I'm confused!

What I see on the electronic media and what I read in the print media has confused me about ongoing activities. I'm one of the many ordinary, law abiding citizens of this country going through this dilemma and all I want is that my country should do well and be looked upon by the other countries as a place that they'd like to be in. For that to happen, we need to achieve greatness and greater accomplishments and hence, this doubt that has crept in. I'm gonna discuss a couple of specific cases - one at the national level and the other at the state level - below:-

  (a) The black money issue.

  During the last elections from what was being bandied about, a lot of unaccounted money has
  been stashed away in foreign banks, over the years, that had the following characteristics:-

        (i) it amounted to a few lakh crores
       (ii) it was stashed away mainly by the wheeler dealers and the fixers from almost all walks of
             life
      (iii) some of it belongs to the high and the mighty who've done it to avoid paying taxes and to
             maintain their 'lily white reputation'.
   
   If this money were to be retrieved and brought back to the country, poverty would be a thing of the
   past and the guilty, however 'mighty' they were, would be taken to task to set an example to the rest
   and prevent further wrongdoings on this front!

   Now they talk of the confidentiality clause regarding the account holders signed between various
   countries and other strictures that are in place towards avoidance of double taxation etc.

   My doubt.
   
   Weren't the protagonists who talked of getting back the black money aware of these blocks
   when they're promising us during the elections? Or were they just election rhetoric? Or is it
   that there're a lot many, who owes allegiance to the ruling front, that figure in the list? And
   don't tell me there are only 627 defaulters - the number of people who figure in the list in the
   sealed envelope handed over to the court by the government!

   A definite action is expected and without delay!  

    (b) The barring of bars in Kerala.

    Towards bringing about complete prohibition in the state over the next ten years, a phased
    closure of bars has been undertaken by the government. Judging by the numerous errors(?) in
    implementation of the government's directives coupled with the frequent interventions by the
    judiciary, it's amply clear that the political class is divided over the vexed issue. It's definitely
    a winner among the women voters of Kerala, but prohibition is fraught with attendant problems.
 
    It will bring about a mushrooming of illicit bootlegging and 'drinking havens' close to the borders
    with the other states that would require strict monitoring and effective dealing.

    Anyways, as per the latest orders of the High Court of Kerala, only 62 bars - 21 in five star
    hotels, 33 in four star hotels and 8 in heritage hotels - are allowed to function in the state. This
    will come into force, after a month, when 250 bars of the  two star, three star and unclassified
    varieties will shut down after the disposal of pending appeal petitions connected to the case.

    Consequentially, the district of Wyanad will have no bars as there are no star hotels there! The
    outlets of the Beverages Corporation, an undertaking of the state government will, however,
    continue to operate!!
 

    My doubt.

    Is the government serious in bringing about a total ban? If it's affirmative, then why're there
    so many errors creeping in when the directive should have been clear cut and unambiguous? 


Tailpiece.

I suppose, the deviousness inherent in political decisions is something that I'll never be able to comprehend, being a layman!

      

The 'Kiss of love'.

The organisers of the 'Kiss of Love' have invited couples at the Marine Drive in Kochi, PM 02 Nov, to protest against moral policing. They'll express(?) love and draw people's attention to the fact that no one has the right to interfere in one's personal life. The LGBT(Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals and Transgenders) community has rallied behind this drive.

Background.

The 'Jai Hind' TV had aired a show, last week, alleging immoral activities at the cafe, 'Downtown' in Kozhikode city. The owner, however, had explained that he's only facilitated young boys and girls to meet up and spend time over a beverage. He has been making good business, all right. (One can never know as to whether there's a business rivalry angle to the whole thing which might have prodded some other, in the field, to feed discriminatory information).

Within hours of the airing of the show, the activists of the student wing of the BJP had attacked the cafe, causing damages. Incidentally, the channel is owned by the Congress Party!

It's this act of moral policing that has prompted the organisers to come up with this sort of a counter!

Comment.

There seems to be two active groups in the country which are:-

      (a) the first, that supports democracy, thereby welcoming the evolution of society which, in
            effect, embraces change.
      (b) the second that are conservative and support rigid cultures and ethos, that have come through
            the ages and thereby, resistant to change.

My take.

India is a land of tolerance. Everyone has space and therefore, every point of view needs to be heard, debated and then disposed off ensuring that the final outcome is a majority decision. To arrive at it, violence in any form, has to be shunned.

In this case, the vandalism of the cafe was wrong and unwarranted!

