What after Olympics?

18% of the world’s population and not even 0.8% of the total Olympic medals and we are very happy & cheering on the biggest feat of medals till now. Six medals do seem like a rich haul for a nation that has been happy just to participate. Olympics are over and we will get over the fleeting ecstasy generated by each of these handful medals. There will be lots of people including me who will whack our sporting authorities for being poorly administered, blame our spending on sports, and criticize how we treat our sports stars (I still couldn’t believe that India sent Mr. Bachan for the Olympic Torch bearing ceremony) and then…. And then we will forget until next games…….

The supporting authorities & the failed Governments have also devised excellent ways of fooling people. As soon as a sports person wins a medal different state governments and departments start showering money on them that too crores. And mind it; these are the same governments which do not have enough money to provide food, water, shelter, roads, education to its people. This culture of rewarding the already rewarded is sick.

I am not writing this to undermine the great performance of the athletes at the London Olympics. They deserve attention and praise. But the funny thing is that before the Games began, nobody gave a fair chance to these players. Instead of showering money on them after winning medals, Government should spend money on the sports and sportspersons before they went to qualify for those events; they should be given good facilities, proper diet, good permanent income to sustain their livelihood. But before these games all the focus was on the glamour boys and girls of Indian sports who have won some medals in the past, and they failed this time I will say only because of the media pressure. And now all the attention being given to players like Vijay Kumar and Mary Kom, is not because we want to recognize their talent and appreciate the sacrifices they and their families have made to reach where they have now despite all the miserable conditions which our country put them into. We're applauding them because as a nation we are desperate for medals and Vijay, Mary and others have given us a false hope that we are a rising power in sports but we are not…..

No country has performed well in sports without taking care of the basic needs of its people. In India where majority of the public don’t have access to clean drinking water, where almost all the people are without regular supply of electricity (here I am not considering Madam ji and electricity spent on her Robots), where public is without good healthcare system, where the poverty line set by the government is 28Rs/Day (Yes, we can only laugh at it) and its better if we don’t talk about the access to the playgrounds and sporting facilities. How do we expect to do well in sports? Even the present number of medals is a miracle.

The Games are over and again there would be power-grid failures, fights for drinking water, Traffic Jams, shortage of food because of poor monsoon, Floods in Mumbai because of heavy monsoon. Despite all the economic growth of the last decade we are still world’s most malnourished country, yes even worse than the African countries. One in every three malnourished children in the world lives in India. But, for a reason beyond comprehension, instead of worrying about this lopsided development, we seem to celebrate it.

A long medal tally in Olympics does not make a country great, instead only a great country can stretch their medal tally to the top. And please don’t fathom that India is a great country (I won’t buy it if you again start debating on culture and all that), in no way it is. While we the general people continue our obsession with the Olympic medals, there are plenty of Indians who would continue to loose a million battles every day. And till the time we don’t care about these basic things, we will remain pretty much at the bottom of the Olympics medals heap.

Give us good living; we will give you good medal count.

BluesImHof & Bollywood Euphoria

Finally, I got something to cheer about my present Deutschland trip. Last weekend was the best one of my two months of stay here. “Are you interested in music?” My friend and colleague asked me during lunch few days back. A Punjabi, and you need not to ask him if he likes music or not, they just love it and love it madly. So, was my answer to him. So, he invited me for a weekend break to his home place Mainz city, about 40Kms from my place Frankfurt. There they organize a music concert ‘Bluesimhof’ every weekend of July, and it was a big successful concert running since ten years.

Blues is type of Jaz music and ‘ im hof’ means in a house, so its like a music concert in a old house of a village, Sounds interesting? Yes, it was. So all set and I was in Mainz city on Saturday at around 11 o’clock, there my friend was waiting for me along with his girlfriend. First they took me around the Mainz city for site seeing, Old market, Roman temple, thousand year old Cathedral, Rhine River and in the evening we moved to their village Einglheim about 10Kms from there. The scenic beauty of the road from Mainz to Einglheim was mesmerizing. Narrow roads through the wine yards which were spread to miles on both sides, small villages hinged on the far hills, wind turbines, stud farms, it was all there in that few kilometers of stretch.

