The Lies of the Year!

As Indians, we were subjected to a lot of lies in 2009. From outrageous claims like kids using a certain soap attending school 40% more than those who didn't, to news channels claiming they had "exclusive" rights to national disaster stories, we had our share of craziness unleashed upon us. Not very different from other years, and no less deserving this time, but here is a list of lies so goddamn spectacular and large scale, they were not just presented as truth, they are still being gobbled up as such.

5. India is going to be a superpower!

Yeah right. 29th position in competitiveness, based on economic performance, government efficiency, business efficiency, and infrastructure. Before you start thinking this isn't so bad, consider we are according to the World Bank, at the 122nd place for "Ease of doing business". Even worse, we're slipping. Just in case you'd like to bury your head in supersand and ignore these facts as mere numbers, we have 41% of the world's poor people, our public health system is a joke, and corruption puts us at 88th place in the world. In other words, there are 87 countries that are less corrupt than us, (not that our ranking will suffer much if the order was reversed!). 42% of our children suffer malnutrition, and rape is our fastest growing crime. Most definitely, we need someone with superpowers to save us, but we're by no means going anywhere near becoming a superpower anytime soon! It's a great lie given the facts stacked against it, but for sheer staying power, 5th place on this list!

4. Hindi is India's "National Language".

No matter how much we fight this untruth, there are enough people to propagate it. The print media was a bit careful about it this year, but channels like CNN IBN actually sent out reporters with cameras and microphones on programmes like Y Not, to proactively promote this absolute lie, calling Hindi our "national language", when the simplest of editorial ethics could have nipped this in the bud. Some of our politicians went far enough to trumpet this lie on the floor of the Parliament, and nobody went to jail for this blatant contempt of the Constitution. Example: http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20091109/816/tnl-i-am-proud-of-abu-azmi-for-taking-oa.html Even though you have to be really stupid to believe this one, a lot of people actually subscribe to it, particularly Hindi speakers, so how can we deny them 4th place?

3. People in our government are on an Austerity Drive!

Sure! Just look at how many cars follow a minister to the railway station, never mind the airport, and never mind how many millionaires our political system creates while they all work for the upliftment of the poor and downtrodden. Austerity my left foot toe, could we have a little more efficiency? This joke was so bad, it even wore itself out of mention in the media in less than a month. What a lie to unleash upon even the stupidest amongst us! And now, a New Year Gift for the nation - Parliament approves free air travel for any number of ministers' relatives - http://in.news.yahoo.com/48/20091222/814/tnl-parliament-nod-for-free-air-travel-t.html. The lie itself wasn't all that great, but for silliness, it gets some ridiculously valuable points to stand 3rd here.

2. We are here to show our support for the victims of this horrible terrorist attack!

No shit! What are you willing to do? Offer yourself to terrorists in exchange for some of the hostages? A lot of our monkeys aped people all over the world in propagating this wicked lie and repeating it, particularly after the Mumbai attacks. Some of our celebrities, even rascals who bought guns from the underworld and have gone on trial for terrorist and anti disruptive act crimes, promptly pulled sad faces on TV and parroted this lie. Sure you're showing solidarity with the victims of terror, you bastards. Light a candle or shed a tear if you want to feel good for yourself, but please spare us the lie about showing solidarity with people who're getting killed by terrorists. How sick to lie to dead people, instead of saying to their souls, truthfully, "Tough luck my friends, but thank God that wasn't me stuck there!". Do we have to insult them after we let them die? Enough already with the biggest bullshit of the last two decades, now firmly in fashion in India.

1. Barack Obama becomes the USA's first black president.

Hello? Barack Obama isn't black any more than he is white. His father is black, from Kenya, and his mother Caucasian. He is a person of mixed racial ancestry. The real question to ask is - if he was elected President of Kenya, would he have been considered Independent Kenya's first white president? There is a limit to spread a lie, but how could the media of the USA not take up such a great opportunity? Their whole viewpoint was more like a reaction to the thought - "Wonder when the next nigger would come along for us to celebrate and exorcise our demons of being called a racist country!" A man who looked a little black was good enough for them, and the Indian media was quick enough to endorse him as a full black man, like we give a shit about black people in the first place!

