Terrified into Stupidity!

Through the last 40 hours, the drama of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai have occupied Indian media focus, but have also served to highlight a dangerous trend - pandering to America's way of doing things, starting with a full subscription to thoughtlessness.

According to Ravi Shankar Prasad, National Spokesperson, BJP, "As you (Barkha Dutt) rightly pointed out this is a replica of Nine Eleven in India". http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/video/video.aspx?id=45516. According to this fool, "It is time that India responded in the same way as America responded"! America responded by attacking the wrong country, pissing away its economic well being, and stands empty handed seven years later, with Osama Bin Laden roaming free and Americans mad about phone tapping and torture that led nowhere. America's image took a beating worldwide and is now on the precipice of a massive economic downturn. Is this the example we want to follow, you bloody jerk? Why can't you set higher standards, and why can't these standards be our own?

Barkha Dutt started this nonsense, despite being a Padma Shri, asking if this is India's Nine Eleven! What a mockery she is making of this prestigious award by being so cluelessly glued to the way America does things! I had enough of this looney bin when she was brimming with emotion for Barack Obama and never got beyond the dumbed down versions of everything she saw and reported on from the east cost of the USA. Now, she is here, canvassing the emotion of the situation instead of presenting the facts in a clear light and causing a mature debate.

Just this afternoon, she asked a gentleman who was tensely waiting for news about a relative stuck inside one of the hotels under siege, "How are you feeling? You probably have no words to describe it"! and immediately stuck a microphone to his face! What a tinhead!

I have been hearing the word "hostages" over and over again on all the news channels, and frankly, how can so many people be hostages if most of them didn't even see the attackers? They were just trapped guests who floundered out somehow. The word "hostage" is defined in the dictionary as "a person seized or held as security for the fulfillment of a condition". Clearly this was never a hostage crisis anymore than a snake dance. But what does it do to the image of India, when we take pride in rescuing 100 or more "hostages" but build this picture in people's minds that security is so lax that 100 or more hostages can be taken in one sweeping move over public exposed areas!? The FACT is that none of the people who came out were hostages but our media loves the sexiness of that term. Multiples of morons.

Now, onto the dance of the diplomats - "We stand strongly behind the people of India" - clearly means we are the ones taking the bullets, while everybody else hides behind us. Can we really see Bush running into the building shooting at terrorists? Can we hear any nation offering to offset the compensation being paid to the victims' families? This has reached a point where the same stupid, meaningless noises are made by leaders of every nation exactly like the noises others made when their assets were attacked. Only the Israelis had the sense to say something truthful like "We have full faith in India's security operations".

"We strongly condemn..." is another one that has done its rounds for a long time and obviously the stupidity tank never runs dry. Where is the condemnation? I wonder if I would have listened to my parents if they had said, "We strongly scold you for your mischief" instead of "Come here you little rascal. You're grounded for a week! Now, apologize!" Oh, this one's richer than a single criticism. If a condemnation wasn't a strong one, wouldn't it automatically be downgraded to a criticism? So, what's up with a strong condemnation? Can we hear something like "These f@#$ing terrorist motherf@#$ers should be roasted on a slow fire!"? Please, so the terrorists may actually get the message their minds can comprehend?

Clearly, terrorism unleashes a lot of people's stupidity. It is amazing how there is still a player who can set a higher standard. BBC. The BBC report has all about going deeper, unemotionally, and finding information that nobody else has paid attention to, like talking about a person who was arrested in London with a connection to an earlier attack in Mumbai and how he is being held by the authorities in London to question about this one. None of the heavy breathing emotional nonsense here. How do they do it? By actually doing it, I would say. Can we stoop a little less and copy them instead of stupid Americans? That might be really hard, yes? Maybe one of these days I will take Barkha Dutt hostage to teach her the ropes or whip her with one.

Making a Suckumentary

Serbjeet Singh's documentary about "The Land Time Forgot" is playing on DD. The only reason I am watching it is because the cricket match has been interrupted due to rain on this channel and might restart any time. Typical of so called documentaries made by Indians, this piece of comedy is full of lofty words in sound bytes describing what we can already see. "This is a lovely spot, you know". "Yeah, the landscape is so exciting" - These are spoken lines for heavens' sake!

He is somewhere in the Himalayas, which a lot of people have a fascination for. But somehow the Himalayas also inspire a lot of untalented, clueless fools into thinking they can go there with a video camera and somehow capture the essence of the great, grand, magnificent, imposing mountains. If the mountains are so commanding, why does the film maker even put himself in the way of me experiencing it? Every time this idiot opens his mouth, he reduces my appreciation of the mountains.

Beyond a point, mountains are mountains. What is the bloody film about? If I see someone there trying to get medical help because his nose has to be drilled open from not having blown it for two years, there's a story I want to see. If one of the yaks goes mad and gores everybody in a village, there's a story I'd really want to see. But who really wants to see this "general" informational crap? Can't I get the same information from the internet if I was that curious?

"This is fantastic, look at the beauty" he announces to another clown hanging out with him. If I couldn't see the beauty of what he got on camera, why is this fool making the film? And if I can see it, why is he talking about it?

If Indian fictional cinema drags for most part, Indian documentaries totally suck. In fact, they have spawned a whole new genre called the Suckumentary and should be sold as comedy. Why would I be interested in being frequently told whether this fool is at eleven thousand feet or thirteen thousand feet, when it is obvious to me that he is pretty high up. Didn't I see his jeep climb and climb? So is he likely to end up being below sea level after all that groaning uphill? Come on! Do we really need to hear his describe "turquoise waters" when we can see it. Or is he afraid that we might be snoring?

One thing our so called documentary film makers need to realize is that without a strong story, a real awakening of the audience to something new, without a new point of view, without any point of view, without an argument, without a reflection on the "human condition" in any theatre of mankind, there is no bloody film! Why do these immature clowns really even think of wasting time, money and resources on simply bringing us video footage and putting them together in the name of making "documentaries"? It is strange that India has had more wildlife than Western countries for thousands of years and yet we haven't produced the kind of quality commonly visible in National Geographic or Discovery.

Then there is the emotional narration, expecting to contaminate us with the deep feelings the film maker has for the subject. For example Valmik Thapar's pathetic heavy breathing announcement - "Just minutes ago, the lord of the jungle, the biggest cat of all, the Bengal Tiger himself was here"! No tiger on screen, just a lead up to a bloody footprint. I wonder if a lump of dung would have been more convincing. It better be the tiger's for Thapar sounded like he was ready to contribute. Where is the bloody tiger now? He never shows up. It takes hard work and the fool hasn't put in the work. That's all there is to it. Our filmmakers, well actually, shotmakers, are trigger happy fools in paradise with a camera. They just shoot and shoot, and often continue to shoot with their mouths and then finally from behind and then get shot right there when it matters.

Simply carrying a camera on a trip does not produce a film. Simply narrating what the people on the trip are going through does not cut it either. Describing gods and goddesses and folklore of those areas still doesn't constitute a story of any sort. This is simply time consuming, boring SHIT. Oh, I was just informed by the voiceover that two statues of gods didn't acknowledge the presence of this film maker by as much as a flicker! Thank you very much. Actually I thought one of them winked at me!

