1,383 jawans were killed, 1,047 were wounded, 1,696 went missing and 3,968 were captured. Songs like ‘Aye mere watan ke logon‘ and ‘Kar chale hum fida‘ were written. Films like Haqeeqat were made. Poems were written and teardrops were shed on the graves of the brave men who lost their lives protecting the honour and people of this land! 

Reading about the war gives me goosebumps and arouses an irrepressible surge of patriotism. But it also makes me angry! Angry- because after a millennium of servitude, we are still incapable of protecting and preserving the national integrity of our motherland! Angry- because national security is still not a priority for us! We first allow 26/11 and Parliament attack and then serve Kasab and Afzal Guru as our national guests! Angry- that we find IPL to be more important than blockades in Manipur and earthquakes in Sikkim!

Angry- that caste, region and religion continues to divide us and rule our thoughts and actions! Angry- that we allow the corrupt spineless and incompetent hooligans to dictate the course of our motherland! Angry- that we don’t vote and are least bothered about the matters of national interest! How on earth do we expect Kashmiris to feel for this land when we let the state be molested at will by Pakistan and China in turns! Angry- that Kashmir and Arunanchal are still ‘issues’ for us and have not become reasons for our sleepless nights!

Do hell with the government! A country functions only as much as its people! It is high time we understand this!

Kingfisher flights have been cancelled without the passengers being told in advance. Their employees haven’t been paid for months, the airline owes heavy money to the oil companies and airports, the airline’s bank accounts have been frozen, and there is no food on flights due to ‘technical reasons’. Their balance sheets are bleeding! Kingfisher has already declared losses of 444 crores in the third quarter of this year– up from 254 crores last year. Kingfisher’s current debt is close to 1.3 billion dollars.

However, shutting down of Kingfisher airlines is definitely not in the national interest. I may ideologically differ from Mallya, but I personally admire him, for the way he has stood against bailing out the airline. Any other industrialist of this country would have succumbed to such losses. As someone who believes in the free market, he is ostensibly against it. He wants the government to tweak its civil aviation policy. Let’s not forget how Mallya established his low-cost airlines by building on Captain Gopinath’s dreams! Kingfisher’s contribution to the aviation industry in India is immense. Government taxing the aviation sector heavily without creating alternatives or facilitating growth, is not going to take the aviation sector anywhere. India cannot afford to go back to Indian Airlines days! It’s high time, a both parties sit and arrive at a solution!

UP elections by-and-large mirror the way elections are contested in India. First regional quotas, then caste based quotas, now quotas based on religion? How much more must the right to equality suffer? Read my latest article on the NRI.

Immediately after the encounter, religious identity took over national identity for most politicians, who left no stones unturned to gather votes by accusing each other over this. The Delhi High Court ordered the National Human Rights Commission to probe. NHRC submitted a report saying the encounter is genuine. Delhi High Court accepted the report. Last month, our home minister again confirmed that the encounter was genuine. He said, “every authority who has looked into it, has agreed that it was a genuine encounter.” And much to the disappointment, the encounter and its subsequent verifications have all been done under the domain of the congress government itself.

How stupid is it for the Law Minister to rake up this issue again? How can he contradict the stand of the very government that he is part of? And is it true that madamji cried? If so, why did she cry? If not, why is the Law minister of this country lying to us? How can he belittle the brave sacrifice of inspector Mohan Sharma? Has he forgetten the Jama Masjid shooting and the Varanasi bombing which were the aftermaths, or rather, revenge of the Batla House encounter? Who is he justifying? Why are such sensitive issues being meddled with, just to garner the muslim votes? First it was 9% reservation for them. When the Election Commission censured him, he challenged them further saying even if they hang him, he will fight for muslim reservations. Is this the language the Law minister of this country should use? The Law Minister!

Original and new stories are always easy to portray as cinema. The director has the liberty to expand the vision of the original script. If the story is being filmed for the first time, then he has the definite advantage as he is setting the rules of the game. Even if he messes up with the story, only the screenwriter will be aware of it. Bringing known incidents on screen is comparatively difficult job. This is a problem typically faced by directors who make film on adapted screenplays. However, films made on adapted screenplays usually have a limited audience who have read the novel, and are left with the scope to compare. But drawing incidents from tales that are as popular and diverse as Ramayana or Mahabharata is indeed a challenge for directors.

