Drishtikone
If you can forget both clamor and silence, you will surely understand the simultaneous realization of the absolute and the relative. Read more
If you can forget both clamor and silence, you will surely understand the simultaneous realization of the absolute and the relative. Read more
There was a lot of reaction on my piece on Raj Thackeray and may felt the Biharis will decimate their culture. Here are my thoughts: Since our independence, North Indians - specifically the Allahabad crowd ruled India. South Indians and the others were almost not welcome. And majority of this crowd was either with lawyers background or elitist. Even the business was North based for the most part. Over the years this has changed. One of the things that has changed all this is Knowledge economy. Suddenly the education oriented culture of the SOuth had a way to assert itself. Now, instead of SOuth Indians going to north for jobs and becoming the butt of jokes.. the reverse happened. This is a natural process. In the last 2-3 decades, a lot has happened because of this migration - for one the lines of demarcation are weaker between the North and South. I have many friends who are married to SOuth Indians. And the intermingling has helped everybody. In my personal view, it is a FITTING reply to Max Mueller for his Nonsensical Aryan Invasion theory! What he hoped to achieve with those theories, our generation will annul with a simple tool.. economic migration! Read more
Can the Central Government please take away his Indian passport and let him travel around the world with his "Maharashtrian Passport"? Also, there is no reason for him to have the Indian citizenship. Let him call himself a Maharashtra citizen and get by with him bank account and elections. Good luck to him. I have a very simple adage for such guys - those who want by the yard but give by the inch, should be kicked by the foot! Just as pseudos like Arundhati Roy - who live on Indian hospitality and yet abuses it repeatedly; or Teesta Setalvad who shoots from the hip and wants to taken seriously. This idiot, and these mad pseudos are a curse on our nation and deserve no difference in treatment. Interest of Indian nation - a complete one at that - is paramount but if any one wants to upstage it with anything narrower, then s/he should be tackled right away! Raj Thackeray may be the nephew of Bal Thackeray but the idiocy of that blood line runs through in his vein as well and, in fact he is far more vicious and worse for the Indian national security than his Uncle. Such idiots should be asked to leave the country right away! Or better still just move the Bollywood out of Bombay. It will do many things: 1. De-congest Mumbai, so the residents can be happier! 2. Bollywood can do with a more open space and the studios can get better and cheaper access to supplies and real estate - leading to lower cost of making movies. 3. The new struggling actors will no longer have to sleep on the railway stations because they cannot afford the rent. They can rent apartments at Rs 2000 per month between 2-3 guys. 4. We as India would not have all the eggs - finance, bollywood, soft industries - in one place. It is, in any case, not conducive to India's National Interest. Read more
What is wrong with the US? First it tells everybody and his brother to go democratic and when they have the elections, which do not go along the person US is backing - then it starts all sorts of bullying and lobbying! It is as if US had no idea of what democracy really means. Maybe it is time their leaders could go back to school for a crash course on democracy. Democracy is of the people, by the people, and for the people. That's what Abraham Lincoln said. And he was so right! In that sense, "Installation of democracy" is in any case an oxymoron! No one from outside can even install a democracy! But making it a farcical pretense is even worse! First, the US was backing Benazir Bhutto to form a joint Government with Musharraf, which obviously could not happen. Now Benazir's party won the maximum seats and along with Nawaz Sharif's party should be able to get the strength required. And obviously, both would want to throw out Musharraf, specially Nawaz Sharif may be itching to pay the General back for the way he was treated long back when he was thrown out of the country! This is where US comes in. It wants a special role for Musharraf, even if these two political parties come in. Read more
Politics and Governance in the democracies is no longer about voting and elections. Polls - exit polls and opinion polls - now play a significant role in the everyday scenario. Bush's popularity goes up or down - says the poll.. and that starts to reveal in his decisions. Similarly it affects when the candidates are elected. Opinion Polls were significant in the Pakistani elections as it is in most other countries but it intrigued me when I found out that Pollsters were now ready to give direction to the fledgling democracy based on people's voice based on statistics! After the elections, the scenario in Pakistan is set for a coalition. Who will PPP join is the question. Some say that PML-N (or Nawaz league) is whom they should join based on the results. But then there is PML-Q - which is backed by Musharraf. Now, this mandate is supposed to have been a dress-down for Musharraf so it is strange and useless to have Musharraf in through the backdoor! Read more
