The Snowden Affair and the Superlies!

The world rejoiced when Barack Obama was made president of the USA!  This was a great moment in the history of the most powerful nation on the earth.  A black man was finally sworn in as president!  Only, he is not black, he is of mixed race, with two ethnically different parents, black and white.  But the lie was allowed to circulate and be celebrated - because it did the image of the USA no harm at  all!  No harm done, but he's not a black man, any more than he is a white man.

When he won the Nobel Peace Prize, it surprised a lot of people.   Ostensibly this was given to him, in the hope that he wouldn't spit on it and start another war like his predecessor had done.  I haven't seen any bloody reason why Barack Obama should have won the Nobel Peace Prize, and I actually love the guy, and I think he makes a cool president.  I don't really love Mahatma Gandhi, but I admire him, and I think he is a much more deserving recipient of such an award, but then, we live in duplicitous times, and I don't give a shit about these awards anyway.

It's the hypocrisy that's at high pitch here.

Now, this guy Edward Snowden is running from the law.  He is a criminal according to the laws of the USA, and he committed some sort of anti national act by exposing the secrets of his nation, and the Obama administration is bound to hound him.  It is their duty, and it is totally "legal" to go after him, bring him to "justice" and all that.

Except, in the noise about the man, and his actions that have caused so many ripples in international relations and media, one central question hasn't been asked loudly enough - "How could Snowden possibly have exposed the illegality of the activities of his government, without breaking the law himself?"

Make no mistake.  If his allegations of the widespread spying, snooping, wiretapping, and such activities are true, then the USA is in violation of Article 22 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations to which it is a signatory!

The article clearly states - "The premises of a diplomatic mission, such as an embassy, are inviolate and must not be entered by the host country except by permission of the head of the mission. Furthermore, the host country must protect the mission from intrusion or damage. The host country must never search the premises, nor seize its documents or property."

The nature of the spying, with bugs on crypto-fax machines and on communications cables, clearly breaches the protections enshrined in the convention.

If Snowden had been from Venezuela, and wanted to expose some wrongdoings of the Chavez government, the USA would have welcomed him, set up not a refuge, but a sanctuary, and called him a hero!  All the focus would have been on the atrocities committed under a manic dictator who was plotting the downfall of the civilized world, no less!  This hypocrisy is so old, it should be boring now.

If a child escapes from a church where the pastor is raping underaged children, and tells his story to the world, nobody would want to punish him for ruining the reputation of the church.  An abused wife would totally be protected against her abusive husband, and "legally" helped to separate from him, even if she were to be breaking the vows she took in marrying him, wouldn't she?

A grave wrong has been done, not by Snowden, but by the government of the USA, in the first place, and only to expose the fact has Snowden been forced to do something "illegal".  Any conscientious people should be able to honor his actions.

Whistleblowing is nothing new to citizens of the USA.  Many corporations have been forced to accept their illegal deeds and pay the penalty, because of whistleblowers who were clearly violating company policies they signed on to.  Why should the government of the USA be subjected to any less stringent standards, especially when taxpayer dollars have been used to fund many of these programs?

If Snowden is punished in any way, before the law breaking criminals of the USA's intelligence and surveillance spy agencies are made answerable to their despicable actions, then the USA will have proved once again, that it is the indisputable king of hypocrisy, followed by its loyal subjects in the many nations of the world who refuse Snowden asylum!

- BSK

Happy Freaking New Year!

Happy Freaking New Year!

It's always the same thing this time of the year, isn't it?  Of course a New Year has to come by, and of course we must be happy that we survived the last one, but can it ever be Enlightened New Year! or Healthy New Year! or Peaceful New Year!?  After all, there is precious little we can do to be happy if we are not healthy, peaceful and/or enlightened.

It would tax our poor minds to try and be any of this.  But we can be happy, freaking happy, without any risk of mental, physical, or spiritual overheating.  It always comes down to the lowest nonsense we can be sold.  And yes, it is official, it is all about selling us something.  Happiness can be sold.  In ridiculous quantities, just like sadness, but for now I will stick with this disease called happiness that many of us would like to be addicted to.