Well, to avoid these issues, the directors can take a different route. Instead of keeping some names same and other fictional they can choose the fiction route completely. This way there would be confusion in the audience mind. Viewing would become a new experience. Our directors must know that film making, unlike documentary, does not have the responsibility to mirror the facts. Mixing fantasy and reality in heterogeneous proportions is one of the biggest crimes a director can commit in the process of cinematic creativity. The film has to be truthful to itself and nothing else. It’s high time directors understand this!

For instance, I wonder if India has made any seminal progress in allowing independence of thought. Intrinsic feudal attitudes that might have set in from the numerous invasions on India, are yet to change. The oppressive learning methods of the British colonial age have not yet been reformed yet. In the feudal age, independent thinking might not have mattered much because the royals were expected to think the well being of the people. But in a democracy, where public discourse is paramount, independent thinking is extremely critical. Swamiji also raises his concern on lack of originality. It essentially needs devotion from both teachers and students. Our education system is based more on vocational training. While this is necessary, there is a need of education that inspires intrinsic love and duty towards the profession, which should not be a matter of merely money, but something for which a teacher takes extra pain and performs in his vocation considering it a mission of his life.

What is desperately needed in our country is an education revolution based on the lines shown by Swamji (or any intellectual before or since him who has understood the problems of this land). No country has transited from being poor and backward to being rich and developed without an education revolution. Surprisingly, the education standard of the highly expensive schools are also not comforting. There may be many excuses, be it the skills of the teachers or the huge numbers of students. Shockingly, many of these schools have started to outsource the teaching of some subjects in senior classes to the coaching enterprises. This shows how deep rooted the problems are.

While some corporate houses and NGOs are trying to improve the quality of education, there has to be a great thrust in actually making this change come. I wish the top businessmen of India along with the government pool together their resources to scale up the work of these successful models of educational institutions. Can the energy of the whole nation converge for providing the quality education for every child? Education alone has the power to resolve all the major problems India faces today- may it be poverty, or health, or political leadership. A country can stand up and rise beyond expectations- all of this can happen, only if we take one letter seriously!

Media is the new Indian god- deciding the fate and interpreting the world for all, telling us what to dream, what to think, what to debate. The media has forgotten that the masses are always more intelligent than a single intellectual. Read my latest article on the NRI.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

-Khalil Gibran

It’s the time for exams! Time for coaching centers to get crowded, and the schools to appear deserted. Time for teachers to declare important questions to the best of their knowledge. Time for 12th graders to gear up for entrance exams of various colleges across the country. Time for students and parents to get stressed equally.

For parents, attaining excellence in education for their children is long drawn process. It demands sacrifices from the students as well as parents. As their child starts growing, most parents change their life styles to create an ambience for the child to get interested in study and school. Many parents start buying good books and magazines and engage themselves in reading them in their spare time. Of them, many do it just to develop good habits in their child. The sacrifices parents make to raise their child are indeed endless.

In the process of sacrifices and stress, many parents forget the most important thing- their child’s Freedom! The Freedom of choice. Parents, apart from the usual good things they do, must essentially keep a close watch on the interest of their child. If their child exhibits a clear interest, then they must not force their child into becoming engineers, or doctors. If the child is among the top five students in his class with good scores in science and maths, even at 6th standard, it is very likely that their parents already dream of tagging the child as an IITian.  This, often is the wrong attitude.

Well, the parents must understand that the world is too large and accommodating. It has space for everyone. A forced doctor or engineer at the cost of his freedom of thought is as good as a labourer. After making so many sacrifices at different levels, parents must essentially make one finally sacrifice- this time for their child’s happiness and well being and not wealth and riches- they must trust their child’s instincts and interests. They must gift their child with one essential gift of life- freedom! It is high time parents understand this!

When Kapil Sibal launched this very ambitious project of $35 tablet- Aakash, there was a huge fanfare. It was meant to leapfrog the application of technology in Indian education system, and to assist millions of school children in India. Datawind was chosen the manufacturer of the tablet. IIT, Rajasthan was providing specifications and technical support. Aakash generated huge excitement among gadget geeks and internationally renowned columnists. When Datawind offered Aakash’s slightly more expensive cousin, the UbiSlate7+, the company in less than a week got orders for 60,000 tablets.

