give your views in the comments below. I am not an expert and I don’t want to have the final say on this.

LOVE – THE GREATEST FEELING ON EARTH

Love and Life are two four-lettered words about whom volumes have been written by poets and writers alike. And yet, like writing about Nature, God and Beauty, there is always something more to write.

There is a great deal of confusion whether Love is a selfless emotion or the most selfish of the emotions. It is selfless because when you love, in near absolute terms, you come to a point when you are oblivious about yourself, your needs and desires. Amongst the popular lovers of yore, Majnu was so much in love with his Laila that when asked to write God’s name in school, he wrote Laila. He was caned so hard by his teacher (maulvi) that it was feared that his hands would start bleeding. Lo and behold, the hands that started bleeding were those of Laila. Love is so selfless that you can lose your identity in love and assume the identity of your beloved.

“Duniya pukarti hai mujhe tere naam se…”

It is also a selfish feeling since you love a person to the exclusion of others and that person is called ‘my love’, ‘my life’ etc. As the holy book of the Sikhs, Sri Guru Granth Sahib brings out, my is roughly tranlated to ‘haume’ and loving someone to the exclusion of others is like claiming something for yourself and hence has an element of selfishness about it.

A mother’s love for her child has both elements in it: the selfishness and selflessness. A few decades back, in an earthquake in USSR a woman was buried with her child under the rubble for three full days and nights. She kept her child alive by feeding it her blood! It is a feeling of supreme selflessness. However, the feeling with her, “The life that I am saving is my child, my creation, my life, my love. If I die it would die. So I have to keep myself too alive”, is indeed a selfish feeling.

Lets put it this way: would you expect Laila to bleed for the entire humanity? No, she bled for her own love. Would you expect the mother in USSR to do such a sacrifice for other children? No, she would do it for her own children.

Selfless or selfish or a mixture of both, Love brings out the best in human beings. Yes, one has to get rid of ‘haume‘, as per the scriptures. However, the highest attainments of Leadership through Love are only possible if there is ‘haume’ (my-ness or ego) involved. Soldiers lay down their lives for the love of their country. Cricketers win matches, snatching victory from the jaws of defeat by having the feeling of my-ness for their team, province, state or country. Getting rid of ‘haume‘ is to be rid of belonging and attachment. However, if you are rid of it Love dies for everyone except for paramatma (Supreme soul) or God.

So, don’t think too much whether it is Selfish or Selfless to love. If you are thinking of it, you are aware of ‘Self’! It can’t be the purpose of Life to reach back to God. To love one another may also be the will of God.

I have always challenged the oft-held views. In my ‘An Alternate Philosophy of Life‘, for example, I have challenged our obsession with seeking God for ourselves. I have, on the other hand, suggested that we get out of this obsession and think of the society, the way the Westerns do. In India, most people love God but are not so prone to love one another, cleanliness (despite the renewed stress on Swachchh Bharat (clean India), and values. We would if there was some self-interest or ‘haume’ involved in these.

Here are some of the things that I suggest that we love:

1. Love Life. The greatest gift that God has given us is that of Life. We should love ours and those of others. As Indians, when we drive, pardon my saying so, but, it isn’t apparent whether we love ours’ and those of others. Perhaps we should demonstrate it in more ways than the present one of furiously honking and abusing another person off the road. Each one of has the feeling of self-preservation in some degree or the other. Yes, it is selfish to love one’s own life. However, if you don’t love your own and value it, you cannot be expected to value others’. Last year’s Alejandro Inarritu movie The Revenant (a movie that I didn’t like because of its raw and relentless violence) won him the Best Director’s Award as well as Best Actor award for Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie is all about the quest for survival under extreme harsh conditions for Hugh Glass whilst seeking revenge against John Fitzgerald, a fellow trapper who left him (Hugh Glass played by DiCaprio) as dead after stabbing him. Take the opposite extreme, that of a Jehadi or a Mujahid. He doesn’t value his own life and those of others in the mistaken belief that by killing himself and others he would, perhaps, serve some purpose of God. Loving Life is the first signs of gratefulness towards God for having created beings, mountains, plains, rivers, seas, etc.

2. Love Nature. God made the Universe very beautiful indeed. We are part of it and we are beautiful too. However, Nature is more beautiful than all of us individually and collectively. It is our beloved. It is not ashamed to have a bath right in the open and emerge even more beautiful. It doesn’t bore us with the same shape, colour, fragrance and hue all the times. One of the most enchanting things about Nature is that it is forever changing. Just when we feel that we have seen the most alluring part of it, it unashamedly reveals another even more fascinating. Nature reflects the endless attribute of God Himself in case we are used to personifying God.

3. Love Music. It doesn’t matter what kind of music you like or love; be it classical, instrumental, Western, Raaga based, or even punk. However, I would be very suspicious of a person who doesn’t like music and considers all music as jarring noise. Music is the expression of the soul. There must be some expression of your own inner self that finds resonance with some music. My family and I consider life without music to be no life at all.

4. Love Children. God gave us innocence at birth and even before it. We had it when we were children. But then, we plunged into worldly knowledge and lost it gradually. That’s the reason that we, with all our knowledge, are farthest from God and little children with their innate innocence are God-like (Please read: ‘How Unbiased Or Innocent Can We Become?’). Therefore, it makes sense to love the child in you as also to love children.

5. Love Animals. Many of you must have seen the most successful South African movie ever: the 1980 movie ‘Gods Must Be Crazy’. The movie is about the simple bushmen of Kalahari Desert in Botswana who are happy and content with what God has given them until they are exposed to a Coca Cola bottle (symbolic of the modern world) having been thrown close to them from a plane. And now, the single coca-cola bottle is the source of envy, jealousy, anger, frustration and violence that they had never experienced before. The animal world is like the world of the bushmen as seen in the movie. There is no fear, danger, jealousy, greed and guile. If you can’t be in the wilderness, the next best thing to do is to have a pet and then you suddenly start realising that God made all His beings in His own liking. You can’t help loving them. Indeed, nowadays, scientific and psychological studies have shown that loving a pet relaxes you and enriches your life.

6. Love Silence and Privacy. We like Sound. Indeed, we like all sensory experiences of hearing, smelling, seeing, touching and tasting. However, there are experiences beyond the senses and these can be found only in silence both outward and inward. You have to make your surroundings and environment around you silent. In modern-day India, for example, we collectively detest silence and are at home with unfettered noise. Considerable part of it is – hold your breath – devotional (Please read: ‘A Quieter Mumbai – Is It A Pipe Dream?’, ‘Noise Is The Newest Form Of Devotion’, ‘Sounds Of Silence’, ‘State Sponsored Noise’, ‘This Patakhawali, This Bombawali Has Nothing In Common With Deepawali’, and ‘Who Are The “People” Whose “Sentiments Need To Be Respected”?’ ) What kind of devotion it must be that uses noise as a medium and doesn’t respect other people’s privacy?

7. Love the Jawan (Soldier). As long as there is ‘haume’, there is violence. As long as there is violence, someone needs to protect us from being subjugated by violence. That chosen one of God is the Jawan or the Soldier. Whilst others have a profession or vocation, his is a devotion, a sacrifice and way of life. To love a Jawan is to thank him for risking his own life whilst protecting ours. No money, awards, gratitude on earth can ever repay him for what he does 24/7, 365 days in a year.

8. Love India. We Indians are the most vociferous jingoists in the world. We carry our patriotism on our shirt-sleeves for everyone to see. But, do we really love our country? The answer is a big NO. The person who loves his or her country as his or her own home won’t do any of the following, for example:

Dirty it relentlessly and expect someone else to clean up the mess.
Indulge in everyday petty corruption and short-cuts knowing that it makes the country weaker.
Whiling away time at work knowing that the country’s well-being is dependent upon each one of us working at full efficiency and dedication.
Sell the country’s interests both overtly and covertly to the enemies of the country within and without.
Have no respect for the law of the land.

There, I have given you my short list of things that we ought to love as our own and cherish that we were given these to love.

One of my poems ended like this:

Some live to love,
I love so as to live.

Perhaps you can do it too.

BEST OF ‘MAKE YOUR OWN QUOTES’ – ‘I THANK YOU, O’ GOD’ SERIES

It has been a little more than three years since I put up in this blog ‘Best Of ‘Make Your Own Quotes’ and fifteen months since I put up here ‘Best Of ‘Make Your Own Quotes’ – Part II’. In these three years or so since the first blog-post and 38 months since I started with the Facebook Page called ‘Make Your Own Quotes’, a lot has happened. One, from a membership of just 30 or so, the Page has a membership of more than 600 now. Two, I started two series: one, about Leadership Lessons and the second about ‘I Thank You, O’ God’. Both are favourite topics with me. I believe that we have to be thankful to God for whatever He/She/It has given us even when we feel that we haven’t got enough. I sincerely feel that gratefulness is the beginning of the journey into happiness,

Why did I start with the page? As I mentioned in the introduction of the first post, “I noticed that on the Facebook and elsewhere, there is a great penchant about putting up Quotes. These range from quotes about Love, Friendship, Politics, Life; indeed about each and every subject. Whilst reading these quotes I was stuck by the realisation that somehow we have this feeling that the sages, saints and wise-people of the past had abundance of sane-advice on all kinds of subjects; but, by a curious quirk of fate, we ourselves and fellow citizens have nothing great to offer in terms of such advice. When I started analysing this, I reached the conclusion that there is nothing simpler than giving sane advice; the answer is really blowing in the wind; it is everywhere. We only have to gather these pearls around us and weave them in a garland”. That’s how I started this Facebook page called ‘Make Your Own Quotes’ with an introduction: “There is nothing simpler than giving sane advice; you don’t have to follow great teachers. Make your own quotes and let others follow you.”

This venture started on the 25th of Feb 2013 and, as I said, I have finished three years of it and it is still going strong. I have received tremendous interest from friends in these Quotes and I am told that around the world these Quotes are being circulated in all kinds of garbs. I have nothing against these since I shall never be making this into a commercial activity.

I like all quotes on Facebook; these provide quick and easy solutions to life’s seemingly complex problems. I believe life is as simple as Facebook; what you get is dependent upon your “settings”.

