Who is an activist? Just about anybody today. That probably is the ultimate symbol of a ‘sound’ democracy, wherein every citizen raises his voice on every issue, pauses for air, and then resumes the charade for a fresh issue, the earlier one having faded under his/her own din over the latest fad. Sign of the times, now.
Browsing: COLUMNS
I am shocked. In fact, I am outraged. Actually, ‘devastated’ would be apt. Summons to Manmohan? Mr Clean, corrupt? No way. If I was in New Delhi I would have hit the streets for the Cong road show, even if it entailed the unseemly idea of walking with Sonia Maino. I am sure Rahul too would have taken a stroll wherever he is holed up, in support of the former PM just as he lent ‘voice’ for Kalavathy.
‘Make in India’ is surely a stupendous success in one sector: Unaccounted money. Financial policy is a mockery because much of the economy is still outside the system. And political sleaze is the biggest source, topping the charts, but rarely tapped, while hard-working but careless citizens get routinely raided and officially ripped.
Suddenly in the last six months there is a spurt of CMs, present and potential. The CM cup is now overflowing. The abundant choice is actually fun if not for the fact that 2016 seems fixed. By God, I meant. Unless He is overruled by the courts, that is.
The irony is striking and sickening. Srirangam, for the devout, is Buloga Vaikundam, the Lord’s abode on earth. Periyar’s parivar in their prime, for their part, wanted to blast it with a cannon, making Srirangam the key target of their ideological, iconoclastic ire. But here’s also where believers and atheists alike now stand united on one ‘count’.
I did not go to the Capital nor could I follow the happenings fully owing to my Hindi handicap. Still I had kept track of the Delhi polls very studiously by all possible ways. Apart from the professional call, the interest was also propelled by an earnest eagerness to understand how our electoral democracy is evolving.
Since I plan to write about freedom of expression today, I am afraid I must be very careful. That in a nutshell is the comic contradiction that mocks speakers, writers, thinkers, artistes, nay, virtually anyone who feels the urge to correct, convince or simply convey something. It looks, free speech will have to slowly seek sanctuary in the suffocating space ‘between the lines’ or worse, get exiled to the oblivion of words unsaid.
It is understandable that re-conversions and Sanskrit science are raising a lot more outrage than Peshawar or Paris amidst the secular brigade here. After all, are not the quixotic tantrums of the Togadia tribe deemed more dangerous than the bloody massacres unleashed by madcaps worldover, all of whom happen to have one common denomination, er, denominator? Indeed, such irony can be dismissed as idiotic but for the insidious intent.
The idea of Time has always befuddled scientists and spiritualists alike. While for the former it is a linear process running towards an unknown, but a certain, end in some distant future, for the latter, particularly in Bharath from yore, time has been cyclical, a ceaseless alternation of creation and dissolution or rather, projection and withdrawal.