The civil nuclear bullshit

Our progress in nuclear energy is much attributed to all the years of sanctions imposed upon us. These sanctions forced India to develop its own resources for each stage of the nuclear fuel cycle and power generation, including next generation reactors such as fast breeder reactors, advanced heavy water reactors etc. This recovery shown by Indian nuclear department had made US sanctions futile. This Civilian accord from the day one indicated yet another gimmick being planned US in an attempt to curb the indigenous development happening in the field of nuclear research and technology. Knowing very clearly the energy deficiency in the country the acts like this would make our power sector dependent on countries like US. India although deficient on uranium reserve is self sufficient on its Thorium reserves hence we have a dependency on NSG over civilian nuclear fuel, the NSG is now trying to bargain with us by forcing us to buy out their technology as well. By buying uranium based reactors from US or France aren’t we under utilizing our resources and bringing the power sector into external hands?   Another important point is the nuclear waste management, currently all the nuclear powered countries are facing crisis in effective and safe dumping of the nuclear wastes and as India is taking the same route, that too with a plan of 25k Megawatt by 2020, we cannot escape from the same crisis unless we plan for it.

Education in India - Which direction are we going?

Educated society has to be the forbearer of a state’s development; this is a basic fact that has been widely recognized by all the ideologies of the world. Yet we fail to recognize this and have encouraged the commercialization of this system. At this stage the class division in the people has successfully infected the students too. Now in this country we have innumerous International schools which become affordable to a very small percentage of people, followed by privately owned public schools, central board schools, state board schools etc. At the end before we start pulling out the hair on professional courses the children are already divided on terms of quality education bought with money. The naturally there is an incline for parents to abandon small schools and move their children to a much greener looking pastures. Even teachers, faculties, management try to move to a well paid institute rather than spending the time in a village school with broken benches.

 The controversial educational bill put up by the first government of Kerala was a landmark move towards normalization of the educational system to make it immune to the fancies of various economic classes, but the wide opposition from the vested parties led to the failure of its implementation and ultimately the dismissal of the government. The bill was aimed to make a standard structure of syllabus, pay system to teachers, and facility. This was the brain child of the educationalist Joseph Mundasserry who proposed this bill to cure the gross imbalance in the distribution of education that already prevailed in the country.

The majority of the public who understand the importance of education never tried to realize the wedge being created in the society while being a partner in the same crime. Public is not visualizing the picture of development from an unbiased point of view, we are not realizing that what we see as development is nothing but a hernia.

...For war is a drug.

"The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug."  - War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

Last Sunday I finally managed to go to Rangashankara for a play titled ‘Robinson & Crusoe’. At first I didn’t read the name properly and mistook it as Robinson Crusoe and assumed that the play would be based on the well known story. But as I stepped inside the auditorium the stage and the posters hung on the walls increased the curiosity in my mind to know how a simple set like this could stage a huge play? It finally turned out to be a surprise and I must say that I didn’t knew the time that flew by while my eyes were glued on to the rendezvous of two shipwrecked soldiers Robinson and Crusoe.

 

The play was directed by a well known director Gracias Devraj, a Kannadiga settled in Germany for past 20 years. The set design was simple, it consisted of a blue ocean and in the middle of that a broken rooftop with a broken electric post stuck to it. The story is set in a deadly war that has engulfed the world, the destroyed houses and abandoned materials indicate the effect of war on the civilians. That is when the two soldiers shipwrecked, hungry managed to grab on to this floating roof. When they both meet on this destitute space the immediate instinct was to approach as though the other person is a hostile enemy and for that fight! And they fight to survive on the rooftop, later understanding that fact that both of them are in no position to wage a war turns their concentration on getting something to eat. Another point to be noted is that both of them don’t understand what the other one is speaking, while one soldier speaks English the other soldier speaks some illegible language which adds to much of the commotion. Together they starts exploring the house from the roof and unearths some interesting stuffs left over by the tenants of the house, something which amused both the soldiers who were trying to find some material to fix their raft/boat to escape which includes some casual clothes, a lantern, badminton racket, an umbrella, a camera and a bottle of liquor. Soon they forgot the war, the fights they had and starts trusting each other despite of the language barrier, they sing and dance under the night sky drinking and making fun at the flying aircrafts and booming bombs. The next day they wake up and try to reconcile everything, after many funny sequences they change themselves into 2 tourists who lost their way and ended up in a paradise beach. Their remembrance of the life they left long back at their villages while they left for war and the tears that swelled in the eyes as it reminded of their beloveds brought back the drama feel. Soon they both got back into fixing the rafts. As they got themselves to row away back in opposite directions to the place where they came from, the emotions swept in. They bid the final farewell and rowed their way to home.