However, as of now both Aakash and UbiSlate7+ projects are facing unnecessary delay. I, personally am disgusted by such halfhearted endeavors by the government and the technical institutions. The deficiencies pointed on Aakash were its slow speed, quick heating, poor battery life, the resistive touch-screen, and support to only Wi-Fi for accessing the Internet. Initially it appeared that the manufacturer was having production constraints, but now as it appears the Aakash will require major upgradation and may not reach the market pretty soon. The Aakash project should not end up with adding one more in the list of failed tablets. One must remember the history of OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), that was MIT’s initiative aimed at deploying millions of rugged, ultra low-cost, individually connected laptops to children between 6 to 12 years of age of developing nations that lack access to such devices.

I wish more engineers would have voluntarily helped Aakash to succeed. I wish government and institutions would have supported this project alike. Aakash may get back on track and make it big. But both Aakash and Nano put together have given us many lessons to learn. India must go for a real big push to enhance it’s RnD and manufacturing sector, and Mr. Sibal must prove himself at least once in one of the many projects he has announced!

The greatest of thinkers have tried to explain the process evolution. Any religious book, if read from a perspective, is a book on evolution. The best of film-makers have tried to explain evolution. The most celebrated scene is, in-fact, the opening sequence of 2001, a Space Odyssey, where Stanley Kubrick beautifully explains the complex mechanism of evolution. This silent sequence is named The Dawn of Man. You may watch the video here.

In the sequence, the ape evolves into man, the moment he learns to use tools, which in this case is bones. If you go by this definition, then evolution is a process where you learn to use larger number of tools. But then, a child growing up can also be termed as evolution. Growing up is after-all, a process of learning more tools and technologies. But when I look around, I see many people lost in modern gadgets. These people can’t figure out today’s date or recall a phone number without diving into their cellphones. They can’t even wake up in the morning or sleep at night without these gadgets. These people have de-evolved or mutated into something strange! If this is evolution, I despise it!

While undergoing my quest to understand evolution, my philosophical turmoils led me to reading an Ancient Greek tragedy, Prometheus Bound. There are a few lines in this drama, which fascinated me a lot. In-fact, उत्थिष्ठ भारत opens with quoting these lines-

Prometheus: I caused mortals to cease foreseeing doom.
Chorus: What cure did you provide them with against that sickness?
Prometheus: I established in them blind hopes.
Chorus: That was a great gift you gave to men.
Prometheus: Besides this I gave them fire.
Chorus: And do creatures of a day now possess bright-faced fire?
Prometheus: Yes, and from it they shall learn many crafts.
Chorus: These are the charges on which–
Prometheus: Zeus tortures me and gives me no respite.

This was around the time, when I came across some beautiful lines from Katha Upanishad, which read- “उत्थिष्ठ जाग्रत प्राप्य वरान्निबोधत । क्षुरस्य धारा निशिता दुरत्यया दुर्गं पथस्तत्कवयो वदन्ति॥” This shloka was later simplified by Swami Vivekananda for general masses. He said- “Arise, Awake, and Stop Not Till the Goal Is Reached!” I had found my answer. “Swami Vivekananda’s thought in action, leads to evolution”, I told myself.

With time, I have come to peace with the questions that bothered me. I guess this is one of the symptoms of evolution. I now know that evolution is more than a natural process. It can be achieved! Evolution, by-and-large means progression. It means reformation and revolution. Not just a person, a society or a country can also evolve. In the sociopolitical setup, evolution means unanimous adoption of a Civil Code by the Indian society, where people evolve towards equality. It means a corruption free nation. It means emergence of India as an electoral democracy where everyone votes. It means peace and prosperity!

I often wonder, if people consciously evolve to their full potential,  all the isms (socialism, capitalism, nationalism, etc) will lose their meaning. Well, I am trying, in my limited capacities, to evolve. We all are.

Thank you for being such great readers. I hope 500 articles is just the beginning. The beginning of a beautiful friendship!

…to evolution!

Note- Celebrating 500 articles!

Note- उत्थिष्ठ भारत goes public today. Have you booked your copy yet?