Documentary film makers in India do not have to answer to anyone for being well below par. They can pretend their way to a few screenings, a few interviews, and some celebrity status. It just isn't serious business, and quite deservingly so. If Michael Moore can make "Fahrenheit 911" and have it make $100million in the US box office alone, it is because it was relevant, powerful, never dragged, and took a bold stand in an argument against the president of the country. It takes someone who wants to tell a story to make a good documentary. Indian documentary film makers seem to think they just need a subject! They themselves would make quite an interesting study on how they hope to define themselves without a clue about what they are doing.

The Momentum of Stupidity

For eight long years, GW Bush ruined America, taking down with him several good things he inherited from Bill Clinton's presidency. For several years longer than that, India was hijacked by archaic notions, too much government control, protectionism and corruption. Corruption still exists, but impacts us a little less these days because the government has given up some of its control. In hindsight, India was down the wrong path up until the time we nearly became bankrupt and then Manmohan Singh came along with reforms that slowly brought us to the light.

In George W Bush's case, he had the support of most of the morons in his country who were willing to panic under the threat of terrorism - to the point where they continued to support the very government that had allowed Sept 11th, attacked the wrong country, did not find the perpetrators of the greatest act of terror on its soil, lied to its people about threats, gave no bid contracts in billions and essentially stole all semblance of order! In India's case, we simply had no experience with democracy and even less with self governance. We were too busy being pious and holy that we never realized for a long time that we needed a strong economy! It took a near catastrophe to wake us up and take up reforms.

In both cases, stupidity gained momentum, simply because there weren't enough minds applied against it. What is it about humans that allows stupidity when it is so obvious? Just fear of bucking the momentum? How does stupidity gain momentum in the first place? Panic? Collective ignorance? A pathological attraction to the 'wrong' choice in case the right choice looks too good to be true?

The financial crisis that started in Wall Street and is threatening to hit a lot of people around the world is no illusion. It is the unmasking of a bag of illusions. Americans thought for a long time that they could continue building their wealth on speculation rather than productivity, by just juggling money. Stupidity again, but nobody questioned it for a long time. Now, they are being forced to re-evaluate a lot of things. India has reacted with fear in the stock market, panicked at the marketplace and is still scared for no great reason. We should have known when we made our future plans based on an exaggerated expectation of continuous growth in the foreign currency dependent outsourcing business that there could be trouble. We didn't. Stupidity gathers momentum much faster and stronger than intelligence.

The CEOs of Indian companies in the IT and BPO sectors aren't leaders but Chief Emulation Officers, who seem to blindly replicate the models of the companies they aspire to be like. Well if Citibank was one of those companies, we should be seeing a one shot 50,000 strong layoff in India soon. News just came in that our marquee "Indian" CEO of Citigroup is likely to be fired. Sounds like a good plan to me if he allowed Citigroup's market value to drop 50% in three days.

If there is one thing to learn from becoming "global" it is that there are enough and more people in senior management circles unwilling to be individually chastised for being different and visionary, while very happy to be found collectively guilty of massive stupidity later. Why shouldn't these overpaid fools lose their jobs for failing to warn their companies of impending doom? If they are "helpless" why the heck do the companies need them in the first place? A duck would be equally helpless, and would even lay eggs at a fraction of the salary. Is anybody questioning the logic of hiring dummies with MBAs? Not with the helpless watching game called stupidity that is pervading corporate India right now.

Every downturn is supposed to bring opportunities with it. With the reduced demand in oil and lowered consumption, environmentalists should be really happy that there won't be so much carbon di oxide in the atmosphere for a while, but in reality they will be unhappy that cash crunches will hold back investment in newer technologies! Add to this lower oil prices and there is no incentive at all for anyone to complain about burning more oil. The next time oil goes up, it will be at the most inopportune time and then we will look back at the stupidity of not running away from oil when we could afford to, which is now, when we have extra money that we didn't spend on expensive oil! But we're so scared now that we're most likely to make mistakes. Humans don't take pressure all that well.

Last night came the news that the big automakers in the USA didn't get the handouts they wanted. It is kind of stupid to start with, like losers asking for medals, but when the BIG 3 are not likely to share profits with the taxpaying public, why the heck should taxpayers' dollars be used to bail them out for not being competitive enough? If Toyota and Honda can do well in the same market with the same pool of labour and skill, there is no reason for GM to be complaining. Of course this has to do with not knowing how to make a single good car, but just because the impact would be huge if GM, Chrysler and Ford went bankrupt, that doesn't mean taxpayers should bail them out. That is just thievery, and the thieves have been fended off for now. There are big auto ancillary manufacturers in India that supply the big three and many are OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers). They're going to hurt, without a doubt. That's the thing about momentum - you cannot stop it unless you oppose it with an equal or greater force.

Indians are going to lose their jobs. No question about that. Quite simply because we are great at competing against each other here at home, but lousy when competing against the rest of the world. While it is unlikely that Eritrea will be making more steel than India in the next fifty years, it is highly likely that we find our economy has bloated because of IT dollars and a higher standard of living that we briefly subscribed to is suddenly going to be unsustainable. We don't have to look far - we don't sell software to end users, we write software for others who sell products and solutions. The "others" are mostly American and some European. These people aren't going to do anything new for a while, and we would have rolled in the momentum of their stupidity! They're owning up to their failed economic models, but we're yet to own up to our overdependence on the US dollar. More stupidity that is not being questioned right now, because of some dangerous remnants of optimism. After all, when we love the Americans so much, you bet we bought some of their delusionary talents too!

The Indian real estate industry is getting the wake up call right now, but is not responding to it. If you ask one developer why he isn't dropping prices, he will tell you nobody else is, so he is going to wait and watch! Momentum. Nobody escapes it, and very few want to escape it. Sheep falling off the cliff, and more to follow. About a billion. The only reason Indians won't get killed jumping off the cliff is because so many of us jumped before us that the valley has been filled! When we do see prices drop, we still won't see sales pick up because people will expect prices to drop some more! That will throw more panic into the industry, and builders won't be cashing in on cheaper cement and steel prices because their moneys are stuck in unsold properties. The biggest ones will see the opportunities and wait out the trough, but the bottom feeders will all look for other industries to play in. We haven't seen the worst panic yet, but the show is coming!

Somehow the Indian government, as if it is qualified to talk about this, is throwing out assurances, based on absolutely nothing, that India is not likely to see layoffs! This is beyond stupidity. It is delusion, which has had momentum a lot longer than stupidity.

The Currency Of Sex

Anand Jon, fashion designer, is found guilty on eight charges of rape and sexual assault on a minor girl, and is likely to spend the rest of his life in jail. To me, there's hardly anything sensational about anything in the above sentence, except for the number eight. Does it really take eight charges of rape to bring a rapist to justice? It would be interesting to study why it took this long in this case, wouldn't it?

The fashion world, just like the world of cinema and showbusiness, offers plenty of opportunity for naive, impressionable young people to be lured into a dreamworld of glamour, success, fame and luxury by doing things that seem fairly easy on the body and very easy on the mind. So, the currency that automatically becomes the differentiator is often sex. The casting couch is by no means a figment of imagination, and many young people are propositioned nicely enough to take it or leave it for the next struggle to get a shot at the limelight.

Many youngsters choose the casting couch in the same vein of thought that brought them to it in the first place - easy success. So, it is no big deal to have sex with someone who can potentially promise you a big bonus in return. This is prostitution, except that the prostitute has a choice attached to something that is important to him or her. Most youngsters can walk away from having to make this choice, but their egos will hurt even more with failure than with having unwilling sex. So, the claim is that there isn't much choice, but the real choice is between paying a price using the currency of sex, or having to stick to your virtuous ways and struggling some more. More often than not, it is stupidity that leads young minds to make wrong choices, and it is no different here.

