The bedlam at Johannesburg

Looks like we are not chokers after all. Despite almost snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, the Indian team has won the Twenty20 World Cup!

Shoaib Malik apologized to all the Muslims in the world for not winning the world cup and he assured them that the team gave its 100%. I understand his pain, after all, Allah was busy listening to the prayers of his true followers across the border.

But good to see so much young blood for a change.

What is contempt of court?

Contempt of court is a funny phrase in India. The courts use it to reiterate to the errant citizens and people in power that the courts must be respected and any insinuation that they are inept or wrong will be strictly dealt with.

The problem is that the biggest culprits, the politicians in power, usually do not have to go through such a bother. Yet common citizens are the ones who get the most contempt of court notices, or so it seems to my naked eye. Earlier today, the Supreme Court sentenced four people, including three journalists of the Mid Day newspaper to four months in prison for bringing the court into disrepute. The newspaper had run a story that said that the former Chief Justice of India, Justice YK Sabharwal, had benefited his son by his rulings on the sealing drive in New Delhi. The newspaper had also run a cartoon on the issue. The cartoonist bore the court's wrath as well.

Personally, I am a big fan of the Supreme Court, and firmly believe that they are the one wall between the politicians and their desire to sell this country out. But this is just a murder of our constitutional right of freedom of speech.

Slander is one thing, and yes, media does have a lot of personal vendetta, but here, the person in question was not the CJI anymore, but retired, and once retired, he does come under the purview of public scrutiny.

The fact is that the entire functioning of the shitty city of New Delhi is one huge conundrum, and it will take more than a Supreme Court order to set things right. In fact, I don't think things can ever be set right in this country. And its no lie that the judiciary is also steeped in corruption, if not as much as as in the polity, but its there nonetheless.

As for the media, while I agree with them this time, they are not above my contempt because of their utter lack of understanding of national issues.

Lets riot in the name of the Lord

Gandhi said that the greatest constant in the world is change. Most people in India still believe in that maxim, except that they believe that everything else around them should change but their own selves.

I find such examples in everyday life all around the country, where extremist groups, fighting for one ‘cause’ or the other, regularly attempt to subvert the system by breaking rules and then browbeating the authorities into not taking any action.

Most of the country today lives on a very dangerous cocktail of religion and a failing system. In fact, religion seems to be filling the vacuum that the failed system leaves behind. While its a sad truth that the country is falling deeper into the abyss of religious fanaticism everyday, its also obviously clear that most of it comes from the most backward parts of the country.

Uttar Pradesh is one of the most backward states in the country, be it in terms of governence, the filth in their politics, or simply the standard of living. While our forefathers thought it prudent to make UP the most important state in choosing our federal government given its size and population and the then economic might, UP has sadly squandered that privelage. Now it is a state that is used as a whore by unscrululous politicians looking to put a foot into the door to political greatness.

Where law and order fail, other methods take over, and in UP, that method is political bullying by those sections of the society that have been passionately pandered to by the lowly neta. The minorities in UP are some of the most politically important groups in the country, yet are some of the backward as well. Politicians will bend over backwards to get the Muslim vote, but the sad truth is that the latters are still lagging behind in education and basic human development. I am just using this as an example to illustrate the lethargy that has set into the Indian society, a lethargy that debilitates your ability to stand up against exploitation.

I am sure the people of the country know how our illustrious politicians are busy raping the country and the society with their hunting dogs. I am sure because I come across surveys time and time again about how politicians are the most hated of all, how corruption is India’s biggest threat and all that blah blah. Yet we are what we choose. So there has got to be a mental lethargy responsible for the fact that we can’t see that we are voting for monkeys and wolves.

My whole point when I started to write this post was to write about the recent deaths of the ‘Kanwariyas’ or ‘Shiva’s devotees’, who came under a passing train and many died on the spot. Before I elaborate, I just want to say that they should not be considered devotees at all. In fact, this group is the biggest farce in the name of devotion. Their annual pilgrimage to Haridwar is peppered with constant harrassment of everyone else they come in contact with.

On the road, they walk with the belief that nobody else has a right to walk on the same path. When they take the train, they travel with the belief that nobody else has the right to be on that train. And this is one of those vocal, extremist groups that readily break rules and bullys the system into not punishing them. Being vocal and voilent, and somewhat politically important, of course the spineless politician is ready to lick the dust off their shoes.

So this is how the people died in that unfortunate accident. There is a railway bridge somewhere over the Saryu river in Gonda district in UP. There are two tracks on the bridge, and there is no pathway for pedestrians. I am sure all of us know that the only way one can stop a train on any part of the journey other than the station is by pulling the chain during an emergency.

So this bridge comes up and the monkeys, I mean devotees forcibly stop the train on the bridge and get off, walking on the other track. The train coming from the other side does not, and should not expect pedestrians walking on the tracks as if it’s a bloody footpath.

By the time the train comes to a halt, it has run over some of them, while a few jump into the river.

Now these hypocrites are angry because the Railways did not change their functioning to pander to their free will. They tried to burn the nearest railway station, and have called for a bandh in the district and maybe a few other places. Either the media is playing dumb, or simply too stupid/scared to bring this simple obvious fact up. A tragedy it is, no doubt, but these hypocrite hooligans have turned it into another reason why they must be hated.

But then it’s just another day in the gutter of humanity.

The oxymoron called "Student Politician"

In Hindi, this specimen is called a "Chhatra Neta", literally, a student politician. In reality, this person is anything but a student.

India has had strong student politicians historically, but over the years, political activism on our campuses has deteriorated into a corrupt and dirty system, like almost everything else. Only recently has this issue been given its due importance, with the Lyngdoh Committee submitting a report on ways of reforming the entire system. Ms. Mayawati, the CM of UP, has now banned student elections across the state, and the budding student activists are out in full force in most parts of the state, doing what they do best harrassing the common man and damaging public property. Hopefully, she will not budge because UP is one of the worst cases of extreme criminalization of campus politics.

Perhaps her move has a strong political motive other than simply doing good. The Samajwadi party, led by her predecessor, Mulayam Singh Yadav, has a strong base in UP campus politics. Most of its new leaders emerge from campuses of the once great universities such as Allahabad and Lucknow Universities. In fact, student politicians had a free reign during his regime.

Delhi University is one of the premier universities in the country, as well as one of the largest. The elections to the Delhi University Student Union have always been a heady affair, mostly contested between the Congress and the BJP. But recently, the fervor reached to such a crescendo that the Supreme Court had to step in to cool them off. The question they asked is pertinent: how many of these student leaders are actually students? The court said that most student politicians today are part time students and full time politicians. In fact, most of the candidates contesting university polls are way past their prime, and have been enrolled for years! I think there was a law in recent years putting a limit on their ages! I dont quite recall if it was at a state level or the federal level.

I am all for regulation of these political mavericks. One of the worst things to have happened to campus political activism is the unbridled involvement of political parties. While the poll budget for the DUSU elections are fixed at Rs. 20 thousand, it is an open secret that political parties pump in lakhs behind their candidates. Of course, college politics are also the stepping stones for future politicians in training, and they need all the training they can get in political browbeating and corruption if they have to rape the system later successfully.