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Worth knowing and worth realizing and yes … worth agonizing.

India’s Coup d’état

General J.N. Chaudhury

As I saw the front page of today’s Indian Express, I came seriously close to believing that indeed, a coup was possible in India. Today’s Indian Express revealed that Gen. V.K. Singh brought 2 Army Regiments within striking distance of Delhi on the eve of his filing the age-row suit against GOI, without notifying the Ministry of Defense(which is the standard protocol).

The legacy Gen. Jayanto Nath Chaudhuri, the Indian Army Chief from 62 to 66, left, seemed to inspire Gen V.K. Singh heavily. Gen. Chaudhary planned a similar stunt in 1966.

My thoughts on the possibility of a military coup were halted when I consulted the table of precedence of India. After some mathematics I concluded that the Army Chief was preceded by at-least 250 officials in the table! The standard modus operandi for staging a coup is to swiftly arrest all the people preceding the coup commander in the table. Needless to say, this is easier said than done since it would require an operation of national/international magnitude since the governors of all states, high commissioners / ambassadors to commonwealth countries etc. are placed above any of the Service Chiefs.

Thanks to the antics of Field Marshal S.H.F.W. Manekshaw. Indira Gandhi’s two successive moves restricted the Service Chief’s dominance to the periphery of his cantonments. She abolished the honorary title – ‘Field Marshall’ and pushed down the chief’s stature from the second rank in the table to the twelfth rank.

The true motives of Gen. Singh bringing his troops, unscheduled, close to Delhi, is anybody’s guess. But I believe, given his sweet-talk with the government in the past few months, he had good reasons to feel threatened.

General V.K. Singh

The chain of events of the past few weeks have opened a serious question for debate – how much can the civil encroach and dictate terms? My answer is – ‘to the hilt’. The whole logic of having an indirectly elected supreme commander of armed forces, testifies the fact that the military in a democracy has to be subdued by the civilian authorities. This is essential for democracy to exist at the first place.

I would say, the army chief questioning scams and bringing the alleged to books, is a welcome effort. But a display of force to influence national political decisions is not only uncalled for but is also high-handed. The government petering-out in the future is not a triumph of righteousness but a symptom of slow poisoning of democracy.

RESOURCES

To see the full report revealing General Chaudhury’s intentions –  Frontline’s Volume 27 – Issue 16 :: Jul. 31-Aug. 13, 2010.

Republic of India’s – Table of Precedence.

‘Bitch Please !!!’ – a call

Very rarely does such foolish and irrelevant stuff invite my attention. Needless, to say it does not even deserve my time and energy.

When I try to picture friendship in the Indian context, abstractly, I often see the K.R.Narayan’s ‘Swami and Friends‘ characters, clad in faded grey pants and lose shirts, walking arm in arm, in the backdrop of a mango tree. At-least, this is how I used to see it till a couple of years ago.

A guy in his early 20s, insisted that he would narrate his memoir to me. I met a boy called ‘X’, a few days ago on the New Delhi Railway Station.

The day X entered Engineering School, he was apprehensive, skeptical rather. Apart from the ‘new place, new people’ skepticism, it was the ‘whom to be with‘ vs. the ‘whom not to be with’ dilemma. After a lot of deliberation and calibration, somehow X became a part of an 8 member group.

The first few days were easy. They flew by. Unity was hardly an issue, instead it was their strength. Although, it is hard to comment with certainty that as to what was the major most ‘unifying factor’. But one of the factors was their belief that a single sex group would ‘thrive’. No language issues. No mannerisms required. One could actually be one’s own self.

As time progressed, and as semesters flew by, the dynamics changed, rapidly. Unknowingly, there became three factions. The determined souls, the loose souls and the confused souls. X’s view commands that the rough breakage of the gang was 4-2-2 respectively. For people who can exercise their rationale well, the breakage is no rocket science. For others, it’s none of their business probably. By the way, X was a determined soul.

The determined souls stayed put. They stuck to the original assumptions.

The loose souls plummeted into the dark world of prostitution.

The confused souls can still be found on one of the bifurcations.

On God’s green earth, every human, (if you ask me)every creature, has the right to think freely and distinctly. Hence, X just wouldn’t do the honors of calling any one faction right or holding some ideology wrong. X is no church.