Stupidity lends credibility to the fact that this particular success is the only shot that person will get, and that it is somehow important to choose. Making it look like a choice between success and failure is the dark talent of the crooks who have the power to control the careers of these young people. Even darker is the talent to sell the world the idea that fashion and glamour are somehow important artistic endeavors that have some meaning in the real world. The world that consumes glamour in any form is equally guilty of creating the atmosphere in which crimes like this can take place.

But the law is myopic enough to allow the vast majority to consume and pour money into a sham industry, while the few who rise to prominence have the power to exploit. This is no different from any other industry, but the big difference is that there are goods and services that are essential to us so we can't shy away from buying a shoe knowing fully well that it might be made with child labour, but we can certainly shy away from attending that pathetic fashion show where young men and women strut uncreative clothing and jewellery and what not and actually imagine they have a career ahead of them.

If it takes eight charges of rape to bring down one of these shenanigans, it is because it dawned on quite a few of them rather late, that they gave what was asked and they still don't have careers! All of a sudden, they realized they have been had, and decided to make a case of it. If they had soared to fame, it would have all been hunky dory. For heavens' sake, it really isn't that hard to figure this out, is it? So, this is really a case of the sore losers trying to get something back for having been stupid in the first place.

It is no news that the promise of easy sex attracts a lot of people to the world of show business. That is hardly to taint the efforts of those genuinely attracted to the art and craft and various other serious pursuits in these industries, but fact remains that physical proximity and the need to please certain people can put people in rather awkward situations. We can almost certainly trust a seventeen year old who has put in a year of effort to get to that point to feel as if he or she has invested a lifetime for this "moment" and feel that it would be stupid to let go of the "opportunity" that beckons. It is like entering a threshold to something special, a portal to climb above all peers, an escape from the drudgery and a shot at the "real" thing, whatever that may be.

The power of sex as a currency is never to be underestimated. It is often used by two kinds of people - those with low self esteem, and those with a shortage of every other currency - intellect included. There is absolutely nothing to prevent our young men and women to call in the press and bring down the house on a pervert pretending to be an artist of immense capabilities who can launch careers. But that is not the kind of fighting spirit that brings them to these positions in the first place. They are used to grovelling and begging and pleasing in order to have that one shot at success. Such people will almost never complain. So, it takes eight failures and probably eight fools waking up to reality that they have no careers in fashion to complain against someone of this "stature".

There's another reason for this easy prey phenomenon. Parents of the so called victims. They want bragging rights and want their children to reach for fame that usually evaded them. So, they do whatever it takes to push their children towards stardom of some kind. There are some who are actually stupid enough to tell their kids they can choose to sing and dance on TV but not get into films because the world of films is "bad"! But behind most of this absurd behaviour is the confusion with material goals. Most parents get a little desperate wondering how to get their children to a future that is secure and abundant, and are actually willing to pay a price for getting there a bit quicker than other parent-child teams might.

The currency of sex has been used for centuries. It will continue to be used for centuries, and one example of bringing a guilty person to justice is hardly going to make a dent in a phenomenon that is well heeled, copiously nurtured, hardly spoken about, and completely accepted as normal. Given the opportunity to be sexually predatory, it can be either a fashion designer, film producer or a pastor, and chances are that person will choose to be an animal, especially when the consequences are not likely to be harmful in the slightest way.

The Hindu Terrorist.

The dreaded Hindu Terrorist is here at last. It is not so much a new arrival of a phenomenon, but an acknowledgment that is beyond denial now.

Soon after the Babri Masjid destruction, I felt violated by an act of terror. One of my country's monuments had been destroyed, and even without the other incidents this act triggered in the years to come, I maintain that this was a singularly ugly act of terror against India. It was also significant for the clear evidence of the Hindu terrorist.

I had heated arguments with people who claimed in all their well meaning stupidity that these were people trying to correct an historic wrong, and that there was originally a temple in the site where the mosque had been built. Now, as far as I am concerned, I am an Indian citizen, and my country was born on the 15th of August 1947, and on that day, if it was a mosque, then it is my country's mosque, and I am proud of it. I don't care about what existed before for that may be part of the legacy of the Indian land, it certainly is not part of the Indian nation's history.

The greatest argument I had was with a group of people who interrupted a cricket game I was playing in to ask for donations, ostensibly to build the Ram Janm Bhoomi temple on that very spot. I flatly refused, but they proceeded to give themselves an iota of respectability by saying they were from the Indian Institute of Science. This got me furious. I asked them why when they had the gall to claim respectability by belonging to the INDIAN Institute of Science, how could they support the destruction of an INDIAN monument in the name of Hinduism?

To me, these people were supporters of terror, and should have been thrown behind bars for even attempting such an audacious task. India is a secular country, and we signed up for our constitution, which reaches well above a God concept and bows only to a Truth concept. We are way more secular than any other nation has ever even imagined itself to be. Religion and faith all have their places in our country, but more than anything, our respect of our principles of tolerance and acceptance should and will rule supreme.

The games of political parties already stand ruthlessly exposed. No Indian citizen's glee or disappointment with a political system should reflect negatively upon that person's contribution to the nation's ethos. Our ethos is one of knowledge, progress, truth, justice and compassion. No piece of history that took place before the 15th of August 1947 should put any responsibility upon any of our citizens to correct today, and no piece of legislation that came into existence after this date can be ignored without showing disrespect to the India we have today.

The presence of Islamic terror in India is a well documented fact and continues to be on our radar. What we now have is irrefutable proof that the Hindu terrorist exists. Political parties will run helter skelter to distance themselves from these elements, no doubt, and that is to be expected, for our politicians are rats in the majority. We have saffron clad, politically active public personalities involved in bombing that has claimed Indian lives. For parties like the VHP and the BJP, who love to claim that there is no Hindu terror, this is a clear "Shut up, thank you". The biggest alarm bells for us are indeed the involvement of military personnel, particularly those of officer ranks, in acts of terror in the exact fashion of Islamic terror - bombs!

On TV yesterday, I was puzzled by the expression used to describe a certain "militia in support of the government" in Congo. I would think this means the military of the country - wearing a national uniform, working in tandem with the government, officially entrusted with the job of protecting it from external threats. For some reason, this sounds like a group of armed people with no official sanction, but still supporting the government in a multi party, multi faceted clusterf^%k! If our military is fighting terror officially and unofficially causing it, where do we stand?

The loss of faith in our institutions would cause our nation to bleed a lot worse than any terror attack. We already do not have any faith in our police. We definitely do not have any faith in our politicians, except for the top few. We used to have faith in the military, but now, that is under severe test. Nothing short of hanging the guilty will do to restore some of this faith. But knowing our country fully well, this will probably get dragged into a long drawn affair, and end in a nebulous status quo that neither answers the question nor dismisses it. That is the India we are used to - a sluggish, unclear, directionless, chaotic mass that defies all logic and intelligence.

The Hindu terrorist could not have stated its existence at a worse time, but better late than never, and definitely it is never too early to show up if you exist. It is clear the Hindu terrorist has arrived. Using positions within respected institutions, with plenty of sanctuary in political ranks, Hindu terrorism is unlikely to give up and fade away, now that there is no reason to hide any more. We aren't just interested in rewriting the history of our monuments, we would like to bomb India as well, just like the Islamic terrorists we hate!

