The Zero sum Game

They took everything from us and claimed as their own. We believed them, awestruck with their perceived superiority, as if we were watching a ring fight between an ant and an elephant. They say that out of sheer mercy, I have a different theory although, they us back one singular thing and we could not even cling to that tight enough as we had tried mercilessly to forget our past or anything that was once good about us.

I have a feeling that they gave it back as they could not really understand the concept of it. They gave back with some vengeance, “Here, take it and explain to the world what it means”. They smiled at our back and we were at a loss to figure out what this moth ball shaped thing was all about.

I was hardly twelve years old, when I was despatched to a boarding school in Kusumapura. The school was affiliated to the University of Nalanda and specialized in high level mathematics and astronomy, both subjects I hated the most. The only saving grace was the school co-educational, but as always, beautiful girls hardly come to study such dry and boring subjects. The school was situated outskirts of the main city of Pataliputra, almost in the middle of what I thought as a forest, making it impossible for the students to bunk class and catch a movie in Pataliputra.

The principle was a young brilliant scholar who went by the name of Aryabhata. He was quite reserved and introvert and we always found him huddled in the corner of the library writing notes. But as a teacher he was excellent and made mathematics a fun subject.

It was so easy to find a number which leaves a reminder of 1 when divided by 2,3,4,5,6, but is exactly divided by 7 or to solve general equations like 3x+5y=1.

Aryabhata was lonely and missed his lover in Nalanda and she was stunningly beautiful, we heard. He used to sit under the wood-apple tree, lost in his stupor, misted eyes, dreaming about her. He felt the emptiness in his heart, “How can thoughts of love be so painful”? , he would say to Bhaskara, his favourite student. He wrote long letters to her but never posted them, they remained as treatises of unequivocal love. In despair he sank into the depth of his subject, solving problems of the nature ax + by = c.

His desires, loneliness transcended his sense of space and time and one day he worked like a man possessed to find out the solution to derive the circumference of a circle. He taught us these new techniques by intuit and we could see only Bhaskara document it in his neatly maintained plantain leaf notebook. We later found out that the approximation of π was correct up to five decimal places.

One day, while he was resting under the tree, maybe dreaming of his lady love, a wood apple fell from the tree and landed next to him, missing his head by whiskers. The sound woke him up and realizing what had happened, he instinctively rubbed him palm over his bald head and murmured, “When the soul is empty even thousand arrows cannot inflict any pain, but an uncovered head is a different thing”. He strode to the study and kept on murmuring, “When the soul is empty, when the soul is empty”.

The next day when he came to the class he had a profound disposition, as if he had just attained enlightenment. He spoke about the curved nature of space and even if we have an infinite number at some point it will meet.

He spoke of Brahma, the Absolute, and how all matters in the universe were intrinsically linked to him.

He confessed that his desires, impure thoughts has digressed him from his true calling and he realized that to pursue pure love one has to have a pure soul, which is seldom possible in the boundaries of society.

He then spoke of the emptiness, the void or “sunya” as the plane that separates all concepts like black and white, right and wrong, life and death, happiness and pain and as if in a trance he scribbled a wood-apple on the black board and said,” Let this symbol define the beginning of an end”.

We hardly understood what he said and after sometime forgot all about it. Bhaskara, as a true disciple, spent all his life trying to make sense of it and even passed it on to his students like Barahamihira, Bhahmagupta as an unsolved problem.

Time passed and we waited for some supreme beings to solve the unsolved problem for us. The westerners took it, gave a halfhearted interpretation, the Chinese escaped with a quaint symbol and the ball was thrown back to us.

We, as stupid as we always have been, to avoid the problem have started doubting the ethnicity of Aryabhata – the Arya in the name smacks of Aryan and hence he is a foreigner who invaded our country and drove the Dravidians down south.

It will take few more centuries, if at all, to find out what “Sunya” really means, but at least for centuries to come we can avoid the problem by debating on the region where Aryabhata came from and trying to pass on the problem to that damned country, who gave birth to such a hopeless person, who in pain of love found out “Sunya”.