X just couldn’t finish his memoir. He boarded a train and left with the promise of completing it sometime later this decade.

However incomplete the memoir maybe, it still manages to give deep rooted insights into the natural human behavior and solidifies the law of attraction.

At times, one might empathize with his mates. But then, his pain is his pain. You can either choose to leave your chair and face the brunt of pulling your pal out of the wicked prostitute’s arm or you can sit tight, enjoy the show, and shed some crocodile tears with him, later. Either ways it will disturb your peace. If I were in X’s shoes, I ‘d choose the later, not because I am an escapist but because I believe that some things are best learnt through experience and a kick in the butt.

Peace.

I am shaken ……

and of course what the hell !

Engineering the youth

Some of the well-established coaching centres of Kota (a city in Rajasthan, also considered the Mecca of IIT-JEE coaching) charge a tuition fee anywhere between Rs.70,000 to Rs.2,00,000. If reports are to be believed a coaching centre in Kota called The Bansal Classes, which is believed to have commenced the devilry of ‘coaching students’, has gone a step further and proposed a concept called a coaching city. A huge area of land over 200 acres dedicated to ‘coaching students’ and containing ‘facilities’ like shopping complexes, sports complexes, a movie theatre for refreshment, a food station etc. among other stuff is anticipated to take this industry to a whole new pedestal.

Academicians and researchers, as well as the HR community has time and again stressed that these so called ‘coaching classes’ train the students the process of pattern recognition. The aim is to make a student encounter as many types and as much variety of questions as possible before he sits for the actual exam so as to enable him to recognize the type of question he has previously encountered and solve it in accordance with the method his tutor has fed him.

Consider this piece of fact – in the financial year of 2009-2010, from independent audits it was compiled that the coaching industry raked in 15000 crore rupees. Now analyse this in the backdrop of the budget allocated for all the 14 IITs put together for the financial year 2009-2010 which was a mere 3000 crore rupees. The whole exercise, which put simply, has robbed the nation of 18000 crore rupees apart from the more important - independent and original thought process of Indian youth.

During this formative stage of adolescence they get into the habit of pattern recognition and steer clear of original thinking and some start to even unconsciously fear these out-of-the-book thoughts lest they might be wrong. It is because of this very problem that the corporate HR managements are going after engineering graduates of other colleges whose thought processes aren’t as restricted and offering them higher base salaries.

There is probably no single party responsible for the state in which the technical education in India is today. But to my mind this problem stems from the obsession the country has with engineers. I find them just a bunch of nerds, including me, who when should have rode a fancy bike and gone to proms and balls, were busy mugging equations.

At the end of the day, an engineer should be able to engineer something.

A nosediving kingfisher

Kingfisher is often projected as a luxury airline and only one of the seven airlines in the world being awarded a 5-star rating. The bright red colour and in it clad gorgeous air-hostesses makes it a paradise for any middle-class person. This has been the USP of Kingfisher since its inception in 2005. This USP was good enough for it to have the largest chunk of passengers for the year 2009 despite delayed flight schedules and randomly cancelled flights.

But I seriously wish to talk about the mess Kingfisher is in right now.

It is already under a debt of 7057.08 crores, that’s not the point of contention. Our dear government wishes to bail it out. Even that’s not the point. The point actually is that the government chooses such a course of action against a backdrop of poor farmers committing suicides, street children dying malnourished and various other endless problems.

The mess Kingfisher is in right now, never happened overnight. It is a result of careless and ill-planned fiscal and financial management which resulted in an aggregation of losses incurred, year after year. The following is a table I scooped up from Wikipedia showing clearly how this corporation failed to take counter-measures to ensure a safe(if not a profitable) ride for the company(look at the net profit column, all entries with a negative sign) -

#	From	To	Months	Total Income	Cost	Net Profit	EPS
01	Apr-05	Jun-06	15	1,352	1,692	-341	-68
02	Jul-06	Jun-07	12	2,142	2,562	-420	-42
03	Jul-07	Mar-08	09	1,546	1,734	-188	-11
04	Apr-08	Mar-09	12	5,577	7,186	-1,609	-55
05	Apr-09	Mar-10	12	5,271	6,918	-1,647	-54
06	Apr-10	Mar-11	12	6,496	7,523	-1,027	-16
07	Apr-11	Jun-11	03	1,991	2,255	-264	n/a
Total			75	24,375	29,870	-5,496

Now let’s compare the case of Kingfisher with Air India. In its eight decades of being operational, Air India amassed a debt of 42750 crores. In absolute terms, this figure might seem horrendous but compared with Kingfisher and bringing in ‘years of operation’ as a factor, we understand that probably Air India didn’t fare as bad as Kingfisher.