What could be the agenda of the Hindu terrorist? What hate could they possibly direct towards us Indian people? The scariest enemy is one whose motive is unknown. In comparison, the Islamic terrorist is fairly clear in its stupidity. We do not know the Hindu terrorist, except that he could be wearing a Lieutenant Colonel's uniform. The sanctity of no Indian institution lies above suspicion now. The culprits shouldn't just be brought to book, they should be roasted over a slow fire in public and killed mercilessly, since human rights should not and cannot apply to people who do not behave like humans and threaten the very existence of other humans.

Expect more chaos. Expect this to become a test of national character. Expect us to fail that test by not even beginning to answer it. Expect us to not feel bad about that either. Expect us to write another confusing chapter in our chequered political history that will baffle people for years to come. Expect our media to never get deep into this matter for it threatens to become too politically sensitive. Expect great lip service from our politicians. Expect India to treat this as just another incident and not like a tip of an unknown iceberg that looms just below the water level.

India sliding!

Imagine this - the Obama administration shuts down all incentives to offshore work and forces American companies to size down their India operations, in an attempt to keep jobs in the USA. At face value, this isn't likely to happen in a simple stroke of decision making, for American companies need their offshore operations to remain competitive and be able to offer their products and services at competitive prices.

But, we are still at the beginning of a true recession, and a lot of bloodletting will happen from industries that have expanded under speculative growth conditions, spurred on by high stock prices. Put simply, people have pumped in a lot of money into industries they have perceived will grow forever, and it has been easy for them to raise money to expand into the future. This has summarily come to a halt with the crash in the USA.

India has a few companies that have over the period of the last decade, done their best to diversify and build core competencies that can compete instead of waiting for the outsourcing crumbs, but the majority have indeed run for the handouts brought in by the "cheap labour" sticker. These are the companies that have mushroomed all over India, particularly in cities like Bangalore. Not surprisingly, there isn't a single Indian product that you will find on every computer in the world, and even as HCL has one of its smartypants in its ad. claim that HCL builds software that does some significant things around the world, the irony is not lost on us when the ad. ends with the claim of being a $5billion company, not a Rs.25000 crore company!

In other words, many Indian companies see themselves as totally dependent on the American economy, and the extent of them being global unfortunately is the extent to which they can beg for business from American companies. There just isn't going to be that mad rush forward growth over the next two years, because recessions are not easy to turn around, and while some Indian companies will benefit for the good reasons, many will perish because they are just not good enough.

There are two different approaches with building companies, in general. The first model is the honest model, where investors and core workers come together to build a company that will produce goods or provide services that they believe has a good chance of making the company profitable through revenue streams they can sustain over fairly long periods of time. The intent is to capitalize on ability and demand for whatever this company produces. There is competence, and there is honesty. The other model is to build a company that lasts long enough to make enough noise before going public, and then use the stock market to sucker the public into buying their stock at as high a price as possible, giving an "exit strategy" to many of its founders and early employees, particularly senior management. This is the "get rich quick legally" scheme, which works very well when there is positive sentiment about the sector and the country's economy. Indian animation companies have done well with this conniving intent, and the people who bought their stock are nothing but fools.

The .com boom period brought the second model to light in India. Many Indian companies were overjoyed at how they could con the public into investing in companies that might be duds two years down the line, but how could the investors and senior management care any more if they made tons of money and "exited", leaving the company to flutter as the winds blew? A lot of companies that are not in the core sectors like energy and infrastructure will obviously decline now that the proverbial bubble has burst and if there are Indian software companies that are low in the pecking order of larger companies built up in stock markets rather than in real produce, then they are all on their way down.

The gleeful Indian "technocrat" is about to be exposed for his true incompetence and more importantly for how disposable he is. This is going to shock a lot of people, but Indians are fiercely proud and will find it very hard to cut back on lifestyle, which in the last five years has been the single biggest paradigm shift. All of a sudden, we will witness a robust coming of age of Indian industry, particularly the software and services industry that simply has no product or service the world desperately needs. This is the best thing to happen now, rather than five years later, and it won't be fun if you are one of the people going to lose your job. But it will be fun for the rest of us to watch, since the booming retail sector might need some of your foreign accents and groomed looks - you might even get discounts on groceries and low end consumer goods.

America has been an engine, no doubt. But it has been a fake engine, fuelled by growth based on speculation and financial experts who lost their fundamentals in an attempt to build quick empires. This is a time when empires older than a hundred years old are collapsing. No amount of government intervention is going to help restore the order of a year ago, because that was not order in the first place. It was already in a state of decay, and delusion kept the world going. The US dollar is not based on gold reserves. It is helped by commodities like oil being pegged against it. The Euro is based on gold, and is bound to be much more stable because there won't be any more Euros than there is gold to buy with it. The American dollar is paper money and unless America becomes truly productive, its dollar won't be worth much in the days to come.

America currently imports more than it exports. China holds most of the debt Americans owe, and they can afford to because they are a manufacturing economy. They are regularly producing things that the world cannot live without. India is in a bind being a services economy since it is much more dependent on what others want from us. America wanted cheap programmers, we produced them. America wanted people with fake accents talking on phones, we manufactured them. Now, America wants to reduce its energy dependence on oil and wants millions of solar modules and wind turbines, it is going to ask China, not us, to make them!

That is where we stand today. Our biggest boon is our size and our people have to consume and be the engine for our own economy. But our software "techies" haven't produced much for our consumption, and we basically don't have so much need to drive this overgrown and overrated industry. We did not grow other areas in the same time, because we were shortsighted and highly opportunistic. Now we will witness the reality check. Techies without jobs. The big shots will do fine if they adapt and have saved money, but the middle to bottom rung of fools who can't put a sentence together but have been in the software industry for a few years are toast. These aren't "techies" but low level assembly line workers in an air conditioned environment. If an ape could read code, it could do this job.

Suicides, broken marriages, they're all a coming, my friends. Indian pride will be hurt, and our sense of panic will come to the fore again. It is never pretty, but this time, the show promises to be particularly ugly.

Barack Obama and America's coming of age.

Today, it has been all celebration, and rightfully so. Barack Obama today became the first person of African American heritage to be elected President of the USA. The significance of this shouldn't be lost on anyone following this exciting news. In over 200 years of the USA existing as a nation, and 389 years since the first Africans were brought to America as slaves to work on British colonies, this is the first time any person of colour has been bestowed the rare honour of being the country's leader and indeed occupy the seat of one of the most powerful people in the world.

Not only were the odds heavily stacked against him, he was also fighting to be elected in a time of strife for the USA, with two wars and a looming recession that the whole world has felt and reacted to, not too positively. But Obama, being the brilliant leader he is, ran a campaign that was so sophisticated and so inclusive that all the traditional Republicans and their think tanks were reduced to sideshows with no substance at all. The Obama campaign outthought, outmotivated, outspent, and completely outplayed the republican campaign and made them look like amateurs in a world of phenomenal professionals.

The romance of all this is indeed beautiful, and the whole world has waxed eloquent about the significance of this historic moment, emotional for a lot of people, and amazing for the ideals upon which America has always said it stands upon. Indian media has been very sharp, as representatives of the world's largest democracy, to present this spectacle in its colour, although largely positioning their reporters in liberal bastions where the story was juiciest, particularly after it became obvious that Obama was going to win and win big.