After having some rest in the cozy guest room of the typical hut shape European house we moved to the concert venue - a village house, a kind of which we have seen in old Hollywood movies, a big open area in front surrounded by high walls and a big high roof hut at the end which contains a small stage in the centre, all around the four walls there were many stalls of local food and off course the Beer. The organizer was a friend of my colleague, so we got the nearest table to the stage. We ordered our food and drinks, all set and in an hour the ‘Kai Strauss band’ was on stands.

The reason why I am writing this blog is not the wonderful performance of the group, but the interesting conversation I had there. A mid aged lady Mrs. Grazina Nicolaus was quite interesting, she was born in Latvia, her father is Russian her mother is from Poland and now she is married to a German, moreover she can speak six languages. If this didn’t amaze you the next thing she told me was – “I am a die hard fan of Bollywood movies” to that, my eyes were struck wide and she continued “Ya, you know Aiswarya Rai? She is so beautiful” and her expressions while saying this was like anything.

“And I love Shahrukh, that movie in which he got drunk for Aiswarya and eventually dies at her door step”

“Devdas” I completed her sentence.

“Yes, Devdas. It was so romantic”. She told me she had a large collection of Bollywood movies dubbed in German language. “Only the songs are in hindi, and I love their music also”.

“Have you ever been to India?” I asked with curiosity.

“Noooo” a sad reply.

“But you must go, you love Bollywood romantic movies; then you must visit Tajmahal – the symbol of love” I said and I couldn’t believe on my ears when I heard her reply to that.

“I want to, but you know I am afraid of snakes, they scare the hell out of me”

Now what’s that, from where the hell these snakes came from? I didn’t utter a word but she read my expressions. “Ya, I saw in so many movies, they always scare the girls and I have a kind of snake phobia”

I laughed uncontrollably on that. It took me long minutes to make her understand that India is not only Bollywood movies or what they show in that. Finally, before leaving for the night she half heartedly agreed to my definitions of India.

P.S.In the bed at night I was thinking ‘What was more interesting, BluesImHof or the Bollywood Euphoria?’

Fight against corruption doesn’t END here

They (Politicians) set a Trap and Team ANNA walked right into it. Or should I say this was the only motive of Team Anna also?

Some of you must say I am biased like Indian media, but believe me nobody has paid me for writing this and nobody has pointed a gun on my head. I am not a pessimist also, I was even a part of many of the Anna’s rallies against corruption, and I am sure one day if not this then some other revolution will definitely change the course of our nation, nothing lasts for eternity not even the bad times, you know. 

But as of now Team Anna’s struggle ends here, and it is going to become a part of the problem itself. As I denote, ‘it’s a middle class thinking that problem can only be solved by diving direct into it’, but that’s not the case. If Team Anna has wanted to recover ground they must have supported the clean candidates from outside, rather than entering the political fray itself. It’s not like that only Team Anna is clean and every other politician is corrupt, only he is a true patriot and no one else.

A political party is much more than an NGO or a movement focused on just one issue. It’s not that all other needs of people have been taken care off and the only last wish they have left is to remove corruption. This single ideology of corruption is not even a sure starter for a political party in a country like India, where sixty percent of the public is below poverty line and where whole life span of a man goes in arranging a shelter and daily bread for his family. There are so many other major issues also Population, Poverty, Education, Caste, Religion, Development, I speculate if any of the Team Anna member has a first hand experience of these issues or even thought of that. For a moment if we assume that Anna does manage to get few MPs elected to Parliament (Which seems very difficult, that I have experienced in recent Punjab elections; Manpreet Singh’s People’s party of Punjab did not get a single seat with all the honest leaders and same ideologies as of Team Anna in it). Then also other parties MPs vastly larger numbers, who'll oppose Anna's demands, and thus defeat him easily.

And it’s not only in politics but, corruption in India is systemic, not incidental. Corruption is what funds Indian democracy; whether we like it or not, it’s our lifestyle now. And it will take years and lot many efforts to remove it from our genes. I wonder why Team Anna lost its fire just in a year. Team Anna's decision to enter politics is a sad let-down, it reveals that there is lack of ideas at the core of the team. In my view they would have agreed with the Lokpal Bill as passed in the Lok Sabha. It would have been a good start and few years later, a smart Anna would have rallied again and brought about new changes. That’s how laws get made; you can’t hit the bull’s eye on the first attempt.

The politicians will be very happy now they set a trap, and Team Anna walked right into it. They have Anna exactly where they wanted him. Now he will learn how complicated politics is, how easy it looks from the outside and how difficult it is from the inside. As of now I give credit to Anna for just one thing, he made the general public aware of their power and gathered them under one umbrella, other then this Anna failed in every respect.