HAPPY REPUBLIC DAY

Our next door neighbours, a pesky couple in their late twenties, living together, turned out to be quite patriotic, given the fact that the male constituent is from the country from whose rule we got relieved in 1947.
They started their Republic Day celebrations when the clock stuck twelve and continued till five ‘o’ clock in the morning. Beers and whiskey flowed like water as if John Barleycorn was the guest of honour. Electronic music pumped from the music system and the only saving grace was the fact that the neighbours down below has taken a leave of absence.
My kid woke up to the cacophony at around 3 a.m. and my wife had a tough time putting him back to sleep. It was hard to explain him that living in an apartment has its pitfalls and the only way of having a house in today’s world is either you have it run down hereditary or you have wealth disproportionate to your legal source of income, which is only possible if you are a policeman, politician, public relation agent or a portfolio manager. He is too young to understand the nuances of 4Ps and Cs.
By early morning, our neighbours and their party circuit were too tired or too drunk even to recognize each other and right now might be sleeping in the arms of strangers.

I switched on the television at nine and made my kid to sit and watch the Republic Day parade. He has never heard of the word “parade” before and thought that I was refereeing to a “parrot”. So he kept on asking me when will the parrot come and told me all things he knew about a parrot,” Parrot is Green colour, Parrot can fly, Parrot is a bird and Teacher says it is not a vegetable.” After waiting for fifteen minutes for his elusive parrot to come, he thought it was enough, this Parrot is worse that our train service and wanted to go back to his Cartoon Network, where Ben10 was there to save the planet from all the aliens.

It was after a long time that I watched the Republic Day parade. The age old white Ambassador cars have been replaced by swanky BMWs. The Prime Minister arrived in a seven series BMW in a JJ Bhalya outfit to pay tribute to the “Amar Jawans” in the India Gate. My wife pointed that the President was draped in a very fashionable, white, designer Kanchivaram Saree. At that age it was really difficult for her to stand through three hours of this ordeal, after all there was no shed above her and she almost had the same plight as that of the street beggars.

I once heard a rumour that the armaments displayed in the parade are a part of a tribute to their services. After the parade they are sold as scraps as they have outlived their usage.

From last few days the street vendors have been selling the tricolor at the road crossings. With rising prices, even the bargain champion could not get one below five rupees, albeit the fact that there was a group discount for more than ten pieces. Unlike the politicians they had limited choices in their marketing promotions. They could not offer 20% free and distort the tricolor and neither had the scope of buy one and get one free, like the politicians are telling the separatists, take Kashmir and get Jammu free.

The malls have been well decorated, with tricolor shaped balloons, special promotions to invite the holiday crowd. The mall workers have been given new dresses for the occasion, to be deducted in installments from their monthly salary – there is nothing called “Free” Lunch or Dinner and not even snacks.
I had been out to measure the atmosphere in the streets, called up on an Auto Rickshaw to take me to a nearby distance. An old Muslim driver, had two tricolors crisscrossed at the wheels smiled at me and said in broken Hindi, “I am taking you today, but would have refused if it was any other day”.

What does Republic Day mean to him?
Patriotism does not come by birth or by education, nor by teachings or by intellect. Ours is derived out of fear and greed, as we grow old and keep on thinking about the unsafe world where our children will be thrusted upon. So we hide under the facade of secularism, patriotism or any other schism so that the country we stay in is a little safer.
Now a days the cost of life is cheaper than that of Onions, yesterday a group of people burnt alive a collector when he found out that they are adulterating kerosene, per litre cost of which is less than a kilogram of onion.

But for the man on the street, for my Auto driver, the day is a reminder that in spite of all the trepidations faced by the terror strikes, inflation, scams, political innuendos; it is a celebration of the fact that we after all are all part of the biggest democracy.
It is in these “common” people that celebration of Republic Day gets a sense of responsibility.
Today is the day where corruption will take a backseat and hence a Public Holiday.
JAI HIND!!

