vagyakartha

War of all against all - this is what Thomas Hobbes considered to be the human condition within the state of nature. Had he visited Chennai this month, he would have received final proof, if proof were needed. Incidentally, this Hobbes was a philosopher. The livery stable owner who offered the Hobbesian take-it-or-leave-it choice was Thomas Hobson. I am not that stingy, you may have this trivia, that which follows, or both.

First, we had the people’s leader Vijayakant’s call for a grand kickoff of his political campaign. Hundreds of thousands of supporters were summoned, clothed in bright yellow tee-shirts, paid and transported to the city to demonstrate their entirely voluntary support of his movement, the payment was merely to cover their expenses. surely. They arrived by the bus-load, lorry-load, van-load, SUV-load and taxi-load – spilling out of the sides and overflowing to the top of each vehicle. They expressed their enthusiasm by dancing on the tops of buses. When these caravans stopped, stopping just about every other vehicle in the city, they climbed down from their lofty perches and danced on the street. Inured and impotent police watched silently. The people fumed in vain.

But, he is for the people and an honorable man. How can we blame him for the actions of his avid supporters? So what if all pertinent laws were waived for the duration, isn’t that the norm?

A few days later, all our political leaders concluded that the only way to stop the “massacre of innocent Tamils” in Sri Lanka was to form a sixty kilometer long human chain. It poured cats and dogs that day, more like rhinos and hippos actually. That wasn’t much of a surprise, the monsoon has set in after all. So, our leaders – for they are all, all wise men – roped in (should that be chained in?) children. These children were pulled out of their schools and colleges and made – oh, sorry, they volunteered out of concern for their fellow Tamils – to stand in the rain for hours. As expected, traffic in the city came to a grinding halt. Little children took four hours to get home from school, returning at 8 PM. Half hour drives and commutes turned into three-hour long endurance tests. Exhaust fumes from all the stalled vehicles enveloped the city. The senior most leaders weren’t affected – for they are all, all clever men. They had been driven to their ceremonial spots in the chain in cars adorned with swirling red lights and brought back to their dry homes minutes later.

It didn’t seem to bother anyone that these deeply concerned and wise leaders had been essentially silent when those Tamil brethren were killing innocent Sinhalese, when women and children were being forced into terrorism and when a country with great promise was stopped dead on its tracks. They had wisely concluded then that it was not for them to interfere in the internal affairs of a tiny neighbour. We will not interfere now either, but that was never the intent. A meaningless, but nevertheless grand display of solidarity was. If that made the lives of millions of local Tamils miserable for a day, well, that’s a small price to pay. Particularly when the senior most leaders paid none at all.

We the people follow our wise leaders, as all obedient people should. For they are all, all wise men.

Deepavali was once a festival of lights, until the Chinese invented firecrackers. Even with firecrackers, Deepavali used to be healthy fun. But, when the country’s population triples over all and quadruples in major cities, when disposable income has grown steadily in real terms and when imports bring in firecrackers far more explosive than any seen or heard earlier, healthy fun turns into a horrifying mix of intolerable noise and suffocating smoke. The very young are terrified, the very old distressed. Animals cower in fear and those that have to fend for themselves go hungry. Public roads become private fire-grounds and overflowing drains are clogged by millions of bits of paper.

But, how can we deny Mahabali the wish that Lord Vishnu Himself had granted him? So we do it, year after deafening year – with all the consideration for our fellow citizens and beings that our wise leaders display.

Considering religion, gender, age and income levels, odds are that a minority of Indians are inflicting this pain annually on the majority, overwhelming majority counting Indian animals. Is this how we should celebrate the triumph of good over evil? Or, is it merely a case of omnium contra omnes?

Labels: India, Indian heritage, Indian politics

# posted by Vagyakartha : 3:44 AM  0 Comments

With long nights and longer nightmares fast approaching, this may not seem the time for daydreaming. Even less so when the nebulous dream's protagonist is Senator McCain. But then, isn't a realistic daydream an oxymoronic waste of time?

Senator McCain recently pulled his campaign staff out of Michigan. RealClearPolitics’ poll of polls shows that he trails Senator Obama by just over 10 percentage points there. The recently released New York Times-CBS News poll shows him trailing Senator Obama by 14% nationwide, against the RCP poll’s 8.2%.

It may be unseemly and premature for Senator McCain formally to concede the presidential race at this stage, the consequences for future Republican candidates would be severe. And, the Grand Old Party certainly does not deserve to become the Capitulate And Run Party.

Nevertheless, I dream of him calling off his campaign, returning his unspent federal funds as his symbolic contribution toward shrinking the ballooning deficit and announcing in a national address that he will work with Senator Obama and his party colleagues in Congress in putting the country first.

It seems almost a certainty that Senator Obama will be the next president, one with an almost unassailable majority in Congress. That majority is likely to be far more left-leaning than any congressional majority in recent memory. There is a clear and present danger in that. Senator Obama’s apparent tendency toward sensible economic policies, even when the stimulus of a large deficit is warranted, could well be overwhelmed by Speaker Pelosi’s strong leftward lurch.

However vociferous the Republican opposition may be to such pulls, it is unlikely to be effective and will sound like the whines of sour-grape losers.

McCain, given his earlier well deserved reputation and stature, is in a strong position to convert a partisan donnybrook into a laudable, bipartisan “Country First” effort. In fact, no one else can come close.