To top that, it was kid’s play for Mr Vijay Mallya to sit on top of the facts and figures and influence his position as a Member of Parliament to influence the media against publicizing the ill-affairs of Kingfisher for a better part of this year.

I seriously fail to understand the following – why the inefficiency of a luxury airline be compensated for with the taxpayer’s hard earned money? Why the government is giving free lunches to corporate honchos who can otherwise run a booze-business with a lot of success?  An even more fundamental question is that why does the Prime Minister believe that a normal middle class person would fly with a luxury airline (if he would fly at all), so as to relieve his sufferance? Moreover, after consuming any such bailout package will Mr Mallya divert his focus and energy from swimsuit photo calendars and over-salaried stewardesses to actually bailing out this corporation? Will he realize the worth of a multi-thousand-crore package, which could otherwise been utilized in alleviating some poverty from the country?

George Orwell was dead right. All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. Our less fortunate countrymen do not enjoy these bailout packages, only the rich do. The bigger the corporate, the bigger is the bailout package. An inefficient management should be meted with the expected repercussion, which is failure and inefficiency, and should be left to rot. In Darwin’s world, the government is setting a bad precedence for the unfit.

Nathuram Godse’s Last Words

The source is www.vijayvaani.com, also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathuram_Godse acknowledges the post in its foot notes. Also the idea of the speech is inspired by one of my closest friend and batchmate. 