I started off by giving tips to people on how to make their own quotes, eg,:

Great Quotes Tip #1: Compare Life, Love, Relationships etc to something mundane and infer “great” sounding advice out of it.Here is an (original example): “Friends should be like electricity wires; opposite poles, running parallel and lighting up lives by meeting”. For effect, inscribe this on a totally unrelated picture of, say, a Frog in a Pond. Wanna try your hand at it; go ahead….nothing is simpler! Try comparing Life to Beans!! Go ahead, now that you have joined this site, you will eventually follow your own quotes!!!

Here is therefore the third tranche of Best of ‘Make Your Own Quotes’, but, on a unique topic of finding reasons to thank God.

I may not be a traditional believer in God, the one who personifies God and identifies with Him or Her with innumerable idols and pictures. In the ‘Philosophy’ section of my blog there are a number of posts about how the current concepts of God and Religion are causing more harm and even evil than the evil these were conceived to eradicate. Of particular interest to readers would be a blog-post titled: ‘Whose God Is It Anyway?’ that I wrote five and a half years ago. I am into God as a supreme force that should guide us, bind us together, keep us from doing wrong and look after us as children. I am also a believer in the concept of ‘Ik Omkar’, a concept given to us by Sri Guru Nanak Dev ji, and which translated means: ‘God Is One’ and hence there isn’t a separate God for Hindus or Muslims or for that matter Christians or followers of any other religion (Please read: ‘Nanak Shah Fakir – The Movie And Its Message’).

Now that I have explained my concept of God, please go through the following quotes as addressed to that God and not to Ishwar, Allah, Jesus or Buddha.

Lets begin.

The first one is something that we take for granted: our five senses; particularly the sense of seeing. Here is what a friend Puneet Narula had to write about seeing: “We went to a restaurant in Singapore called “NOX- Dine in the dark”. You are served in pitch dark (No watches and mobile phones allowed) by visually impaired / blind waiters. Amazing experience. You can feel and eat- can’t see a thing. The food tastes better because your entire focus is on taste and not how beautiful it looks. You realize how lucky we are that we can see, hear, feel and smell. Check out http://www.noxdineinthedark.com/”

I believe that God has really made this world beautiful. However, all the beauty that God made would have been lost on us if God hadn’t given us the good sense to appreciate this beauty. So here is a quote about it:

Thank God, we have been given the ability to smile; to make light of our troubles, burdens and situation. If it hadn’t been for this ability, we would have led and lead such hopeless lives:

We can never, even if we try our best individually and collectively, to thank God enough for giving us the emotion of Love. God gave us Dark, so that we know the importance of Light. Likewise, God gave us all the other emotions so that we would realise that Love indeed is the best:

We are often frustrated, especially in arguments, that the other person has a different point of view. But, what if God had given us all the same way of looking at things. It would indeed be such a dull and drab world:

There is no end to God’s Creation. Just at the time when you feel that you have got handle on some part of it, another world opens before your eyes and other senses. It is pointless trying to see the beginning and the end of the universe as if God’s creation is finite. It would be better to adore its infinity and rejoice that there is enough for us for all times to come:

We feel it is intrinsic and innate. However, we refuse to believe that God gave it to us. There is great merit in believing that God gave it to us since, when the chips are down, and darkness engulfs us, we can ask for more. My own experience is that when I have asked for more, God has given it to me:

The holy book of the Sikhs have repeated mention of this Music that is beyond ears. Even if we talk only about the aural experience (within the reach of our five known senses), it is still heavenly. Who else, but God would have thought of giving us this wonderful gift:

There is considerable debate about what is Right and what is Wrong, about Good and Evil. Since all virtues on earth are relative (Please read ‘Absolute Virtue’), it is quite possible that someone’s Wrong is another man’s Right and vice-versa. However, Reverend Emerson once said, “God, don’t let me prove right with arguments that I know to be wrong.” This quote is about that ability and I sincerely feel that God gave to most of us, if not to all of us:

God gave us Life – a four lettered word. He gave us Love – another four lettered word – and most of us love the life that God gave us. For others, God ensured that another four-lettered word was given to them so that even if they won’t love their current life, they would know that the future would be better. God gave us Hope:

We often bemoan the fact that nothing is permanent in this universe. One form is always evolving into another. In some cases it is so slow that we ain’t conscious of it. However, it surely is changing. Whilst we think of it, many a times, as a bad thing, the fact is that it would have been hopeless if we were to encounter a permanent situation and world:

We require worldly knowledge. However, worldly knowledge also confines us and puts limits on our imagination and innovation (I have several posts on this such as ‘How Unbiased Or Innocent Can We Become?’ and ‘Being Non-Sensical May Be Far Sighted’). A child, in this aspect, is better than us. I am fond of giving this example that when a bus tumbles down a hill in an unfortunate accident, often the children and infants are saved. There is, therefore, merit in looking at things afresh as a child; somewhat different from the pejorative expression: ‘Putting one’s foot in one’s mouth’. Have a look:

The next one is related to it. We sometime feel that we haven’t been given the requisite skills to live and survive. However, the fact is that God has provided for us to live and survive. Here is from Sri Guru Granth Sahib:

“Sail patthar mein jant upaaye,
Taa ka rizk aage kar dharaya,
….Un kavan khilaave, kavan chugaave,
Man mein simran karaya”
(The one who gave birth to creatures in moist rocks,
It provided for their nourishment there too,
…..who makes them feed, who provides for them,
Think about it in your mind)

Here is my quote about it:

The next one is the simplest of the quotes and should have come much earlier:

God made no secret of it. God didn’t send us on a wild-goose chase. However, it has made sure that its own abilities (being the Creator) would be far beyond the sum total of all our individual and collective abilities. Here is the quote that was born out of this:

Yes, there is God, if not as a person or a being, but as a Force or Creator. But, of what use these knowledge had been if God had not blessed us with the ability to reach out to it. And since God made everything, it is conceivable that God only gave this ability to us. Hence lets thank God for having given us this ability:

The concept of God as that Force to whom we can pray to solve our problems provides us with tremendous relief. Just imagine that if we hadn’t invented God we would have felt alone and helpless. Here is the quote for that:

God’s Creation is totally discover-able by us; like they say: Seek and thou shalt find. Here is the quote for thanking God for that:

I have discovered – and I am sure each one of you who is reading this would have – that there is newness in God’s Creation everyday, every hour, every moment. It has been medically established that millions of cells in our body are dying everyday and being rejuvenated. Have a look at this, put up by me on the New Year Day of the year 2016:

We have thoughts and emotions and ideas and we want to convey to others and listen to theirs. Over centuries, various languages evolved to convey these to others and those who understood these languages had not much difficulty in understanding thoughts, feelings and ideas of others. However, there is a language of humanity that God gave each one of us and it is beyond the languages that we ourselves made. This is a language that is beyond verbal and text means. It is the language beyond all senses too. It is a language between hearts. Here it is:

I have maintained that there are more reasons to thank God for than we can think of. We feel that the most precious gift that God has given us is Life. However, each one of us in our lifetime discover that there are many things that God made, for which it is worth giving up life. Taste this:

This is something that most of us discover during our lifetime but many of us never think of thanking God for. The fact is that despite our putting a price on many things – the more precious we feel they are, the more is the price – there are quite a few of the most precious things of life that are absolutely free. Have a look at this:

We fall in the habit of cursing our memory and the oft heard crib is: “I don’t seem to remember many a thing”. We reason it out that all that God had to do was to give us elephantine memory so that we would never forget anything. However, think again after seeing the following quote:

Every once in a while the chips are down for us and we feel that the whole world and even God is lined up against us. I am convinced that God never gives a problem to us without giving us the skills and abilities to solve it. And, it adds to our happiness when we have solved it.

And the last one in this part of the series is about Faith, Hope and Love, the building bricks of the house of our happiness. God is, I am convinced, not like human beings (whatever its shape, size and form be). It isn’t seeking happiness by making us think of it all the while. It is purely in our interest. Hence, if you want to have Faith, Hope and Love without ascribing these to God, there is nothing ungodly about it. That knowledge has also come to you from God that I believe in. I would rather thank it for these since I obtain enormous satisfaction and happiness by thanking it for it:

I am sure by now I have convinced you to subscribe to ‘Make Your Own Quotes’. What do you have to pay for the subscription? Nothing; not a cent, pence or paisa. It is totally free. All that you have to do is to like the Page and these Quotes would be delivered to your timeline automatically. You can, on the page, make your own Quotes and share these too with others. Dozens of subscribers have done it already.

DREAM OF DIGITAL INDIA AND THE COMMON MAN

When I was in the Indian Navy, we often had to travel by train. Now, anyone who has ever traveled by Indian Railways a few decades back would tell you what an ordeal it used to be. Though in Nov 2010 I had written a humorous piece titled ‘The Great Indian Train Journey’, anyone who had spent hours standing in queues, dealing with corrupt and inefficient railway officials before, during and sometimes even after the journey, would tell you that humour was the last thing that you associated with the misery of railway reservations and ensuing journeys. As I wrote in the essay: “It is incredible to think after what you have gone through that the journey has not yet commenced.”

Cut to modern age. You do your reservation online in the luxury of your home or office. You have an application installed on your phone and it tells you how late the train would be at your boarding and alighting stations, what is the trend for the last week or so, where exactly your bogie would be, and who exactly to turn to for complaint and assistance. Just by having Internet, even the gargantuan Indian Railways suddenly appear more efficient and less corrupt.

Similarly, you have had great time in buying from online stores such as Flipkart, Amazon and Paytm. You have even been buying movie tickets online and you can confidently predict whether it is going to be good movie, the kind of movie, its exact duration and where would you and family sit and even enjoy your snacks.

Convenience and efficiency galore. However, Digital India is much more than that. The two key phrases are e-Governance and e-Services.

Looking back, it appears incredible that the Government of India launched National e-Governance Plan (NeGP) as late as in 2006. Not much notice was taken of it due to poor net-penetration in rural areas as well as poor net-coverage and speeds. Those who dreamt big such as the then Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh were eventually voted out as not being in sync with the aspirations of the people at large. Some people realised that it was going to be be a significant thing in future but in the absence of means, the ends sought were far too lofty to be realistic.

