Silence

On Tuesday, 18th July 2006, a week after the Mumbai blasts, the whole nation or atleast some parts of it, observed a minute of silence in the evening to "show solidarity" with the victims. The fact that we are in general a very emotional population, this event helped the media to not only increase its TRP but also to exaggerate the import of the gesture. It was a gesture aimed to tell the victims that, "All of us are with you in this moment of tragedy". That's it. But to say that it was a gesture that gave a "strong message to the terrorist" is simply ridiculous and this was what our media did.

Each time a bomb blast takes place injuring innocent men, women and children, apart from the politcal rhetoric about winning the war on terror, these sentimental-solidarity-expressing gestures have become a commonplace in India although neither the government takes any concrete action against the terrorists and their networks nor do we demand that from the government. I believe the only way we can offer some consolation to the victims of terror is by hunting the terrorists down, putting a freeze on their activities and accounts and convicting them for all the heinous crimes they have so far committed.

The power of silence can neither stun nor scare the terrorist. A mere expression of solidarity cannot defeat terror. The sooner the media, the government and we the people realize it, the better it is for the nation.

Insanity unlimited

As a solution to the ongoing "temple scandals" where a number of women (at last count three) entered various temples (at last count the number of such temples was two) they were not supposed to enter according to some medieval rules of the respective temples, the liberals with all their intellect suggested the same old solution of making entry to all temples open to both men and women. But this hasn't quite been implemented. Hence, logically, we can safely assume that this solution doesn't work. So why not try something different?

That different solution entails having entry to temples exclusively to either men or women and in some cases to both. This isn't discriminatory because neither men nor women are allowed access to all the temples. This also promotes the concept of unity of God because more than the temple's deity, the gender of the devotee will be more important. Hence more than being a Shiva temple or Ganesha temple, the temple would be a men's one or women's one.

Further extending this concept to children, we can have children's temple where only children are allowed. Also we can have temples based on age groups. For example, an under-19 temple will allow only people under the age of 19. This will allow temple authorities to market their temples better by providing the facilities that their temple's devotees (or shall I say visitors) would desire. An under-19 temple would not normally need a meditation hall. It can instead have a big internet parlour.

Well, I think I should end this post here. Otherwise I would be allowed only inside an asylum.

We the people of India...

Last week, I had the "Constitution of India and Professional Ethics" exam, hopefully the last theory exam (I said hopefully, since it all obviously depends on the results) of my engineering course. While studying for this exam(this act of studying normally happens on on the day before the exam), I realized an important truth; and that was the fact that our Constitution can be used (or shall I say amended) tactfully to solve most of the problems facing this great country.

Although the solution is simple, somehow we haven't even attempted it yet. Only Indira Gandhi came near it. She included the word "socialist" in the preamble to our constitution and made this nation a socialist state - a goal accomplished through bloody revolutions in China and Russia. Similarly, she made this nation "secular" officially, again by the mere addition of the word "secular" to the preamble.

What we need today is a further extension of this concept of amending the constitution tactfully, purposefully. The problem of corruption ceases to be a problem if we simply include another word to our great constitution - "Corrupt". The preamble would then be something like, " WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR CORRUPT DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC..". Simply put, this will have a significant impact on this nation not just economically but also w.r.t. literature, arts, cinema and many more. We will have books like, "Seven effective ways of highly corrupt people", "The Corrupt Indian" and the like. We will also see a genre of movies where there will be no evil since corruption (against which many movie stars have fought, although in movies)would no longer be an evil.

Another fight of present day governments is against people who do not pay tax. This can be tackled easily. All you need to do is abolish taxes. This, when done with the previous move of making corruption legal, will not have any bad effects. While corruption increases the sources of livelihood for people , tax abolition will increase their savings and thus people can themselves spend on building roads, toilets, schools, swimming pools and basketball courts. Such in-house(literally) sporting facilities like basketball courts can nurture young sporting talents in the country and help us realize the dream of winning more than a medal in Olympics.

As I told in my previous post, we can also declare our nation as "obscenely backward class" nation. This avoids the need to bring periodic legislations to enhance reservations.

As I said these are very simple moves (simpler than reserving seats in IIMs) that have to be taken by the government. Only thing is we don't have people in the government who are bold enough to execute these measures.

How to make India number one in cricket

Today evening, me, Arjun, Arvind played a game of cricket. But with a lot of innovation. You were out if you were unable to make the bat meet the cricket ball twice in a row and also if you made that bat-ball(cricket ball, I am making this clear to avoid unnecessary misinterpretations) contact more than four times. This led to a lot of funny ways of getting out. The game ended. But the innovative thinking (or stupid thinking, perhaps) continued.

We sat down to take some much needed rest after a not so tiring game of cricket. The issue of reservations came up for discussion, but in a lighter vein. We have heard about how reservations can be introduced in cricket team selections. We applied this concept more fully in that discussion(Doesn't this word sound very bureaucratic?). In the following passages, I shall explain how.(Doesn't this sentence sound like one from a textbook?)

