He is not sleeping...

It is alright to poke, call or shout at a sleeper who you want to desperately wake up. My wife does that all the time. While NYT is trying to do that precisely here, it appears to me, as an onlooker, a mildly amusing entertainment. Perhaps a horror movie of future.

Because the person is not really sleeping. He is just pretending to sleep.

For all the talk of development and bullet trains, deep down he knows that he is not the miracle-worker that Arnab Goswamy and his credulous and massive followers hoped for. Modernity does not reside in ATMs or Trains. It is a transformation of mind and culture. The modern so-called development that the Indian middle class is waiting for - that is not the Gomukh of miraculous powers. But, it is just a child of a cultural change, perhaps the youngest born. I will grant that Modi is acutely aware of this. But then, there are a couple of problems:

Gunless Taliban

My right hand is dysfunctional. But I cannot help but write these few sentences.

Taliban killed hundred+ children in Pakistan. Since everybody is so distressed about Taliban killing children, I had my faith in humanity fully restored. But, oops....I am at a loss to explain which Taliban was doing this to children all across the world?

Oh, I forgot. This is just meat.  Regular Red Meat. No child. I have my faith in humanity fully restored again. As long as we have this incredible ability to play with words so that fundamental concepts like Life, Human Being etc. can be redefined to suit our convenience, I shouldn't be having any doubt in the overall moral standards of humanity. After all, it is subjective & relative.

But wait, why can't Taliban define their own terms? Oh, stop asking these questions, you moron. Don't you have sensitivity? It is the time to mourn, you know. Because children are dead. How dare you support Taliban? You freak...

The Kiss of Contradiction

India is the motherland for contradictions. We adore love stories and screen romances. Yet we vehemently oppose love marriage. We consider the nature in its entirety as divine. Yet, we absorbed untouchability. We had wealth beyond measure. Yet, we continued to live in poverty. And this is just a start of an endless list.
So, how could that theme vanish when it comes to the campaign of "Kiss of Love"? Without getting into the merits or demerits of the campaign itself, there is a tangential - yet very significant in a bigger scheme - to this story that cannot be ignored. It is the nature of a political contradiction that faces the large majority of young generation. Like most contradictions, the people who face it may not be even aware of it.

The first official glimpse of Authoritarianism

When the new Gujarat governor signed the bill that mandates voting in local bodies, I do not see it as a law confining to the borders of a state that I have not even visited. There is a larger frame to this picture. And that frame is made out of the wood from the forests of Authoritarian-lands. This picture does not smell of any flavor of democracy.

Authoritarianism does not rise up as a tsunami on one bad morning. It always works itself up as a destructive hurricane-  starting with a mild pressure variation, building up slowly, steadily and stealthily in some remote vastitudes of sea before climaxing to its ferocious form right before the landfall.

Marx wrote Das Capital in 1849, Lenin took power in 1917 before Stalin could bring the Socialist dictatorship to climax in 1929 in Gulags. Marx never envisioned a Gulag, neither Lenin. Yet, there it was. Like the seed of a poisonous plant making itself fruitful over years & decades.

Indian Revival vs. the West

R Jagannathan of FirstPost critiques Pankaj Mishra's recent article in New York Times. Well, I think I need to critique both!!!

First, Pankaj Mishra claims that there is a ressentiment within the Indian elites that is subterranean, which is potentially more dangerous than Taliban and ISIS etc. In reply, Jagannathan thinks that it is the West who is afraid of a revived liberal & democratic India who is about to find its Hindu-Buddhist-Jain cultural moorings, and that Mishra is just attending to pander to this fear.