Just hoping, that this step of Team Anna will not help Congress in 2014 elections as it happened for Akali Dal in last year’s Punjab Elections.

P.S. The WAR is still ON

eNough is eNough

Just another official dinner of our department with our vendor from S. Korea, and I joined my fellow colleagues. Some formal introduction and then the same question – So, How about your stay in Germany, are you liking it? And same formal reply from my side – It’s good, going great. Few more questions which I replied with a formal smile, then some comparison started by the big fat fellow colleague of mine, between India & Germany, actually it was not a comparison; he talked about the population, non-existing roads, silly traffic, un-hygiene, corruption it seems as if he wants to demise the shinning India image. Like a good Indian some what I tried preventing Indian image by using the same old tactic, good Indian culture and hospitality, which obviously is better than Germans, but in vain; as even I knew, whatever he was saying is all true and quite visible to everyone even the foreigners. My question is, then why can’t these corrupt Politicians, inefficient Bureaucrats and lazy administrators see that?

Monsoons are here and as every year, Gurgaon roads are gone. It’s difficult to differentiate between a street and a small river and to top on that sewages are overflowing all over, converting the look alike rivers to dirty nallahs. I mean do you need to be a rocket scientist to understand that a city needs a good drainage system before the roads. Every year they come and repair the roads, come rains and the roads are vanished again; and that does not even need monsoons, even a small rain is enough. And it’s the same story for all the cities and states. Are the state Governments and Municipal corporations sleeping, don’t these administrators have some common sense or they don’t want to do anything?

My German colleague even showed me the pictures of mad traffic and street vendors and auto-rickshaws standing in the middle of the roads. He continued his story and I was wondering that is it really difficult for traffic police to make people stand before the Zebra crossing on traffic lights? NO, but they don’t want to do that. There are dedicated Bus lay-byes on Iffcco Chowk Gurgaon but not even a single bus halts there, instead you can see all the auto-rickshaws, illegal cabs, Buses standing in the middle of the chowk. And Police vallahs are always there but busy in warming their pockets.

Earlier I used to think that condition of the MG road will improve after Metro work completion, but I am still waiting for it to improve. I can’t think of any reason for the present sand dooms on the footpaths, open sewages and yes don’t you dare think about that ‘Government will provide dustbins on the road sides’ you see all our roads are a big dustbin, you are free to litter around. Once my cousin who lives in a far village of Haryana asked me that you won’t be having stray dogs in Gurgaon, as it is a big city? To that I laughed and replied – NO, not only dogs we have pigs and plenty of stray cows also. I came out of my thought process when the German colleague showed me another picture of Delhi Railway Station on his smart phone and obviously it was horrible.

Hold on, my ordeal didn’t only end there. That German fellow was well aware of the political scams 2G spectrum, CWG scam and I was like dumb silent on that. You can expect anything in a country where big scam criminals like A. Raja and Kalmadi are free with-in a year or so and the next day they were sitting in the parliament with there fellow politicians or should I say fellow criminals as majority of them have criminal charges on them.

Wake up you bloody morons, enough is enough. You people are responsible for such a pathetic condition of India – a country which was once referred to as ‘Sone ki Chiriya’; and we have to listen to all this shitty stuff by these foreigners and have to digest also.

Is INDIA heading towards another EMERGENCY ???

This blog comes from nowhere, I had not planned to write this……………...

I am reading about ‘Operation Blue Star’ since past few months; to dig out the truth of that time, I am reading about the political environment which prevailed during that period of time. To that, what got my attention is - State of Emergency in India (1975 – 76).  I never heard about it before, so this is the time to know about it, and I turned on my Google driver. The outcome of ‘the know how’ of this event is very strange and you must also think about it.….

The Congress Party of India has been historically associated with the Indian politics from the budding independence movement so are the charges of corruption and miss-trust on the congress party. In 1966 after the death of Lal Bahdur Shastri, Indira Gandhi (daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru), was selected as the President of the Indian National Congress Party. In 1966 Mrs. Gandhi defeated Moraji Desai to become the fifth Prime Minister of India and the first woman to hold that position.

