THE DARK CONTINENT

Africa is a continent burning in the ignominy of a vexatious past and seems to be heading towards a future which looks even more obscure. The once the great land of mysticism and resplendence is now infamously known as ‘The Dark Continent’. Dark continent, I am not sure if it is an expression coined by the first world which openly proclaims their racial intention’s, but nevertheless the rustic, ruthless happenings which has become the norm of the daily life in the African subcontinent shores up as a perfect reason behind this proclamation by the rest of the world. This continent stands as a testimony to the antonyms of peace, tranquility, freedom, progress, prosperity and above all humanity and it has become more synonymous with what humanity promulgates as Darkness.The greed for more and hatred has killed millions of people, in a country called Rwanda 800,000 people got killed because of the conflict between two dominant communities Hutu’s and Tutsi’s, some of the nations in the African continent have been ravaged by civil wars and many still are stuck in a political turmoil, In the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone more then 4 million (40, 00,000) people have died because of war and its effects such as diseases and famine. In an other country called Sudan the conflict between the government supported militia and the non Arab rebels have claimed 200,000 lives and has displaced nearly 2 million people. The civil war which erupted in Angola just after its independence in 1974 lasted for 27 years making it the longest civil war which has left 300,000 people dead. More than 200,000 children are fighting these civil wars in various African nations’ as child soldiers.

Since 1987 the Lord’s resistance army (LRA) in Uganda has wreaked havoc by killing more than 12,000 civilians and displacing 1.4 million people, in a small country called sierra Leone between 1999 to 2002 the RUF rebels (Revolutionary united front) fought against the government to take control over the country and its diamond wealth, thousands of people perished and a million people were left without homes. All these facts indeed annunciates the truth that the African continent is overwrought by the darker side of humanity but who is to be blamed for all these chaos the answer would be time or to be precise it would be the man’s curiosity to explore or to be even more precise the so called first world nations of today. During the period of colonialism the sophisticated European minds came to Africa and introduced one of the darkest aspects of humanity to the Africans, the unjustifiable, unscrupulous need to enslave a fellow human being. For decades the European traders made money and more money by trading African human beings as slaves. A human mind which could go to an extent of considering a fellow human being as a mere commodity is the mind which has plunged into the ultimate darkness, a darkness which is the culmination of all the other abominables like greed, animosity and impiety it is this darkness a remainder of European sophistication which has been plaguing this continent for decades now and has transformed a what could have been a land of opportunities into a land of desperate’s, warlords and dead bodies. - R. Prasanna Kumar

NEW INDIA

As of now We live in a society where probity has no part to play and being square is being impractical. We don’t care about the corrupt, unscrupulous politicians, knavish government officers, bad and dirty roads, we don’t seem to care about the terrorist and fundamentalists who are trying to disintegrate this country for the sake of what they believe in, which might be true for them but killing people for the sake of what they believe in can never be justified nor we seem to have the mind to think about a seven year old kid who works in a local tea shop or in a hotel to earn his food or about the people who spend their lives begging in the traffic signals and temples. There are 200 million people in this so-called great nation of ours who don’t have a place to live.Can we change all these? Can we create a NEW INDIA? The answer is yes… You might ask me how? Well you all know how and that’s what you have been doing all these years; compromising, but now you need to compromise on your perceptions, the perception that you need to be afraid of the government, the perception that you alone cannot change this country, the perception that the entire country is a very big toilet and a dustbin. Of all the perceptions which has been plaguing our minds the one important perception which is the reason behind all these chaos is money is everything. If you can compromise on all these perceptions and never compromise on being true to your self, your true self will emerge out; when this transformation happens with every Indian a NEW INDIA will emerge!!!

- R.Prasanna Kumar

IS OUR COUNTRY A GREAT DEMOCRACY

We live in a democratic country and we surely are proud of it or for that matter are we really?. Every citizen in this country knows that there is something wrong with this so called democratic country of ours, Many don’t talk about it because it is that dearth which allows them to live more than a sufficient way of life, not to mention that a member of parliament in Uttar Pradesh gifts Bentley’s to his friends and many other's don’t talk about that dearth because they feel that their rights on freedom of expression and speech doesn’t mean any thing to them when it could jeopardize their rights on freedom to live and to live happily ever after. An ordinary Indian gains much respect when he puts on the garb of an voter every five years and the respect that he gets does not become the end to the means but the means to an end which is to make him remain as an ordinary Indian till the dawn of his death. We live in a democratic country were virtuous people like Manjunath and Sathyendera Dubey‘s get killed for being virtuous and for exercising their basic fundamental constitutional rights as the citizen’s of this country, these incidents doesn’t make it to the front page’s of the news paper’s or magazines or as a topic debated by various panelists in show’s organized by news channels but some how the media seems to feel that it is their moral responsibility to scrutinize a eleven member team when ever it loses a game of cricket. our constitution binds us all together and patronizes that all the citizens of this country under the law will be treated equally regard less of religion, caste, creed, color and sex, the differences that money and religion has created in the people’s mind which is perceptible and tenacious enough beyond any words has blinded us all to a fact that the very purpose of our democracy is gasping for its breath.
- Prasanna Kumar