When I see that svelte model selling me a car with a huge big smile on her face, I want to slap that bitch.  No, not the bitch that is doing the modeling for she needs the money and the uplifting experience of showing up, but the bitch that was conceived in some advertising hero's head that if there is a svelte bitch grinning at me invitingly, I am unlikely to notice the shitty engine, the lousy engineering, the extras that don't come with the base model, and the terrible service, and actually shell down a few lakhs of my hard earned money on a stupid car.  That is the insult I can do without.  Happy freaking New Year.

When I see the troupe of little shits telling me to put my AC at a certain temperature so that my cooling is "sensible", I want to boot those smiling germs out of my sight.  Again, not the pampered upper middle class urban Indian little shits, whose parents are busy shagging every rupee out of their jobs and businesses imagining modeling is some sort of career for their little shits, but the little shits that got approved by the marketing manager of this air conditioner company that believes I can be sold a fucking air conditioner by attaching this cute little bunny train of smiling satans to his stupid product.

Yeah, I'd like to be happy as much as anybody else, and most of the time, I am.  But these times are when I am distinctly disjointed to the "idea" of happiness.  I don't want any symptom of happiness to be ever present and showing itself.  It is fucking fake and I am sick of it.

I really don't want plastic air hostesses smiling at me when I enter a plane.  I have done it many times before and I'm hardly likely to refuse to fly after buying the ticket and going through that harrowing nonsense called check-in and security check, including the statutory rape carried out by the assholes with the metal detectors that have so far not managed to nab a single terrorist, but have indeed allowed many to pass through and hijack planes.  But I can put up with collective dumbness, since that damn airplane is a damn good invention if it can spare me from the piss and shit smelling railway stations and bus stops and get me very quickly to my destination.

I acknowledge I love some air hostesses.  They are just sexy enough to let me remember what to grab if the plane goes into a tumble mid air.  I'm sure God will be very happy to welcome the bastard who remembered to live in the moment, even in his last moment!  Happy Freaking New Year!

After going through the horrors of delays and bad food and terrible in-flight conditions, OR the miracles of on time departures, landings and safe exit from the plane, surely, we can be spared the electronic voice telling us we are welcome at the arrival airport, where we really want to spend the least amount of time!  I cannot understand why it takes us about an hour to fly five hundred kilometres, but it takes our bags one third of that time to get to us from the same plane we came on, to our hands.  But I am happiest in that waiting period at the baggage claim area, because there is a quiet, a calm, nobody selling us anything, and no grinning asshole there handing our bags to us!  The luggage just shows up, with minimal fuss, as the coldest, most impersonal machine keeps all nonsense out of the way.  Thank you very much, dear machine and thank God for the inventor that removed the human element from this one.  I really appreciate this not being one more fucking happy experience to soak up.

Insincerity I can handle - salesmen doing their job, being competitive - I get that.  But why the fuck do they have to sell me something based on THEIR assumption that I am not content?  This is the part that really pisses me off.  It's just hard for me to sympathize with presumptuous assholes who go to business school and "learn" that they can take it upon themselves to "sell" me something, which necessarily means an intrusion into my mind space.  Who the fuck gives these motherfuckers the permission? 

If there is any law that prevents one kind of nuisance, like taking a piss on the wall, why can't there be a law on other kinds of nuisance?  Get off a train at 5 in the morning at Chennai Central, and the TV screens attack you with loud music and dancing chicks gyrating and welcoming you to buy clothes, another bunch of whores asking you to buy spices!  They are all grinning orgasmically. and being really inviting, but at 5 AM, I could really use a peaceful walk to the exit.  End result?  This irritation is what I remember and I have remembered never to buy clothes at those shops and never to buy that brand of masala.  Happy Freaking New Year idiots!