The Beggar who came from the Cold

The visit of President Obama is filled with uniqueness and this inimitability suits the stated purpose of the visit.
Nowadays it is a fashion in the business circle to measure the effectiveness and performance of a newly appointed CEO on the basis of a report card based on the first hundred days in the office. The CEO also makes sure that in the first 100 days he visits to inspire the subsidiaries in the countries which are generating or have the potential of delivering higher returns, India often featuring in the top 10 of this list

The president may be allowed some concessions for not having to make it in the first 100 days, but surely did he visit China and India in the same year and stopped short of visiting Pakistan in spite of coming so near.

Also President Obama may be the first and presumably the last non-white president of the U.S. to visit India as America impedes their experiment with “change”.

This is the first time a President of America came calling to India on a purely business mission and landed in Mumbai, bypassing the state honour at Delhi.
What ever was left of “strategic” policies with the South Block was shifted to a secondary visit after the main mission was accomplished.

On the first day of the meeting while some symbolic private deals worth around $10 billion were struck by private ventures, while in Mumbai you have to play along with Ambanis, the press and media went ballistic on the mere modalities of non issues like President never uttering the sinful word, Pakistan, and how India will benefit from this visit.

The American administration has made no false claims about this visit as being purely a mission to save the greatest nation of the world albeit the fact that our expectations are simply creations of our own fecundity.

But a careful look will emphasis on the point, what really America has to offer besides "running" shoes and "bottled aerated" water and an operating system which crashes more often than its running period?

There is not much of technology that America can offer in the field of agriculture, industrial technology, healthcare and communications - either India has the self expertise or they have better partners in Europe to choose from.

Today is a far cry from the fifties and sixties where Indian Prime Ministers went to U.S. with begging bowls asking for food to feed the ever growing hunger of people, fed over enthusiastically on doses of socialism and what India got in return was rotten, rejected lots of PL240 wheat, which was meant for cattle feed in U.S.

The only thing that America can offer is military technology, where it has got real expertise, cultivated through decades and tested at all battlefields in the world , which had been their own creation for testing their developments.

This is where the President is needed to do a hard sell with India, as India has a strategic reliance on Russia, France and to some extent even Israel on these issues.

Nowadays military deals are predominantly done by politicians and thrust upon the armed forces, with a result that to some extent we have seen our intelligence and military capabilities compromised.

This visit of President Obama is no exception, except for the fact that Americans, in a way they do the best, has taken their best leaf out of the marketing expertise from Harvard or MIT and succeeded in camouflaging the whole visit with a "partnership" or "collaborative" overtone.

We, in India, stand to gain nothing out of this visit, not even money that can buy you a candy. America has come with a begging bowl but with a mentality, of a misplaced notion, as the most powerful nation of the world.

This is clearly reflected in the tone and tenor of the president and while we may jump around, with our never ending colonial mentality, relishing on his intellect and charisma and wanting our politicians to be wearing pinstriped suits and speaking cultivated Harvard "English", but at the end of the day for a farmer dying of hunger neither the town hall meetings or the business meets gives them any hope of survival.

This is typical of America as it is typical of India to be subservient to any visitor, even to Pakistan, under the guise of our heritage of treating our guests as God.
Over the last six decades India was looked down upon by the U.S. state administration, so much so that Henry Kissinger did not think twice before calling Prime Minister Indira Gandhi a “bitch”. There is a growing rhetoric that we must forget the past and move ahead, but this rhetoric will remain rhetoric, till the major political parties can forget about the incidents of 1984, 1998 and 2002 and move ahead. Selective amnesia can be disconcerting.

While the Tea Party may object to what they see as an abject wastage of money spent in this visit of President Obama to India, we Indians hardly see the amount of capital that will be carried away by the Air Force One leaving us doing what best we can - sucking our thumbs.
November may be too early or in this context even Mumbai, but this visit of the President Obama can be aptly termed as "The Beggar who came from the Cold", to borrow from John Le’ Carre, and if that may restore any pride in our already famished hearts.

