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. जितेन्द्र माथुरFebruary 16, 2018 at 7:29 AM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 16, 2018 at 7:34 AM

      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
  2. pushpendra dwivediFebruary 16, 2018 at 4:21 PM

    me to

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Grandeur of the dooms

John Keats by William Hilton [Wikipedia] One of the poems included in CBSE’s class 12 English literature is an extract from Keats’ Endymion . A question that has come to me again and again from students as well as teachers is: What does “the grandeur of the dooms…” mean? It is a line that has perplexed me too. I have been amused by the kind of interpretations given in the guidebooks for students. Quite many of these books interpret the word ‘dooms’ to mean the Doomsday. Look at the following answer given in one such guidebook made available online by a well-known educational establishment.  That is very amusing considering the fact that Keats was an agnostic, if not a confirmed atheist. Keats would never accept a God who would come riding a majestic cloud on the day of the Last Judgment to apportion the good and the evil souls to Heaven and Hell. Evil is an integral part of life, Keats knew too well. No human can avoid evil any more than “a rose can avoid a blighting wind.” How...
7 comments
Read more

Broligarchy

A page from Time Broligarchy is a new word I learnt from the latest issue of the Time magazine one of whose lead stories is titled ‘ American Broligarchy ’. Wikipedia teaches me that ‘broligarchy’ is “a neologism and portmanteau combining oligarchy and broism describing the rule of government by a coterie of extremely wealthy men (occupying leadership roles in the tech companies and tech-enabled businesses).” The Time article informs us that Trump’s greatest “bros” are Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the three men who were given the most prominent seats, ahead of Cabinet members, at Trump’s Presidential inauguration. These wealthy businessmen play crucial roles in Trump’s way of governing America. They pump a lot of unregulated money into politics for their own selfish reasons. A menacing outcome is an unhealthy (for the public) expansion of presidential power with fewer checks on the Congress. The Time laments that this “would be a recipe for more corruption under an...
10 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

Love Affair of Pearl Spot

AI-generated I am not fond of fish. Fish doesn’t taste like fish, that’s the reason. We get adulterated fish most of the time. In Kerala, my state, traders are reported to use formalin for preserving the freshness of fish. Formalin is used for preserving dead bodies by embalming. You will find me in a fish stall once in a while, though. My cats want fish occasionally, that’s why. Not that they are particularly fond of it. For a change from the regular pellets and packaged wet foods, all delivered promptly by Amazon. Even cats love a change. Most of the time, the entire fish that I buy is consumed by my cats. So much so, Maggie and I have come to think that fish is cat food, not human food. People may have different reasons for not eating any particular food. One of the most endearing reasons I heard recently is that fish is a symbol of the voiceless. People commit atrocities on fish, this person said [I forget who – I read it a couple of weeks back on Magzter]. They suffocate it ...
11 comments
Read more

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
45 comments
Read more