This lie is #1 for the sheer scale of nonsense and the amount of gloss and floss that comes into play each time it is unleashed and for the audacity with which the whole world has gobbled this black horse-shit!

Happy New Year!

A question of rape

Shantaram Naik, MP, mentioned yesterday in the Parliament that some
women invite rape and murder because of their behaviour! The view
itself isn't shocking, coming from an Indian male living in the stone
age. But the logic behind it should disturb anyone who can spare a
thought about the quality of people we elect to public office, to
supposedly represent us.

In quoting what the fool said - "This incident has been blown out of
proportion in the electronic media... Young lady herself invited all
the alleged offences against her, ultimately resulting in her tragic
death in the middle of the night....!" and then later, outside the
Parliament building, "Two types of rape... different angle... rape is
alleged against a man who has been moving with a lady for some
time.... police should investigate very cautiously!"

How do you blow an incident of rape out of proportion? It is the most
demeaning of crimes, for there is no reversal, there is no complete
justice, and in my opinion should be punishable by death, like in many
Arab countries. No matter what you do, you CANNOT blow a rape out of
proportion. Nothing is even comparable to it and no compensation can
ever truly be just.

This idiot Naik is essentially stating point blank that if he can
reach the fruits in his neighbour's garden, he can very well steal and
it would be his neighbour and his garden that should be blamed for
inviting his thievery. Very nice, Mr. Naik.

How many times do women in India have to be abused and reabused before
our leaders even begin to respect them? How dare such ignorant,
insensitive, absolutely distilled morons refuse to even comprehend
that a crime is a crime! If I get verbally abused, and I ended up
killing my abuser, I very much doubt if I'd be let go on the basis
that the abuser invited his death at my hands, no matter how true that
may be. Is rape any less serious? What about when murder follows
rape? Can any crime be more heinous?

This Naik represents the stone age Indian Male's attitude towards
women - sexist, ill informed, and simply lacking respect. This is the
mindset that leads to abuse, assault, rape and murder of women. This
fool in my view has taken the side of rapists and abusers and is
encouraging them, basically saying women they think they can rape are
fair game.

S. M. Krishna, the External Affairs Minister evaded the "sexist"
remarks question about Naik and said, "Tourists safety is government
responsibility, but foreign tourists also need to be cautious". Why
don't we put "Be cautious about getting raped when you travel to
India" on every Incredible India poster? I thought this guy had some
brains, but clearly he is whacked out too.

If we have rapists on the loose, this is a bloody law and order
problem. We're still not saying that our rapists are a problem!
We're not saying that we have in our society, dangerous prowling
rapists, many of whom are politicians, who can rubbish a police case
and turn it on its head. What would it take to make this admission?

The Russian Consulate is about to issue an advisory to its tourists
asking them not to venture out after 10PM in Goa. This really should
be very insulting, but we don't care about such things. Not the
Indian male for sure. For all of this would take integrity and a
sense of decency. For some reason, the Stone Age Indan male, the
SAIM, for short, thinks this is an issue of attitude. The SAIM is
intimidated by modern women, especially if they are Indian. It is a
complex issue, and one that needs to be ruthlessly dealt with.

I have come across a lot of SAIMs who are nothing but third rate,
sexist scum, allowed to flourish on this earth by their mentally
enslaved mothers who cannot teach their sons an iota of decency for
having such a lousy view of women. A lot of SAIMs think rape happens
by women who simply don't behave appropriately. Some of them actually
think and express their opinion that this is an attitude problem.
Sure you probably won't get raped if you are ugly and sit at home, but
it certainly, most certainly, shouldn't be an invitation to get raped
and murdered if you are attractive, have a life and want to be out and
about at night.

Many SAIMs tell me about a golden period that India had, especially
under Lord Ram, when women were decent and our society was just
incredibly "good". Hello! Ravana also showed up around the same
time, didn't he? Was Sita flaunting something? How come she never
gets blamed? And what about the less spoken about story of Ram having
questioned her fidelity when she came back? Sorry, that is not the
mentality I want to subscribe to. Imagine an entire army fighting to
bring back your woman, and you dare ask her if she slept with the guy
who kidnapped her! If this story is true, Ram didn't set standards
high enough for me. But clearly, this is the highest standard that
many Indian males seem to subscribe to. Hey Ram.

