Skip to main content

Cry, my beloved country



India is a rich country with too many poor people.  It is primarily because the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals.  According to the World Inequality Report 2018, India is the second most unequal region in the world.  The Middle East takes the cake with the top 10% of the population owning 61% of the national income.  10% of the super-rich Indians hold 55% of the country’s wealth. 

I was sitting in a friend’s car yesterday when he refuelled the car with petrol at the rate of ₹76 per litre.  I wondered aloud why people didn’t protest against such blatant exploitation as whimsical pricing of petrol and diesel in the country.  I belong to a state whose recent BJP nominee to the Rajya Sabha, Alphons Kannanthanam, told the highly literate Malayalis that the income from the mounting petrol prices is being used to construct toilets in North India.  Malayalis have more than enough toilets in their homes.  In fact, the number of toilets in Malayali homes is likely to surpass the number of persons in those homes.  Why should the Malayali pay for the toilets in Bihar or Madhya Pradesh?

“As long as the common man keeps paying for the luxuries of our leaders, there will be no protest,” my friend said.  “Who paid for the Kerala Speaker’s glasses which supposedly cost half a lakh of rupees?  Who paid the ₹1.2 lakh bill for the Ayurvedic treatment of our finance minister?  Who will pay the new proposed salaries of our MPs and others associated with them?  Who pays for the petrol of the vehicles of our politicians?”  My friend rattled off a long list of things for which the aam aadmi in India is paying, not things but luxuries enjoyed by our politicians most of whom have no worthwhile qualification of any sort.  We pay for the opulence of our leaders.

“This is the helplessness of India,” my friend said. “Modi has made India incapable of questioning.  Do you run for money to buy bread for your children or go questioning the villains who sit in the legislatures?”

What a pity!  Cry, my beloved country.





Comments

  1. Agree with you. Questioning appears to be a crime in this era our beloved country is undergoing. Right now, people like us can cry only as the dictator at the helm has the confidence of fooling a sizable chunk of the people (voters) to win elections after elections taking the advantage of 'First Past the Post' system and then boast of shamelessly - '1.25 billion Indians are standing by me'. Alas ! Presently all right-thinking Indians have no choice but to wait, wait and wait only.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Right now we are waiting. I hope the waiting will be over after the 2019 elections. I hope India will vote placing reason above sentiments. I hope people will see through the hollowness of bombastic speeches.

      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

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

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...