INTERNET HINDUS

THE INTERNET HINDUS

                 Contrary to the common understanding,  the term ‘Internet Hindus’ is given by the handsomely paid old breed arm-chair leftist intellectual- writers, with  impressive university degrees to flaunt, to the lesser-off, who they, in their misplaced arrogance, despise and ridicule in the mass media.  These lesser-off are Internet savvy, average educated Indians mostly Hindu- techies, mobile –wielding 24x7ers, students,  employees in the private sector companies and corporate houses, and   the  educated  youth belonging to the much-troubled and far the more stressed middle class urban India, whose main claim to fame is their being Internet-savvy. Despised by the elicit creed and the mainstream mass-media, all through these years, their deliberately suppressed thoughts, views and sentiments, now find volcanic explosion on  various free web-sites, where they pour their heart out, through blogging ,chatting and social networking. In the cyber space these poor souls share their views, sentiments, frustrations, love, bickering, romance, virtual and real life experiences, in short almost every shade of human feelings and emotions,  with other similarly placed persons-called ‘friends’( in the web’s own lexicon and vocabulary). To them, for the first time in the history of free India, the constitutional  Right to freedom of speech and expression, is now leaping out of the law books to take the shape of reality. In the cyber space they, not only  now uninhibitedly express and share their hitherto suppressed views and sentiments through blogs and articles but also venture out to expose the fraud, hypocrisy, games and gimmicks that the self-proclaimed saviours of our so-called democracy play on the nation.  They  now question the authenticity of the out and out pro-establishment so-called mainstream media-both print and electronics, which, in the most despicable show of atrocious arrogance, has so far and so long  denied  them the media-space, which they desperately needed and richly deserved , to ventilate their grouse and grievances mainly against the establishment.  Their number runs in millions.

                Goes without saying that the emergence of this new tribe of rebellious youth brimming with  meadow-dew fresh thoughts on everything, under and over the sun, out to reject and rubbish the status-quo and bent upon giving practical shape to the Socrates’  famous exhortation: “An unexamined life is not worth living”, is sending shudders and shock-waves down the delicate spine of those who have been manipulating  anything and everything to their advantage in the safe believe that no one could question them. On the other side the visibly disturbed elite class,    actively supported by the mighty establishment, and  mainstream media with the help of  whole army of  handsomely paid writer-intellectuals on their pay-rolls, is up in arms against these Internet voyagers to defend the status-quo, establishment and the despicable entrenched vested interests.

                The new generation of Internet activists, do not have the matching qualifications of their counterpart intellectuals in terms of highfalutin degrees and awards who,  for a long time now,  have been active on the electronic and print media.  The all-powerful establishment is also bent upon making the life and living of these Internet activists, more and more miserable and stressful to stall their purposeful romancing with the Internet;  enfeebling them by denying them the level playing ground.  In-spite of so many handicaps, hiccups and hindrances, they have been acquitting  themselves well- doing all that that can be done for their cherished cause- braving all the odds and obstacles wilfully imposed on them by the conniving establishment which dreads the word ‘change’ and roots for the meaningless misleading jargon: ‘development’- a battered hat which has lost  its shape  on being tried on so many  heads.

watch with abated breadth, as the hitherto much-maligned and derided tag-Hindu- instantaneously turning into much coveted trophy of honour and achievement. While all this fails to dent their reputation as intellectuals, and  continue to be handsomely remunerated  for writing all such pro-establishment, hackneyed stuff,  appear on their favourite T.V. Channels participating in talks, discussions and other intellectual activities- mostly as invitees and experts, it has certainly exposed them for what they are- downright hypocrites.

                Goes without saying that these blue-eyed boys of both the print and electronic media, can not afford to stray away from the pre-structured policy of the either- except for some inconsequential deviations now and then designed only to project (obviously faked and pretentious) objectivity and impartiality of the concerned journals or the T.V. channels. Sometimes, it does bother their conscience, but money matters more, and hence triumphs.

