WAITING TO EXHALE

The largest democracy in the World, sounds great, India; where everyone aspires to be a politician. It is the best job in the world to govern a docile serpentine queue of 1 billion plus people. Truly a delightful job in this rain soaked, draught ridden, cyclone prone country to govern these bovine people who will tolerate anything in the name of democracy, unlike the Americans who demand facilities or the Italians, who if a law is absurd ignore it, or the Brits who conscientiously rise up baying for the blood of perpetrators of injustice.

Imagine after 50 years of independence our politicians have managed to eradicate the last vestiges of basic essential services like health care, electricity, education, drinking water & every state coffer resembles mother Hubbard’s cupboard.

The irony is despite all these festering wounds on the effete citizens each state tries to rub in salt to these wounds by exercising more taxes for already non existent infrastructure.

Take Maharashtra for example they now levy a lifetime vehicle road tax when the only roads are pieces of stones tied together by garbage plastic ribbons. They charge toll for over bridges that are half completed and have been causing traffic snarls for the last 3 years. P. U. C. certificates when actually half the population is slowly being poisoned by carbon monoxide (or is that part of the family planning or population control ministry). When the traffic department runs short of money they just ban tinted glasses or out of state vehicles, the revenue and graft generated by this gives a respite for a year or so before they decide on some other form of ban or tax to torture the harried motorists. The traffic lights that were put up at a great cost to the tax payer are put off by the traffic constable so that he too can contribute his mite to the long traffic jam.

Slum dwellers who are the biggest vote banks are encouraged to encroach on private and public
Property including railways, steal, water and electricity so that in a few years each state will be equal in having power crisis’s, and spread rampant diseases that destroy Lacs of people.

Memories arose, was it the last decade, in another life when our forefathers struggled and sacrificed their lives. I think of this sacred land of the EAST, MOTHER INDIA like a PROMETHEAN HUNT our race is in peril, our sons our calling for help & life goes on like some absorbing tragedy, in which only fools & madmen rush out to take part in the action while the silly middle class sits back to watch KAUN BANEGA CROREPATI.

A Buddhist comparison, as cold as the conclusion of a metaphysical syllogism, a compassion not only for men but for all life which struggles, cries, weeps, hopes & dies not perceiving that everything is a phantasmagoria of nothingness.

AU REVOIR

K. VINAY KUMAR