BSK.

The Melting Point

In the rich tradition of poor Indian documentary film making, The
Melting Point today came on CNN IBN, presented by Bahar Dutt.

Sure enough, we found ourselves in front of the idiot box, and we must
be taken for idiots, for nobody else would actually watch and be taken
for the same ride again and again. We went to the Himalayas, saw some
ice melting, and a sage who also takes photographs of retreating
glaciers, and spoke to people who spoke of how a gushing stream is now
a trickle, of how one particular glacier is retreating at twenty
metres per year. Oh, we also heard that a billion gazillion square
kilometres of ice is now MELTING!

Everything is MELTING! The world is MELTING! The Clicking Baba says
so, and he thinks this could be the end of the world. What else can
poor Bahar Dutt do, other than sit at his feet and listen in rapt
attention? This is, after all, profoundly important.

Anytime you go to the Himalayas and look at ice in bright sunshine,
you will find water dripping off it. THAT is NOT global warming! It
is simply a regular cycle of ice forming and melting. That is not the
image we should be seeing. But this is lazy, insidious film making,
at its worst when done by a typically clueless Indian documentary film
maker. Okay, okay, we get it, the world is melting. So what? Why
did you have to drive your crew all the way upto the Himalayas and
pollute it some more to tell us what we already know? Why can't you
tell us anything new? Did you find out anything from YOUR trip that
we should absolutely be enlightened by? Of course not, Bahar Dutt.
Because you have not done the basic homework needed to make a
documentary. You have no story!

Why would CNN IBN put out such a poorly formed documentary on air?
That shouldn't surprise us, coming from a channel that sends out
equally dumb reporters on other programs that claim Hindi as the
National language, but let's not lose focus of the issue itself - poor
presentation of a subject already well known. In other words, there
is no film here. There is no story, and this whole Melting Point
episode is nothing but a gaping hole.

She also claimed we're living in denial. That's really pushing it,
unless this documentary is five years too old or we're about five
years old. Sorry, but this is an inconvenient truth. We are in the
middle of a well represented international summit in Copenhagen, for
heavens sake, on climate change, global warming, and all related
issues, and what each country in the world must do. This is
definitely not living in denial, and it looks like this woman is high
on thin Himalayan air and low on IQ.

Why is it so hard to even copy from the best in the business? The
same country that has polluted the earth the most for so long, the
USA, has long since leaped forward and found answers for reversing its
oil dependency, and has developed technologies to run entire cities,
for instance, on solar power. It is already here. A solar powered
aeroplane left the ground years ago and has been flying non stop for
years. Again, not Indian. There is no denial. It is time we ran the
stories that can actually make a difference to us.

A little bit of intelligence will go a long way in judging for
ourselves what we CAN do to fight againt climate change, assuming of
course that we caused it in the first place. India is one of the
lowest energy consumers in the world. Our per capita pollution is a
small fraction of those bums in the USA and now, China. We should be
happy we're concerned, but switching off all lights for an hour in
Mumbai, and all the young fools driving to the beach to join some
arbid human chain is just plain stupidity. Here's why -

83% of the world's atmospheric pollution is caused by power
generation. That 83% is not going to be touched even by a fraction by
any of our cities even having a blackout. If the power coming to your
grid is from a hydro electric or nuclear source, don't even try. The
nuclear fuel has already spent its heat on the heavy water and it has
already transferred its energy to the turbine that is running the
generator, well before you decided to switch off your lights. The
water that gushed through the turbine in your hydel plant is simply
running through it because of gravity. In other words, hydro electric
power is virtually free, and has no consequence on the environment.

Thermal power, on the other hand, is an issue. But still, the power
plant isn't going to run any slower because of you groping in the dark
for an hour and feeling good about it. Not only is India a very small
polluter, our biggest electricity consumption doesn't come from
lighting homes! It goes into heavy industries, running our trains,
and so on. There's no stopping any of that.

What we could do is run our vehicles more efficiently. Get more
mileage out of them, drive the longer route if it promises fewer gear
changes, do some hypermiling if we are expert drivers, and just plain
walk instead of drive when we can. The exercise cannot hurt, and we
can feel good for more than one reason. Public transportation is
miserable so there is no point sacrificing our productivity and having
to take a shower after each trip. A two wheeler instead of a car is a
great idea, but may not be practical. Driving without the A/c on is
simply not an option given how much grime and dust there is in the
air.

