Skip to main content

Winners and Losers




The world belongs to winners.  Losers have no place in it.  If you are a loser, learn to pretend at least, pretend to be a winner; otherwise you will be an outcast, part of the debris.

America became a winner in the 20th century by bossing over other countries.  There was no morality or ethics in the way they achieved the victory.  Not in the way they treated the natives of that land.  Not with respect to the Blacks.  Today the typical American is ready to kill their perceived enemies – the Asians, for example.  But the plaque at the base of  the Statue of Liberty will go on to proclaim with the magnanimity of a typical American televangelist who is also a close friend of President Trump: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Israel is a winner today.  Having bombarded thousands of people and their homes.  Having seized their lands.  After all the massacres.  The Israeli Declaration of Independence will go on to read sanctimoniously: “The state of Israel will be ... based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions...”

Our Prime Minister, Mr Narendra Modi, will visit Israel soon and learn from them more about winning.  Not that Mr Modi really needs any lessons.  His four visits to the US during two years of his reign were also redundant as far as learning is concerned.  He knows more than all those leaders out there.  His past is still vivid in our memories.  Who can forget Gujarat 2002?

Such is the world.  As long as you are a winner what you did and what you do are beyond moral and ethical considerations.  Innocent people can end up as traitors or antinational or Maoists or whatever. 

A great leader can change this situation.  A great leader can bring about a paradigm shift.  A system which is founded on morality and ethics at least to some extent.  Until such a leader emerges, you can’t afford not to be a winner. 

Comments

  1. जितेन्द्र माथुरMarch 9, 2017 at 4:57 AM

    You said it Sir. Winning is everything whether by fair means or by foul. Hypocrisy prevails everywhere. That's why the world listens to (and adores) the winners and not the men of morals. Immoral ones preach morality to others when they become winners because their winner status entitles them to preach those good things to the (real or supposed) losers which they seldom follow themselves. By winning only, the thieves are able to capture the police stations and the courts to enforce the 'Rule of Law'.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 9, 2017 at 7:00 AM

      Yesterday a group of Shiv Sena people turned moral police in Kochi beating young people with canes. Religious leaders of all hues including Christianity are found to be highly immoral in Kerala, caught with various misdeeds and crimes including raping of children. But the real tragedy is that all these leaders will come out unscathed and the victims will continue to suffer because such is our system.

      Delete

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...
18 comments
Read more

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...
12 comments
Read more

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...
8 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