 

This play tried to explain the triviality of hatred and hostility, irony of war and destruction and victory of brotherhood and hope. It showed us the future we are inviting, the extent to which man could go to satisfy his hunger for power, comfort, convenience, wealth and redemption for his hurt ego. And worst of all common man believes in wars! They believe wars can solve problems, subjugate the rebels, and enforce order even though the human history has proven how futile the wars have been. Wars have always taken a special position in the society, numerous fables, legends and epics have gone to all extends to glorify war. Most of the gods, heroes, villains are legends of a war epic. The reason why people doesn't even bother giving and taking a life is all because they draw inspiration from the heroes in the war epics like Sri Rama, Achilles, Hercules, and many other.The wars in epics have been interpreted as holy and sacred, like Achilles tells in Troy - "If you die in the great war, your name will be remembered by the mankind". We are humans and all the humaneness are all built in by us as we developed, but deep inside we are all animals and when in times of war there is no human or humaneness and we ride back to the animal instincts. At the end it leaves nothing but destruction and destruction only.

Common Man - The Villain ?

I just finished reading a book called ‘Great Indian Middle Class’. The book was written by Pavan Varma a bureaucrat. The idea behind the book was to explore the lifestyle, priorities, attitudes, behavior and the political and social involvement and outlook of the Middle class in India . The book was structured very well listing out the events and popular response to those events starting from the days of Independence struggle till the beginning of 21^st century.

 

I kept asking me several questions, what is a common man’s dream? What do parents dream about them? To me it was a good education, then a decent job that pays me well, a house and a car maybe, marriage and peaceful retirement. From the many million forwards I have received talks all about how to stay happy, what to keep me motivated etc etc. As it now occurs the society that we live in has become irrelevant to our daily life. In earlier days there used to be some strings attached to the society, not in terms of any feeling towards the well being but rather on mattes like marriage, status etc which is of common interest and subjects of dispute. But now laws are more lenient, people have started to take more freedom in choosing marriage, education etc. Particularly in secluded places like cities. This has made us grow more and more immune to the social changes, or social needs. As the book says, India ’s independence struggle never realized to empower people. Even after the country achieved the independence, most of the classes in India remained under the same bondage they already had. These were the tumulus periods of Indian development.

 

Getting back, it questions the responsibility we have shrugged off from our shoulders to maintain a totally independent society/country. This behavior leads to many questions like why after all we struggled for independence. Was it just for getting rid of a set of rulers whose ethnicity didn’t happen to match with ours? Was it to really get a chance to rule the country as the British have? Was it to give every people in this country a freedom which many couldn’t even dare to dream? What finally happened after the Independence ? Gandhiji got shot, rivers of blood flowed in the name of religion, zamindari systems prevailed, caste based discrimination transformed into class based isolation, educated elites managed to get employment, and the downtrodden remained forgotten. A constant sense of a feeling that we cannot reach the status of rich and elite never got away and even after being filthy rich the crave for more money, investment, savings were the only things that made us worry more.

 

We learnt on techniques of self upliftment, we learnt that education is the path to achieve all the self-interests, but we didn’t bother to look back and see whether the facility to give this service is available for all the people, we learnt about new health care techniques and their benefits but we failed to see that majority of the people in the country were excluded from these benefits because they come with a price tag, we learnt about all the techniques available to save tax, we learnt that competition is the ultimate word for development, we learnt how to close eyes on many things that contradicted the idea of meritocracy that we claimed is deteriorating the development. We saw educational institutions turn from beacons of the society to the brokers for corporate. We see corruption and learnt to accept it as part of the society, while at the same time accusing the government for corruption. We learnt that voting is a way to show their consciousness towards the nation’ well being and at the same time wash our hands from any responsibility accusing the government for their inaction. We have learnt that share market is a place where you can make money with just putting in some money and without putting any of your effort and literally do legal gambling. We have learnt to love the propaganda news like ‘Indian wins Nobel prize’ while closing the eyes on news like ‘ India ’s literacy rate is low’, we have learnt to jump and merry at the news like ‘Share market jumps 100 pts’ while ignoring the ‘2 lakh farmers suicide since 2008’. We have learnt to justify our insensitiveness to social well being as the generations go on. Though physically one, this country is getting split heavily into classes, with a society of self-interested individuals quoting all the historical facts and fantastic theories to justify the social paradigm as something that is good.

