Skip to main content

I don’t trust my government



I uninstalled from my phone the UMANG app which “allows you to access Indian Government services online through web and mobile (phone)”.  It was installed because I received a message that hereafter all notifications regarding my EPF would be sent only via this app.  But when I saw that the app was demanding too much from me, like access to my contact list, to the picture gallery in my phone, to my email contact list, to the files on my phone and so on, I put my foot down and said No.  I don’t trust my government so much, I’m sorry.

Source: Here
There are quite a few other apps that I use which also demand a few permissions which I have given.  But I’m willing to trust those service providers – willy-nilly, though – more than my government.  For example, I trust my bank whose app also demands quite a few peeps into my private affairs.  I trust Google which actually peeps too much.  Why don’t I trust my government?

My government has never given me satisfactory service at any time in my life.  It has only taken as much as it could whenever it could in various disguises.  It continues to suck my blood and I know the process will end only when my body is taken to the grave.  No, not even then.  One of my dearest ones will be sucked in the name of my death certificate even after I bid the final adieu to the government. 

Now Punjab National Bank has been asked to pay the “entire ₹11,360 crore to counterparty banks in the alleged fraud involving jeweller Nirav Modi.”  Where will PNB get the money from?  They will obviously charge it from their hapless customers in the name of various service charges as State Bank of India did.  By penalising accounts without minimum balance alone, SBI earned ₹1771 crore during April-Nov 2017, a sum that surpassed their net profit of ₹1,582 crore.  Those who could not save even the minimum balance, the underprivileged people of India, were penalised in order to pay for the offences of the richest defaulters in the country like Nirav Modi.  Now, PNB will ape SBI and the impecunious Indians will atone for Modi's sins.

Let us recall the fact that Nirav Modi was one of the Indian businessmen who accompanied Prime Minister Modi to the World Economic Forum in Davos recently.  Reports are also coming out about the Chhota Modi’s (as Congress named him instantly) associations with the Ambanis and Adanis who are the virtual rulers of the country today and whose huge debts to SBI were also indirectly put on the poor of the nation. 

How does such a government expect me to trust it and its apps which seek too many accesses into my private affairs?

If the government had fulfilled a fraction of its electoral and post-election promises, if the country’s best orator’s words carried a modicum of sincerity, I would have been tempted to retain my trust in the government.  Now when the best orator appears on the TV I hear myself chuckling; I hear others snickering.  The snickers give me hope, hope that stretches to the general elections in 2019.

Until then I shall go without the messages from the EPF department.







Comments

  1. I empathize with you. Billions of Indians like you (and me) are feeling the same way. May God be his judge because the voters do not seem to intend to be so.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for joining me here, Jitender ji. I'm sure the voters will recognise the reality as against the promised utopia and do the needful in 2019.

      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

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...