Friday, August 16, 2013

Only the way it alone knows how to know

A severed milieu
that I am not used to in lieu of
what I used to presume
about things
the way I only could presume
is exacting, intriguing
and yet
so inconsequential
why?
why would it have to be that anything and everything
should have a certain connotation and texture
as insinuated by the minds
of gone forever in due measure 
why?
a thing that can leap time and space
and pass through the vortex
where even the light would falter
is binded by the extremities of definitions
as illustrated by the minds of gone forever 
arguing that its for its own sake
in fact just incase
which sounds so stupid and meaningless
even then they say
just in case
why?
how verve the color's may be
they fade through eventually
even the add on textures
do lose their verdure
and yet the ways of minds of gone forever
have sustained and they still endure
why?
sensing a meaningless
parody in all this
I remembered the fortitude
of the words that I had read long time ago
which had it in them
the ardor my heart alone could know
only the way it alone knows how to know ...

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

My views on the movie Ship of Theseus

                    I watched the movie Ship of Theseus just now here in Chennai at PVR cinemas, First thing first I enjoyed the interactions of all the characters with their own perceptions of morality, whether it be a photographer not wanting to claim credit for what she thinks is not entirely her creation or the dilemma the Jain monk faces as to whether his principles do mean anything at all when he puts it to a test or it be the business man wanting to do a right thing at all cost, every interaction left me with a certain yearning for more, I don't know why? may be because the movie at some point started to become an extension of my recent quest to find an answer to a question which I dint realize existed in my mind until I saw the movie dogville recently, its quite a movie of a different kind left me wondering whether morality make's one weak or arrogant, not strong but arrogant. I read a few reviews before watching Ship of Theseus which were all unanimous in their praise for the story about the Jain monk, a part played brilliantly by Mr. Neeraj Kabi , but I dint feel the punch the reviews were talking about which I am sure is because I am used to such ideas or concepts or the truth's or whatever one wants to call them, that a human being is not a single organism but a collection of millions or billions of microorganisms, but yes I can imagine how someone would feel when he or she confronts such a view for the very first time, I am sure it would make his or her mind restless churning the dogma out that had set in.

                    I have been pondering on the nature of duality myself for sometime now and the reasons behind the very existence of everything around us mostly from a skeptic point of view rather than as someone wanting to find a greater meaning to life. I came across a certain view sometime back, have you ever wondered about our experiences of the present never being of the present but only of the past, the experiences we experience through our senses whether it be through seeing or hearing or feeling happens the way they happen because of the perfect Interlinking of our sensory organs with our brain by the electrical signals which pass through our nervous system, when one sees an object the photons reflected from the object falls on ones retina which then gets converted into an electrical signal which then is transmitted to the brain through the nervous system, which the brain processes and then one realizes that one is seeing something, but for anything to transfer from one place to another it takes time, so when you see an object the photons that hits your eyes has to get converted to an electrical signal which then needs to reach the brain so when you actually feel that you are seeing the object you are not exactly seeing the object belonging to that moment but of the previous moment ....Well coming back to the movie, Ship of Theseus is one of those movies which cannot be subjected to the ritual of movie reviewing, aiming to gauge the movies entertainment value seems so trivial even before any effort could be made, right from the start to the end the poignancy with which the movie flows leaves you wondering whether you would want to watch this movie all over again and the answer seems to be a poignant yes coming from deep inside .....

Saturday, July 20, 2013

A Platonists musing

Deluge of shadows,
getting heaped into a
single moment of time,
making your head spin
the way space wouldn't wind,
time and space
is that of any matter
while all that is to be said
and all that is to be done
remain said and done
and it all
leaves you wondering
why the deluge of shadows
and for me to ponder
why should I lie on the meadows,
 
hmmm......

well something's as they say
are good
when left unsaid than said
and undone than done
even while it keeps
you wondering time and space
should that be of any matter
for things around
to let me be ....

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Rupee breaches 61 mark ...