Too bad, but you as an individual living in India, don't count for
much when it comes to polluting the earth. But don't get to your
Melting Point, just because Bahar Dutt is so concerned about looking
concerned about it on TV. She doesn't count for much either.

Stone the liars.

What happened to the Austerity Drive? Already out of fashion? I had
a feeling this austerity nonsense would fade out and it has.

Rahul Gandhi's famous train journey was marred by an incident of stone
throwing, now thought of as probably being perpetrated by "kids". I'm
sure it takes the CBI, the RAW, the Railway Protection Force, and the
Special Protection Group a very long time to figure out the exact
details on who threw stones at the train Rahul Gandhi was in. It's
such a sad day for democracy when one of our representatives goes on
an austerity drive and gets treated like this. It is also a sad day
when kids are chosen for such terrorist attacks on unsuspecting
politicians.

MK Azhagiri and one of his cohorts chose to travel by economy class
instead of business class on a flight from Chennai to Delhi. I'm sure
this is remarkable, considering the plane consumes 40% lesser fuel
when two people move their butts from business class to economy class.
If they moved lower to the luggage hold, or even better, get thrown
out of the plane, it would lower the consumption even more I'm sure!
But austerity cannot be taken to such low levels, can it?

Who pays for a public servant flying on official duty? Surely it must
be the Government. Air India and Indian are both government owned and
operated companies, and so is the Indian Railways that Mr. Rahul
Gandhi is suddenly a patron of. So, who is actually "paying" less or
more? This is all internal government "billing". Just numbers on
paper, signatures to settle accounts, nothing going in, nothing coming
out of any pocket. So, what exactly are we saving? An eight hour
train journey instead of a one hour flight? That sounds like a loss
of productivity to me, nothing else. Security through two crowded
railway stations must be harder and more expensive to provide than
through two airports, but then, that is also government resource.
Lies, however, are a politician's resource and there seems to be
plenty where all this comes from.

Whenever a minister from one of the smaller constituences goes to the
capital, especially in Tamilnadu, a whole force of white clad "cadre"
of party workers accompanies the minister to the railway station,
looking very important and purposeful, but riding up and down in cars
just to send off one person. This entourage must cost money, and it
certainly causes a nuisance in public space. Imagine if every
passenger descended on the station with fifty followers to send them
off!

In all seriousness, it seems our politicians need lessons in
austerity. So let's cut their benefits and expense accounts. That
will make some difference to the treasuries, and the fact that they
will use their phones less and travel less will also mean that they
will sit in their seats more. That means they will have to put in
more hours if not more work, which is a good thing. At the very
least, they will be a little more available where they should be - at
their offices.

Without a sliver of a doubt, the Austerity Drive is not an eyewash.
Our eyes have tar, wool, and dung slapped riight on and should any
sight manage to sneak through, we have clouds around them. They
cannot be washed. They have to be excavated back to life. Let's get
adults to stone trains on Rahul's next trip.

The fact that baffles me most is how little our government mechanism
takes advantage of the technologies that we proudly trumpet - computer
science, information, telecom, remote sensing, you name it, we've got
it. And yet, our bureaucrats and politicians fly to another city to
attend a meeting, sometimes for just an hour or so, and then fly right
back the same day. What is stopping them from using a video
conferencing facility from their own gleaming unused laptops? If I
can chat face to face with my friends in the USA from a small town in
Tamilnadu, see their kids growing up, share files and audio and video,
and collaborate on projects, what is stopping our stupid politicians
from doing that?

If they're too stupid to do this, they need to be educated. Unless
the need for physical contact is immense, as in having sex, there
should be absolutely no need for anyone to travel to have a talk. I
would say the same thing of huge summits like the clowning that is
going on in Copenhagen right now. The whole summit is eco unfriendly
to the nth degree. So many countries, so many delegates, travelling,
their entourages, their laundry, their hotels, the food, the security,
the local transportation, for what? Just so that they can all be in
the same time zone physically? What could be more absurd in the 21st
century?