Enjoy - My Fellow Countrymen

The following is an article published in The Telegraph.
Only the so called Bengali intellectual can relish & digest such articles without any feelings of discontent.
This is by some non descriptive Supreme Court lawyer called Rajeev Dhawan - scooped out by NDTV after the "Ayodhya verdict" - please note that the fellow never uses the word but referes as "Babri Masjid" judgement.
The best part are his recommendations - with such people around India can never fail.
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Like Caesar’s “Ides of March”, the much-awaited Babri Masjid judgment by the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court has come, but not gone. It is now certain that both Muslim and Hindu litigants are going to appeal to the Supreme Court. It is no less certain that the Supreme Court will stay (stop the operation of) the judgment to prevent any further unilateral action by an aggressive sangh parivar.

Aggression by the Muslims is unlikely. After the Babri Masjid judgment, they have become a much weakened minority. They lost when Hindu idols were placed in the Babri Masjid complex on December 22-23, 1949. Insult, most unbecoming, was added to injury when the masjid was destroyed on December 6, 1992, whilst the world looked on. Then came the final blow when the Lucknow bench judgment of September 30 disempowered them both legally and morally. What will they negotiate with — except concede their claim for the greater glory of the Indian (Hindu?) nation?

The judgment was delivered by three judges: S.U. Khan, Sudhir Agarwal and Dharam Veer Sharma. It is customary in such cases to have a minority judge on the bench so that, at least, appearances are met. In the Babri Masjid Case I (1994), concerning the validity of the government takeover of the site and the surrounding Hindu land, it was the Muslim and Parsi judges who strongly dissented. Here, it was thought that the Muslim judge — Justice Khan — would dissent if faced with an unreasonable majority of Hindu judges.

Although there were a huge number of issues before the Lucknow bench, they can broadly be classified into two. The first was — who did the site belong to? If the answer to the first question was the Muslims, did the Hindus have a right to pray at the site? And would this right to pray have to be obtained from the Muslims or superimposed on Muslim ownership of the site? Thus, the central issue was really: who owned the site?

The answer to this question should have been simple. It had been answered in favour of the Muslims in 1885. Again in the 1940s, when Shia and Sunni Muslims fought over which waqf the site belonged to, it was the Sunnis who won. Now, if the Muslims did not own the site, how come the Sunnis won? There was also a precedent for this kind of situation. In the 1820s, the Shahid Ganj mosque had been taken over by Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

Matters simmered on. The Muslims lost the case in 1855. By 1940, the Privy Council was confident that the mosque site belonged to the Sikhs and not to the Muslims. The only further issue in the Babri case was whether Muslims had filed their case within 12 years of December 22-23, 1949, from when the Hindus claimed hostile possession of the site. There was no dispute that the idols were placed on the site that evening in December 1949. As it happens, the Muslims filed on December 18, 1961 — a few days before the limitation expired. So, they had not lost the site by adverse possession to the Hindus.

Why did this simple solution not appeal to the judges? Justices Sharma and Agarwal simply assumed that this site was always a pilgrimage for Hindus since time immemorial. Even recent history belies such a conclusion. Myth and conjecture cannot displace truth. Faith may move mountains but cannot eclipse facts. This was no basis for a legal Hindu claim to the site. This was simply imagined history. Curiously, Justice Khan went along with this theory but with some doubts.

His first doubt was that while the Hindus may have prayed in the area, there was nothing to suggest that it was the Babri site that was sacral. His second doubt was that although the Ram Chabutra and Sita Rasoi had been constructed, the claim that this was the exact spot of Ram Janmabhoomi came along only years after the mosque had been built. In other words, the Hindu claim was concocted as a counterfoil to the very existence of the mosque.