And then, last year, on 01 Jul 2015 to be exact, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Digital India campaign. Whereas the 2006 plan was just a plan, the Digital India campaign takes into consideration the need to set up right electronic infrastructure including availability of high-speed Internet, extensive rural and urban penetration, and technical excellence and support. The dream is that it would result in digitally empowered people, knowledge based economy, efficiency, transparency and corruption free society.

The nay-Sayers would maintain (in the atmosphere of cynicism that years of ill or non-governance led us into, nay-Sayers are legitimate) that simply by improving advanced Internet and Data services, how would these objectives be met?

That’s why I gave you the Railways example. Let me give you some more examples:

Land Revenue Records. I heard the former CM of Himachal, Virbhadra Singh, speaking in a public gathering in my native town Kandaghat that the Patwari (The Patwari is a village (land or revenue) accountant (also known as Talati, Patel, Karnam, Adhikari, Shanbogaru, etc in various parts of the country) in a village is more powerful in his village than he, the CM, was in the state. And how does the Patwari derive his powers? Simple, by manipulating the land-revenue records in his custody. In my village, these are maintained on a latha (white coarse cloth) with indelible black ink. The Patwari, only the other day, used to measure the land through chains and see it on this latha by a scale rule that only he has. So, if he swings by a fraction of an inch on thew latha map, a substantial part of your land might actually go to your neighbour. The Patwari is thus open to corruption and bribery and even charges under-the-table sums of money to give you copies of your own land-records. There are thousands of instances wherein both or several of the contending parties fill his coffers to achieve the desired swing in their favour. The contending parties then resort to judicial action and for several years (decades in most cases) fill the coffers of the lawyers and/or judges (Please read: ‘The Great Indian Judicial System’). Now imagine that the land-revenue records are not only digitized but readily available in digital form on the net. You access them and you know precisely where your land is on the map and in reality. The corrupt and inefficient Patwari suddenly looks like a pygmy as compared to the giant he made himself into by keeping all that knowledge only with him and on latha and dog-eared registers in his moth-infested cupboard. Last year you must have seen an Idea mobile ad on television about an opportunist trying to hoodwink the village people out of their lands by offering them insignificant sums of money. A village girl, however, had the facts about land digitally available on her mobile phone and put the hood-winker to shame. That’s the face of Digital India of future.
Diaster Relief. A few years back there was a super-cyclone in Orissa and Andhra coast. Hundreds of thousands of people died and were rendered homeless as the warnings didn’t reach them in time. Extensive relief material was collected country-wise. It is estimated that half of it didn’t reach the intended people and was siphoned off by corrupt middle-man and touts. Not having live information about the affected populace, grossly inequitable distribution of relief material took place; some villagers received much more than was required whereas others perished due to total lack of it. Now, as this data is more and more digitally available and distributed, first of all the alert systems are more effective in evacuating people to safety. Then, the distribution of relief material is coordinated real time and equitable distribution takes place without much corruption and inefficiency.
Beneficiaries of Government Doles. Presently, about half of government doles under various welfare schemes are siphoned off by middle-men, touts and undeserving elements. The government, in preparation for a full-fledged Digital India has got a Bill passed in the current session of Parliament that would ensure direct distribution of doles through Aadhar Cards. Now a few years back even if that was the intended lofty aim, it would still not be possible due to lack of digital penetration in the villages. However, now it is possible to empower people directly and ensure transparency.
Digital and e-Literacy. Just as it did the local Patwari good to keep the people in the dark, the politician and babu derived their vicarious powers over people to keep people ignorant and illiterate. Both Digital and e-Literacy are the buzzwords to make people knowledgeable about their rights, government schemes and other plans. Digital Literacy deals with knowledge, skills and behaviours required to deal with digital devices such as computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones seen together as networks and not computing devices. E-Literacy, on the other hand is general literacy through not classroom learning but through e-Learning.
DigiLocker. The Government of India, in the year 2015, launched Digital Locker facility. It helps people to digitally store their important documents like PAN card, passport, mark sheets and degree certificates. The lockers are authenticated by Aadhar cards. It would not only stop pilferage of documents but also stop spurious documents generated by unlawful elements. Only day before yesterday I was reading in the newspaper that even the databases of potential candidates for jobs both on the government and corporate networks can be shared thereby reducing enormous paperwork and ensuring transparency.
Participating in Economical and Political Growth. Thanks to Digital and e-Illiteracy, there is hardly any participation of people in economic and political growth of the country. Politically, you have to belong to one party or the other; all of which extract their pound of flesh. With spread of Digital and e-Literacy, the political clout of common people becomes stronger. Take Economic Growth, and just the example of Stock Markets. So far the retailers share of stock markets is abysmally small and insignificant to make any dent in the overall sensitivity of the market. However, with the spread of Digital India to small towns and villages, the percentage of retailers share becomes more and more and then the big-guns in the markets (the Harshad Mehta and Jhunjhunwala types) are not able to manipulate the markets with the ease that they used to.
Accountability of Government Functionaries and Departments. The best example that I can give in this case is that of Police. It is a known fact that lodging an F.I.R. with the Police Station on legitimate complaints is a herculean task, if not totally impossible. However, e-filing of F.I.Rs is already underway in some of the stations. A few months back, a car recklessly driven by a driver fell on our roof-top, next to the highway, in my native village in Himachal. Our tenant woke me up in Mumbai at about 2 O’ Clock in the morning to tell about this accident. The miscreant’s people were dilly-dallying in paying compensation to us thinking that they would get away with less than half the sum by greasing the palms of the police. So when the police arrived on the scene and talked to me on the phone, they said that it wasn’t much of damage and to let them go. I informed them that an e-F.I.R. showing the accident and the damage caused had already been filed by me. I was thus given adequate compensation before they took out their vehicle. In similar manner, with public records being digitally available and online filing of RTI and other complaints, the accountability of government functionaries would improve.

I can go on and on. Now, it would start occurring that Digital India is not just about social media, Facebook, chat groups, smartphones and applications and easy availability of information. It is much more than that. Once realised, it would really make Indians empowered and India society efficient and corruption free.

Surely, the work didn’t start only with the launching of Digital India campaign last year. Take my last company RIL, for example. It had been working on this digital revolution, appropriately called RJIO for several years now and it is talked about that more than 100, 000 Crores of investment has already gone into raising infrastructure such as National Optic Fibre Network to enable high-speed digital networks across the length and breadth of the country. A limited soft-launch of the prototype 4G network was there on 28th Decmeber, the birth-anniversary of the founder of RIL Shri Dhirubhai Ambani. A full fledged launch is scheduled in the second half of the year.

Various other players like Airtel and Vodafone have jumped on the 4G bandwagon without having the crucial LTE (Long Term Evolution) technology, which only RIL has. Anyway, as long as the dream of high-speed internet connectivity of rural areas is realised, I don’t see any quarrel between the service providers’ use of technology. However, I do see a conflict between their commercial interests and the dream of Digital India. This is noticeable, for example in Airtel ads on the television where the use of 4G in remote places such as Mashobra in Shimla is for such entertainment as watching cricket match live on the mobile from Eden Gardens in Kolkata.

The US strategic-thinker and writer, Fareed Zakaria, on 21 Feb 16, flew all the way from US to Mumbai to interview Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and MD of RIL on RJIO’s scheduled launch. Mr. Ambani told him that what US was able to do in decades, India was on the cusp of achieving in two years. Significantly, Mukesh Ambani is the one who talked about rural India and empowering youth of the country to realise their dreams.

Mukesh Ambani in conversation with Fareed Zakaria (Pic courtesy: http://www.firstpost.com)

Mukesh Ambani, in the interview aired on CNN worldwide spoke about rural penetration equivalent in percentage terms to US in the year 2016 itself and achieving best in class connectivity in the world by 2018.

Lets say the dream of Digital India in its core elements is fulfilled by 2018, it would make India join the super-league of nations that have people electronically empowered and in position to demand e-services and e-governance.

I am excited and keeping my fingers crossed.

FEAR IS THE KEY

I am fond of giving this example in my talks of a frog having fallen into a pit. A rabbit came there and cajoled the frog to come out of the pit by making all out efforts to do so. The frog just sat there at the bottom of the pit helplessly and resignedly. The rabbit motivated him with frequent shouts of “jump”, “yes you can”, “you can’t spend the rest of your life there” and “think of how nice you would feel when you are out of the pit”. But, the frog made no effort to jump and get out since it had already decided that it couldn’t.

Finally, the rabbit asked the frog what help he required to get out. The frog said that perhaps if the rabbit would fetch a ladder, he would climb up the ladder and come out. The rabbit, good Samaritan that he was, went to fetch the ladder and after a few hours managed to get there with his friends carrying the ladder. They noticed that the frog was happily sitting outside the pit. On inquiry the frog replied, “I thought that I could never come out of the pit by jumping. But, after you went to get the ladder, a snake came into the pit and I had no choice but to jump out”.

Fear is the key. It is that all important motivational factor that leaves you with no choice.

I have a senior, a most respected senior, in security industry who feels that deterrence based on fear of being caught and punished is the basic tenet around which security needs to be built. If people get the message that when they do something wrong (petty theft to huge frauds), they would be caught and punished, “97 percent won’t”. The reverse is also true, in that, 97 percent would probably fall into the temptation of doing something wrong if they felt that there were near 100 percent chances of getting away with it.

We used to have a school-time joke of kids attending a Christmas party. Many eatables were laid out on the tables. One of the kids noticed a sign near the cake plate: Take only one slice, God is watching. He went, next, to the chocolate plate and told his friends: “Take as many as you want; God is watching the cake”.

Of course, as societies evolve, respect for law becomes ingrained even when big brother is not watching. In my former service, Indian Navy, when Captain K Pestonji returned from his deputation to West Germany, he told about motorists waiting at the red lights in the middle of the night even when there was no one to see and theirs were the only cars. Similarly, during the 2004 Tsunami, in Japan, a case was reported of a motorist waiting at the red traffic light even when Tsunami was approaching from behind. An Indian, on the other hand would – nine times out of ten – jump the red lights if he knew there wasn’t a cop or a camera guarding those lights.