The "common man" has long since started taking advantage of
technologies to simplify his life. There are 59 crore cell phones in
India standing as proof for this simple fact. The politicians and
bureaucrats that claim to work for the well being of this common man
are the jokers that haven't got it yet. Time for a public interest
litigation.

The missing wealth of common sense.

Why is it that New Delhi gets excited with something as drab as the
Commonwealth Games?

Sixty years after getting independence it should be quite obvious to
us why the "Commonwealth" was formed in the first place. It would be
a way of ensuring legal thievery of certain countries by her majesty
well after granting independence. No matter how cloaked, it is a
cunning term, and a dubious collective that we should slip away from.

If Canada, UK, Australia, India and a smattering of other
insignificant nations form the commonwealth, it is not hard to see who
has the resources and who needs to plunder them. Does India have any
benefits of belonging in the commonwealth? Is it easy for any of our
people to migrate to the other countries in this club? Of course not.
Do we need any monetary aid from any of these old coots? Definitely
not. So, why even pamper the idea of a commonwealth? Because in New
Delhi, you can afford to be a bozo in government circles and not have
to think afresh, ever.

The Olympics are not profitable for the host nation these days, and
this, in the age of television. The Commonwealth Games are not going
to be anywhere near profitable, because, the biggest sporting powers
aren't participating, and who cares about this event anyway? But the
infrastructure cannot be anything less than Olympic level, so we have
to build and build and build, a lot of which we should already have
had, but now finally will. We're spending 10,500 crore rupees of our
wealth, but for what?

News just came in that the organizers of the Commonwealth Games sold
TV rights for a whopping US$120million. Wow! 564 crore rupees!! How
lovely. Since there are no other tangible incomes from events like
this, what about the other 9936 crore rupees? Consider the
US$1billion plus the IPL generates, and the fact that our government
refused to give security cover for it and it ran away to South Africa.
Our own, home grown world beating event, chased away to another
country, while this shineless, colonial remnant of a Commonwealth
Games that is a surefire dud is very much here to celebrate and create
a loss for us. Very nice of you idiots in New Delhi.

Here's the latest joke - top British athletes are not even
participating in the Commonwealth Games! All their gymnasts have
preferred to attend the gymnastics world championships instead of
coming to Delhi. Now, what kind of clowns couldn't have, after years
of fanfare and organization, foreseen this horrendous co-incidence.
Indian clowns, who else?

Is it a showcase that will bring us prestige? If a sizeable
population of the world is not going to be tuned in, who is going to
give us the kudos? Nobody worthwhile. New Delhi went the whole hog
for the Asian Games in the 80s, but then, that was Asia! We are a
proud and diverse continent, with plenty of sporting nations and a
history that binds us. There is something to look forward to.

Now we have three white counties, one full of trees and ice that
actually stands to benefit from global warming and has no clout of any
kind in the international arena, one full of convicts that have
recently attacked people of Indian origin, and another an island that
supplied the convicts, and then, India, that was ruled by the thieves
from the island for two hundred years who still won't return a famous
diamond stolen from us. Some history this. Neither of these
countries is anywhere near the top in any track and field sports or in
any big ticket showcase of talent, having been regularly beaten in
numbers and medals in all disciplines by China and the USA. So, we're
not seeing top class sports action either. It is all second tier - a
whole tier above what India usually aims for, but a whole tier below
what India's cricket crazy crowds are used to.

Let's get over trying to rack up the frenzy. This is a shitty event,
being held in a shitty city that our own Home Minister had to address
the people of and tell them to improve their attitudes! Fucking
Commonwealth Games. Who gives a f**k? What distinction is India
going to get from hosting these silly gala events? Is our sporting
temper going to get a boost? Definitely not. Is the infrastructure
going to last a lifetime? Think again.

One can walk into any public stadium in any Indian city, particularly
the capitals, and see how dilapidated the place is, how badly
maintained, and how beautifully representative of our administrative
disabilities the place is. Not a surprise that we don't produce world
class athletes. But we have the gall to question Abhinav Bhindra's
patriotism when he talks more about how his dad helped him focus and
gave him his infrastructure for training rather than the nation that
did nothing to bestow upon him a culture of excellence. We should
actually be grateful he has nothing to say about India as a nation for
his honest opinion might be very negative.