From the early 1970s onwards, pervasive discontent shook India: large sections of the population came out in demonstrations against rising prices, fall in the supply of essential commodities, unemployment, and more importantly, corruption in government administration. These protests reached a crescendo in 1974, with students leading the agitations and giving them an organized shape. The Gujarat state government ruled by Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party was forced to resign that year. Mrs. Gandhi realized that she was losing her hold, and was threatened by a political crisis. The threat became imminent when the Allahabad high court (from where Indira Gandhi won in the parliamentary election in 1971), declared her election invalid on corruption charges. The high court judgment barred her from holding the office of prime minister, but granted a stay for 20 days – to allow her party to choose another leader (since the Congress party still enjoyed a majority in the Indian parliament).

Unable to find a competent successor, Mrs. Gandhi, appealed for “complete and absolute” stay and she was granted a “conditional stay”.  This decision gave rise to outcries of opposition from the opposition that she should resign.  Strikes by labour and trade unions, student unions and government unions swept across the country. In response, the authority of the maintenance of Internal Security Act was used to arrest more than a hundred people on June 26th who opposed Mrs. Gandhi and her party.  A proclamation of Emergency was issued by President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, on the advice of Prime Minister Gandhi.

The powers given to the Central Government under this form of emergency virtually have no limits. Civil Liberties were suspended and the government introduced a mandatory birth control program. The government of India banned four major religious, political and revolutionary parties and 22 associated parties with them. An amendment to the Representation of the People Act was drafted to clear Indira Gandhi from the Allahabad high court ruling. At least 50,000 or more people had been jailed in India in first 3 months of Emergency. At last Emergency was withdrawn on March 21^st 1977 after a period of 21 months.

Now what I am thinking is – High corruption, Rising Prices, Black Money, Rupees downslide, Squeezing Economy, government’s dictatorship & wrong policies and the Public Unrest are the terms which are presently clouding India. Same reasons coupled with many wrong decisions by Indira Gandhi led to that phase of emergency in 1975. Presently the only difference is that Mrs. Sonia Gandhi is driving India from the back seat instead of Prime Minister's position rest everything is ditto same and I don’t think there is any such gutsy judiciary left in India who can charge the corrupt politicians. So, the mango people are just left to wait and watch, let’s see where it is heading? Moreover, Anna Hazare movement and his arrest, Lathi Charge during Baba Ramdev Protests, other happenings with all the socialists & RTI activists and other public protests…………

Is INDIA heading towards another EMERGENCY ?

I am not sure, but my intuition says – something big is going to happen before 2014 elections….. Keep your fingers crossed

In the land of the NAZI'S

BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Porsche………

As a Mechanical Engineer and a lover of the Mean Machines these must be the words which should come to my mind on the name of The Federal Republic of Germany or it should be Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Karl Diesel………But there is some fancy about the name or I don’t know what; NAZI’S is the word which comes to my mind at first.

I was super excited about my three months official trip to Germany, but my enthu. was bitten hard first by the official delays to the trip and then after reaching Germany the sleepy town Offenbach (A small town near Frankfurt, where my company’s head office is situated) punched out all my remaining excitement. Cherry on the top; it rained throughout the weekend and drained down my plans of roaming around the bustling streets of Frankfurt.

Nothing much to do rather than watching TV (which majorly runs German channels) or reading something….. I choose the later, OK now, no rewards for guessing what I am reading; yes about German history, particularly about Hitler and Nazi’s movement. Earlier also when I was in Seoul I started reading about Adolf Hitler, but now I can’t recall why I stopped in-between and went on to reading about M.K. Gandhi (I don’t use Mahatma or Bapu for him as most Indians used to prefix it with; anyways that’s another topic I will tslk about some other day).  So, I was talking about Nazi’s.

First thing I read on the internet about Germany is that it is world's fourth largest economy by nominal GDP and the fifth largest by purchasing power parity and the second largest exporter and third largest importer of goods. I know it’s a developed country but still….. Amazing figures….. Anyways lets move on to the history…….

The strangest and funniest part of the NAZI history is its formation itself, you must read about it – In 1919 Anton Drexler founded DAP – German Workers Party; his party had strong nationalistic views and was anti-Semitic. The party had been looked as a potential socialist threat by the armed forces so they sent a police spy to investigate the impending danger, and the spy is none other then – ADOLF HITLER. In few months he became so fascinated by the party’s politics that he became an active participant in every event of the party and soon he rose to the top and named his party as Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party). The term Nazi was an acronym formed from the first syllable of National and the second syllable of SoZialist. And the other strange thing about Hitler which I got to know few years back is that he is not even a German, he was an Austrian.