There is nothing to suggest that Muslims gave up their site. Justice Khan’s conclusion was that “both the parties i.e. Muslims and Hindus were using and occupying different portions of the premises in dispute… and both continued to be in joint possession of the entire premises in dispute”. Thus, both failed to prove their title, so the site belonged to both. So, they become joint owners. How Nirmohi Akhara was entitled to one of the portions of the site defies proper explanation.

On one issue, Justice Khan and his colleagues differed. This was the sangh parivar — Bharatiya Janata Party theory of Muslim aggressors wantonly destroying Hindu temples to build mosques. The theory was important to Hindu fundamentalists to support the Hindu case for historical revenge against idol-destroying Muslims. This approach assumes that present-day Muslims had to pay the price for their irreverent ancestors. This was a war cry for revenge. Justice Khan refused to countenance this claim for historic revenge. The archaeological evidence did not suggest that a real contemporary temple was destroyed by Babur. If Babur had done that, the site would be haram and unacceptable for Muslim prayer.

The Archaeological Survey of India’s view that the site was haram has been solidly questioned by distinguished archaeologists. Justice Khan accepted that there may have been a defunct temple in the site many centuries ago. But the Hindu judges gave total support to the sangh parivar revenge theory. The evil deeds of Muslim invaders had to be punished even if they did not take place.

This leaves the question of the Hindu right to prayer at this site. This right is predicated on the basis that there was a historical Lord Ram who was born on this very site in Ayodhya. There is no proof of this at all. But, lest the argument lose its real colour, let us assume that common sentiment assumes the existence of Lord Ram of Ayodhya. But the assertion that this very site was his birthplace was only a reaction to the fact that a mosque had been built there. What better way to discredit the mosque than to say that was the holiest of holy sites?

It was a communal argument invented for communal reasons. Such an argument could not be the basis of a property right in favour of the Hindus. If Hindus were in possession, what was the need for the trespass of putting the idols there on the night of December 22-23, 1949? The factual situation was that the Hindus had abandoned their right to the site and claim to a temple.

There is little to analyse in the judgment of Justice Sharma. It is entirely pro-Hindu, discloses no legal basis and upholds the Hindu claim for no better reason than that he wanted to do so. His judgment is absurdly long and does not sustain argument, but only sentiment. Justice Agarwal’s judgment also does not bear legal scrutiny and is insufficiently balanced in his treatment of hopelessly inconclusive historical material. Ultimately, the Hindu case is based on hearsay and ‘say so’.

What were the judges trying to do? A title suit was converted into a partition suit on the flimsy basis that since the property belongs to neither, let it belong to both. Alternatively, it has always belonged to the deity and those who took it from the deity must suffer for it. But the whole world belongs to the deity without forcing focus on his unproven birthplace on earth. But it seems that the judges were in a panchayati mood to find a solution which they had not been asked to find. “Share the site,” said the judges. Not even half-half; but two-thirds Hindu and one-third Muslim. This division eludes a proper foundation. The judicial solution is unworkable. Muslims will be ousted into a corner to feel even more insecure than they do in a majority-dominated Hindu India which lets fly at Muslims, Christians and other faiths with ferocious malice aforethought.

The suggestion that mosques can be destroyed physically and legal titles taken away with legal alacrity dishonours a secular rule of law on which India’s togetherness must rest. Some say let us bury the hatchet on this dispute and move on. This seems eminently wise. But no solution should be based on a decision which induces the minority to feel cheated out of its claims. This is yet another example of brow-beating Muslims into second-class citizenship in which they cannot even defend their legitimate rights in a court of law.

I believe a solution is possible. The site can be divided. First, the Muslims need to be given an apology before anything else is done. Apologies have an important place in dispute settlement. Second, the waqf board’s legal rights must be recognized. Third, they need to be persuaded that the old mosque or a new one will be built on, or in the vicinity of, the site. Fourth, a plan to build a world heritage area in which all religions can be accommodated should be chalked out and the land distributed accordingly to make this a world heritage site to be visited by all.

I have a sense, that if Lord Ram were to arbitrate this dispute, he would approve of this kind of a solution.