[On 8 November 1948, Nathuram Godse (19 May 1910-15 November 1949) rose to make his statement in court. Reading quietly from a typed manuscript, he sought to explain why he had killed Gandhi. His thesis covered ninety-pages, and he was on his feet for five hours. Godse's statement, excerpted below, should be read by citizens and scholars in its entirely, for it provides an insight into his personality and his understanding of the concept of Indian nationhood – Editor] “Born in a devotional Brahmin family, I instinctively came to revere Hindu religion, Hindu history and Hindu culture. I had, therefore, been intensely proud of Hinduism as a whole. As I grew up I developed a tendency to free thinking unfettered by any superstitious allegiance to any isms, political or religious. That is why I worked actively for the eradication of untouchability and the caste system based on birth alone. I openly joined anti-caste movements and maintained that all Hindus are of equal status as to rights, social and religious, and should be considered high or low on merit alone and not through the accident of birth in a particular caste or profession. I used publicly to take part in organized anti-caste dinners which thousands of Hindus, Brahmins, Vaishyas, Kshatriyas, Chamars and B—–s participated. We broke the caste rules and dined in the company of each other. I have read the speeches and writings of Dadabhai Naoroji, Vivekanand, Gokhale, Tilak, along with the books of ancient and modern history of India and some prominent countries like England, France, America and Russia. Moreover I studied the tenets of socialism and Marxism. But above all I studied very closely what Veer (brave) Savarkar and Gandhiji had written and spoken, as to my mind these two ideologies have contributed more to the moulding of the thought and action of the Indian people during the last thirty years or so, than any other factor has done. All this thinking and reading led me to believe that it was my first duty to serve Hindudom and Hindus both as a patriot and as a world citizen. To secure the freedom and to safeguard the just interests of some thirty crores (three hundred million) of Hindus would automatically constitute the freedom and well-being of all India, one fifth of the human race. This conviction led me naturally to devote myself to the Hindu Sanatanist ideology and programme, which alone, I came to believe, could win and preserve the National Independence of Hindustan, my Motherland, and enable her to render true service to humanity as well. Since the year 1920, that is, after the demise of Lokmanya Tilak, Gandhi’s influence in the Congress first increased and then became supreme. His activities for public awakening were phenomenal in their intensity and were reinforced by the slogan of truth and non-violence, which he paraded ostentatiously before the country. No sensible or enlightened person could object to these slogans. In fact there is nothing new or original in them. They are implicit in every constitutional public movement. But it is nothing but a dream if you imagine the bulk of mankind is, or can ever become, capable of scrupulous adherence to these lofty principles in its normal life from day to day. In fact, honour, duty and love of one’s own kith and kin and country might often compel us to disregard non-violence and to use force. I could never conceive that an armed resistance to an aggression is unjust. I would consider it a religious and moral duty to resist and if possible, to overpower such an enemy by use of force. (In the Ramayana) Rama killed Ravana in a tumultuous fight and relieved Sita. (In the Mahabharata) Krishna killed Kansa to end his wickedness; and Arjuna had to fight and slay quite a number of his friends and relations, including the revered Bhishma, because the latter was on the side of the aggressor. It is my firm belief that in dubbing Rama, Krishna and Arjuna as guilty of violence, the Mahatma betrayed the total ignorance of the springs of human action. In more recent history, it was the heroic fight put up by Chhatrapati Shivaji that first checked and eventually destroyed the Muslim tyranny in India. It was absolutely essential for Shivaji to overpower and kill an aggressive Afzal Khan, failing which he would have lost his own life. In condemning history’s towering warriors like Shivaji, Rana Pratap and Guru Govind Singh as misguided patriots, Gandhi has merely exposed his self-conceit. He was, paradoxical, as it may appear, a violent pacifist who brought untold calamities on the country in the name of truth and non-violence, while Rana Pratap, Shivaji and the Guru will remain enshrined in the hearts of their countrymen forever for the freedom they brought to them. The accumulating provocation of thirty-two years, culminating in his last pro-Muslim fast, at last goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhi should be brought to an end immediately. Gandhi had done very good work in South Africa to uphold the rights and well being of the Indian community there. But when he finally returned to India, he developed a subjective mentality under which he alone was to be the final judge of what was right or wrong. If the country wanted his leadership, it had to accept his infallibility; if it did not, he would stand aloof from the Congress and carry on in his own way. Against such an attitude there can be no halfway house. Either Congress had to surrender its will to his and had to be content with playing second fiddle to all his eccentricity, whimsicality, metaphysics and primitive vision, or it had to carry on without him. He alone was the judge of everyone and everything; he was the master brain guiding the Civil Disobedience movement; no other could know the technique of that movement. He alone knew when to begin it and when to withdraw it. The movement might succeed or fail, but that could make no difference to the Mahatma’s infallibility. ‘A Satyagrahi can never fail’ was his formula for his own infallibility and nobody except himself knew what a Satyagrahi is. Thus the Mahatma became the judge and the jury in his own case. These childish insanities and obstinacies, coupled with a most severe austerity of life, ceaseless work and lofty character made Gandhi formidable and irresistible. Many people thought that his policies were irrational, but they had either to withdraw from the Congress or place their intelligence at his feet to do with as he liked. In a position of such absolute irresponsibility, Gandhi was guilty of blunder after blunder, failure after failure, and disaster after disaster. Gandhi’s pro-Muslim policy is blatantly illustrated in his perverse attitude on the question of the national language of India. It is quite obvious that Hindi has the