India is never going to win a bid for the Olympics. Thank God for
small mercies. But that doesn't mean we should constantly piss away
money on what we're not good at. If the recent debacle of games for
handicapped people at Bangalore wasn't enough of an embarrassment,
what could be? There were no steps to the stage, and the Chief guest
had to be physically lifted up to he could stand on his higher perch
and deliver some speech! We're a nation of fumbling idiots in the
collective. It is a good thing we don't have ambitions of empire, for
if we conquered the world, we'd turn it into a trash dump.

Cold facts - why do we go to a sporting event? To see our team win,
primarily. Not much of that is going to happen at the Commonwealth
Games, certainly not in the disciplines we'd like to see some
spectacle in. To see incredible human feats - that's not going to
happen either, because the Commonwealth doesn't have the greatest
sporting heroes. To have a good time - we can do that in several
different ways these days in India, thank you very much.

If Doordarshan is going to be covering these stupid games on TV, maybe
that's enough motivation to leave the country for a while, on its own.
DD's sports coverage is less than 1 on a scale of 10 in terms of
quality, and those mindsets are not going to change anytime soon. I
wonder why they are still around. That is one organization that
should be scrapped from the face of this earth. What a blight on
media civilization. Not very different from our other pathetic
attempts at "showing" we're world class, since we never get to "feel"
world class in anything.

Our cricket team, thankfully, is doing it, and it is doing it for a
reason - there is enough incentive to be good. Our track and field
athletes are heroes in that they are trying to scrape a living out of
drab circumstances, and despite every attempt by the government of
India to stop them, they are doing well in some cases. We could give
them 10,500 crores of incentives to become better - 3 crore for every
international gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze. That should reap us a
lot more than this pomp and gala nonsense that Delhi seems to have a
fetish for.

The right to be Indian.

IN FULL PUBLIC view, a few things happened in the last two weeks that
should make every Indian very, very angry. Every Indian that cares to
call himself or herself Indian, that is, in the truest sense of the
word.

The Babri Masjid destruction issue is not about to go away anytime
soon. By no means should the issue be buried, ignored, or postponed
in its resolution, no matter how complex the process may be or how
painful the truth may be to any of us. Someone as clean in his public
image as Atal Behari Vajpayee has been found culpable to the
destruction of the Babri Masjid, and India should not just hang its
head in shame, it should take every radical step possible to ensure
justice is brought upon the wrongdoers, no matter whose name the list
of such contains, ranging from those who are proud of the havoc
unleashed upon us on the worst day in free India, to those who assume
their right to "represent" the religious majority of this country with
absolutely no sanction whatsoever. They're not elected
representatives of Hindus, so they have no authority to represent
anything Hindu. Period.

This isn't about religion. It is about righteousness. It isn't about
Ram, it isn't about Allah. It is about that pledge we undertook to
uphold the Constitution of India. It is about character, and it is
about integrity. It is about our ability to judge for ourselves
whether we want an India that lives in the present and aims for an
egalitarian future or choose to live like cavemen in an India that is
deeply entrenched in dogma, irrational thought and a narrow minded
regressive mindset.

This is not a religious issue. The debate should never be allowed to
go in that direction, for that in itself will be an admission of lack
of understanding of the situation. This is about India, the nation,
the oaths we have solemnly taken, the sovereignty of everything we
stand for as a nation, and our integrity in protecting all that is
Indian. So, if a clown like Kalyan Singh wants to keep talking about
his temple versus a mosque, he should be shoved out of the room for
showing contempt of the nation.

The matter of how the Liberhan report leaked out is one of concern,
but by no means one of such staggering importance like what the report
itself contains. With wisdom or shortsightedness, the report has been
tabled well before its deadline, and even that is irrelevant in
comparison to the gravity of what it contains. This is a clear
indictment of a party that supposedly stands for a strong, united
India. This is the BJP being shown in its truest colour - that of a
shadowy, fundamentally religious, divisive party hell bent on showing
disrespect to the Constitution of this country.

Along with the BJP are the RSS, the VHP, the Shiv Sena, and a host of
other misled and misleading outfits that fit well in the
constituencies of the "Sangh Parivar". Let them fool us no more.
This is the mindset that not only wants to turn the clock back to the
years of Lord Ram, to the glorious times of an India that might exist
only in mythology, but also one that somehow equates a few of our
women visiting pubs to the erosion of this great Indian culture.