The Systematic Distortion of Indian History

History is half as true as the colour of the historian and is specifically true of history of the Indian subcontinent. While the ancient civilization in the subcontinent produced volumes on philosophy and religion and to some extent popular literature, ranging from great epics, couple of dramas to explicit eroticism in the form of Kamasutra, but when it came to writing a detailed account of day to day life or about its surrounding environment [flora, fauna, socio economic life], they almost drew a blank.

What remains today as accounts of those periods are through intermediaries, mainly through the travelogues and in some passing comments in treatises on other subjects. The visitors came from far away land like Persia, China, mostly for trade purposes or for the sheer adventure of the unknown and once they stepped into this beautiful land with the richness of material and soul, they stayed on for years devouring what ever came across their way and left with bag full of documents and an enriched heart.

The Chinese came to take away the teachings of Buddha, besides selling their silk and earthen ware, but as again there was complete lack of enthusiasm in part of his disciples to share their Masters words of wisdom. The Hunan king invited monks to China and commissioned them to translate the wisdom of Buddhism in their language and as a result the volumes of Buddhist literature in China far exceed that of India.

In the 4th century B.C. there was an attempt by Kautilya through his epic Arthashastra, which although is a treatise on statecraft, politics, economics policy and military policy, gives us certain details about life and times of that period.
The Islamic conquerors maintained, like all military generals do, a daily log and that carried on even to the Mogul dynasty with Babar to Akbar maintaining a personal account [or through their courtesans, Akbar could not read or right] like Akbarnama [Book of Akbar]. Although it served more as a military document for Babar and Humayun, but in hands of Abul Fazl it took a more refined stance, but can in no way be treated as an unbiased account of the rule and life of the subjects at that time.

The history till independence of India has been flooded by the works of European historians whose accounts ranges from mythical to spiritual to upright derogatory.
Like the “History of India” was written by John Mill, who never visited the country and never spoke any local language. This format of history suited the British as their ulterior motive was to rule the country and it would be counterproductive for the British subjects to come over to a land and hit hard against a culture which is far superior in terms of its philosophical content than theirs.
The colonial rule left copious volumes of documents, the India House having more documents than even the Central Archives of India.
Orientalism, a word made famous by Edward Said in the 20th century, influenced a breed of Indian historians and they carried on writing history of the subcontinent immersed in the same sprit of Postmodernism. The writings depended more on the official documents of the British rule, with very little independent research, but was made more accessible to the general public at large.

If history was the life of a king, his conquests, his queens, his wealth then rendition in comics like Amar Chitra Katha would suffice. But history is more than that and modern history tries to delve more into the socio economic life of the subaltern in the rule of the king. But history is no science that it can be verified by experiments, the historians need to depend on what ever account is left from those times aided with some architectural evidence.
Any event in history can have three versions – one by the perpetrator, another by the affected and the third as an outsider perspective. All accounts have their own self bias and hence it becomes a matter of hard choice for the historian to write an unbiased view of the event without being influenced, partially or fully.


Mass in a socio political context is a mere number until or unless it is led to a certain activity, either in a constructive or destructive way and it is then that the mass gathers momentum and makes relevance. Mobilisation of the mass requires a tremendous effort by the leader and the leader can be a part of the mass or an outsider with a cause which appears to appeal to the mass. The stature of the leader is determined by the quantum of the mass moved – Mahatma Gandhi being one of the finest examples in India.
But it can be argued that a physical presence of a leader is not always needed to create a movement, with a clear distinction to be made between mass movement and mob.
In today’s socio political context, the society has been fragmented to suit the various political parties in terms of caste, creed, religion and other attributes. This also is for the purpose of obtaining maximum benefit from this fragmented mass, but it is also easier to derive “stimulus” that would sway this mass. If one thought that individual brilliance within the mass may negate this affect then it is only a presumption, because once you start believing in the “stimulus” your reasoning gets obfuscated by the greater cause.