Two years back, a friend and I visited Vienna, a city ranked amongst the first ten in the world for tourism. Knowing what to expect there, I told my friend that in a day’s time, he should count the number of cops on the roads. By the end of the day, he was not able to spot a single one. And yet, all traffic and people moved with discipline. But, it takes centuries before one can get to that level of self-regulation. I remember having seen pictures of 1971 New York Power Outage and how people, who were not thieves till that time, helped themselves to all kinds of goodies from the malls since all the cameras were switched off due to the outage.

Whenever we talk about Indians rigorously following all traffic rules in Singapore but blithely ignoring them in India, it comes out that the penalties are universally applied in Singapore and cannot be circumvented by paying the cops chai-paani money. In Indian Chalta-Hai manner, the lack of deterrence promotes taking short-cuts and then that becomes the new law.

And it is not that we don’t have it in our culture or religion to use fear as the key. In Hindu religion, the fear of Death and the Punishment that we would get in Hell for our misdeeds often kept us from doing wrong. Indeed, this is the basic tenet, which keeps us on the right and the correct path. Two years back, I had visited this temple in Gujarat and one of the priests was advising a middle-aged man and his wife on the schemes available for charity in the temple. He said that the basic scheme was for Rupees 1100 but added for effect that the scheme worked only for those who hadn’t done any wrong deed. For those who sometimes indulged in wrong, benefit would be gained by donating Rupees 2100. The man was about to take out the sum and offer when the priest added that he should add Rupees 1100 for the welfare and long life of each child. And then, he came up with the clincher: Rupees 5100 would even look after his soul after death. By the time we left the wife was cajoling the man to dish out Rupees 5100 to ensure safety of children and his soul. The priest would have known that fear is, indeed, the key.

Some of the most well circulated posts on Whatsapp are the ones that tell you that good luck would come your way in case you forwarded it to twenty. However, you would rot in the fires of the hell in case you omitted forwarding. And then these give examples of people and what happened to them when inadvertently they didn’t forward the message to twenty. Of course, you don’t believe in this gibberish. But, you reason it out that there is no harm in passing it to your friends. Fear is the key.

Despite our religious practices and what is contained in our scriptures, we Indians are idealistic enough to believe that people and nations would behave nicely with us if we continue to give them homilies about peaceful co-existence and other such virtues. We are fond of giving the example of Porus, the King of Pauravas who fought Alexander the Great in the Battle of the Hydaspes (Jhelum) in 326 BC and was defeated. Having been captured alive, Alexander asked Porus as to how should Alexander treat him (Porus). Porus seemed to have replied, “As one king treats another”. It is said that Alexander was so impressed by his adversary that not only he reinstated him as a satrap of his own kingdom but also granted him dominion over lands to the north extending until the Hyphasis (Beas).

This idealistic and largely non-realistic philosophy – somewhat similar to telling a lion to convert to vegetarianism because of its mutual benefits – has been practised by us as a Grand Strategy. For decades we are trying to convert our neighbour Pakistan to vegetarianism by such promises as good relations, most favoured nation, and peaceful co-existence. And Pakistan terror groups, very routinely, get away with terror killings of our countrymen. We threaten them with – hold your breath – discontinuation of talks. Fear and deterrence are conspicuous by their total absence. Indeed, the only fear that the cross-border terrorists think of is that since killing Indians in terror attacks is such a cake-walk, they (the terrorists) may not get the 72 virgins (houri) in paradise that they would have got if there was some degree of difficulty involved in such jehadi act.

Of course you cannot fight Terror with Terror as was tried out, quite unsuccessfully in Punjab; Gulzar’s 1996 movie Maachis portrayed the ill effects of state-terrorism let loose on innocent people converting them to terrorism. But, fighting Terrorism with Deterrence brought out by Fear of Consequences is another thing altogether.

Fear can be the key if it is supported by Love and not Terror. You cannot, for example, make loyal personnel in a company, by always confronting them with the fear of losing their jobs; some of the companies, for example, revel in their hire-and-fire policies. The employees, of course, pay back such companies in kind. And suddenly, you find, that they are not afraid to lose their jobs but you are afraid to lose them.

Fear is, of course, the key and is a pragmatic security philosophy. However, in the end, I leave you with two thoughts that shall be covered in the follow-up article:

In some regions of Maharashtra, farmers commit suicide unable to pay back crop loans due to failure of monsoons and other factors. What fear of consequences would work against such people; more so, if they were to be wrongly motivated to perform wrong and even terror acts?
What exactly is the difference between Fear and Terror? At what stage the distinction between Deterrence and Terror would appear to blur.

Let me hear your views in the comments below.

On the lighter side, here is an imaginary (I hope) conversation, on the phone, between a kidnapper and a man whose wife has been kidnapped.

Kidnapper (nastily): We have your wife. We shall not set her free if you don’t give us Five Lakh Rupees.

Man (Matter of fact): And I shall kill you if you set her free!

There is, as you can see, a quick transfer of Fear.

PHILOSOPHIES THAT MAY HELP YOU

At the end of the last year I wrote an article titled: ‘Debatable Philosophies of Life’. I gave you five of them that have become obsolete and don’t make sense anymore.

You may be tempted to ask as to which are the philosophies that would help you. In this article, I have listed some that have helped me.

Philosophy #1 Have a World of Your Own

This follows naturally from the first debatable philosophy: We should be selfless.

It is not possible to be selfless. Hence, make space for yourself where you are by yourself, comfortable, and without having to explain to others the why and how.

Two anecdotes shall make it clearer. One is about our cat Minnie. Out of all the toys that we have for her, she likes an empty cardboard box the first. Every once in a while she goes and sits in her box and imagines that no one can touch her there.

The second one was related to me by an ex army officer during the recent Pathankot terror attack. He told me about the time when he was in a unit in J&K engaged in anti-terrorist operations. One evening, after they returned from an encounter in which two terrorists were killed, he looked down from his room to the river bank where some children were playing in the sand. He watched them for sometime and noticed they were totally oblivious of terrorists or other distasteful things of life. It won’t have mattered to them where they were: in India or Pakistan; their play was much more important to them. It was a world of their own.

Now, I am not suggesting that you become a recluse or isolate yourself from everyone. All I am saying is that you should have a world that you can retreat into when you want.

My world, for example, has music (old Hindi songs) and writing. When I am in this world, for the duration of time that I spend here, the other world ceases to exist even with all its seemingly urgent chores, problems and tribulations.

Try it; it is not escapism. Everyone requires a world of one’s own.

Philosophy #2 Train Yourself Not To Have Regrets

I have proved it in my earlier article about Debatable Philosophies Of Life that the philosophy ‘We shouldn’t live in the past or we should forget the past’ is ludicrous, not pragmatic and is against the progress of civilization through knowledge since all knowledge is essentially past knowledge.

I have also discussed in an article called Absolute Virtue that all virtues in this universe are relative; the only absolute is God. It is the same for evils too. The realisation that neither your virtues and evils nor of any other person or persons on earth are absolute (and can only be better than some and at the same time worse than others) should automatically lead us to the pragmatism of the philosophy that I am suggesting.

Indeed, it is not just a question of more or less; sometimes, it is difficult to make out the difference between good and bad, virtue and evil. As the English say: one man’s meat is another’s poison.

Hence, whilst remembering your past (that you cannot get rid of), you don’t have to have either regrets or false pride; you can be worse off than some and better off than others.

It should also fill you with relatively guiltless existence or life. If you have consciously done what you were convinced was right and good and it actually resulted in a catastrophe for people you know or do not know, you don’t have to constantly or relentlessly curse yourself.

In one of my essays, I have brought out that when Christ on Cross said, “God, forgive them for they know not what they do”, He certainly didn’t mean it spitefully or superciliously. He was conscious that human beings will never have absolute knowledge of the cause and effect of their actions; it would be Godlike if they did.

One can, therefore, keep one’s conscience clear.

In case you haven’t trained yourself, it won’t come to you simply because I suggest. Gradually you will learn to be free of regrets and guilt-feelings. It is a great liberating feeling.

Philosophy #3 Have Least Expectations From People Close To You

You are a good man or woman and you have a world of your own and have not many regrets. However, it gnaws you a lot to know that people are both unreasonable and ungrateful. No matter what you do for them, they do not appear to have any gratefulness at all towards you.

A close friend of mine in the last one year, to his utter shock and horror, found out that the person whose career he had nurtured with his own hands for the last two decades suddenly chose to tell everyone that he had become what he had become due to his own hard-work, professionalism and vision. Now my friend is not the one who is prone to say ‘Et tu Brute’ to all those who ditched him. He is a great leader and a great realist. But, it proved to me that none of us are beyond expectations. The least that we expect is for the recipient of our goodwill to acknowledge and say, “Thank you”.

However, the realisation that being selfish is hardwired into man for his survival over centuries and that to expect a person to see things from your point of view is totally unrealistic should help us to gradually calibrate or moderate our expectations until we bring them to near zero.

Good leaders, for example, do not motivate people by just telling them what they (the leaders and the organisation) would get out of following the leaders’ schemes or plans; but, they do tell them what they (the people) would gain from them.

Your expectations of people become more realistic and viable if you are able to align them with their expectations.

Philosophy #4 Train Yourself To Be Filled With Hope

It is a four-lettered word like Life, Love and Time. Many a times when it sounds most unrealistic (a myth), start believing in it, build stories around it, relentlessly think of it and you will see it works. The fact is that the whole world is a myth too. You are what you believe you are; you see what you believe you see (Please read: ‘The Virtual World’). There is a saying that if you think of a virtue repeatedly; it would soon become yours. Hence, it is possible to be trained to become Hopeful.

Now, you are bound to argue with me that two of the failed philosophies, viz, All men are born equal, and ‘As you sow, so shall you reap’ actually do not leave much room for Hope. People who are meant to get better of you will get better of you, you will argue. Very true; however, Philosophy #2 above: ‘Train Yourself Not To Have Regrets’ should, if followed correctly, should fill you with Hope. We never have complete knowledge of causes and effects concerning us. How can we have this about others? Hope is simply about the wellness of the outcome concerning you. It is not lessened by their doing well too. The more you dream it is all working out well for you, the more it fills you with Hope.

