Skip to main content

Mr Modi and Utopia


Speaking during a function in Raigad yesterday, Prime Minister Modi threatened the nation with more “difficult decisions.” 

From today's Times of India
A couple of days back, Steve Forbes, Editor-in Chief of Forbes magazine condemned Mr Modi’s demonetisation as immoral and theft of people’s property. 
A few days back, Wall Street Journal wrote that “Instead of factory openings or large new investments, the images that tell India’s current economic story include snaking lines outside banks, distressed workers migrating back to their villages, and tax raids on jewelers and officials caught with hoards of allegedly illicit cash.”

Today is Christmas, a festival that marks the birth of a man in whose name a major religion came to be founded.  Christianity has always upheld suffering as a virtue.  It has relished imposing more and more rules and regulations, restrictions and penalties on its people.  Its priests and other leaders love to threaten the faithful with ominous consequences if the teachings of the religion are not abided by religiously.  Listening to Mr Modi’s speeches these days, I’m reminded of the Christian preachers. 

In a way, Mr Modi is more Christian than the evangelical preachers.  While the latter sell suffering here on earth so that the believers can receive their reward in heaven, Mr Modi is selling suffering in order to create a utopia here in our country itself.  The heavenly reward is more credible than the earthly utopia. 

Mr Modi is trying to eradicate evil from the country.  He thinks it is possible to eradicate black money, corruption, greed, envy and a lot of other things which are integral parts of human nature itself.  Mr Modi is trying to become a Messiah, a god incarnate, who will clean the human nature of all evils – at least in Bharat.

Earlier when his obsession was confined to physical filth and garbage (Swachch Bharat, Clean Ganga, etc), most people must have thought something was going to happen since they were practical objectives.  Nothing happened, however.  Bharat has remained as filthy as ever.  So has the Ganga. 

A man who couldn’t even achieve very simple, practical goals is now going to clean up the Indian hearts and souls. 

We are going to face a tough future, it seems.  Nothing good may come of all this since greed is incurable and people will always find ways and means of hoarding money, black as well as white.  

In the meanwhile, we can entertain ourselves by boasting about the gargantuan projects such as the 190 metre statue of Shivaji in the Arabian Sea and the Sardar Patel statue in Gujarat.  Each will cost the nation about Rs 3000 crore.  We shall continue to waste our time standing in queues before banks and ATMS trying to take out our own money.  What is that suffering compared to the glory that awaits our nation in the form of great monuments?  Suffering is a religious virtue which can create a utopia in India.  Let us embrace it even as Jesus embraced the cross.  And wait for the utopia to take shape.


Merry Christmas. 
Indian Bloggers


Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownDecember 25, 2016 at 10:45 PM

    Very true and an interesting point. This entire exercise by the government shows how a great vision can be implemented so badly.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 26, 2016 at 7:25 AM

      I'm wondering about the validity of the vision itself 😆

      Delete
  2. जितेन्द्र माथुरDecember 26, 2016 at 8:53 AM

    Perfect sarcasm Sir. And you are right in your comment that the validity of the vision itself bears a question mark. Perhaps all those who consider the Indian premier as a noble-hearted person pursuing some pious mission are mistaken. And he is not even pursuing RSS or BJP agenda. He is pursuing his own (hidden) agenda and not being dictated by any other organization or agency. He is a complex person and through his shrewedness and excellent marketing skills able to misguide a whole generation, a whole nation (or at least a sizable part of it).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 26, 2016 at 9:01 AM

      That's the right assessment of the man. Extremely ambitious, he has only been using the RSS as a stepping stone. Today the country is his stepping stone. To global heights!

      Delete
  3. Abhijit RayDecember 26, 2016 at 11:21 AM

    I think we are taking comments in Forbes magazine way too seriously. On an average, western press do not have much good to say about India. An over populated country, plagues by corruption, rampant maltreatment of women, unhygienic neighbourhood etc. You name it, it is here in India. Now what is new if they claim demonetisation is antipoor. So many years of poverty alleviation has brought us to a situation where one has to demonetise currency. Strangely, none of your sarcasm is directed towards rampant malpractices of the past. Is it your pet peeve that is showing? I wonder!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalDecember 26, 2016 at 11:43 AM

      Interpret it as you like, Abhijit. The simple truth is that i find Modi an amusing character study and I am a man of literature. Modi will be figuring soon in my novel as a character, a very brief appearance albeit.

      Delete
  4. Sneh AsnaniDecember 26, 2016 at 3:52 PM

    Completely agree !! Good post!!

    http://www.bootsandbutter.com

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...
10 comments
Read more