                 As stated above, these worthies, in a carefully designed strategy, associated the Internet activists

with the hitherto maligned word ‘Hindus’  with a view to denounce, decry and degrade them and to project them as ‘communal’. However, in their anxiety to paint these  Internet activists with the communal dye, they conveniently overlooked the fact that Hinduism stands for all that is good,  great , beautiful and  pure in secularism as against the officially touted secularism, which at its best is pseudo-secularism, and at worst a contrivance devised for minority (read Muslim) appeasement aimed at cultivating, nurturing, nursing and fostering the minority (read Muslim) vote-bank for the purposes of gaining political mileage over the rival parties in the elections. Thus the ploy to defame and degrade the Internet-savvy urban middle-class India by appending the word ‘Hindu’ to them got misfired, and the cult is going from strength to strength, and  in the process  glorifying Hinduism to the huge chagrin of this so-called elitist class of intellectuals and the mainstream media.  Hinduism gained the respectability it so richly deserved, but persistently denied all these years by  the vested interests and the pseudo-secularists, entirely for political reasons which have got absolutely nothing to do with the ground realities. Secularism in it’s pure form is synonymous to Hinduism. No wonder, the class called’ Internet-Hindus’  comprises  of entire  Internet-savvy educated middle-class India, with the people of every religious persuasion proud of being associated with it. And, without exception, they all are extremely happy and delighted with the tag, sorry “Trophy”.

Parrking space crunch 02-04-09

PARKING PROBLEM – AN OFFSHOOT OF LOP-SIDED DEVELOPMENT

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The severely limited parking space in almost all the Metropolises, getting increasingly shrunk by the day, is sure going to cause nightmares to the harried citizens. Add to it the thickly congested roads used by incessantly tensed drivers with frayed tempers, shouting and fighting all through the way to their destination and you get the big picture. The family would be thanking God for his small mercies, if their near and dear ones drive back home in one piece, even after being involved in an ugly incidence of road rage, accident and/ or a bloody brawl for the road-space- the things likely to become a matter of routine in not too distant future. One wonders, why the ever-rising graph of incidences of violent road-rage and fatal or near-fatal road- accidents does not ring alarm bells for the policy-planners and those in authority?

The neighbours fight like sworn enemies for limited parking space within block areas in residential colonies of big cities. Parks within them need to be reconverted into parking ground to meet the hugely increased demand for the parking space.

And now, with the small Nano and other small models, looming large all set to flood the vehicle market in a big way, the crisis will further deepen. Not only the arterial roads of the big cities but even the dirt roads of the countryside small towns and villages will get the taste of congestion, pollution and what not? Of course, the cash-rich farmers of the States in the neighbourhood of Delhi will continue to move in their swanky cars, as hitherto, but others will certainly go for Nano in a big way. Don’t be surprised if, some years from now, going for a morning walk, you are accosted by a beggar driving a second-third hand battered Nano, with his one hand on the steering wheel and the other jutted out of the window, holding a bowl thrust right under your nose: “Pitrool ke vaastey paisa dey dey, Baboo.” (Spare some money for filling the car, please).

The situation right now is very grim indeed. With the Nano and other newer models swarming down on the roads of our cities, like a cloud of locusts, the bad will get to worse in near future.It is estimated that each day Delhi roads are swarmed with around 1500 new automobiles further accentuating the already acute problem of parking and road congestion in Delhi. The story could not be much different in other metropolises and big cities. Less said about the spiraling atmospheric pollution, the better.Western countries have already labelled us as "the bad boy of the climate change talks" and are pressurizing us to cut down our greenhouse gas emissions As J.R.R Tolkien. aptly puts it in his book Lord of the Rings, we should "........uproot the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till". America has decided to take tough measures to tackle vehicular emissions. Those when implemented would reduce polluting emissions from vehicles by more than 1/3rd. And that would be equivalent to removing about 18 crore cars from the U.S. roads by 2016. Alarm bells are already ringing for our country, the world’s fifth largest Green House Gas emitter. Here mere vehicle emission cuts won’t serve the purpose; even though per unit vehicular emission in our country averages substantially more than that of the U.S.A.This certainly, is not the type of growth or development that we should strive for. Action on climate change and global warming should take precedence over the economic growth. While our economic growth caters to the greed and caprice of less than 10% rich and powerful moneybags, the climate change is likely to adversely affect the life and livelihood of around 7.5 million poor of the country every year. We should put a cap on car manufacture to curtail its production . Cancel all the deals on automobile production, manufacturing and sale.