If there is one thing that is totally missing from all media so far, it is the mention that America the adolescent of 200 years of age has finally shown symptoms of becoming an adult, officially getting past puberty and coming of legal adult age. For all its greatness, America has always been a sum of its various interesting parts, and never a grown up as a whole. Now, finally, with this emphatic expression, thanks to youngsters and people who chose to stay awake, America has shown that it is not genetically flawed and is capable of adulthood and adult behaviour.

The greatest progress in America in any sphere has taken place in Blue states - those that traditionally vote Democrat. In fact, Blue states overwhelmingly overshadow the productivity of Red states, who sometimes seem to produce nothing but voting blocks and religious zealots who clearly should have no place in the twenty first century. Sarah Palin, scarily is from one such state, and this right wing nutcase who wants to legalize aerial hunting and thinks Putin is going to attack America over Alaskan airspace, did come perilously close to having her chance to be President!

At the time when India was getting its independence from the British empire, won with a non violent movement that still baffles humanity, segregation was legal in the USA! It was perfectly normal to expect a black person to be hanged without trial if charged with a crime, and the likelihood of a black person ever getting the same treatment as a white person was almost nil. To this day, there is a significantly larger percentage of black people in America's jails in comparison to their percentage of the nation's population, and there are still many, many places you can visit in the United States of America where if you are not white, you will be looked upon like a parasite fully worthy of nothing but suspicion.

Racism is as American as apple pie, and it exists in its ugliest forms in American people's minds. This is not to define the whole country by the actions of a few, but it is worth remembering as we celebrate and join in America's greatest political step forward. There are American parents today who are busy warning their children that their country is doomed to be taken over by Muslim terrorists because Obama became president. Earlier today, when John McCain was delivering his concession speech and congratulated Obama, his supporters were booing! Booing! That's how retarded some of these people can be. There are Americans who are scared to their bones by Obama being president, and for reasons that are uniquely American - usually prejudiced, baseless, and conditioned by an upbringing of ignorance and intolerance. That is not about to change anytime soon.

The balance may have shifted for now in favour of a more progressive America, but that doesn't provide the grounds for us to assume that America has done anything more than somehow endure its coming of age. To be fair, America has had in place for a while the framework for greatness, the structure to provide the opportunity for anyone to step up and take up enormously ambitious dreams. It provides for great checks and balances that carefully prevent the hijacking of a democratic system, and yet, it watched helplessly as Bush and co. systematically ran into the ground America's surplus economy, waged a war based on lies and treachery, gave no bid contracts worth billions of dollars to companies in which their politicians had vested interests, and ruined the country's reputation to the point where Eritrea and Solomon Islands might well be the most celebrated members of the Coalition of the Willing that the supermoron from Texas put together.

It is possible today to lead a life in America where you can do well financially without much of an education, you can buy enough insulation to never have to deal with a human being too much unlike yourself, and live a life of complete ignorance of the rest of the world. There are many pockets in the USA where people have chosen to do exactly these things and their vote could still decide which country gets bombed next. Driven by belief above knowledge, they have an icon in Sarah Palin who believes that dinosaurs and humans co-existed at some point, and these are the people that constitute 48% of the popular vote that Barack Obama did not win! (Imagining T-rex on Noah's ark still makes me smile in abject resignation!)

There was more negativity and cheapness from the republican campaign against Obama than there was any substance and dignity. Sarah Palin's attempts at linking Obama to a well known fear psychosis of terror, knowing fully well that this domestic terrorist is a university professor, should give us enough insight on the kind of people she knew she was addressing. These are the people who continue to pull the USA down to the stone age, and her "folksy appeal" is hardly directed towards any good folks who believe in hard work, abundance, and wonderfully universal concepts of brotherhood. Indeed, the biggest believers in Palin politics are more likely to be fear mongers and religious creationists who want to reject all scientific education, who do not mind being ruled by trepidation and suspicion of those "big city liberals"!

The fact that Republicans lost this election doesn't mean that America has gone beyond extremely conservative, narrow minded, fear driven, ignorant and prejudiced thought processes. America is by no means setting a great example for the rest of the democratic world to follow. Countries like India should smile and congratulate America for its bold step forward, like a special needs child of enormous physical power that has just uttered its first word.

The lesson for India from Barack Obama's success should not be the romantic, unsophisticated views that our Padma Shri winning journalists like Barkha Dutt seem to be so enamoured with inflicting upon us with Disney like sweetness. (The funny sideshow - the immature joy on Mira Nair's face last night as she spoke to Barkha Dutt to demonstrate exactly the limit of her understanding of American politics - nothing surprising coming from a filmmaker who makes a living out of trashing India for the viewing pleasure of white people.) The lesson for us is to trust our fundamentals and put more faith into our democratic processes. We never condoned racism, we never legalized segregation, and we threw enough clout around to kick South Africa out of the cricketing fraternity for practising apartheid, and we led the Non Alligned Movement. We are not an ideologically compromised nation to need to look up to "America" for any kind of direction.

We as a nation still occupy moral high ground, and we're only sixty one years old. Still, we should see the intelligence of Barack Obama in having to fight through mentalities that are centuries behind our people's. His positivity should be an inspiration to us. His unwavering energy and calmness should encourage some of us to get engaged in our democratic processes. We should exercise our rights more, and grow up with awareness and courage, in much the way Swami Vivekananda has long since told us. It wouldn't take much to note that America still wants to be one nation "Under God", but India's founding fathers got way beyond human constructs and concepts of belief, while putting "Truth" as our highest ideal. Satyameva Jayate!

Against all greatness

Knowing fully well that The Hindu is a better paper, what makes some of us reach for The Times of India? When both papers are right in front of us, all things considered, The Hindu should never have to compete with The Times of India. Yet, there is a place for sub standard, mediocre, and absolutely crappy product in every sphere! How do we let this happen, even when there are no financial ramifications involved?

How do we voluntarily choose to watch song and dance programmes on television, when it is on plain view that neither is the talent on display so breathtaking, nor is the format of the programme all that exciting? Quite simply, we have a great amount of space reserved for the mindless, for the easy access "fun" experience, which can take us from one moment to another, without having to tax our minds. This can be therapeutic once in a while, but when we put up with sub standard all the time, we are on a slippery slope.

Visit the Madras Boat Club and you will find fairly elite people enjoying dinner on the lawn at the back, facing the river. If you were smelling impaired, you'd have the greatest time, but whatever is wrong with these morons that they would completely ignore the stench of the river which is nothing but sewage?! It is unbearable and most sane people would run from that stink, but for the members of the MBC, no problem! That's the amazing part - it is as if it is normal to pay a lot of money to experience dinner with the huge stench of sewage all around!

There was a question in the Indian media asking where our Obama was. A bit of a stretch, perhaps, considering Senator Obama is yet unproven, but the signs of a visionary leader are there. The signs of greatness are there without doubt. So, if there is an Obama amongst us in India, we have to kill him early, and nothing succeeds like India stifling any and all attempts at greatness, no matter who it is putting the effort. We love to pull everyone down to the average, below standard level, so that we can all be in a level playing field. India is one of the few countries that still genuinely believes in making it as hard as possible to be great. Collectively, we hate it when someone forces us to set higher standards for ourselves.

