Free Markets and the UDCs'

<>In a country like India it does not require one to be an economist to imagine the consequences of unbridled laissez faire regimen. It would herald an era of Robber Barons. A Darwinian winner takes it all scenario which would ultimately strain the social fabric beyond repair causing violent unrest and misery.

The reasons for such an eventuality are not far to see. India might be the worlds largest democracy but there is hardly any effective mechanism that protects the rights of its citizenry. Anyone with adequate money and muscle power could hijack the system for its own narrow gains at the cost of society at large. The much-touted legal recourse is so costly, slow and tedious that few venture to invoke this despairing course. There is no welfare system worth the name that could ensure minimal health and education facility to its citizenry.

In a milieu like this compounded by abject poverty and illiteracy you have a virtual gun-powder keg that only needs a few sparks to ignite. It is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

But under the new uni-polar world order led by free market hype (equated with democracy) the third world wannabes are making the situation so vulnerable that collapse of capitalistic order becomes a palpable reality. It is the Johnny’s come lately who are lending credence to this fear and it becomes imperative on the Rambo Nations of the west to realise this reality lest their mad hurry to usher in free market capitalism becomes a self defeating exercise.

Anil K Singh

The vanishing joy

In travelling the stretch between Lucknow and Raebareli, an hour and a half car ride, you do not come across anything dramatic scenically. No Wordsworthian dales and fens. No verdant greenery of Kerala or lush farmlands of Terai. It is a plain stretch with some arid and some wet patches and a level railway crossing that is often closed and invariably so if I have some appointment to keep.

May and June are the worst months to travel. Countryside assumes a monochromatic pallour of anaemia. And as the day progresses the sun burnt tarmac begins mirroring the dust drenched languid landscape. Sunrise hour is the prime time to travel in summer. The air is bracing. Birds on their wings. Every contour of the landscape accentuated by the ground level rays of emerging sun. Scenes of such summer morning drive roused my interest in birdwatching. I distinctly remember that on a good day sitting on the back seat being driven at seventy kilometre per hour I could spot upto thirty different bird species. The count came down sharply on the return trip in late afternoon.

House sparrows, common mynah, crows and the odd red vented bulbul greeted me even before I was out of city limits. By the time the outskirts turned to countryside I would have encountered eurasian hoopoe, pied mynah, bank mynah, brahminy mynah, yellow-billed babblers, shikra, eagle and pond herons. Once into the countryside little and medium egrets, white-breasted waterhen, wagtails, rockchats, Indian roller, drongo, tree pie, white-breasted kingfisher, crow pheasant and green bee-eaters could be spotted foraging.

There were certain birds, which were spotted at only some specific places. Near one stretch of open semi arid grassland I always saw crested larks, rufous backed shrikes and white-eyed buzzard. White rumped vultures and scavenger vultures could often be spotted in hordes near settlements.

To day, ten years later my drive to Rae Bareli no longer yields the same rich crop of birds as before. A few of the species have almost vanished like the white rumped vultures and crested larks. The waterbodies are fast shrinking yielding to population pressure giving way to cultivation or settlements. Some of the babool patches have almost vanished and have been replaced by boards of proposed industrial estates, which never seem to materialise. I some times wonder if I were to start doing this stretch today rather than twenty years back would it still rouse my interest in bird watching. I doubt very much.

Brats!

If the rich of the country are a spoilt lot their brats can’t be any different and if anything even worse. India in the last three decades has spawned a breed of nouveau riche that has been weaned on the leakages of government funds. The progeny of this tribe has had a free dip of the till with over indulgent parents doing nothing for moderation.

It is the children of such rich who reinforce the obnoxious stereotype of rich brats who routinely figure in gory episodes like the recent BMW hit and run case in the capital. If parents in their pursuit of mammon choose to abandon all their filial responsibilities the children are bound to acquire a distorted value system. A system which does not accord any weightage to hard work, value of money, duty, civic sense and character.

How does the society allow continuance of this behaviour type?

Who and what could be done?

Are their any strenghths in this culture?

In defence of the fleeting present

Life is lived in small measures. Small hopes. Small things to look forward to. It is only in retrospect that these little links appear as one long chain of hopes realized or compromised. Trail of foot prints which in their moment were all path breaking but much beaten in hindsight.

The chimera of mission, vision and focus all find permanence only in post facto postulations. In essence they are all infinitesimal steps taken in the being of moment to moment that have meandered their way to get somewhere. So never forego the meagre present for the elusive Holy Grail of bigger tomorrow.

In the miasma of suspended hopes, choked aspirations and suffocating political rhetoric every pie in the sky appears larger than life. An optical illusion. The more diffused the light at the end of the tunnel the larger the apparent aperture. Photographers have a word for it – blooming.

Instantaneous gratification has a lot to recommend itself. Hark not the fakir who hawks the virtues of self-denial. Beware the cult of sado-masochists. Give wide berth to guilt peddlers. Fulfillment is always fleeting there is no permanence to euphoria. The seekers of eternal ecstasy either take the self-deluding route of hallucinogens or settle for intellectual masturbation of experiential nirvana. Both convenient vehicles of self-deception.

The credo of working in the present, living in the present and enjoying in the present for the present and of the present is the only realizable life philosophy. A life that everyone, willy nilly, leads - but not everyone accepts it. Most of the time retrospective vision and rationalization accords to it its own tag and aura imparting pseudo respectability, which resonates well with societal norms of self-perpetuation and preservation.