The dictates of the emerging situation are loud and clear: For the present, more than flyovers and roads, we need to create parking lots, not only in and around office-complexes but more so within residential colonies and blocks and that may entail converting many a city parks into parking-lots on priority, besides constructing multi-level parking facilities.

While the alarm bells have been ringing for quite sometime now, one wonders why the government and the policy planners are not hearing? Why are they not seeing the writing on the wall in bold relief and looking the other way when the urban landscape of the country is getting uglier by the day- chocked with mindless unplanned and grotesque development? All the big cities are bursting at their seams; severely straining the extremely fragile infrastructure. This prosperity for less than 10% has robbed the middle-class India off its tranquil, peaceful quality life infesting it instead with perpetual tension-filled days (and nights) with no respite in sight. The quality of life of middle-class India should not be sacrificed at the altar of higher and higher standard of living which unplanned development as ours ensures for the 10% rich of the country, who corner its 90% wealth while the teeming millions live below the poverty line. Thus broadly speaking, the quality of life of the nation as a whole deteriorates if the development is not tempered with equitable distribution on the national wealth as has been the case with our country ever since independence. Presently the more challenging problems which call for urgent action are: Global warming, climate change, scarcity of essential natural resources and as such we should put the issue of economic growth on back-burner and concentrate on them. Consumerism and diabolical materialism are the bane of the society and we should be wary of promoting them in the name of economic growth. If the ancient Indian wisdom and the accumulated experience of millennium is to be believed, happiness lies in minimizing the wants and, not in multiplying them.

Population explosion in a country as mismanaged and as misgoverned as India is akin to extending an open invitation to the ghost of Malthus which, even otherwise, resurrects here, off and on, in the form of deaths and devastation in terror attacks, endemics, epidemics, wars, pestilence, diseases, floods, accidents, poverty and starvation driven suicides, murders, pre-mature deaths ( our maternal and infant mortality rate is just about the highest in the world and the average life expectancy little over 60), increasing Naxalite- and now sitting at the doorstep the “Taliban” -insurgency and violence and endless such maladies so much so that human life has become the cheapest commodity in our country.

Only the rich and the politicians are benefited by the growth of human capital which they gleefully welcome. To the former it guarantees cheap labour-force and an inflated number of gullible consumers and to the latter a swelled minority (read Muslim) vote-bank. And all that at the cost of the poor and the middle-class whose poverty and miseries get compounded with each addition of an Australia every year to our population. No wonder, the rich and the politicians incessantly sing virtues of being “many” through their handsomely paid writers, ghost-writers and ever-obliging press and electronic media, caring a hoot for the miseries and depravities caused thereby to the remaining teeming millions.

Sadly, in the big cities and the Metropolises, the car has left the domain of being a luxury to become a necessity - a commodity needed for the very survival in an extremely busy city life. No more are they needed just for convenience and comfort, as used to be only a couple of decades back. No wonder, if the phenomenon of rear to rear driven cars in a lengthy beetle-like formation crawling their way on the busy city roads, all the time blenching volumes of carbon-dioxide and other poisonous gases in the atmosphere, honking and competing for every inch of the road space, soon becomes an unalterable part of the busy city life. Long traffic-jams and snarl-ups at every next turn of a road, are right now here to stay. Sad and lamentable; they call this horrible phenomenon:-“development” and every politician and political party swear by it.

While the government and all those policy-planners know it fully well that the root cause of all maladies is the unbridled growth of population, they seldom talk about it, let alone taking necessary measures to control it. Why the successive governments have been shying away from taking the most stringent measures that are urgently called for in order to contain and control the burgeoning population? Why are they not enforcing small family norms by meting out extremely harsh and deterrent punishments, disincentives and penalties to the defaulters, just as in China? Is not the politics of minority (read Muslim) vote bank also, directly or indirectly, responsible for it?

Do extra-ordinary maladies not require extra-ordinary solutions?

-SANJOG MAHESHWARI