The earlier manifesto of 25 points by NAZI Party, which I read on the internet, seems to be all right except 1 or 2 demands. But somehow at some point of time it went all wrong. The Nazi’s advocated the supremacy of the claimed Aryan master race over all other races. They claimed that the development of humanity depends on the Aryans and the Jews are the greatest threat to the Aryan race and led to the human holocaust specially Jews.

Hitler's foreign and domestic policies had the goal of seizing space for his people. He directed the invasion of Poland in September 1939, leading to the outbreak of World War II. Under Hitler's rule, in 1941 German forces occupied most of Europe and North Africa. By 1943, Hitler's erratic military decisions led to escalating defeats. In 1945 the Allied armies successfully invaded Germany. By then Hitler's supremacist and racially motivated policies had resulted in the systematic murder of eleven million people, including an estimated six million Jews (one million Jewish children, two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men).

In the final days of the war, during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, Hitler married his long-time mistress, Eva Braun. On 30 April 1945, two days later, the two committed suicide to avoid capture by the Red Army.

The basis for Hitler’s extreme hatred for Jews are still not clear, historians had given different reasons for it from ordinary prejudices to some relate it to the Germany’s defeat in World War-1* caused by Jews.

Presently I am reading Mein Kampf (My Struggle) a book by Adolf Hitler. He wrote the book while imprisoned after his failed putsch in Munich in November 1923. It’s a lengthy book (450 Pages), hope I will finish it soon and then will definitely let you guys know what are my findings about Hitler and his fundamentals.

* I don’t know anything about World War-1; will read about it some day.

Satyamev Jayate - A cynical Praise

“I am no one to bring change or resolve any issues. One person cannot improve this or give solution. The only solution is each and every one of us should say ‘I WILL NOT DO THAT’”

Sunday 6^th May I was travelling, so I missed the first episode of Satyamev Jayate. Even if I was at home, I am not sure I would have watched this much hyped show, as I know Mr. Perfect is a great business personal and a perfect Marketer. So this hype and the suspense about the concept of the show were created by the perfect marketer mind. Even after the show went on air and everybody praised it, as of my cynical nature I did not watch it until……..

This Sunday I was free at home, and as Mr. Perfect says in one of the promos ‘Sunday, khoob soyiye….9 baje tak…. 10 baje tak…. Fir to main aa hi raha hun, aap ko jagane…. 11 baje’. I woke up at around 10 in the morning and was still lazing around when Neiha stopped her remote buzzing at Star Plus. And I was glued to the screen till the time Amir Khan said ByeBye, not only that I even watched previous episode on Youtube.

Aamir Khan has done it. The perfectionist has indeed proved why he is called so!

Obviously the show is about TRPs but at the same time it’s a sincere effort that makes people hope and gives people the audacity to stand up against the unsocial practices. As commoners share their real life experiences on the show, Amir unravels their emotional pain and uncovers truth that the society is ignorant of. What I saw in the show is the truth. The truth that lives alongside us all…

In this episode Aamir talked about the horrible reality of child sexual abuse, an alarming and frightening truth. The research has shown that as many as 53 percent of the children are sexually abused. The touching part of the show is when the people who went through the ordeal narrate their stories. The opening episode showed agonized mothers who braving all odds gave birth to the female child; they shared their petrifying experiences on national TV. The show is an eye opener, people like me who thought that female foeticide is predominately practiced by the uneducated class and in the rural region; will surely get shock on the findings.

It’s not as if these issues haven’t been touched upon in TV programmes. Even Amir Khan has done such awareness oriented projects on big screen; ‘Taare Zameen Par’, ‘Peepli Live’, ‘Rang de Basanti’….. all these films put across a social message. But, content wise 'Satyamev Jayate' is quite different; the show narrated real life stories and relied completely on facts. One couldn’t stop himself to admire the sort of research that they had put into the subject.

The most impressive part is the efforts done by the perfectionist to come forward and do his part to help the nation to overcome such evils. Each week they will select a different NGO to help address the issue discussed on Satyamev Jayate. In partnership with Axis Bank, they invite the public to join in and help.

BRAVO AAMIR!

P.S. Hope it will not end in being just another talk show