most prior claim to be accepted as the premier language. In the beginning of his career in India, Gandhi gave a great impetus to Hindi, but as he found that the Muslims did not like it, he became a champion of what is called Hindustani. Everybody in India knows that there is no language in India called Hindustani; it has no grammar; it has no vocabulary. It is a mere dialect; it is spoken, not written. It is a tongue and a crossbreed between Hindi and Urdu, and not even the Mahatma’s sophistry could make it popular. But in his desire to please the Muslims he insisted that Hindustani alone should be the national language of India. His blind followers, of course, supported him and the so-called hybrid language began to be used. The charm and the purity of the Hindi language were to be prostituted to please the Muslims. All his experiments were at the expense of the Hindus. From August 1946 onwards, the private armies of the Muslim League began a massacre of Hindus. The then Viceroy, Lord Wavell, though distressed at what was happening, would not use his powers under the Government of India Act of 1935 to prevent the rape, murder and arson. The Hindu blood began to flow from Bengal to Karachi with little retaliation by the Hindus. The Interim Government formed in September was sabotaged by its Muslim League members right from its inception, but the more they became disloyal and treasonable to the government of which they were a part, the greater was Gandhi’s infatuation for them. Lord Wavell had to resign as he could not bring about a settlement and was succeeded by Lord Mountbatten. King Stork followed King Log. The Congress, which had boasted of its nationalism and secularism, secretly accepted Pakistan literally at the point of the bayonet and abjectly surrendered to Jinnah. India was vivisected and one-third of the Indian Territory became foreign land to us from 15 August 1947. Lord Mountbatten came to be described in the Congress circles as the greatest Viceroy and Governor-General this country ever had. The official date for the handing over of power was fixed for June 30, 1948, but Mountbatten with his ruthless surgery gave us a gift of vivisected India ten months in advance. This is what Gandhi had achieved after thirty years of undisputed dictatorship and this is what the Congress party calls ‘freedom’ and ‘peaceful transfer of power’. The Hindu-Muslim unity bubble was finally burst and a theocratic state was established with the consent of Nehru and his crowd and they have called it ‘freedom won by them with sacrifice’ – whose sacrifice? When top leaders of Congress, with the consent of Gandhi, divided and tore the country – which we considered a deity of worship – my mind was filled with direful anger. One of the conditions imposed by Gandhi for his breaking of the fast related to the mosques in Delhi occupied by the Hindu refugees. But when Hindus in Pakistan were subjected to violent attacks he did not so much as utter a single word to protest and censure the Pakistan Government or the Muslims concerned. Gandhi was shrewd enough to know that while undertaking a fast unto death, had he imposed some conditions on the Muslims in Pakistan, there would have been found hardly any Muslims who could have shown some grief if the fast had ended in his death. It was for this reason that he purposely avoided imposing any conditions on the Muslims. He was fully aware from past experience that Jinnah was not at all perturbed or influenced by his fast and the Muslim League hardly attached any value to the inner voice of Gandhi. Gandhi is being referred to as the Father of the Nation. But if that is so, he has failed in his paternal duty inasmuch he has acted very treacherously to the nation by his consenting to the partitioning of it. I stoutly maintain that Gandhi has failed in his duty. He has proved to be the Father of Pakistan. His inner-voice, his spiritual power, his doctrine of non-violence of which so much is made of, all crumbled against Jinnah’s iron will and proved to be powerless. Briefly speaking, I thought to myself and foresaw that I shall be totally ruined, and the only thing I could expect from the people would be nothing but hatred and that I shall have lost all my honour, even more valuable than my life, if I were to kill Gandhiji. But at the same time I thought that the Indian politics in the absence of Gandhiji would surely be practical, able to retaliate and would be powerful with the armed forces. No doubt, my own future would be totally ruined, but the nation would be saved from the inroads of Pakistan. People may even call me or dub me as devoid of any sense or foolish, but the nation would be free to follow the course founded on the reason, which I consider necessary for sound nation-building. After having fully considered the question, I took the final decision in the matter, but I did not speak about it to anyone whatsoever. I took courage in both my hands and I did fire the shots at Gandhiji on 30th January 1948, on the prayer-grounds in Birla House. I do say that my shots were fired at the person whose policy and action had brought rack and ruin and destruction to millions of Hindus. There was no legal machinery by which such an offender could be brought to book and for this reason I fired those fatal shots. I bear no ill will towards anyone individually, but I do say that I had no respect for the present government owing to their policy, which was unfairly favourable towards the Muslims. But at the same time I could clearly see that the policy was entirely due to the presence of Gandhi. I have to say with great regret that Prime Minister Nehru quite forgets that his preaching and deeds are at times at variance with each other when he talks about India as a secular state in season and out of season, because it is significant to note that Nehru has played a leading role in the theocratic state of Pakistan, and his job was made easier by Gandhi’s persistent policy of appeasement towards the Muslims. I now stand before the court to accept the full share of my responsibility for what I have done and the judge would, of course, pass against me such orders of sentence as may be considered proper. But I would like to add that I do not desire any mercy to be shown to me, nor do I wish that anyone should beg for mercy on my behalf. My confidence about the moral side of my action has not been shaken even by the criticism levelled against it on all sides. I have no doubt that honest writers of history will weigh my act and find the true value thereof someday in future.” Nathuram Godse was hanged a year later, on 15 November 1949; as per his last wishes, his family and followers have preserved his ashes for immersion in the Indus River of a re-united India