A practical example is a Fire Alarm system in an office building. When the fire alarm rings, the people inside the building, irrespective of their rank [from the managing director to the bell boy] moves to a place outside the building in the designated “assembly point”. In this case the trigger for the mass movement [exodus] is inanimate, a mere electro-mechanical contraption called a fire alarm, the stimulus being the personal safety of the people inside the office building.
Neither Jawaharlal Nehru nor Indira Gandhi and her generations afterwards were mass leaders but were quite a contrary and the mass leader in Jayprakash Narayan never came even anywhere near to political power. But they had had cultivated the art of creating the stimulus with their strong official machinery.

While the Left parties and BJP has a clear ideology and to that extent also some of the regional parties like BSP [dalit ideology], RJD [social equality], but the oldest party of India, Congress is devoid of any ideology so as to speak.
The relevance of Congress ended with the independence, it was a forum which gave the voice of the Indians to reach the colonial rulers, but subsequent to independence and creation of India as a secular, democratic polity, Jawaharlal Nehru failed to create an ideology which could bind the party to their grass root supporters. The wind of nationalistic policy in terms of nation building based on socialistic principles played for a decade and with the waning of that spirit, there was the period of simmering disquiet, which Nehru could hardly handle and in many cases made blunders.
But behind the great veil of Socialism, he sowed the seeds of that nefarious “stimulus” which unknowingly has spread its tentacles and engulfed our daily lives which will be discussed in details subsequently.

“The Matrix” series by Wachowski Brothers borrowed heavily from the Buddhist or Vedic philosophy. It is a simple tale that tells that the computers have taken control of the humans, controlling their brains and thereby their actions, and how a group of “originals” try to fight out of this imperialistic control.
Movies like the “Enemy of the State” depict how every move in our life is monitored by the government, which is nothing more than a control of our lives. The control becomes easier if the polity believes is a similar ideology and do not contest any opposition to that ideology, the ideology can be religious, philosophical or political – but the central theme is to make the polity believe in that.

During the height of the “Cold War” the leftist states in India were flooded with books from Russian distributors like Mir and Vostok, highly subsidized. The collection varied from textbooks of basic science [some becoming as popular as to attain a textbook status] to writings on socio economic principles of Marxism.
Dmitri Mendeleev was a bigger figure as a true Russian than the proponent of the Periodic Table of Elements and for every scientific discovery of the allied West there exists a counterpart in the Soviet domain.
The state propaganda was drilled hard into the public domain and in fact they started believing what they were fed with as they were practically cut from the rest of the world.
Such was their faith in the leadership that in China, another Marxist block, nearly 30 million people died in Mao’s quest for transforming the traditional agrarian based Chinese economy into a modern communist society through the process of agriculturisation, industrilisation and collectivization.
The mass were in complete agreement with the principles of Mao Zedong, any rebellion being violently suppressed, in its Great Leap Forward which ultimately led to a famine and death of unparalleled proportions.

We may take pride in living in the worlds greatest democracy which adheres to secularity, is guided by jurisprudence and allowed by the constitution of freedom of speech which retains our free thinking and logical reasoning.
It is entirely another perspective, what if the ideas on which our reasoning pattern depends is based on a huge propaganda? What if what we have been taught through our school days is a clearly crafted play?
It has been assumed that not more than 1 to 2 mass leaders are needed per ten thousand people and a complete control over the minds of these leaders makes it easy for domination. Are we moving towards a Matrix like society where instead of computers there will be select few calling the shots?

This is the basis of the distortion of the Indian History, against which people are becoming aware only now, thanks to the efforts by the huge Diaspora who are investing their time, energy and money to uncover the truth and expose the culprits of systematic distortion of History.

Advancement in technology, free market, communication has helped in the spread of ideas which contradict the forty year period of systematic alienation of the people from the truth.