In return for abandoning his incredibly ill conceived tax plans, he could help ensure that all incentives for wealth creation aren’t wiped out by a vengeful Congress. In return for completely abandoning the fundamentalist fringe of the Republican party, he could assist in pulling the Democrats away from their irresponsibly populist fringe, if populist is the right term for it. He could permanently banish Appallin Palin to political oblivion and work on the sensible energy and environmental policies that America and the world need with desperate urgency. He could work to convince his party colleagues that unless America works hard at educating and training tomorrow’s workforce, so they can be more productive and value-effective than those of all other countries, both the relative and absolute declines in the real wages of blue-collar and service workers cannot be arrested. He could even join the president in convincing the world that few Americans are as innately bellicose as Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush. He may even be helpful in convincing the world that American exceptionalism is at best a ridiculous notion, not a defensible doctrine.

There is just so much he could do, if only he were to choose to do so. I strongly suspect that he will find a willing and highly capable collaborator in another losing senator, Hillary Clinton. Imagine Obama, Biden, McCain and Clinton working together in serving the country.

Oh well, a recumbent retiree can dream, can’t he?

Labels: Barak Obama, McCain, US Elections

# posted by Vagyakartha : 2:41 AM  0 Comments

I wrote this in November 2004. Somehow, it doesn't seem to have aged much. This time however, I feel pretty confident that the Blue candidate will win.

Pundits without Purple Patches

Events that others handle with elegant ease often leave me confused and befuddled. What they see with crystalline clarity, is as clear as mud to me. It must be due to some combination of chronic intellectual myopia and accelerating visual presbyopia. This irritating condition is rendered more so by elections.

I had been left totally muddled by Indian elections over the past couple of years, despite perspicacious punditry. I consoled myself saying that this is India and befuddlement is the norm, except among pundits. Now, it’s America’s turn. During the months leading up to the elections, the pundits said that the key issues were jobs, the economy, Iraq, America’s standing in the world, terrorism, healthcare, Social Security, incompetence, inconsistency, etc. Poll projections did their yo-yo swings – hardly conducive to clarity. But, one thing was clear, it looked like 2000 all over again.

The pundits came up with a tidy device to aid people like me, a map with each state brightly coloured red or blue depending on the candidate who was going to capture its electoral votes. I was duly impressed by their prescience and ingenuity, Madame Montessori would have approved. Understandably, they could not colour all the states, some were “just too close to call”. Nevertheless, major steps had been taken toward clarity.

I was up with the roosters that Wednesday to watch the results and be elucidated by pundits on why the electorate voted the way it did and what the results would portend for the nation and the world. The Red-Blue map, with a few intervening white blocks, appeared on TV along with the pundits and all was well. The numbers flowed in viscously and the pundits were pleased to reconfirm their earlier colouring.

Chadless Florida punched Red, Pennsylvania went Blue, leaving Ohio to settle matters. Ohio wouldn’t oblige, but Kerry wisely did. The colouring could now be completed, though corny Iowa had to wait. The pundits were alarmed. There were contiguous patches of blue along the entire West Coast, the northeastern coast (the pundits’ East Coast starts at Washington D.C.!) and around the Great Lakes. The rest of America had gone homogeneously Red. The nation had been irreparably “cleaved”. I was lost.

The pundits weren’t. They said that “moral values” had been the deciding issue that cleaved these formerly united states into a gigantic red blob of bible thumping bubba states in the middle and a blue rim of enlightened liberal states. I didn’t get it. “Moral values” hadn’t been mentioned as a major election issue up to that moment. Do people get “values” while they are standing in line to vote? What about all the other issues? What did I miss and when?

I attacked my laptop in search of answers. All the data that I gathered just left me more befuddled. What the pundits viewed with chromatographic clarity, I saw as dichromatic diffusion. Except for the District of Columbia, which had cast over 90% of its votes for Mr. Blue, all the states looked decidedly purple to me. As I see it, very minor swings would have dramatically changed that Montessori map.

Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington – are constituents of “the rim”. If a total of just 283,000 voters in these states – representing less than 1.8% of the votes cast there and 0.25% of nationwide votes – had voted Red instead of Blue, “the cleavage” would have shriveled. Mr. Red would have won 349 electoral votes to Mr. Blue’s 189 and the pundits would have declared a Red landslide, with negligible change in the total popular vote.

Did the Reds really find Mr. Blue’s values abhorrent? More voters in blood-red Texas voted for him than in all of New England. Conversely, Mr. Red received about as many votes in presumably libertine California as he did in the red blob stretching south from Montana and North Dakota to Nevada in the west and Kansas in the Midwest. These nine states gave Mr. Red 46 electoral votes, California gave him none. So, is California all Blue? Is Texas all Red? Both look purple to me, much like the rest of the nation.

To me, Mr. Kerry seems nowhere near as unpopular as the pundits imply he is. In fact, millions more voted for him than sent Mr. Clinton to his first term as President. Further, the Reds elected 85 Democrats as senators, congressman and governors. If I were truly concerned about America being split into “Two Nations Under God”, I would point out to Mr. Bush that 48.5% of voters, residing nationwide, preferred the Blue views and values. I would caution him not to be sanguine about a mandate from a sanguine blob of a country. But then, I am just a befuddled bystander. What do I know?

# posted by Vagyakartha : 9:55 AM  0 Comments