Philosophy #5 Do Not Chase Friends, Love And Happiness

All these three are a natural fallout of social existence of man. How can Happiness be a fallout of social existence, you may ask. Agree; but, chasing Happiness is. Amongst all the virtues that are relative, the one where we do most comparison is Happiness. Many a times people feel happy and content but are saddened by comparison with those that they think have more.

My close friend whom I have mentioned above in the article is fond of telling about officers feeling happy about being given Excellent grading in their annual performance review. However, such happiness is short-lived when they discover that some others whom they regarded as good-for-nothing have also obtained Excellent grading.

Chasing Happiness is like chasing a rainbow; anytime you feel it is close and you can almost touch it, it appears far away. I have come across many people who would have been happy but the chase after Happiness has left them fatigued and sad. I must have Happiness at all costs even if that makes me miserable they seem to say like the Manna De song in the 1974 movie Aavishkaar: Hansane ki chaah ne itana mujhe rulaaya hai (the longing for laughter made me cry a lot).

Chasing Friends is a hobby that one indulges in similar to collecting stamps and trophies; the more one has, the happier he or she would be. Various philosophies are thrown in such as Life without Friends is meaningless and No one understands you better than your friends.

Yes, indeed, Friends are important in one’s life. However, making Happiness dependent upon having them as friends is not called for. At the back of one’s mind should always be the thought that another person on earth is as unique as you are. No one can really be selfless; it is not in the nature of the man. People would naturally be your friends of their interests and needs coincide with yours. Chasing them won’t get you anywhere. The opposite may actually be the result.

Finally, even though Love is the best emotion on earth, chasing Love is unrealistic. It is a bird that would sit at your window when you don’t go hunting for it.

I read a poignant piece by a middle-aged lady who awaits her children visiting her in the same fashion as she used to visit and spend time with her parents. She bemoaned how the very definition of love between parents and children have changed; the latter don’t appear to have time for the former. Love demands a lot of time thinking about the loved ones and spending with them. This lady should have realised that the nature of people is always selfish; only the degree of selfishness changes with people and time. If this lady had somehow read this article and paid heed to my usable Philosophy #1 about building a world of her own whilst concentrating on building one for the children, it would have never come to this pass. Chasing Love, now, or any time isn’t going to help.

There, I have given you my short list of usable philosophies. When you do a thing over and over again, it becomes a habit. God has intended the world to be like this wherein like the earth rotating on its axis and revolving around the sun, each one of us is required to achieve perfection by repetitions. So, first time in case the practice of these philosophies do not come easily to you, do them again and again and your mind, like a trained dog, would follow your command of Go fetch it.

Best of luck.

WHY AND HOW DO I BLOG?

Mujhe kuchh kehna hai…

Jorn Barger is around the same age as me. He coined the term weblog on 17 Dec 1997. Basically, during those days of surfing the net, logging the web would be to leave one’s own imprint on the web rather than merely accessing it. Barger’s weblog became a term to describe a novel form of web publishing. The term was shortened to blog by Peter Merholz in 1999; the shortening process was actually a lighthearted way to pronounce weblog first as we blog and then simply blog.

I was an Indian Navy officer until 28 Feb 2010. From 01 Mar 2010, I joined the blogging community. In Feb 2014, it tickled me to know that I am one of the 172 million bloggers on the net.

In a blog-post titled ‘All Photographers And Writers, No Viewers And Readers’, I brought out that the biggest two techno-social changes that have happened in the last decade or so have affected our lives in a huge manner. Thanks to these two changes, everyone is a photographer now and everyone can write and publish.

Lets compare, for example, shayar (Urdu poets) of yore with the modern day ones. In the earlier days, you wrote when the brainwave hit you; actually since most of the shayars were heart-broken or heart-struck, it was more of heart-wave than brainwave. Now, after writing, you waited for an invitation to a mushaira (a poetic symposium) whereat you hoped to read out your nazm or ghazal amidst shouts of waah waah and mukarrar mukarrar from your audience. Once in a while you got noticed – like Hasrat Jaipuri by the movie mughals Prithviraj or Raj Kapoor – and then life was made for you.

Nowadays, within minutes of your writing you publish on the web. And in case you have nursed your audience, you start receiving waah waah and other accolades straightway. Who are these guys and gals who give you accolades? Well, they are bloggers like you who offer waah-waahs and give the urls of their own blogs so that these would be both ways or many ways rather than one way.

Bloggers on Indiblogger, for example, have excelled in the art of discussion blogs (similar to their personal Facebook Group). By a rough estimate many of these blog-posts wouldn’t take more than ten minutes to write and that too not one’s own writing but – say – quotes picked up from here and there. And then the voting starts; exactly how we elect the parliamentarians or the prime minister. There are ways and means in which you get noticed whilst voting for someone’s post so that he/she would be obliged to vote on your post too.

Nearly three and half years back, after understanding how the blogging community works, I wrote an essay titled aptly: ‘Blogging – Race Or Stampede?‘

In a recent Bloggers Meet, Indiblogger organisation itself brought out proudly how a particular blogger had built up for herself great discussions following. So, whilst Wikipedia describes a blog as a discussion or informational site on the world wide web, most of Indiblogger sites are merely discussion sites. The sheer numbers mitigate against Indiblogger even attempting to assess or encouraging blogs by their quality.

Now, why would you use blogging for the purpose of discussions when better and more efficient means are available such as Facebook or Twitter? I guess the idea is to provide your posts with a degree of permanency rather than most of social discussion sites being transitory; the retrieval is better on a blog – say, by date or title.

I blog differently; it is a means available to me alternate to publishing on the primary media. It matters to me little whether any discussion (comments) takes place on the post itself though I have gone on record that I encourage them. But, I would rather have meaningful comments (however few) from people who have read and digested what I had to say and carry forward the discussion or debate rather than merely complimentary comments.

I run as many as sixteen Facebook Groups and Pages for discussions on varied issues such as songs and music, greetings, poetry, pride in India and its armed forces, quotes and general subjects. My experience shows that majority of the people doesn’t even know what it s liking or commenting on. It is merely what Indibloggers do: you scratch my back and I scratch yours; a reading and writing community all rolled into one.

I have a list of about a dozen blogs (imagine from 172 million) that I seriously read. I don’t leave my foot-prints on those in the fear that I would be counted as one of the thousands of back-scratchers that I have on Indiblogger; with an obligation to vote on, like or comment upon my blog too.

It has been a great discovery with me that there are people who do write to make a difference and are not so much concerned about the web-design, widgets and plugins as much as the quality of their posts.

I go out to eat in restaurants and clubs with the family. Yes, the restaurant decor should be attractive, the crockery and cutlery and serviettes of high and appealing quality, the lighting gentle and soothing and the service prompt. But, over and above all this, the food should be cooked well, tasty and healthy. I never forget that all else is peripheral to the food, the main purpose of a restaurant.

It is the same with me on the blog.

Mujhe kuchh kehna hai…

FRIENDS, FRIENDS, EVERYWHERE BUT…..

Breathes there a man or woman who hasn’t read Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ with its famous line: ‘water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink’? I doubt it.

The story of the sailor returning from a long sea voyage can be replicated, with hardly any variations, in the sea of social media and finally in the sea of life.

You may have hundreds and even thousands of ‘friends‘ on Facebook. Some of them may even Like what you put up and once in a while say “nice” “good one” and “hilarious” on your posts. But, it is all so that you will do the same for their posts. Most of them have no idea of what they have liked. Ultimately, on Facebook, as in life, you are by yourself. As Sahir Ludhianvi said in his famous Dev Anand number in Hum Dono (when I started writing this article it was 03 Dec, Dev Anand’s death anniversary):

Kaun rota hai kisi aur ki khaatir ai dil?
Sabako apani hi kisi baat pe rona aaya.
(Who weeps for someone else’s sake?
Everyone weeps remembering something of one’s own)

On Facebook or in life, you are a bore in case you have something to say. Your penchant about saying something fits in well with the definition of a bore: A bore is a person who continues to talk about himself when you want to talk about yourself.

A few years back, when emails just came into vogue, I was one of the early birds who opened an email account. By the time a close friend followed suit, I had a sizable fan following and I used to send each one of them (what I thought) interesting mails. When this close friend joined, I took him in too and started sending these mails to him. One fine day, he sent (forwarded) me a story about a hotel guest not wanting the housekeeping to keep giving him fresh soaps three times a day. He thus conveyed to me that my mails to him were as much a nuisance as the housekeeping bombarding the hotel guest with new soap bars kept all over the bathroom even when the guest hadn’t used the earlier ones. I took the hint and stopped the supply of mails to him. But, the story doesn’t end there. Very soon, he discovered the joy of sharing mails and felt that his were actually more interesting. So, he started sending mails. I didn’t have the heart of sending him back his soap-story.

Recently, he was a little more direct. He belatedly joined whatsapp and forbade me from repeatedly bombarding him with my posts. He said that his eyes get affected reading posts on the whatsapp. He said he’d rather read them on emails (the expression back to square one was intended for such a scenario).

Sabako apani hi kisi baat pe rona aaya…

These are, of course, lighthearted examples. But, seriously, the very nature of man is such that even for his existence he has to forever be concerned with self-preservation and own survival. Even when a friend doesn’t ask you, when face to face with your story, proposal, request, you can almost hear him ask, “What’s in it for me?”

That brings us to the question, “How many friends do you require in life?” And, the next question is even more harsh: “Do we really require friends in our life?” Here is one of the responses:

Friends are, indeed, like Happiness in one important aspect: you are better off not chasing them.

I have seen people actually displaying friends like trophies; such and such is a really influential person in Modi government or close to Shah Rukh Khan or Deepika Padukone…..we used to play gilli-danda together. I had this VVIP in one of my company’s sites. His name-throwing of friends at important positions in his part of the country used to make me think that the entire political and bureaucratic set-up in the state used to by dependent upon his advice.