It is the same mindset that makes them declare, completely falsely,
that Hindus of India will go on the warpath if their temple at this
"disputed" site is not allowed to come up. I can swear by millions of
Indian Hindus, right now, that this is completely a hoax and by no
means representive of even an iota of how we feel towards this stupid
idea of building a temple over the destroyed remains of a monument
protected by law - Indian law, the law of THIS land.

Our "national" media is not mature enough to ask the most important,
incisive question to the parties indicted in this report - "Do you
think it is important enough to build this temple at the cost of
violating the Constitution of India?". If the BJP answers "yes", then
they are politically dead and buried. If they answer "no", then there
is no issue. The guilty go to jail, the rest can shut up and go about
their lives, and India moves on.

The whole problem is, this issue IS that simple. It IS that obvious
to those of us who are rational. We have a nation we are citizens of.
We have certain rules, duties, obligations, and regulations that come
along with the rights, the freedoms, the privileges and the
citizenship of this nation called India. The Babri Masjid is to us,
exactly what it was on the 15th of August 1947. Every structure from
the past that we inherited on that day is a monument and a treasure,
no matter what religious persuasion is part of its history. It is one
thing to hold on to beliefs about what might or might not have
happened in a bygone era from which no historical evidence exists, but
to base an act of destruction for reversing history is outright
hooliganism.

No national debate has ever been held that put rationale, logic,
respect for the Indian flag and the Constitution, and the rule of law,
against dogma and the illicit brewing of religious sentiments that
have constantly challenged and corroded India's every move to an
apolitical maturity of its masses. Are we incapable of even so much
as setting the topic for this debate?

A national treasure has been destroyed. The Sangh Parivar's claim
that no masjid existed at this "disputed" spot should be virulently
spat at as being irrelevant to the argument. The argument should
hardly ever be skewed away from the destruction of a historical
structure that belonged to India. The fact that it belonged to us as
Indians should necessarily supercede all other arguments. The act of
destruction, therefore, is nothing but an anti-national act of
violence against the state and people of India - no less potent, no
less damaging, and no less in meaning or significance than an act of
terror or war against us.

Let us not hide behind the veil that the goons of the Sangh Parivar
who destroyed the Babri Masjid are after all "our people". They are
Indian citizens no doubt, but look just a bit further, and they are
also the rascals who desecrated a part of India that is no less sacred
to us than our flag. They have shown disrespect to our nation, and
based on their religious ideology, they are standing up against us and
telling us that they are ready to go to any length to fulfill their
commitment to carry out the construction of their temple.

It isn't enough if we tabled this Liberhan report and pointed fingers
at these anti national elements. They should be treated like the
criminals they are. It is time for us to choose whether to allow the
religious sentiments of a group of people should find any freedom of
expression, when it is directly in opposition to the interests of the
Nation of India. Are we Indians before we are Hindus or Muslims or
candidates of other persuasions? That is the question before us. If
we are not Indians first, we do not deserve an India. We deserve
something much more constraining like rule of the Taliban. The Sangh
Parivar would most certainly fit the bill for this sort of rule.

In a smaller matter of loud mouthing, but no less indicative of this
malaise, Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray attacked Sachin Tendulkar for
his anti-Maharashtrian speech. Tendulkar didn't say anything
anti-Maharastrian. He stood by his firm belief that he is first an
Indian, while acknowledging that he is proud to be a Maharashtrian.
This isn't opinion, it is the truth. Anybody who understands
Tendulkar's simple English words can know this truth. Not only has
stupidity pervaded the Shiv Sena, it is celebrated. This Shiv Sena is
part of the clown brigade that brought down the Babri Masjid, let's
not lose sight of that fact. So, now we know how intelligent their
perceptions are.

We need to go beyond these issues and ask ourselves why - in the most
secular of nations on paper, in a nation whose Constitution doesn't
even mention "God", we do not have the courage to give ourselves the
sanctity of our collective as Indians, the weight of importance to our
own human spirit that subscribes to the idea of "India". It is true
that a lot many of us didn't fight for the freedom to be Indians.
This is our chance, right here.

BSK.