                         I knew this day would come eventually, I knew that Mr. Chidambaram would lead us to this stage when he said things are fine and the government will do everything to keep the animal spirit of our economy alive even while he knew that our borrowings have increased considerably and it was in no way in accordance to our spending, when you spend more dollars than you bring in what else can you expect, our import bill is now at around half a trillion dollars, this country is now staring at a huge trade deficit, mainly owing to its allegiance to "Dollar" so much so that it chose to snub real freedom seeker's like Snowden and Julian assange.
                           Our imports have been hurting us for a very long time and nobody seemed to care about it for a very long time until now, because now the dollar has been gaining strength against many major currencies, A weak dollar made things really different for Indian rupee in the past, the rupee was getting pushed up for apparent very limited reasons, now all those reasons have nothing to offer to make rupee competitive against the dollar, the NDFC market (Non - deliverable forward contract) has been pushing the rupee down even further, it would help if the RBI takes appropriate measures to make dollar delivery system streamlined so that the price of the dollar doesn't get spiked up too much beyond the markets requirement, and it would also help to keep a tab on the unwanted speculation that's happening in the currency market.
                            Things would be far worse if our remittances were to become a little shaky over which our government has no control, The Indian manufacturing is in shambles, a country which has 800 million mobile phone users has not been able to induce an environment for Indian mobile phone manufacturing to thrive and have a hold of at least 30% of the mobile phone market, how pathetic is that. Rupee has depreciated 20 % in a year, if this government is not going to take advantage of this depreciated rupee we all can be sure of one thing that we are being led by a bunch of nitwitted prosaic seemingly learned nut heads.
                              If I were the finance minister of this country now the first thing that I would be doing at this stage will be to have several measure's implemented along with the Department of industrial policy and promotion, and commerce ministry mooting for a shift in the way this country views its exports industry and manufacturing. India has always been reluctant to become an export economy. It has been such a difficult question for me to answer with so much of untapped skilled and unskilled cheap manpower why hasn't India managed to become an export economy, well I know the answers for most of the questions, one of them being there has been a lack of will to do anything about it, This government headed by the Congress party for sometime now has been bending over backwards to introduce the food security bill which beyond the comprehension of my nerdy little brain.
                              This government is trying to hard sell an idea that is sure to backfire like all its grand overtures in the past, fuel subsidies, farmer loan wavier, MNERGA, being blind to the inefficiencies of the PSU's. This government is making a terrible mistake of confusing charity with governance, charity is for people who cannot fend for themselves, not for a group of people who form an economy, who when given the chance to uplift themselves socially and economically will do so with the kind of precision that's close to the natural order of things. This government headed by congress will fall not because of its inefficient handling of things in the recent past but because of the grand overtures it made in the distant past even before the BJP or NDA came into existence. and yes of course corruption, how can one ignore this governments enormous achievement of putting our country's name high above in the coveted list of most corrupted countries in the world, is there a person in this government who can come out and say " I am as clean as your conscience wishes me to be"?, Confucius said superior men know what is right, inferior men know what will sell and i must add that the inferior men also know how to "Hard sell" it.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Enough is enough , Do we need another war !!!!


                 Things are moving at a pace that's very disturbing, the last thing the world needs now is a war and death of millions for nothing, North korea for all these years has been reiterating only one thing again and again that it wont give away its independence to choose how it wants to protect itself for anything, the world super powers who over the years have shown so much of diligence in handling situations in many parts of the world, by their very virtue to make things more worse have ruined the lives of millions of people whether it be in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Iraq, and now they have set their eyes on North Korea with their untrammeled allegiance to their virtue which i am sure has guided them now to decide that north Korea isn't the kind of country that they can allow to exist as a country anymore.
                 
                      One like me would consider crime against humanity in whatever form by whoever whether its committed by a political establishment or by an establishment fighting against the political establishment as one and the same, Some People I am sure understand 9/11 as one of the Biggest attacks in the history of "mankind" but they really need to know what "biggest" is ....more than 300,000 people died after Hiroshima Nagasaki bomb blast more than 400,000 suffered from radiation injuries, Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have been killed since America started going around bombing countries and killing people mercilessly in the name of protecting its people and making other peoples lives in other countries difficult, People are ok with what America does when it says its only to protect itself but they are "Not Ok" with North korea a communist nation asserting itself whenever it feels threatened and says it might show what it is capable of when it comes to protecting itself and its people, a few clamoring for war seem to be placing their arguments based on the notion that "what America is doing is for its people", Well they might be right in a way to make such an assumption because that's how things seem on the surface, one needs to take many things into consideration before even attempting to arrive at a conclusion which would allow the understanding of the entire truth possible.
 
                    There is only one truth and its "Economics", here is a country which consumes more than any country in this world, if history is any proof the power over the world trade and in essence over the world has always lied with the economies which can consume more and America is no ordinary consumer, its an economy ready to incur any amount of debt to keep its consumption ever increasing and how could one allow such an economy become unsafe, to state the fact America is a country which has more number of guns than people ! , and one just needs to look at the number of shoot outs that happen in schools and colleges every year in America to know what is really happening in that society, latest being the Newtown massacre in which little children 20 of them i suppose were gunned down by some 20 something kid, The gun manufactures lobby over there is so powerful and wealthy that the government has not been able to do anything to have a leash over the guns being manufactured or over the guns being supplied, so much for a country which says that it cares for its people, its all as simple as the statement that is to follow If India is a $ 10 trillion dollar economy today Indian lives would become more valuable than anybody can ever imagine, a 26/11 kind of attack would mean nothing but the end for Pakistan. So people should stop drum beating and should stop blindly crying for war which will only make this world worse than it is now.
 