Most often than not, people ain’t friendly with you but the position you hold. As soon as you retire or are transferred from the position, the friendship, such as the way it was, becomes more realistic and people realise what a bore (my children’s vocabulary has this word called loser; a very fascinating word) you were all along. The office where I work has this person whom I frequently call as the finest leader that I have come across. All my friends often echoed these thoughts of mine and added quite a few stories of their own regarding his sterling qualities, sagacity, professionalism, human-touch, and result-oriented approach towards everything. A year back the management side-lined him and brought a fire-brand, young and outstanding person in his place. Gradually I was stunned to notice that these friends gushed about the sterling qualities, sagacity, professionalism, human-touch, and result-oriented approach of – hold your breath – the new boss. They would begin every presentation with the oblique suggestion that somehow the wonderful, pragmatic ideas of the new leader were not even thought of by the earlier loser.

The way the world is made, after human life appeared on earth; it is a need that brought people together (You may refer to Abraham Maslow’s ‘Pyramid of Needs‘) . Relationships and friendships are either causes or results of this need. Else, these have no other special basis for existence. Religion and Spiritualism teach us that the sooner we are rid of – or at least less dependent upon – these needs, the better off we are.

Now, I am not suggesting that we go out of our way to offend people or have them as unfriendly. All I am saying is that don’t have friends as obsession or score-cards or trophies. If we can have one or two whose needs (I am using the world in its larger connotation) coincide with ours, these are much better than thousands who like everything that you say without even listening to it or reading it.

In this song penned by lyricist Indeevar for the 1967 movie Upkaar, one gets close to what the scriptures tell you:

Kasame vaade pyaar wafaa sab, baate.n hai.n baato.n kaa kyaa
KoI kisii kaa nahii.n ye jhuuThe, naate hai.n naato.n kaa kyaa
(Vows, promises, love, loyalty, all are mere words; and words mean nothing
No one belongs to anyone, these are false relations; and relations mean nothing)

Hogaa masiihaa saamane tere
Phir bhii na tuu bach paayegaa
Tera apanA khuun hii aakhir
Tujhako aag lagaayegaa
Aasamaan me u.Dane vaale miTTii me.n mil jaayegaa
(The Saviour would be in front of you
And yet you won’t be saved
Your own blood (relation) will ultimately
Light-up your funeral-pyre
O’ ye, who flies high in the sky now, you will be razed to the ground)

Sukh me.n tere saath chale.nge
Dukh me.n sab mukh mo.De.nge
Duniyaa vaale tere banakar
Teraa hii dil to.De.nge
Dete hai.n bhagavaan ko dhokhaa, inasaa.n ko kyaa chho.De.nge?
(They will walk with you in good-times
And turn their face away in bad times
The worldly people who become yours
Will (finally) break your heart
They deceive God too; why would they leave human beings?)

Happy New Year, Friends!

DEBATABLE PHILOSOPHIES OF LIFE

One of the biggest truths about God’s Creation is that He/She/It made all virtues and evils Relative. The only Absolute is God Himself. Thanks to Albert Einstein, the Relativity of Time in the Universe is now somewhat well known to us. For others, please read my Absolute Virtue if you entertain any doubts.

What an essay, at the end of the year, you may remark. The fact of the matter is that end-of-the-year itself is not universal or absolute reality. It exists on Earth simply because of rotation of Earth around its axis and its revolution around the Sun. It doesn’t universally exist. It is a convenient method adopted by us to anchor our lives to a dimension called Time, which too is purely our own creation. You may argue with me that Time does exist; after all, we do get older, trains and aircraft are scheduled by hours and minutes (and sometimes seconds), we get our salaries because of it and if there was no Time, our world would collapse. Fair enough; but do remember that our invention of Time is actually an effort, on our part, to give a beginning and end to things, events and people on Earth only and has relevance only to our minuscule part of the Universe, ie, very micro part of God’s endless Creation as a whole.

One of the fundamental laws of the universe that we have discovered (not invented) is the Law of Conservation of Energy. The law of conservation of energy is a law of science that states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but only changed from one form into another or transferred from one object to another. This law of science is actually a pointer towards the ludicrousness of considering our self-invented dimension of Time so as to define beginning and end to things and people.

Einstein's Spacetime Cone (All of physical reality is contained within this cone; the region outside ("elsewhere") is inaccessible because one would have to travel faster than light to reach it. (Pic courtesy: einstein.stanford.edu) — Einstein’s Spacetime Cone (All of physical reality is contained within this cone; the region outside (“elsewhere”) is inaccessible because one would have to travel faster than light to reach it. (Pic courtesy: einstein.stanford.edu)

That leaves Events, Ideas, Thoughts, and Emotions. Lets take Events first. All Events actually result in Energy and Mass to be changed from one form to the other and hence it is covered in Law of Conservation of Energy. As far as Ideas, Thoughts and Emotions are concerned, we often claim to be the first person to have come up with a thought or idea; whereas, all these already exist in one form or the other. We only re-discover them. Mercifully, as far as emotions are concerned, we never claim to be the first persons to become angry, happy, fall in love with, hate etc. We have no idea how these evolved and who was the first person to get angry, love-stricken, hated or happy.

From my Facebook Page 'Make Your Own Quotes — From my Facebook Page ‘Make Your Own Quotes

The second last thing to consider before we take up the main discussion is whether there are any universal truths, beliefs or perceptions that have withstood the test of time. There ain’t many; not even the most sacred ones. Consider that Adam and Eve were sent on the earth and they produced a boy and a girl. For the world to progress, this boy and girl, brother and sister, that is, must have procreated amongst themselves. Likewise, hundreds of beliefs and tenets have changed over centuries. Hence, whilst there are no Absolute Truths in Space, there are none in Time too except one.

The last thing that I want to take up is the distinction between Natural and Artificial that we have made. Natural is defined as existing in or derived from nature; not made or caused by humankind. Artificial is the exact opposite of it; made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural. On the easier side is the difference between natural flowers with their texture, hues and fragrance and artificial look-alike flowers. On the complex side is the natural way (fire, flood, solar-action, wind-force etc) to convert one form of energy into another and artificial way of doing it say in lighting a bulb. It becomes even more complex when we think of the fact that human beings are part of Nature and there is nothing that they can do that has Free Will (Please read: ‘How Unbiased Or Innocent Can We Become?’). Hence, if Natural is God’s Creation, accepting as something Artificial is like accepting that someone other than God can create. Let alone faith, it is against the science of law of conservation of energy. So much for the distinction between Natural and Artificial. God makes the temperature drop as we move away from the centre of the Earth (increase altitude) and away from the Sun (in earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun); that is natural. But, we, as human beings made air-conditioning (God had no role to play in it!) and made temperature fall wherever we are even when we are closest to the Sun in the orbit of the Earth. Now, that is Artificial.

(Michaelangelo's The Procreation) — (Michaelangelo’s The Procreation)

With this background, lets look at some of the debatable philosophies of life; I call all our philosophies as philosophies of convenience to serve specific purposes or objectives. Lets examine if these are anachronisms.

Philosophy #1 We Should Be Selfless

An ideal man, it is said, is the one who is selfless. To start with, if you read ‘How Unbiased Or Innocent We Can Become?’, you would know that to be completely selfless (without ‘haume’ as Guru Granth Sahib calls it) is to find and merge with param atma. Therefore, we can only be partially selfless.

Now, lets examine how being selfless is against the grain of human nature (what a word, you may say, when seen in the light of the discussion on Natural and Artificial.

Every instinct and every reflex action of a human being, over generations and centuries, is honed towards self-preservation and survival. Indeed, Men have come up with Herculean efforts, brave and courageous acts that we have admired in furtherance of their survival instincts.

You take away self from Man and he merges with Param Atma. That means that it is not possible to be absolutely selfless for a man. Would that really be the purpose of Life that God sent us on this earth and we should always be doing everything to merge back with Him? We can only be partially selfless. However, in the bigger definition of selflessness, to do something for the betterment of one’s soul, family, nation and world still has the element of haume’ about it; one does it because it is one’s own. There is still me and mine involved in it. A mother, for example, does everything for her child; it would be somewhat more selfless if she did for other than her own child. It would be somewhat more selfless if she did it without thinking of gains for her own soul.

Philosophy #2 We Should Not Live In The Past or We Should Forget The Past

All our knowledge is in the past. The world is made safer, securer and better place to live in because of past knowledge. And yet, many of those who have the best interests of our society in mind routinely tell us to forget the past.

In our survival instincts, we are hard wired to remember the past and learn from it. We don’t have to, for example, die ourselves to learn the horrors of dying. We have knowledge of people dying and we consciously avoid all those things that can kill us; say, for example, jumping from high-rise buildings.

Think of how dangerous the world would become if all of us we were to forget the past and start discovering everything afresh. Think of how lost we would be if we were to start with a clean slate everyday or every hour. In this case, Ignorance will not be bliss.

There are people and countries such as Taliban in Afghanistan who tried to bury the past. But, these generally have disastrous results.

Another connected advice or philosophy is to live in the present. It is like living in a house made of just one straw. That’s exactly what Present is; a fleeting moment that becomes past like a bubble in a pond. Trying to capture the Present is like holding this bubble in the palm of one’s hand.

Lastly, the Past also enables us to provide an anchor to excel. So, if you are trying to break the world record in high jump, and you have been jumping, say, 6 feet, you are able to make out the gap that you must fill. Other people’s similar feats also enable us to emulate and excel.

Philosophy #3 All Men Are Born Equal

Of all the hogwash that is dished by those who are adept at making feel-good philosophies, this takes the cake.

Millions of years ago when Life started on earth, it is possible that God may have made all men equal. However, over all these years, generational and genetic memory ensured that each became unique and different. It is for this reason that even though the DNA of even twins at birth is the same, it undergoes changes as they grow up and their children do not have the same DNA.

This philosophy of convenience actually fills us with hope that we have the same chances of succeeding as, say, Bill Gates or Narendra Modi.

Every once in a while we have success stories from those who were not born with silver spoons in their mouths but did well through sheer grit and commitment. The fact is that if similar grit and commitment were displayed by the ones born with silver spoons, it would be a totally different story.

Now, I am not suggesting that it should fill each of us with defeatism that we were not born of the same mould as Ambanis or Birlas. All I am saying here is that it is okay to make peace with one’s circumstances dictated by generations of data-memory and move on to do one’s best to achieve the best under the circumstances.