A few weeks ago, I called 139 to find the status of my train, and got an automated voice telling me it was on time. I went to the station on time and found the train was a hundred minutes late. I was furious, for what is the point of having this automated system if I cannot get accurate information? A hundred minutes of my time is valuable, but more than that, the lousy maintenance of the system is no excuse for stealing a hundred minutes of my time! I duly filled out a complaint, in triplicate as the Railways have it, and got a sympathetic railway official who gave me another local number to call to get "reliable" information! This is the problem I have with India - we never seem to make intent and action meet.

We celebrate chaos and we love being out of order. It is all great if this order we are fighting against is one of extreme regimen, and we are losing our minds and our freedom, but completely to the contrary, we do have a lot of freedom! We have so much freedom in this country that we don't have to perform up to snuff in anything we do. The few of us who choose to be great at what we do, have to do whatever it is that we do in complete insulation from everybody else, because we don't encourage any attempt at being great at anything, unless it is close to bringing a windfall bonus!

Even the educated amongst us eat at unhygienic places, do not demand basic sanitary standards out of our all encompassing logic that there is no point, and almost consider it unfashionable to take action against the ever ready low minded unthinking mediocrity worshipper that can and will affect our lives negatively. The bus that plays a movie way too loudly absolutely beckons us to walk up to the driver and tell him to put down the volume. In extreme cases, I have had to cut the wire to the speaker directly above me, and damn the loss in entertainment value the other deaf passengers have to endure! Sometimes, we have to be militant about keeping our sanity. The truth is, you pay for a bus ride, not for the noise, and you bloody well have a right to a peaceful journey.

The Indian government machinery is famous for recruiting low minds, and absolute morons. When there is a quota system designed to infuse the system with underperforming idiots, who won't be fired if they don't perform, this is to be expected. But on our side of the coin, we have every right to demand that they perform. The right to complain is something we should not have to think twice about, but given that we put up with a mediocre system, there is absolutely no need for us to be stuck with the faults of idiots who can stall our normal conduct of life. The Right to Information is a great right, but only when exercised.

At all levels when you demand information that is not forthcoming, you are bound to meet an attempt to intimidate you, either through a low mind government servant that throws attitude or ignores you until you make it unbearable. And then, your decency will come under question, with the underlying hope that somehow you will not be willing to let go of a little dignity, and will therefore "behave" when you don't get the service you deserve. Sloths who work for the government think it is their birthright to not perform, and act as if you are acting way above your authority when you ask them to simply do their jobs. Why do we put up with fools like this? Because we love them!

We in India have this enormous empathy for the underperforming sloth, unless he is a cricketer. That is the one uniform that carries a lot of responsibility. The cricketer must be an all conquering, intense, positive, world class performer with attitude to boot! Everybody else is allowed to graze on the plateau of collective pathos. Why is it that we demand so little for ourselves when it isn't hard to do so? Do we love so much to be backward? Or is it our discomfort with the pursuit of greatness because it demands that we get off our lazy butts and become active?

Fact remains that we love to belong in some kind of greatness, as long as we don't have to work for it. Our five thousand year old heritage is the biggest culprit in breeding this lethargy in us. Who can take that away from us? Nobody, and that is the problem! What work does it take for us to lay claim to having one of the greatest civilizations in our ancestry? Nothing! What joy! But, what are we willing to do to make India work better today? What can we do to make our lives better? Forget the patriotism and nationalist nonsense - it isn't worth the sweat. It is worth the sweat to have our system work properly, atleast for most essential part. Let's forget about the thousands of years of our forefathers' legacy that is supposed to be all bathed in glory. That is part of this land, not part of our lives, our nation or our realities today.

What India is today is a herd. A herd of mindless, selfish, uncaring, unspiritual individuals who don't really care about anything remotely reaching greatness. We have no place for original thought, no tolerance for brilliance, unless that brilliance is unstoppable and already at its pinnacle of achievement. And then, we have our cynicism towards over achievers, only too eager to find faults in individuals who have taken their passion seriously and climbed their own peaks. We are a negative lot, finding humour in failure, comfort in low thought processes. We'd rather be led than show the courage to beat our own paths. This is the reason we will be badly affected by shifting paradigms, that other people control, for good or bad.

We are happy to be defined by others, by trends, by messages that subtly alter the way we think. The Indian today is one whose character can be palpably demonstrated by the way the vehicles on our roads have become extensions of our egos. We are always one step away from becoming a mob, because we revel in our little triumphs when there is no risk to our own status quo. We are vastly available to an injection of collective stupidity. We love rumours because our lives aren't that interesting anyway. We discuss other people because our minds have a hard time discussing ideas. At best, we discuss events, because we have the time.

Aha! Time! That is the big one! We just have the time to remain stagnant - no wonder we allow stagnation. We are not in a hurry to get anywhere beyond where we are. We are sedentary but not content, inactive but unhappy. We would like to ensure as much safety as possible to be built around the coccoon of mediocrity that we have mired ourselves in. What can be better than to be unaware? Ignorance has been bliss for a long, long time. It is proven and it is tested against everything. So, we choose to be ignorant.

So, what does an Indian contribute to life on earth as humans? What goes in comes out. We swallow mediocrity by the ton, and spit it out. This shouldn't surprise anyone, for just as we don't mind corruption, we condone laziness, incompetence, and generally do whatever it takes to avoid friction. We are weighed down by our legacy, burdened by our glorious past, and we refuse to come to the present where we don't really count for much. We are the rat race. But then, we are great Indian rats! See, one of us is by Lord Ganesh himself!

Stupid ads and outright lies!

"Thousands of pixels being chased by festive looking dancers. When they are about to catch up, the marauding pixels fly into a giant screen and arrange themselves to make the colourful face of a Kathakali dancer who makes facial gestures on the giant screen" - the brief for the Sony Bravia commercial couldn't have been very different from this yawn inducing, uninspiring idea meltdown. I hardly have a question about the uncreative nonsense that Indian ad. agencies almost always come up with. But if the brilliant colour of the Bravia TV is clearly visible on my existing TV, why would I want to buy the Bravia?

The latest ad for Timesjobs.com on television tells you you will find a better paying job on their site, and then goes on to explain in great detail, on the same site, how they are not responsible for anything in an "as is" presentation of information! http://www.timesjobs.com/popuphtml/Terms.htm#link14 In other words, there is absolutely no effort put forward by Timesjobs.com to ensure the jobs there are indeed the better paying jobs. Stretch that a little, and you will easily infer you could get the lowest paying job and Timesjobs.com will still not be responsible for their own advertisement in any way. How can a service that shouts - "Because you are worth more" completely absolve itself of that claim, after "better paying job" is the the only reason for you to consider their service? Absolutely nefarious.

This advertisement sells you an alternative to an employment agency, without any of the responsibilities you would come to expect. It is just a cheap reference, where the attempt is to cut out the percentage commissions of the employment agency and nothing more. Therefore it is an outright lie that you will find "better paying jobs" there. With subjective claims like "The tastiest Sambar in the world", you can let it go, but when there is something measurable like a person's salary, how can the media planners of Timesjobs.com be so stupid and assuming of people who end up visiting their site? Clearly they can, and I hope the recession causes some of these fools to be kicked out.

By now, even if you are a fairly occasional TV watcher, you must have seen the enormous disclaimers at the end of some ads. that flash for about a second, which nobody in the world can read, for two reasons - the print is too small, and there is just too much to read in one second. So, what is the point of showing the disclaimer at all, especially when everyone in their right mind should know the disclaimer is for dissing all claims made so far by the advertisement that a normal person can understand and trust.