                Every country has the right to make its own advancements in the field of technology, "Market's should be driven by the idea of ownership" - major economies for decades have been using this as a reason to curtail other countries from pursuing any technology which they already possess so as to keep the premium intact which they have been charging to let other countries use what they have been calling as "their technology", North Korea wanted to become capable of sending its own satellites into space and they even invited the world media to take a look at their efforts , even though it wasn't successful USA started to cry foul saying that North Korea has other intentions, North korea is the last bastion free of human greed, its the last country where non essentials have not become needs, Imagine a city which doesn't have thousands of cars stuck in traffic blaring their horns and spewing smoke, imagine a city where you don't have advertisement hoardings all over the place, imagine a city where you dont see people moving in bunch's like zombies always in a hurry, imagine a city where you don't have that homeless person sleeping on the street who is invisible to the hurrying foot steps that moves past him, that citys name is pyongyang. North Korea with its huge untapped natural resources has been a target of all the enterprising profiteering forces for the last 4 decades and they dint budge even a bit, now if things spiral out of control it will be the same story all over again.... make false propaganda..... bomb the country.......turn it into ruble.........start sending your profiteers into the country....make hell lot of money out of all things that belonged to North Korean people once.....

                          I don't know why some people have started to hate so much when someone points out the ill effects of the Idea which drives the markets now "ownership", and one gets stamped as a communist or leftist for just speaking the truth. Why does one have to be a communist or why does one have to be a leftist to talk the truth, when one talks about other than profit he becomes a leftist, when someone says that when you give the extra food that you have to the person who is starving is not charity but duty he becomes a leftist, when one says money as such which has no value which is now buying labour is the cruelest thing man has ever done to himself he becomes a leftist, when someone gives voice to those gullible people who were wooed with false promises from Indian villages and have been turned into modern day slaves in Dubai sweating their blood out in 55 degree Celsius (131 Fahrenheit) heat building high rises for sheiks and CEO's of multi billion dollar corporations at the most cheapest cost possible he becomes a leftist,. all said and done one can be sure of one thing about North Korea it isn't the country which would destroy the extra tomato's that it produces to keep the tomato prices from falling by creating a social culture to make wasting of food acceptable in the name of some lame festival...ever heard of "tomatina". I am also surprised at the way people sometimes can be so insensible about how they present themselves to the world not wanting to seem stupid by trying so hard just to accomplish the exact thing they set out not to accomplish. When it helps us we don't bother about what's happening in a civil war torn country or about the "multitude of liberation armies" fighting each other and killing their civilians with impunity unless those outfits keep meeting our demands for diamonds and Colton and other such minerals, we don't bother about whether a human beings head is cut off or he is stoned to death in a country run by a "Monarch and his family" unless that monarch keeps supplying us with the oil that we need, and we don't bother about a country that is run by a "communist regime" even if they commit the gravest of human rights violations unless they allow us to sell our goods in their market ,I choose to stop here for some might find it really daunting to come to terms with reality.........

 
                          North korea is a country which has been pushed to the extreme, The world super powers and world trade bodies have made an entire nation suffer for decades by imposing terrible economic sanctions just because they wont give their Independence away to decide how they would want to protect themselves and after four decades people start to clamor saying that people in North Korea are starving and the reason is the oppressing communist regime, if this is not broad day light hallucination i don't know what is. At this juncture if anything untoward happens in the name of "WAR" the world has no one to blame but USA and other countries. Nobody is saying powers of the world have to subject themselves to North Korea but at least they could be accommodative and respectful of a country which wants to be respected for being the kind of communist nation that it is, North Korea also needs to understand that economic well being is the only factor that will tilt the allegiance of south Koreans towards it if it wants to make its dream of unifying North Korea and south korea a reality. War and building nuclear facilities for other than civil use can only kill people but will never make them love each other, the world needs to understand this and so should North korea.

                             
          World is about extremely different people coexisting together, that's the real world we all live in, we are at a point where we can make ourselves more understandable to each other we cannot think like those in the past who thought " bombing them would solve everything"....we cannot afford to do that anymore. To end its only fair to point at the fact that it wasn't a communist nation which dropped an Atom Bomb named "little boy"  on another country creating a huge calamity ...and we all know about "Private ownership" and "Profits" do I have to say more.....
 
Cogito ergo sum .......

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Jumping off the cliff......