Philosophy #4 As You Sow, So Shall You Reap

There is absolutely no proof of this philosophy except in folklore. It appears to be a plaintive cry for divine justice by the meek and the downtrodden and fills him with hope when he sees that the thugs, ruffians, and cheaters in the world seem to be doing well in comparison to the good guys. The latter imagine the former burning in the fires of the hell and paying for their sins.

In South India there is a respectable chain of restaurants. At the entrance of these restaurants is a picture of the founder with huge sandalwood garland around it. You are filled with great respect for the man whose vision, sagacity and generosity enabled him to set up mass eating joints at affordable prices. Decades later many had forgotten that he had spent time in jail for making counterfeit money and that he was enjoying the fruits of his earlier labour after his jail term.

These days, the rich and the influential don’t even have to go to jail before enjoying the fruits of their deceit and swindles.

In a recent article titled ‘Is Truth Worth Fighting For?’ I had concluded that all that the conscientious and the saintly do get is the hope that, in the end, they would die happily. So the reward for them to have spent their lives in constant toil and misery is the promise of happiness when the body and soul part. Some compensation that.

Most people are nowadays already aware of it and leave the count of those that live wretchedly but are promised happy deaths.

When the evil don’t appear to be getting just punishments, we cover it up by saying that someone somewhere in one of their previous lives has done something good or that they would suffer in their next lives.

The charade goes on.

It is absolutely debatable whether your deeds, good or bad, will repay you in kind.

It is time we found a new philosophy.

Philosophy #5 Religions Started Centuries Back Should Be Preserved Till The End of the World

Lastly, all present major religions in the world are based on the premise that God or Son of God arrived in this world only during a certain period of time in history, started the religion for all times to come and all those who are loyal adherents of these religions are pious and righteous. The rest are as good or bad as pagans. God will one day punish the non-believers.

The followers of all major religions also believe in and practice the philosophy that even violence and war, in the name of God and Religion are just and justified. Hence, Religion and God are worth laying down lives for – one’s own and those of one’s enemies.

Lastly, the followers of all major religions in the world believe that since the founders of the religions were God or descendants, these have been writ in stone and nothing in these should ever change.

In my ‘Whose God Is It Anyway?’ I had brought out that when, for example, Mohammad told his followers that men should marry many women, he had in mind the war widows of the 7th century AD in Arabia who were young and required shelters, which could be provided to them if men married them. He won’t have made this as a law for all times to come.

There, I have given you at least five philosophies and beliefs that are debatable and suffer from obsolescence. Let me hear your views, if you so desire, in the comments below.

Beliefs, perceptions and philosophies take a long time changing. Why, even expressions do. We still use the expression, for example, skeletons in the cupboard though the last person to see them must have been a hundred years ago.

It is high time we change them in keeping with the modern times. Please remember that when religions were founded they changed the existing beliefs and philosophies of those times. It can’t, therefore, be sacrilegious to do so.

Happy new year 2016 to all my readers and friends.

IS TRUTH WORTH FIGHTING FOR?

Some of my most favourite Hindi movies songs have been penned by Shakeel Badayuni and have Naushad’s music. This has been sung by my favourite singer Hemant Kumar and picturised on the village school teacher Abhi Bhattacharya in 1961 movie Ganga Jamuna:

Insaaf kii Dagar pe, bachcho.n dikhaao chal ke
Ye desh hai tumhaaraa, netaa tumhii.n ho kal ke

Duniyaa ke ra.nj sahanaa aur kuchh na mu.Nh se kahanaa
Sachchaaiyo.n ke bal pe aage ko ba.Dhate rahanaa
Rakh doge ek din tum sa.nsaar ko badal ke
Insaaf kii …

Apane ho.n yaa paraae sabake liye ho nyaay
Dekho kadam tumhaaraa haragiz na Dagamagaae
Raste ba.De kaThin hai.n chalanaa sambhal-sambhal ke
Insaaf kii …

Insaaniyat ke sar par izzat kaa taaj rakhanaa
Tan man bhii bhe.nT dekar Bharat kii laaj rakhanaa
Jiivan nayaa milegaa a.ntim chitaa me.n jal ke,
Insaaf kii …

Abhi Bhattacharya teaching village school children to follow the path of Justice and Truth (Pic courtesy: You Tube) — Abhi Bhattacharya teaching village school children to follow the path of Justice and Truth in the movie Ganga Jamuna (Pic courtesy: You Tube)

India had become a free nation less than a decade and half back and there was heady idealism in the air. These young ignited minds of our villages (India lives in its villages!) were being taught to walk on the path of Truth and Justice unwaveringly so as not just to become future netas of the country but also be filled with the promise of changing the world.

Mahatma Gandhi’s My Experiments With The Truth and Satyagraha goaded us to always seek the Truth and be counted amongst men of stature. Our schools, wherein mottoes generally adorned the walls, had Truth is God and God is Truth painted across in large letters.

It was a lofty objective but there was a sizable number of people who still believed in the Truth and saw merit in fighting for it.

It wasn’t as if that was an ideal or idealist India; the Truthful were then too poor and miserable and Liars ruled then too and lived in comfort and luxury. The path of Truth was then too more difficult than the path of Evil. The difference is that it wasn’t considered totally impractical or to be jeered at as something bereft of realities of life. Those who walked on the path of Truth were respected.

Recently, when actor Salman Khan was acquitted of all charges against him for negligently and drunkenly driving his Land Rover, late night in 2002, that went out of control on to a footpath and killed a labourer sleeping there, there was a public outcry about whether the surviving family of the victim should have sought Justice and Truth or should have shamefacedly accepted the underhand compensation that the accused would have given them and which, allegedly, would have led to the case being allowed to go awry after having been proved beyond reasonable doubts in the High Court judgment of 06 May 2015 that sentenced him to five years imprisonment? It seems that they and others involved with the case followed the more practical path than insaaf ki dagar.

A few years back a person that I am related to accepted compensation for his young son having been killed in a road accident when it was clearly the other party’s fault. I was shocked. But then my relation explained that the family had belatedly made peace with their fate and gotten over the initial trauma; and, they didn’t want to subject themselves to the trauma of seeking justice through the Indian courts.

In April 2012 I wrote an article titled ‘The Great Indian Judicial Circus‘ to bring out the true face of the Indian judicial system. I had brought out that seeking Justice through such a system is not just naive but extremely frustrating, humiliating and devoid of all dignity.

Recently, I started seeing on my computer (through Internet) old Hindi movies that I had missed out during my younger days. In many of these, a barrister was always depicted as a person of high repute. Take Adalat and Mamta as just two examples. Pradeep Kumar in the former and Ashok Kumar in the latter return after their law education in London and on return occupy a most revered position in the society. Their personal integrity and morals were supposed to be beyond reproach. Before that, we had the lofty example of the great barristers like MK Gandhi, BR Ambedkar, Chittranjan Das, Vallabhai Patel, Motilal Nehru, and others whose value system is worth emulating.

What about now? The present day lawyer or advocate is as far from seeking Truth and Justice as can get. Indeed, one of the major reasons that the Indian judicial system is in such a mess is because of the avarice of the Indian lawyer (Please also read: ‘Why Do Indian Lawyers Behave Like Gods?’).

It is because of the Indian judicial system that if you started a case in order to seek justice, it or other cases arising out of it would be pending for the rest of your life whilst both the contending lawyers would have made more money through your cases than your original loss against which you sought justice. The Salman Khans of the nation do not have cases pending against them because their money power ensures that they get expedient justice whilst some 46 Lakh cases are pending in the High Courts and thousands in the Supreme Court. But, if you are an ordinary citizen, to your original misfortune (against which you seek justice) is added the misfortune that you pay for in terms of money, loss of peace, dignity, physical and mental health.

The judicial system provides for judicial immunity enjoyed by the judges and others employed by the judiciary from liability resulting from their judicial actions. Cases where the judges have misused this immunity are increasingly surfacing in the media and public debate nowadays. But immunity generally does extend to all judicial decisions in which the judge has proper jurisdiction, even if a decision is made with “corrupt or malicious intent”. More and more cases are coming out in the open these days wherein the judges had been bought.

My family in general and I in particular have been at the receiving end of trying to get justice through the court for someone having encroached upon our land in Himachal in the year 1999, sixteen years back. We are now mired in so many cases that the original case (five times decreed in our favour but repeatedly challenged in higher court by the other party because of loopholes provided by the lawyers and/or the judges) is now relatively insignificant. The closest analogy that comes to one’s mind is that of making you forget your headache by hitting yourself hard on the toe with a hammer. That, in a nutshell, is the essence of seeking Truth and Justice through the corrupt and inefficient Indian judicial system.

“War” said Herman Wouk, “Is a terrible business in which thousands get killed and you are damn glad you are not one of them”. Likewise, if you have never been a victim of the Indian judicial system you are likely to have that superior air about you and look down at others who are forced to seek Truth and Justice through the system.

All seekers of Justice and Truth through the unending loop of Indian judicial system are not just ridiculed constantly for their impracticability; but also sneered at for not having evolved with the society. You are roughly in similar position as a rape victim. But, whilst people have at least sympathy for rape victims, no one has sympathy for you for being so obdurate as persisting with seeking Truth and Justice through the Indian system.

For the number of years – decades really – when you are fighting for Truth and Justice and your case drags on, you lose sleep, peace, money, dignity, reputation, respectability and as I brought out earlier, physical and mental health. Any time between one-third to half your life is spent in abject misery.

And, what is the reward waiting for you for having been loco enough to follow the path of Truth? Well, the song itself tells you:

Jeevan naya milega, antim chita mein jalake
(A new life after cremation!)

The 1957 V Shantaram movie had this very popular hymn penned by Bharat Vyas:

Ai maailik tere bande hum
(O, Master, we are your people)
Aise hon hamaare karam
(Our deeds should be such that)
Neki par chalen, aur badi se taren
(We should tread the path of Goodness and shun the Evil)
Take hanste huye nikale dum
(So that we should die happily)

Dying happily; is that all that one would hope to get after living in abject misery for greater part of one’s life fighting for Truth and Justice?

Two stark examples come into my mind. One is about the whistle blowers in our country who have sought the difficult, tedious and now increasingly dangerous path of Truth. Their antim chita (cremation) has been much sooner than expected. And second, about the fate of Right To Information activists; many of them lost dum (breath) in Maharashtra alone (just like the police protection officer did later who was traveling with Salman Khan on that fateful night in 2002 in his Land Rover) and one can only hope that they did so hanste huye (happily).