Communication, the very point of advertising, is sometimes lost on me. Especially with car advertisements where the car flies through the air, skids all over the road, spins, and just about manages to find a grip of safety before vanishing into the horizon. I would think a car that throws itself about so easily would be the most unsafe thing to buy and the most unsound investment. Especially if the car is tiny like a Swift, I'd go all out singing its praise on how roomy it is and how solid on the road it can be. If it is all over the place, I kind of begin to feel it is flimsy and untrustworthy. Am I the only one who has this problem?

The ridiculous advertisement also has its place somewhere, except when you begin to wonder why a motorcyclist would hire a helicopter to throw him from several hundred feet high onto the top of a building. Motorcycles are not aircraft, and if you landed on the top of a building in one, and survived the fall, you'd pretty much have nowhere to go. Now if the building itself was your destination, what do you need the motorcycle for? Stupidity at its bleeding worst.

Then comes the sexuality crutch. Why would you think of sex when you are drinking a bottle of Slice, for heavens' sake? Aamsutra, my flaming arse! When I am thirsty I might reach for some Slice, and if I love mangoes, great! But sex is not something I associate with a fruit drink, no matter how much Katrina Kaif seems to be turned on by the thought of humping a mango or a Slice drinker. Jittu Krishnamurthy was right when he said, "In lieu of creativity there is sexuality". Most of the time, sexuality is what seems to be easily on tap for most of our ad. makers, and they don't even bat an eyelid about what the product is! If the fools working in advertising agencies are so bereft of ideas, why don't they just quit? Maybe we should make a Kaam Sutra ad. for them to get the hint? "Make way, not ads."

The attempt at the abstract - this is the genre that gets me really laughing. Like the ad. for the Tata Safari Dicor, that starts of about "lines", and how you can make your own "lines" with the ugly beast called the Tata Safari! What an idea, Sirji! How many customers actually think about buying a car as the same as buying a paintbrush to make lines with?! If I wanted to make lines, I'd find a thousand different ways without having to buy an SUV. Give me a f$#@%ing break. The abstract should be left to geniuses who can present some weird connection in a sane way, not to half drunk dopey eyed wanna be rebels turned washout creatives.

There aren't that many professions in which anything goes! Most of our India centric ads. are all about filling up the airwaves with noise. Speaking of noise, why does the volume jump up as soon as it is time for an advertisement? Right in the middle of a cricket match, which itself is fairly well controlled in terms of noise during a broadcast, the ad. will just blare its way into your life. My hand is invariably on the Mute button as soon as it is time for a commercial. So, I get to watch most ads. without sound anyway. No TRP machine will report this fact, and some advertiser somewhere is losing money and not getting value!

"See what happens when a CD begins to dream"??? Since when did inanimate objects start dreaming and we found out what they dreamt about? This offering is from Moser Baer, with ugly black wires morphing out of nowhere and hitting the roof, the floor, the model's hands, and what not, before becoming all kinds of electronic goods - simply unimaginative, uncommunicative rubbish presented with the finesse of a snake devouring a rat. I wonder how this gets past the brainstorming stage - assuming there are actually coherent stages to the process of unleashing a commercial on unsuspecting masses. Scarily, this commercial is a computer graphics lift from a science fiction movie. Maybe that is why we are asked to imagine what happens when a CD begin to dream? I'd like to see what miracles happen when our ad executives begin to think.

The Axe deodorant commercials seemed to be rather well put together until they came up with the latest one with the chocolate flavoured temptations. Apparently, only women fall for the smell of chocolate and will stick themselves to glass in pure longing, even when they cannot smell the spray! How retarded can things get? If a deodorant smelt anything like chocolate or reminded me of something to eat, I'd be completely turned off. Watch this product vanish off the shelves for being absolutely idiotic in conception, ad or no ad.

The stupid, stressed out woman who thinks her husband is dead when she finds him snoozing and is shocked when he wakes up, leads me to think she was hoping he was dead! After all, presumably, she would be the beneficiary of her husband's life insurance policy! Knowing fully well that "Life Insurance" is actually "Death Insurance", they don't really have to tell us how happy we can be just because we bought insurance, do they? I mean seriously, what the heck do we care once we are dead? Sure it must be the hardest thing to sell, but in all seriousness, if you needed Kal Par Control (whatever the crap this means, especially to those of us who cannot read English and end up understanding in Hindi), you'd work to make more money today, not spend a little more on an insurance plan! Moreover, if there is another company selling the same thing, telling you to let tomorrow lie and just enjoy today, what are you supposed to do? Very confusing, and might be better if someone would just tell us, "Look, someone is going to need this money if you croak". After all, how many of us are fooled by insurance ads anyway?

Now we have the very stylish PSAs, like "Save the girl child" that comes to us in the middle of a cricket match on Ten Sports. Hello? It isn't as if we are all about killing the girl child, and it certainly isn't those of us who understands English and can see the point of a poignant message that needs the message. So, what is the point of this PSA as opposed to the crude ones made by the same ministries? The direct ones in Hindi, that treat the viewer like a stupid villager are actually much more effective in communicating the point. Check out the one where the girl child in the womb talks to her father through a stethescope! Then there is the really thought provoking one that asks us to imagine a world without women. I thought about it, honestly and deeply, and really came to this - I'd definitely hate seeing fewer women around, but... Wow, wouldn't that be a good way to control human population?

Remember the Intex commercial, extolling the virtues of their speakers, especially the drop of the pin you can hear clearly while the older gentleman is clearing his ears? Well, if I can hear it on my existing set of speakers, I sure don't have any reason to buy Intex, do I? Am I the only one thinking out loud on this really base level of stupidity exhibited by fools who are paid to precisely not do this kind of work?

Selling Delusion

Sarah Palin, the American Republican vice presidential nominee has proven to be a real dead duck - dumb as a brick, shrill as a whistle, incapable of coherent thought, and absolutely awful at displaying intelligence. It is almost as if intelligence is an extra terrestrial precious metal with this woman. And yet, she has had her impact on this campaign, proving once again that there will always be someone willing to buy into delusion.

It is also the revenge of morons on intelligent people, when they support a candidate who is more "like them" instead of being able to acknowledge there are others who are more capable and definitely better. But for this, delusion has to be bought into, and Sarah Palin is an expert at selling delusion. After being hammered with the simplest of questions in interviews, she went on to criticize the interviewers for being mean, and losing out on opportunities to ask her things she wanted to talk about! The plain and obvious truth is, she doesn't have much to say that is so important, or even coherent.

But the people buying into the delusion couldn't be happier, because it takes effort to acknowledge, discern, recognize and support the more substantial candidates. This kind of candidate is the perfect cheap chocolate that is always going to be sold at a discount.

There is no winning against people who are delusional. That is a hard one for intelligent people to digest. It is a fact that humanity is based on a system where the right to survive and be represented in the collective has nothing to do with intelligence. If the majority of our road users break the rules and make it dangerous for those of us who do follow the rules, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it, except formally complain to equally incompetent and status quo loving nincompoops, who are indeed happy to see things stay the same.

Delusional people are also selectively blind, selectively deaf, and ready to selectively apply value systems to the things they subscribe to. It is a character trait, and it is highly noticeable! The unfailing occasion when this trait screams for attention is when an illusion is being smashed, like a celebrity who turns out to be a little less than the image. The delusional fan has a hard time accepting it not because it would fundamentally change anything, but because the delusion has been fed for too long to kill so ruthlessly!