                          Many believers in the idea of "money always makes more money" seem to have made up their minds to make convincing arguments to the unenlightened that the fiscal crisis has been averted, or as they seem to be enjoying to put it in a fanciful way as they always do, that they have stayed clear of the "fiscal cliff", have they really ?, in all fairness it looks like they have jumped right off it, and whats the first thing you do when you jump off a cliff "you close your eyes". The recent deal which has paved the way for the american government to tax the income of the super rich seems nothing like even scratching the surface, the total debt is lurking at around $ 17 trillion , this measure only aims at putting in some $ 600 billion into the coffers over a decade and what good is that ?, and more so the spending has been left nearly to its own accord and nothing much has been done to keep it under leash at the present rate over a decade the American government would have incurred an additional $ 8 trillion in debt. One doesn't have to be a qualified economist to assimilate a picture of the state in which american economy is  and what it is to raise the taxes to support the already ballooned up spending if not bad news. The median age of US population is hovering at around 37 and there has been a steady decline in the birth rate, to state the fact the american society is aging at quite a noticeable rate, this will only put more pressure on the government in the future to keep the public spending intact or may even be forced to raise it, if that were to happen in the future this deal would seem like "fools did their part".   
                         
               Some might argue that in a way that kind of notion about money might be right, the rich in america have to be allowed to have enough narrow as well as broad money so that the american way of wealth creation happens unhindered, for that i would say yes it might be right but not entirely, it just doesn't take money alone to create more money, money cannot in anyway help itself to make more money when in essence it cannot drive consumption anymore where it has been put to serve. If history of economics is any proof It could be stated that the power has always lied with economies which can consume more and it is very evident where its happening now, The Asian economy as a whole seems to be growing at a very steady pace while the European economy is trying its best to stay afloat, clearly the flow of finance seem's to be heading towards a tide that's bound eastwards. 

              But such an argument may not be convincing enough for a few who have already drawn a very different conclusion by  Equating the consumption pattern of the economies like India and china which were closed to the outside world in the 1970's and in the 1980's to how it consumes now after those countries opened their markets a few decades ago to substantiate their conclusion about money making more money, infact to surmise where the real power actually lies - in the west. Well to put it bluntly money doesn't make its way where it cannot multiply, The potential of an economy to consume is what makes the  capital, land and labor available in the first place. Having said that one has to remember the world today is more integrated than it was in the 1960's or 1970's, then each economy had its own unique consumption pattern and each had its own unique driving factor as far as their economies were concered, for some it was technology, for many economies it was agriculture. and where do we stand now, we are in a world which is being driven by one unique factor, the economic arrangement that makes Nairobi consume the way it does in a small scale is what makes many large economies consume the way they do in large scale, ultimately its all about the ability to consume and looks like America has  reached some kind of saturation point and it cannot keep promising the world that it has enough room to consume more, it's time to cut back.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Truth alone will get you Jailed


                       Two girls were arrested for exercising their freedom of speech and a hospital was ransacked by a bunch of SS (Shiv sainik) goons, this only shows the amount of effort that is being put into making an idol out of a man who was nothing more than a simple politician with tricks, arresting those girls for voicing their opinion is such a ridiculous act which only demonizes the politicians involved in this whole episode of trying to shut peoples voices by force, at this juncture one would definitely would like to know what the authorities have done about the SS thugs who ransacked the hospital just to make sure that we are not in fact a banana republic. This country has to do away with such political rowdyism or should i say "thackerayism" which only undermines our democracy, and by the way the world out there is changing and its changing ever faster like never before, economic growth seems to have become the most important gauging factor of a governments performance in the eyes of the "YOUNG INDIANS", and in such a world there is no place for "Thackerayism".
                      One cannot deny that with freedom of speech comes great responsibility so does accountability in a democracy, if the factors of accountability were to be applied to the deeds of shiv sena's party men this party should have been banned from contesting in the elections long time ago, but sadly we Indians suffer from a very demeaning attitude, an attitude that has not allowed us to mature into a sophisticated society even after 60 odd years of independence, When being on this side of the line helps us we don't question the ways and actions of the people who drew and defined that line for us, and that's so sickening and that's why people like dawood ibrahim came into existence, and 26/11 is still so fresh in our minds and we hear news about scams every other day. 
                      So now whoever one is and whatever one might call oneself as one only is a hate monger in other words "a terrorist" who goes out there and beats people just because they are not from his state or country, When the government grants what the hindu citizens demand its called granting their rights, When the same government does things that grants the wishes of minorities it becomes "appeasement", well i don't deny that politicians use the powers vested in them as tool's to bring them more votes, one might have to question the ideologies of such politicians rather than being blunt in the way expressing ones dissent over a certain issue which seems like one has animosity towards minorities, Mr. Thackreys politics to be frank and fair was nothing but his version of the same tune that Dravida Kazhagam in Tamil nadu played when it raised slogans against the imposition of Hindi which worked so well in the late 60's and 70's, so lets just stop painting this man in colors that he doesn't deserve and lets just call a spade a spade, "He was a simple politician we Indians could have done better without", 'I wish him a good rest, may his soul rest in peace .... Let the idea of Hindu fundamentalism vain from here on or any religious fundamentalism for that matter, lets hope for a better future where religion, creed and statehood will be damned in front of our common national identity             
                                                                     - An Indian