Let the 'Kiss of Love' take place with the rider that the organisers must ensure that the 'love' that's gonna be depicted will be strictly within the realm of propriety and never get out of hand!! The law enforcers are gonna have a tough time, indeed!!!


Tailpiece.

Am reminded of the outcry of the '60s and the '70s, in the western world, with the rise of the 'Hippie trend'. Is this our 'desi' version of the same, I wonder?  

The fickleness of relationships!

I've spoken on this topic earlier too. The story that I'm gonna narrate only accentuates what I'd said earlier.

I know of an elderly couple who're doing very well in their heydays and these days, live in a secluded retired life, rarely mixing with people around. They've a daughter, currently living abroad, as per the diktats of the professional requirements of the son-in-law. That daughter has a cute and lovable daughter and she's in the family way for the second time.

In one of my many interactions with the elderly couple, the lady did tell me that her husband was not keen on having a child which he'd harped upon during the heady days of their marriage. But fate did have other plans and the couple was blessed with a beautiful baby girl. She soon became the apple of her father's eye who went out of his way to provide the very best for her. The little girl grew up to be a confident young lady, did well in her studies and engaged herself in many extra-curricular activities making her a live wire in all the social dos that the family frequented. The small family of three enjoyed every minute of their being together.

But, alas, this idyllic situation did not last long when Cupid struck and the young lady fell in love with a guy, from outside their community, giving heart burns to the father, who tried to dissuade her from getting into the relationship but his little girl was as defiant as he was, when it came to making her choices! The sad fact is that the father has never been able to get over the incident as he's taken it as an act of betrayal by someone on whom he'd showered all his love, all his attention.

The irony is that he's not been able to love his li'l grand daughter, who considers her 'nana' as the last in her list of people whom she loves - after the paternal grandparents and the 'nani'!



Tailpiece.

In one of those unguarded moments, he'd opened up to me on the topic. "There's no use of loving somebody unselfishly. Each one has his/her priorities in life and in their pursuit, tends to be very, very selfish without even bothering as to how much hurt they're causing to those who'd given him/her their....er, everything!"

And he'd that far away look in his eyes, revealing the deep pain within.

Dangerous fallacies.

What motivates people to become terrorists and jihadists? Many a time, youth from well-to-do families are found to embrace this dirty task, dispelling the myth that only the uneducated and the poor are attracted to this dangerous and unacceptable way of life. Probably it's in the waywardness in living and the strange feeling of having abundant power to dispose off lives - with the squeeze of the trigger of the firearm that they possess, flouting existing civilised laws - that attract them to it.

Their initiation is rigorous when they're fed with the craziest of inputs so as to be brain washed completely. All traces of humanness are removed as they're taught to inflict the worst forms of torture on their prisoners, completing the transformation of a human being to a beast! And the worst form of violence has come out of the ISIS repertoire - decapitation!!

The guy who inflicts the maximum damage and kills, becomes a 'Ghazi'. He gets the highest number of the most beautiful virgins in heaven. In other words, for a jihadi to become a Ghazi, he needs to celebrate the killing of a non-believer! 

My take.

The perpetrators of terror misrepresent religious thoughts and provide their own interpretations which are swallowed hook, line and sinker by their misguided followers.

Tailpiece.

Kasab, who was nabbed by the Indian security forces during 26/11, must have realised it all during his time in jail and when the court proceedings were progressing against him.  

   

It seems to have happened only yesterday......

After being in Afghanistan for the past 13 years, fighting the Taliban, the US and British forces began their final and phased withdrawal from that country. Towards that end, their biggest camps viz. 'Camp Leatherneck' of the US and 'Camp Bastion' of the British forces were handed over to the Afghan National Army last Sunday.

Camp Leatherneck, by itself, is sprawled over an area of 6,500 acres and during the height of the operations, both the camps together housed about 1,40,000 troops which is now going to move out of the country. However, about 12,500 US and British troops will continue to remain in Afghanistan for a few more years as trainers and advisers.