The basic assumption is that the backward classes do not have access to quality primary net facilities and coaches. Consequently they will have low batting averages and very few number of wickets to their credit. So they need affirmative action to compete with upper classes who have obscenely high batting averages and who have taken a lot of wickets. ("Survey on batting averages of upper castes and wickets tally of upper castes - 1947-2006 by Yogendra Yadav" shows that all upper caste batsmen, on an average, had a batting average of 15,234 runs and had, on an average, taken 23,456 wickets).

In order to bring about social justice in cricket, the Government therefore, has to bring about some rules. One of them is giving 27 runs extra for every 100 runs scored by an OBC batsman. This can help the team as a whole because, if all batsmen are OBCs , then the team has to score only 73% of the target if batting second or the opponents have to score 127% of the target. That's why noted social scientist Yogendra Yadav says, "Reservations and affirmative actions help the country achieve higher glory". But there is one catch here. Other nations might not accept to this. Then we can simply pass a terse ordinance saying, "India is an Obscenely Backward Class Nation. Non compliant nations will have nothing to do with this new OBC nation".

Well, this isn't enough. We have to help our "oppressed brethren" even more. For every wicket that an OBC bowler takes, 3 more wickets will be added to his tally of wickets also resulting in 3 more batsmen getting out without facing a ball.
I can't emphasise more on how this will catapult India into the top slot in every form of criket among the cricketing nations of the world.

Also, all appeals by an upper class bowler against an OBC batsman will be referred to the "Committe (17 members) to look into oppressive appeals made by upper class bowlers against poor OBC batsman who have no access to quality primary nets". After the committe decides on the issue within a day or two that the OBC batsman was not out, the match proceeds.

Also, we can have shorter wickets for OBC batsman and longer ones for others. By all these measures, we can become the number one cricketing nation of the world. Our sucess will then be tried out by different countries. But since the competence of our politicians in this field is unmatched, they will always remain a step ahead in bringing about more such rules. Then, the other countries would have to just keep trying without the kind of success that we would have achieved.

Stuck in an elevator

The one thing that frightens me in a building is, elevator. Particularly, the automated one. Not that the old fashioned manual ones, that you dont find these days, didn't frighten me. But, atleast there you had more functions of the elevator, like opening and closing the door, under your complete control. Whenever I use an elevator, nightmarish thoughts like, "What will happen if I get stuck in the elevator for several hours? Will I be overwhelmed by claustrophobic feelings? Will I survive in the lift without food for hours?" never cease to cross my mind. Because of such apprehensions, I had hardly used the lift until I joined my engineering college.

Even in my engineering college, initially, I used the lift very rarely. But somehow I concealed my fears. After some time, due to sheer laziness to climb the stairs, I started to make use of the lift despite my innumerable fears about it.

For three years, my fears about the lift hadn't come true. So with only a couple of months remaining for my engineering course to complete, I had thought that these fears wont come true in my college. This was significant considering the fact that the lifts in our college (there are 4 of them) dont work properly all the time. But last month, the unthinkable happened, albeit in a smaller proportion.

On that evenful day, we (three of us - myself and my friends Guru Anandh and Satish) entered the lift in the fourth floor. This was a lift that was not in the operational mode very often. But that didnt deter us. As soon as we got in, I made sure that the lift would stop in all the floors that we would come across on our way to the ground floor by pressing the relevant keys for all the floors.

Unlike the Cyrius Cybernetics Corporation elevators, this one obediently stopped as expected in the third floor. Since no one was willing to use the services of the elevator at that instant of time in the third floor, we closed the door and proceeded downwards. Strangely, it didn't stop in the second floor. It started moving to its next stop - first floor. At this point, Guru (not me, my friend) wondered aloud, "What if the power goes off now?".(He just told this in a lighter vein, not out of any fears of the kind that I have). As soon as he finished saying this, the power went off. We were three fourths of the way down from the second floor to the first floor. The lift stopped since the generator wasn't turned on that day. The inner door of the lift was half-opened (though you will see only one door opening when it is functioning normally) with the outer one in the background closed fully. Fortunately, there was a small gap between the outer doors that was sufficient to communicate with the outer world. The upper part of the inner door was covered by the wall. To say that this was a frightening situation for me, would be an understatement. My legs were trembling. My heart was pounding in a way that it had never done before.

But the other two in the lift, far from panicking were amused at being stuck in a lift. My panic only added to their amusement. This, needless to say, added to my tension.
Anyway, all of us started screaming for help. Because of the strange position of the lift, not many realised that it was stuck. Finally someone came to our rescue. He called the lift operator who was conspicuous by his absence till now. By this time we had managed to open the inner doors completely by pressing the key normally used to open the door in toatlity. The lift operator, then did as simple a thing as turning a screw to open the two halves of the outer door completely. The sense of relief that the opened doors brought to me is something that cannot be described.
Since the lift was stuck quarter of a distance from the first floor, we had to jump out of the lift onto the floor below that was at a short distance. With this final act performed, this whole drama, that lasted for about ten minutes, came to an end. But its memory will remain with me for a long time to come.