As the Indian society plunges further into the cesspool of hopelessness (today’s news, for example, brings out that 77 percent Indians live in various grades of poverty as per international norms) and more and more districts abandon the Indian law (already in about one-third of our districts, the Maoist belt that is, Indian rule of law, justice and governance is negligible), we have to find newer ways to convince people that virtues and human values still have a place in our society. Fighting for Truth and Justice through the Indian system is already a dodo.

How many more have written such 'stories' after he wrote? — How many more have written such ‘stories’ after he wrote?

TIME AND RAINBOW

It suddenly appeared across the hill, across the river and the rocks. Before it appeared in its seven visible vibgyor colours, there was a wedding of giddad-giddadi (he and she jackal); as was the folklore to describe rain and sun appearing together.

It appeared so near and yet so far. As a young boy I ran after it, to catch it in my little soiled hands, to bathe in its vivid hues, even to climb up and look down on the world through its prism. At that time it appeared far; it was near when I didn’t want to own it, when I wasn’t very conscious of its existence; it was far when it crept over my consciousness, when I wanted to hold it and possess it.

I have had the same experience with Time.

Before I lost myself in the rapid whirlpool of later-life Time, it flowed like a gentle stream. Indeed, at times it stood still and placid like a pond, like a lake. I didn’t know how much of it I had but it appeared vast, endless, infinite.

I played lukan-chhipi (hide n seek) with my friends and graduated to marbles, gilli-danda, football and cricket. I was small but Time was big. It was everywhere and totally free. I bought kaafal (a type of berry sold near my school, Vijay High School, Mandi), ice on stick, and an anna a booklet of film-songs lyrics. But, I never had to buy Time.

Perhaps because it was freely available, I didn’t place too much of value on it. As a young boy, I read Herman Wouk’s Caine Mutiny and as was normal for me during those days, finished it in a night’s time. How much I still remember; I am surprised. “Wasted hours” it said somewhere in the book, “Are just as painful in the beginning as in the end; only, in the end, it becomes more apparent”.

And now, looking back in time, that halcyon period of my life, when I had all the Time in the world, passed so quickly. I never tried to catch it but it appeared and disappeared like a rainbow; it was here a moment ago: red, orange, yellow and so on and now it is gone; not even the fading colours beyond violet and below red are there now.

Last to last night I saw the Hindi movie Maya that I wanted to see with its beautiful Salil da numbers based on Western classical music beats: Tasveer teri dil mein, jis din se banaayi hai and Jaa re jaa re udd jaa re panchhi. It turned out to be a trash movie and I rued the two and a half hours’ time that I wasted watching it. Two and half hours; in my boyhood days, I used to spend many times that time just day dreaming, writing worthless poetry or catching butterflies.

It is the same sand, passing through the same small opening in the hour-glass; why does it appear to be draining out much faster now? There appears to be lots to do and very little Time to do it. How do I slow it down? Should I catch it now before it gets still faster and makes me akin to a twig being pushed through the flow against my wish? Did I ever have the power to slow it, to stop it; if not to reverse it? Could I have ever caught the rainbow?

I don’t even think about how it would have been if I had thought, planned and done things differently. I am not even filled with ‘If Only’ regrets. But, it still gnaws me to think about whether I ever had the power to do things independently in my own way or whether I have been in a puppet in the hands of Time, trying to catch rainbows and doing things what have been writ for me including writing this article?

ज़िन्दगी में
ज़िन्दगी की तलाश में
ज़िन्दगी को पाने के लिए
कहाँ कहाँ नहीं गया?
क्या क्या ना किया?
पल पल, छिन छिन,
ज़िन्दगी मोम की तरह
पिघलती रही
ना जाने क्या थी?
ना जाने क्या है?
चंद लम्हे और मिल जाते
लौ कुछ और देर जलती
फिर क्या होता?
वक़्त का सितम
ठहर जाता क्या?
यादों के मरहले
खड़े होके क्या ना बिखरते?
कौस-ओ-क़ज़ाह
हाथ में आ जाता क्या?
ख्वाब की
ख़याल की
सराब की
असलियत समझ आ जाती क्या?
किस को मिली है आज़ादी
वक़्त की ज़ंजीरों से?
कौन समझा है?

Zindagi mein
Zindagi ki talaash mein
Zindagi ko paane ke liye
Kahaan kahaan nahin gaya?
Kyaa kyaa na kiyaa?
Pal pal, chhin chhin,
Zindagi mome ki tarah
Pighalti rahi.
Naa jaane kyaa thi?
Naa jaane kyaa hai?
Chand lamhe aur mil jaate
Lau kuchh aur der jalati
Phir kyaa hota?
Waqt ka sitam
Thehar jaata kyaa?
Yaadon ke marhale
Khade hoke kyaa na bikharte?
Qous-o-qazah
Haath mein aa jaata kyaa?
Khwaab ki
Khayaal ki
Saraab ki
Asleeyat samajh aa jaati kyaa?
Kis ko mili hai azaadi
Waqt ki zanjeeron se?
Kaun samajha hai?

“WE ARE ABOUT TO GET FULL OROP”

This is in good humour and should be read in that spirit only:

The year is 2023. In a solemn ceremony, veterans (those who are stll alive, that is) have gathered fondly at the venue of their fiercest and bitterest campaign field; not Kargil, not Poonchh or Khemkaran, not even at Siachen, but, at Jantar Mantar. They are celebrating the golden jubilee of their campaign to restore OROP that was taken away from them in 1973.

I am just about to touch seventy but there is still enthusiasm in covering mammoth events and rallies.

I overhear an old veteran telling another with immense satisfaction, “We were lucky that although we won the Kargil War in 1999, lost and wounded nearly 2000 soldiers and it was indeed a great victory, the government of India still didn’t punish us as they did after 1971 War.”

To this, one really old veteran, barely able to stand even with his walking stick, responds, “Indira Gandhi was different. Her way of rewarding the victors in war was to reduce their pensions. But, thankfully she didn’t follow in the footsteps of emperor Shahjehan who cut off the hands of the chief architect who made the Taj Mahal”.

Now, it is the turn of the first veteran to interject: “Yeah, she was a kind lady. No wonder the Congress refers to her as Priyadarshini (delightful to look at).”

They would have continued on and on like…like…well, like talking old soldiers but then Major General Satbir Singh, SM, OM, Retd., arrived at the venue. If you are wondering what OM is, it is an OROP Medal that the government introduced in the year 2016, just to keep the agitators in good humour. This medal, the government was proud of proclaiming, had been made after melting all the other medals that the veterans returned in end 2015, showing their displeasure at the government’s apathy towards veterans.

Soon after that babus, police and para-military personnel demanded OM to be given to them too. The government had tough time reasoning with them that they couldn’t have their cake and eat it too; or in other words, have OROP as well as OM. As always, babus, police and para military personnel were not convinced and demanded that the government should give them too adequate medals so that they too have something to return when they don’t get what they want.

General Satbir is old but his face still has that glow and his eyes still have the glint that only those have who believe in honest and straightforwardness and for the cause of their men more than for themselves.

The shouts of, “Sadda haq, itthe rakh” ( Our right, give it now) fill the air. It has been a great war-cry. JP Dutta, the veteran film-maker, in the year 2019 made a movie with this title. The movie had remake of a popular fauji song: ‘Sandeshe aate hain, hamen tadpaate hain’ to tell the plight of the veterans receiving messages from the Prime Minister Narendra Modi that finally the full OROP was just around the corner but the veterans still not seeing light across the tunnel.

Sandeshe aate hain, hamen tadpaate hain (Cartoon courtesy: sainikdarpan.blogspot.com)

It is 14th Aug 2023 and they find an extremely frail, 91 years old, Grenadier Vishambar Singh, stumbling across to the venue with a naked torso. General Satbir noticing him shirtless asks, “Vishambar ji aap shirt ghar bhool aaye, kyaa?” (Vishambar ji, you forgot your shirt at home, or what?)

Vishambhar replies, “Nahin saab ji; kal azaadi diwas hai. Aath saal pehle, aaj ke din, pulsiyon ne mil ke meri shirt faad di thi. Ab saab ji itane paise to nahin hai jo har saal nayi shirt banwaayun. Isliye ghar chhod ke aaya hoon.” (No, Sahib ji; tomorrow is the Independence Day. Eight years ago, the police tore my shirt (here). Now, Sahib ji, I don’t have enough money to buy a new shirt every year. That’s why I left it at home.)

Colonel Kaul whispers from behind General Satbir Singh, “Theek hai. But, we should be ashamed. Men are losing their shirts and sleep over OROP but the blasted OROP is nowhere in sight.”

General Satbir, “I have been told it is just around the corner now. They have nearly sorted out the VRS issue by coming up with a formula that decides your share of OROP depending upon your medical category, age, retirement age, rank and number of years left for superannuation. Of course, it would still be denied to you if you don’t follow the family planning norms. That’s the latest clause introduced by the babus“.

In the background, a reporter is heard talking to a Times of India reporter, “Massive rally by the veterans. I hope this time, at least; you are going to cover it”. The ToI reporter replies, “We have normally been giving it space next to the Obituary column as both are serious and dead issues. Let me see, if someone dies we shall give adequate cover to his body and to this grave issue”.

Just then a plush limousine slides to a halt in front of Jantar Mantar. A happy veteran alights in his worsted suit, gold tie-pin etc. All the other veterans are agog with envy and ask, “So, you actually got arrears of OROP, did you?”

“Nothing of that sort” the wealthy veteran replies, “I took General Satbir’s call for Black Diwali seriously. I invested, in the last eight years, money saved from lamps and crackers, in Narendra Modi’s Achhe Din Aa Rahen Hain Fund (Happy Days Are Coming Fund). The bourses gave me hundred to one on my betting correctly on the outcome of the promise and the fund. I also bought 100 shares of Mann Ki Baat Radio Services at 10 rupees a share. Each one is a lakh rupees a piece now.”

Ninety-one year old Vishambar starts crying uncontrollably. He lost his shirt for nothing.

Category: Opinions