SHARDA & "Us"

The maid, Sharda, who comes to our house to do the daily chores, gets two thousand rupees at the end of the month. No weekly holidays and if by chance she falls sick or takes a day off I can feel the faint sound of vuvuzela [my wife’s grudging grumble] polluting the house.
She has a son and a daughter to support beside a husband who does some odd jobs, but mostly sits at home. She can manage to work at five more homes like ours, and armed with around twelve thousand rupees she wages a battle against WPI & CPI, which seems to be growing stronger day by day with no effective resistance whatsoever and seems to have even overpowered our very own soft spoken, weak Prime Minister, who is a wizard in economics.

Sharda sends her children to school and schools like all great business institutions have no room for sympathy, except for the devil [read people with money and power]. Our education minister has declared that education is the right of every children, but like that fabled word of Dronacharya, the silent or whispering, “iti Gaja” was left out by the media [may be they could also not hear it].
Kapil Sibal’s conscience is clear as water from the Ganges near its tributary [more mud than water] and hence skipping the entrance to the school he is more focused on the abolition of exams for students of the age where finding a girlfriend is of more substance that Newton’s Third Law.

Sharda does not read Economic Times, for that matter she does not read at all, she is clearly leading a life as delineated by the great Hindu scriptures, submitting herself to “karma” without any expectations. Newspapers, televisions are all treated by her as luxuries of life, which when avoided will lead her to the “stairway to heaven”.
She has never heard of terms like WPI and CPI and a mention of the same would lead to a Freudian slip of Communist Party of India [CPI] having to counter another political opponent in the next assembly elections.
Every day she rues that it is getting difficult to meet ends, a fact also echoed by my wife, although the level of their difficulties may well be related to two lines in parallel planes.
She gets a raise every year and that raise is not measured by the inflation, cost of living or even meeting targets or performance, but by shear gut feeling of my wife, which I would say may not be as perfect as the HR initiatives of Fortune 500 companies but leaves not much room for complaint. The measure of the practice is testified by the fact that she is with us for last three years and promises to continue barring any untoward incidents.
There have been some houses where the annual increment was met with resistance, but Sharda alone could not carry on the fight as she has more than a dozen competitors lined outside the house to replace her. This is the advantage some people take, maybe they are wiser in the tricks of the world and my wife keeps wandering why she could not be like them. Such virtues are in great demand in today’s world and it takes more than intelligence to learn them. It is more like flying a plane, where the hardness of your twin assets matter more than your grey matter.

Sharda does not know who Sharad Pawar is, but she knows that her children get less and less diet every passing day. Even if she knew detailed biography of Sharad Pawar she could not have done much as before an election she votes for the party who gives her the maximum ration, which hardly runs for a week. Neither does she know about Murli Deora, whose sleight of hand has led her to preserve as much of kerosene as possible and the family has adapted to eating half boiled rice.
But I envy her; she does not have to bother about the white elephant “automobile” and does not have to travel in those, oh so dirty public transport, rubbing your shoulder and smell with “oh, those dirty public”. In fact there will be a smirk in her face if she finds out she is in the same bus as I am.

Sharda likes Rahul Gandhi, I never came to know why but she says that next time she will vote for whichever party Rahul Gandhi stands for. She also has doubts if Rahul Gandhi will campaign for CPI [Congress Party of Indira] or Forza Italia. From the time she heard that Rahul Gandhi is visiting the home of Dalits and poor, she has bought and kept a nice blanket along with a new set of Stainless Steel plate and glass. She also made a list of things that she would prepare and a list of demands had been drafted by her son in English.
But off late both mother and son have gone into hibernation and she blames the opposition, the anti nationalist, communal BJP, for their absence.

She has dreams and lives by her dreams. She dreams of her son becoming a graduate, getting into a well paid job, getting married to a girl from a good family, having a new house full with the pitter patter of her grandchildren and she, stopped with years of hard work rather than age, will cherish those moments.
Dreams of common man, dreams which will mostly remain dreams and this Sharda will continue till her daughter in law or daughter becomes the next Sharda.

Not a soul will cry, life will go along as it goes, till Sharda gets her next year’s increment.

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