 

If we fail to act to al the crimes and inequalities happening around (due to legal or illegal reasons) and decide to layback on our velvet couches blaming the government then this society will one day rot out and at that stage there wont be government, lawlessness and disorder would be the rulers and our insensitiveness would get its final blow.

Fundamentalism

Last decade's favorite word. I never tried to understand the volume and inner meaning of this simple word. To me this was something that is attached to the fanatism or madness of a religion. As I tried to interpret it the facts turned out sourer as somebody said most of the things change their meaning each time you read. These are my interpretations of the word Fundamentalism.
How many have tried to influence any other person? How many used tangible sources to support their arguments? How many feel low when someone downplays your suggestions or beliefs? How many listens to others so as to get a different perspective or anything or everything that you have believed so far? How many think?

Fundamentalism is a human behavior to preach anything that you believe or assume or predict to another person mostly with an intention of influencing and attempting the other person to come in terms with your terms. Fundamentalism can be of any kind, Religion, caste, political, business, team spirit etc. The list is long. Now going back to how.

How does one become a fundamentalist? Everybody in this world is driven by something, at any moment there will be something that is stirring up in the mind, it could be love, money, pity towards the unfortunate, devotion to god, a sight of injustice etc. Your mind would seek a reason for why you couldn't achieve it so far and a solution to reach there. One thing that happens unknowingly is that the alley towards the mind becomes narrower concentrating only on the cause, reasons, solutions, issues. Then one fine day you meet a person with a similar thought. They tell why you are unhappy, they will be able to produce some instances from the history to substantiate it and along with that inevitably his passion gets added, a very contagious weapon. This agent provocateur needn't be a person it could be stories, writings in newspaper, the things or events that you happen to see around. The moment to take side, there will be an urge to look out for more and more sources to concrete your belief and the moment you get convinced with the idea the fundamentalism wins. Then you meet a person in doubt, you tell him everything you believe with utmost passion and confidence and conviction and then two things could happen, this person might either agree with your thought or might disagree, when he disagrees at that stage if either of them keeps their minds open for all thoughts then it is a defeat for fundamentalism, but if both of them decides not to budge from the foothold of faith then at that moment the discussion turns into a debate and either sides will try to put their gut limit to win the debate. All these vicious circular proceedings bounce over one common thing...the EGO.

Ego can defeat anything; ego is a result of the years of narrowing of mind. Ego as we know is a senseless, odorless, colorless property of the mind to achieve an identity. It is the owner of all the beliefs and faiths that a person has in this world and it will try its level best to defend it. So in the above situation in the first level of discussion the Ego has full confidence in its beliefs and spell out all that is understood of that belief (from some sources) now say that the second person puts out a point loud enough to be a real challenge to the belief, in that case instead of opening up the mind the ego will abandon reasons and try to find out excuses to defend this time. This goes on and it might either end in the defeat of ego, ego reaching out to any level to defend (like violence, subjugation, censorship etc) or a breakdown.

The solution to this problem is to keep mind open, or to encourage keeping mind open, encouraging the people to question you by whom you could save yourself from being a fundamentalist, Never ever bringing in the weapon called fear; Fear is probably the favorite weapon of any fundamentalist. As it is said, maturity doesn’t come with age, it comes with the broadness of the mind. Keep your mind open to everything, use your wisdom to pause and think on what you are doing is correct in all the sense? Whether I am doing something out of fear or a belief blinded by 'wants'. Broadmindedness helps you to see the soul of everything, it will on its own open up all the doors shut by our self due to blindness.