Some may find the muscles very "annoying".. but the performance is just the most fantastic one I have seen. At some places they almost seem to be defying gravity.. so amazing is the strength. Worth a see. Read more
Religion makes people happy because it dumbs them down. Choice is hard to handle. And stressful. Exploration of the new needs one to deal with contradictions and the out of the ordinary without programmed responses. Religious living does not afford that stress. The Choices are made. The results have been deduced. And the sides have been taken. Morality has been coded. So, although you are running around a pole, you keep believing in your progress! You start from and arrive exactly where your parents/grandparents have been for centuries. Here is an interesting study on why humans need "God" and "Morality". We, inherently cannot handle the stress of the greys. We need black and white. Non-duality is NOT our cup of tea. Dr Wilson and Dr Storm found several unexpected differences between the groups. Liberal teenagers always felt more stress than conservatives, but were particularly stressed if they could not decide for themselves whom they spent time with. Such choice, or the lack of it, did not change conservative stress levels. Liberals were also loners, spending a quarter of their time on their own. Conservatives were alone for a sixth of the time. That may have been related to the fact that liberals were equally bored by their own company and that of others. Conservatives were far less bored when with other people. They also preferred the company of relatives to non-relatives. Liberals were indifferent. Perhaps most intriguingly, the more religious a liberal teenager claimed to be, the more he was willing to confront his parents with dissenting beliefs. The opposite was true for conservatives. Read more
There has been so much of confusion over my last article on God, that not only were the atheists un-happy but also the religious. Some people cannot understand when I talk about the Vedantic philosphy and yet denounce the personally created "God". I believe one, of the reasons is because they look at Vedas/Vedantic from the narrow standpoint of religious text.. not as a philosphical treatise. And latter was what it was. There was no religion in the mind of those philosophers/Rishis and they never started any. Today I happened to listen to Gita and then read some of it. Please read the last shloka of 10th Chapter carefully...and you will know what I meant in my article better. I will write about this shloka that I am referring to and other interesting stuff later during the weekend. Also, some people get hurt because to them "Faith" in a God is a personal thing and I have no right to attack that "personal God"! Now, according to me - this "Faith" or Belief business is a very modern curse that have distorted the Vedantic traditions! If Arjun had any faith/believe in Krishna to start with.. you would never have had a Gita! It is sad and our misfortune that the teachers/"Masters" of today dont have an iota of patience that Krishna had. Read Gita carefully.. not until the very end, does Arjun say for the first time to Krishna..." I agree with you"! In fact at the beginning of Chapter 4, he openly challenges Krishna's basis of assertion! Read more
Is US inflating its way into Recession? Lowering interest rates > Lower Dollar > Inelastic demand for foreign goods > Sticky (Real) Deficit > Ballooning nominal Deficit > Run away Inflation. Makes sense? Here is a sampler: -Gold soared $26 -Platinum exploded $91 -Iron-Ore Prices Up 65-71% -Copper surged 20 handles -Wheat prices surge to new high -Soybeans traded at a record high. -Fertilizer makers soared to record share prices Welcome to a world of less jobs and high prices! Read more
This is a rather interesting video of Narender Modi on his address at the HT Summit and his intereaction with the mainstream journalists (mostly of pseudo-secular variety). What is interesting is how these guys keep on trying to take him off topic and how he keeps putting them off. This video shows the intelligence of Modi and the fact that he knows what he is doing. Most of what he says made complete sense in terms of the economic realities of the country. There was one incident in this video which I found to be the most interesting. Rajeev Shukla taunts him on his discussion of Gandhi in his address as his "inspiration". Modi's answer is that his relationship is akin to Gandhi-Bose relationship, and he taunts him back by saying at least Shukla would know that part of the Congress History! It was a very intelligent reply veiled in history (post Haripura elections). It was clear that neither Shukla nor any other "intellectual" in that room got the import. But what can you say about the people who are shallow and talk more. This series also demo'es why this non-Gujarati administrator within BJP - not even a real politician - has become so popular in his adopted state.. such that he was elected by a resounding margin against all odds and opposition from the pseudo-secularists. Part II . Part III . Part IV . Part V Read more
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