Having said the above, let me go through the diary of events of the last 13 years in a quick recap:-

  (a) 07 Oct 2001                                      Consequent to the 9/11 terror attack on New York, US
                                                                 and British forces launch 'Operation Enduring Freedom'
                                                                 thereby, dislodging the Taliban out of power.
  (b)      Dec 2001                                     The UN establishes an international security force to
                                                                 oversee the entire operation. And after two years, in 2003,
                                                                 the International Security forces come under the ambit of
                                                                 the NATO and had 43 countries contribute to the detail. The
                                                                 interesting part was that a part of the US forces came under
                                                                 the NATO control while the remaining continued to operate
                                                                 independently!
  (c) 02 May 2011                                    US forces pin point Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan's
                                                                 Abottabad and destroy him.
  (d) 13 Jul 2011                                       First batch of 650 US troops leave Afghanistan in a phased
                                                                 withdrawal.
  (e) 18 Apr 2012                                      US and NATO work out the sequence of the phased
                                                                 withdrawal and the latter comes out with its blueprint
                                                                 in May.
  (f) 04 Jul 2012                                       The US-Afghanistan diplomatic treaty comes into being.
  (g) 18 Jun 2013                                      NATO hands over its security responsibility to the Afghan
                                                                 National Army.


The apprehension in everybody's mind is as to whether the Afghan National Army can stand their own against the wily Taliban. It's my sincere hope that they do.


Tailpiece.

In these times of the deadly ISIS, the Taliban seems to be a 'not-so-devious' terrorist group if one were to do a comparison of the horrors committed by the outfits. But it's for the well being of the civilised world to have all such extremists annihilated without compunction.

The sad case of Reyhaneh Jabbari.

Reyhaneh Jabbari, 27, was hanged to death in the wee hours of yesterday despite international appeals, by Iran after its Supreme Court had cleared the lower court's punishment of death.

An Interior Designer by profession, she was hired by Murtaza Abdul Ali Sarbandi, a former Intelligence Agent, to spruce up his office. Sometime in the course of getting through with the contract, he'd tried to rape her and acting in self defence, she'd stabbed him to death as per her statement in court in Jul '07. The defence had, however, insisted upon the fact that the knife had entered from behind, thereby demolishing the theory of self defence and she has been in jail since '09.

The victim's family could have saved her life by accepting blood money but they insisted on their legal rights under the Islamic principle of an 'eye for an eye' probably because she'd accused him to be a rapist in a much publicised media coverage!

Was the prosecution flawed as the international human agencies including the Amnesty International have been crying hoarse? Or was it a clear open and shut case of a premeditated murder? Doubts will linger as the incident has taken place in Iran where over 250 people have lost their lives on the gallows on various charges, thus far, in 2014!

RIP Reyhaneh Jabbari!


Tailpiece.

Is it the steep price one has to pay for being in a closed society?



  

Recalling the past.

I'm dwelling on a subject that has asked more questions to myself and for which answers are yet to be forthcoming and there's a turbulence in my mind. Am I getting a clearer idea of the flaws in my personality? Are those connected thoughts the reason for the turbulence?

I presume them to be so. Let me take the case of the 'water diviner' and my classmate, Ramanujan with whom I'd a wonderful evening a couple of days back. A simple soul and a thorough gentleman, who'd admitted sometime in the course of that evening that he was thrilled to be at my house and even though I was in good spirits by then(?), I was humbled by the earnestness in his voice. I mean what was in me that called for such unbridled emotions?

The perspective would be set right when I say that Ramanujan and I weren't the best of friends in school, simply because each of us moved in a different circle of friends. We must have hardly exchanged a few sentences - as conversation - during our five and a half years of stay at school(He'd actually joined the school a year ahead of me). The difference between us - as I see it now with a remarkable clarity - was that while I was brash and reckoned that everything around was happening because of me, he was calm and quiet, who went about his stuff in a dignified manner. And since I came from a family, known to the school authorities was a factor that helped, I must hasten to add that I never ever took advantage of it.

Probably, yet another opportunity has come our way to interact more closely after having frittered it away while at school!


Tailpiece.

I'm reminded of an incident that had happened quite a while back. Subbu Iyer, another class mate of mine and I'd spent an afternoon together on board my ship. Sometime in the course of that afternoon, Subbu said and I quote, "Hey, Rajeev I'd always thought of you to be a different guy" and went on to narrate an incident that had happened when we're in class VIII. The Maths teacher had all of us standing for not having done the homework that he'd given us the previous day and he moved around the class with his offensive looking cane, trying to find out the reasons as to why we'd done the unthinkable. As he reached me, he'd asked me, "Rajeev, what happened? Don't repeat it or I'll tell your grandfather" and let me off. Subbu Iyer, was among the others who were devastated by sir's cane that day. To his impressionable mind, it was blasphemous that I was let off for the same crime that he'd committed simply because of the accident of my birth. And he was validating my persona years later!?

Subbu is no more amid us and must be reading this yarn as I punch them in.