If you know someone who is delusional, what can you do to help? The best strategy would be for you to insulate yourself from the madness first. A frontal attack on a delusion has virtually no chance - it only helps to strengthen its own defence - you are playing right into the delusion artist's premise - you are attacking the delusion precisely because there is some value to it! This is how people who first subscribed to the round earth theory must have felt when they refused to accept the earth was flat!

When you talk to delusional people, you need only prod a little for intelligence to get a really defensive answer like - "That is not something I am interested in", or a fight-for-personal-rights answer like "Why're you telling me this? I don't need to know!" At this point, you better know your time's up. If you are in an even more persuasive mood, you will get "I don't care. I like it!" Now, it really is time to back off!

The Communist Party of India is now famous for being deliriously delusional. Remember the recent attack on the UPA government that our nation's sovereignty has been compromised and India sold out to American interests and so on? I thought for a while that there was probably no delusion involved, but finally, it didn't take much for me to realize that this was what was at play - simple delusion, and a hard sell to us poor believing Indian public that there was an occasion to celebrate a "black day" when India signed an agreement for nuclear co-operation with the USA. There is not one mention of any real disadvantage to India yet! Good old delusion from that idiot Prakash Karat.

It goes beyond blindly applying our value systems to other people. It isn't as if Karat cannot understand in a cerebral kind of way that India is merely engaging in business with another country. It has to do with being delusional about sticking to who he likes and who he doesn't. Very childish, but true of most politicians, particularly the communists, who shot themselves in the foot by subscribing to a no-money-making lifestyle, and cannot even enjoy the material benefits of an emergent India. They want to keep India in the stone age, and be patrons to a foreign ideology, no matter how unsuitable it is to us!

I dare say people who serve in the armed forces are delusional to some extent, when they take this patriotism stuff a little too seriously. It helps of course, to somehow feel that what you are doing is morally on the higher ground, and "serving the country" somehow has a nice ring to it. The delusion of course is that being in the armed forces is somehow superior to other professions, while the truth is that it is just another job opportunity, with its own unique set of benefits, however deserving those may be. But the delusion has been sold brilliantly down the years - if you are a member of the armed forces, you do get some respect, even if you happen to be the biggest moron simply willing to follow orders. It isn't as if we wouldn't defend ourselves if we didn't have uniforms.

It isn't always fun questioning people's delusions. Sometimes it is amusing to just run with it - observe and laugh. There is plenty of supply and apparently, plenty of demand too!

An ally called Objective Reality

There are four thousand young people who move into the city of Los Angeles on a daily basis, following their dream of becoming successful actors in the cinema industry. Many of them have intense belief - an emotional component that is equally noteworthy amongst youngsters moving to cities like Mumbai and Chennai, following the same dream.

A week away from being slapped in the face by the outcome of the US presidential election, John McCain believes he will win and go on to become the next president. There is a theoretical chance of course, but it is akin to needing 36 runs in the last over of a cricket match - possible, but highly improbable. That's why it has never been achieved. That is objective reality. All knowledge begs us to respect this objective reality, while this pesky thing called "belief" can often step in to reinforce the impossible chance!

Faith and belief are inherently risky things to give any sort of importance to, unless all objective reality and the acknowledgment of such has already been comprehensively thrown out! Belief is that elusive something you will hear from people who succeeded against impossible odds. The truth is, belief played no part, but statistics did. The odds were not beaten, merely reinforced. Those who succeed in these circumstances do so because there already exists a small window of opportunity and they are willing to hang in there hoping to be lucky. It has nothing to do with belief when the chance of being hit by lightning is actually bigger than the chance of winning the biggest lotteries.

The reality is, even the ones who didn't hang around long enough to tell us their stories, those who failed and had to give up, also had belief! Even if they had hung around longer, they would have failed, just because the statistics are stacked against them. Why then, do we promote this nonsense called belief, faith, and so on? Quite simply it is because of our inability to tell someone to base their efforts on mere statistical chance! Faith and belief can give us something to hold on to, however illusionary that may be - to stay positive and run hard while not really acknowledging that sometimes, effort can only go that far, and beyond that, we are as much creatures of chance as we are anything else we might imagine.

In taking stock of an individual's chances of becoming rich, for instance, neither effort nor faith, neither objectivism nor prayer can actually guarantee a favourable result. But those who did take their opportunities and based their judgement on a fundamentally sound direction definitely came out on top. People in the community of successful businesses will put less on faith and more on running hard when they know it is time to accelerate their efforts. This is based on acknowledging the objective realities before them. But asking Tiger Woods to be a standout example of "high performance" that we can all emulate is a bit too much. For a genius breakout success like Tiger Woods to take place, a lot of elements have to naturally find their places together. Vijay Singh probably puts in more effort than Woods, but hasn't seen the same kind of success.

What works in the favour of enterprising people engaged in business ventures is that the onus comes onto them, and on certain market factors which they can still work to their advantage, giving importance to understanding and processing information. There are usually many ways to succeed, unlike actors, for instance, whose success depends on someone else's perceptions at a particular time and a potentially life altering decision that might simply "work out". So, what advice can we sincerely give someone who wants to pursue a chance of being successful in a highly unpredictable line of endeavour? The truthful advice would indeed be "Do your best to prepare for an opportunity that might never come!"

The power of prayer is the one unknown that is yet to be acknowledged as a balance tilter. Coming from someone as competitive and celebrated as Billie Jean King, who said she would have achieved a lot more had she realized the power of prayer earlier on, there has to be some truth to it. There are some parts of this realm outside the purview of knowledge that can be applied to every individual. Hence, it is a challenge to ask people to pray and be serious about it!

The truth is, there is an objective reality that stares down upon us all the time. Some of us acknowledge it and use it to our advantage. Most will perish under its intense glare by ignoring it - it is just too cold to handle for most of us. All suffering is because of a refusal to acknowledge the presence of an objective reality. Knowledge can free us, even while being painful. Faith can destroy us, even while being positive. Stupidity, on the other hand, can be the sweetest, shortest ride to doom. It takes stupidity to use faith instead of knowledge.

In choosing our friends and relationships, it doesn't take much for us to decide what influence is good for us and what can be potentially destructive. And yet, all over human society, we can see some of us stuck in relationships that are purely corrosive, erosive of all good energy, and heading towards, at best, a prolonged state of agony. Yet, we will continue to hear from people their summary dismissal of all objective reality, giving themselves excuses and reasons to maintain status quo just for the comfort of the familiar.

There is no guarantee that we live longer by using the seat belt. But it definitely improves our chance of survival in a collision. It is by observing more and more of reality that we have longer life spans today than we did during the stone age. Humans have not progressed by faith and belief. Every step we have taken forward, we have taken because of someone's worship of knowledge and an embrace of curiosity.

And yet, we pray, consult psychics, perform rituals, give our Gods special places in our inconsistent, inconsequential lives, and put unnecessary pressure on them to perform where we might fail! We wear lucky stones, lucky colours, look for auspicious times to do things and basically do everything in our power to ignore objective reality that tells us simply what we need to do better or more than others to get ahead. Now, the number one cause for us to do this has to be laziness. How convenient if we can blame luck instead of lack of effort or understanding! The second more important cause for us to choose this line of reasoning is fear - fear that we might fail despite our best efforts. Fear and ignorance! The two biggest, least mysterious causes for all human problems. May we live to fight them! And may we celebrate reality for the best friend it is!