Quite a few things happened in the past ten days since i've written anything here. The two major tasks I was involved in at work - getting the annual report printed and the work related to the listing of the company I work for, both came to fruitation and it felt good to see some results come out of the numerous hours I spent on them.

Work's been keeping me really busy these days and it just becomes impossible to do anything else. For me, anything else is a lot of things these days, including waking up in the morning to go running, learning to play the guitar (which is going very slowly at the present unfortunately), learning more about photography, and well, trying to keep a social life going. When I am surrounded by so many activities and aims and hobbies and interests, I wonder sometimes what I should write about, considering my awareness of all things political has gone down considerably, and has been replaced by one common platform and that is hatred for the CONgress party and the fraud Gandhi cronies.

So as much as I hate them, ranting on and on about them gets repetitive, and when even I don't want to keep on writing similar rants about them, I would understand anybody else would not like to keep on reading the same rants about them. When I use the word rant, I know I am risking taking away some of the seriousness and authenticity of what I write, because a rant, more often than not, is more about displaying ones anger towards something, usually more heightened than normal and thus less factual and logical, but when I rant about how much I hate whats going on in the country, I try to follow it up with some bits of real news.

Nothing seems to be working for India these days. Its government had stopped functioning many years ago, and the global economic scenario mixed with bad economic management at home have been keeping everybody quiet. The only news items today are as usual, corruption and its many related subheadings, the economic scene in Europe, the falling Rupee, and gold. Just this morning, I read that India's gold demand for the last quarter fell 23%. That's a very big number if you look at it - they fell by 1/4th! India for all its love of gold can't be blamed, with falling rupee and inflation that is not looking to go down anytime soon.

Speaking of inflation, it has been said again and again that inflation is due to the supply side constraints, and raising interest rates can only do so much, but the reasons for the inflation will remain. As pointed out by me and many others, Governments in India are loathe to changing the supply side economics for whatever reasons, and India continues to remain a bottleneck country with bottlenecks and constraints in every conceivable sector of the economy, be it transport, housing, power, health care facilities, education, oh, and most importantly, food.

But real work on the ground needs one to pull up their sleeves and get down to work, and the Government of India and most state governments should never be expected to get their hands dirty. So the other option is to get the people to spend less, and thus when you can't affect the fiscal policy (perhaps because you have none), you attack the monetary policy. High interest rates will inflate what families are paying for their loans, the price of food remains high, so that means spending less on everything else. So basically the demand needs to shrink to match the supply.

If I think about it, its always a good idea to cool the consumption juggernaut down and perhaps give the earth some breathing space. On my way to work this morning, I was thinking that India is perhaps of the world's worst utilizers of space. Our cities are in a sprawl without planning, our agricultural lands produce less crop and food then many other nations of the world, our potable water's running out and there is no urgency to save it, and in general, the common Indian is unhappy and only thinking about money. What I have been wishing on the wild west - that perhaps its time they realigned their lifestyle and conspicuous consumption, could be wished upon my own countrymen.

The conundrum here is that the countrymen I am talking about are 1/4th of this country's population. The middle class is too engrossed in making their own lives better through more money to think about anything else, but what kind of a lifestyle adjustment do I talk about with the millions of poor who live under the open skies and have no steady source of income? What kind of a lifestyle adjustment should the hungry and malnourished children of this country bring?

I ask a question and there seem to be a dozen truths that respond to it in a dozen different ways. I think the chaos around is enough for most of us to just shake our heads and hope for the worst. In this "free for all" India of today, the only truth that remains for most people is that you have to fend for yourself. The slums of Mumbai have no proper sanitation and every morning thousands and thousands of people defecate in the open, but their small living holes which they will return to will have cable television which will be beaming a lifestyle of utmost luxury and consumption which they will watch with gusto.

I heard somewhere, either on television or from a friend, that an issue with Indian election process is that it is first past the post, so in a simple example, if there are a hundred people who can vote in a voting zone, and there 3 candidates, and only 60% vote, so that is 60 people voting out of the hundred. Now one candidate gets 25 votes, and other two get the remaining, that is, 35 votes. So the candidate with the 25 votes wins, but she represents only 25% of the population of that voting zone she stood up in. Again, there can be two issues here, first, that the system needs to change so that a candidate must represent if not at least 1/3, but some percentage of the population in that zone, or second, there needs to be something done so that the abysmal 60% voting percentage rises to at least 80%.

We know that the people who vote today are the most economically disadvantaged, and they are the ones who are always short changed by the people they vote in. Quite ironic really. The same with caste politics. Perhaps a poor person belonging to a caste protected by the constitution would rather live on the 'pride' of having an MP from his or her caste than in a better home with food for the family and school for the kids. At least this is what the politics of India today seems to suggest. The politically disinterested middle class, often blamed for so many of the ills that plague today's politics because of their non-participation and focus on wealth and only wealth was said to have stirred epitomized by the rise of Anna Hazare, and it remains to be seen what levels of participation will be seen when India goes to elections for the national government. I am also curious to see what happens in the many state elections that are coming up, including that of Uttar Pradesh. Rahul "Voted in or not, i'll be made PM of this banana republic by mom" Gandhi has started campaigning against the tyranny of Mayawati, who by the way plans to divide UP into 4 new states! I always advocated for the division of UP into two, but wouldn't 4 be pushing it? India's federal structure already leaves so much to be desired with the states rarely seeing eye to eye with the center. The problem with state politics, as I had written long ago, was that most are simply incapable of thinking from a broader point of view. Their narrow interests sometime go against the interest of this country, and more often than not, they win.

So while I continue to feel worthless and overwhelmed by everything that seems to be going around me, I suppose the only way I can respond is by making my life more meaningful than being just a corporate slave that I am. I'm looking forward to my family visiting me next week and perhaps like millions of others like me, will continue to make my life better, hope for the best and leave the rest to God.