Who cares about niceties anyway..

These are turbulent times admitedly,Companies going belly up/turning turtle/turning Dodo and all. Everyone around is worried and everyone wants sometihng to be done. It becomes a classical case of too many cooks spoiling the party sometimes. We have a government which is fairly prone to such classics, it would have been funny had it not been at the expense of lives & livelihood of people.
Now out Urban development ministry wants to tax auto industry, add congestion charges, discourage private ownership of vehicles and and ask people to use public transport which is non-existant mostly or it does exist in form of blue-line buses and mumbai local with a death toll running into thousands every year.
All this at a time when automobile industry is running a battle of survival worldwide and there are about a million jobs on the brink in this country itself with whatever unemployment figure we have without this "help".
As it turnes out, another ministry in the same government is trying to help the same automaker out by encouraging government offices to buy new vehicles..
I am sorry to say but it sounds like only ministers and babus will have right to zip through and park whatever and churn-out whatever amount of smoke they wish.. all of it in public interest.
whatever happens to people working in the industries, whatever happens to thousands more added to already impossibly congested public transport, what we will have is industry churning out ambassadors for ministers and babus; a happy state to those who get rattled by people speaking out finally..

The Age of Shallowness...

In a week's time I'll be heading to watch the latest Aamir flick- Gajini. The USP of movie, A protagonist who forgets everything in 15 minutes. So interesting-A different take on the same we saw in 50 First Dates, the oh-so-sweet movie with Drew Barrymore & Adam Sandler.
What it reflects though is much more sad and in fact sinister; A reflection of our own 15 minute attention span to things trivial & to things vital a moment before.
It is definitely easier to lean on others for everything, our sitcoms, our news, our analysis, our worldview. it is surely much more easy to come on streets after every attack and demand war- clean and simple. against whom? with what objectives? at what costs? one might ponder and fret till the next big event- The kitsch lasts, everything else is transient.
It's easy to have candlelight vigils, It's easy to bleed tears for peace. talk about track-2 diplomacy when the blasts and murder has had its 15 minutes.
some take an ostensibly different view-they want to barter their safety with land- a land that does not belong to them, a land which is connected to lives of 'aliens'. few of these got a jolt in Mumbai and kept quiet for few weeks- now they are back again with another twisted excuse, another attempt at self denial.
We don't care really. there is an interesting story about a frog- you put it in boiling water and it will jump straight out of it, you put it in water and boil it slowly, the frog will stay in and die.
It's all about attention spans really. every 15 minutes, the page refreshes, the history is deleted, wiped out clean.
A great reason for why we could evolve into civilization has been our ability to accumulate our knowledge generation by gen ration and pass it on, build on it, draw inferences, correct our course.
It's under threat i feel, thus we see the same old ghosts revisiting us again. we had other important things to do in the meantime, there will be other who will exorcise, or take advantage of our slumber to wipe us out we do not know, for it isn't likely to happen in next 15 minutes, and it won't last beyond that anyway...