There are a couple of very happy fat bastards on TV that I'd like to really send running into a desert, chased by hounds.  They show up on food programs, and go all over India tasting a variety of foods.  They do a very good job of showing us and teaching us how a variety of food is cooked, but how the fuck are these bastards happy with every fucking thing they eat?  I love food, too, but I don't swoon with every new dish I taste!  I just cannot buy the monkey's expression when it grins to the lens after eating something someone in a totally strange land and culture just made - every fucking time!  Even my dog takes a few seconds to totally sniff out and check out something new I may feed him.  He doesn't fall for it, so why would I, motherfucker?

Now, I can be kind and assume these fat bastards are happy they are getting a lot of food to feed their big guts, but then what about the bitches that are there at the flick of a button, selling me shit to lose weight?  They are giddy whores, grinning their asses off, working out on contraptions that resemble nothing in nature.  Some of them are even torturing others in groups, and I can tell not all of them are happy.  Physical exercise is hard, and the payoff is good health and fitness, and of course the release of endorphins, also called "happy hormones", but endorphins just make one feel stress free and relaxed.  I have had enough number of endorphin hits to know I don't feel like grinning at some unknown asshole.

I don't need a grinning Mr. Universe telling me how good this piece of equipment is.  He just has to tell me with a straight face what the benefits might be.  If I wasn't interested in fitness, would I be listening to his spiel anyway?  So what is he selling me?

How come teachers do not grin when they teach us, say, geometry?  Sex sells.  We know that.  And sex is supposed to deliver us to ... what else?  Freaking Happiness!  So, what if teachers were to turn on sexiness while explaining what happens when one line bisects another?  Are you kidding me?  A lot of people would be up in arms against this kind of teaching.  But we have no problem whoring our kids out to sell other people some shit with their cuteness?  Adults have sex to sell us shit, kids have cuteness.  What's the difference?  Both look pleased as punch!

Why would ANYBODY be happy to sell us insurance policies?  Insurance is always against bad news, like injury, death, disability, illness, and the lot of miseries is it not?  So, why are insurance agents always grinning like their policy will bring us happiness?  It might deliver us out of misery, but it sure as hell won't deliver any happiness.  And why are those little shits put in this game too, and why are they too grinning while doing this shit?  I swear, any kid that ever talks to me about insurance is going to need dental insurance.

We really should groom our children to regulate their happiness quotient.  They should bloody well not be happy all the time.  It can without a doubt affect their emotional growth if they know only giddy happiness and do not know what it means to be reflective, sad, disturbed, anxious, worried, peaceful, euphoric, light, thrilled, giving, emotionally generous, neurotic and even crazy!  There is much subtlety to be lost by prescribing happiness and by subscribing to it like the dumb assholes we are taken for.

I've had enough and more Happy New Years.  This time I hope to have something of substance.  And I wish you a wonderful, substantial New Year!

If you don't care - hey!  Happy Freaking New Year!

- BSK.

Rest in peace, you lucky rascal!

MF Hussain is dead.  He did live bloody long.  Freaking 95 years!  That's a helluva lot longer than most Indians manage.  And, he led a charmed life, doing what he wanted.

For some reason, a lot of people have expressed that he was somehow shortchanged by an intolerant India.

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article2091330.ece

A nation has moral dilemmas when it has to chart a course to a new existence, accept a grave mistake, or when it reaches a cathartic moment in its history.  Has MF Hussain contributed to any significant moment of India's history?  Not one that I can remember.

Somehow nobody seems to remember that it was INDIA that produced MF Hussain, and it was INDIA that gave him the platform for him to be himself for 70 odd years.  He was our celebrated artist when he was doing horses.  Nobody understood what all the critics were neighing about, but we accepted that after Raja Ravi Varma and some other great artists that everybody can understand easily was great, here was a modern artist that perhaps normal people could not understand, but everybody had to appreciate.

We DID appreciate his shit for a long time, some out of some artistic sensibility that could tolerate the abstract, and the rest out of respect for an old man.  In India, everybody has the freedom to bullshit everybody else and sell a lot of bullshit too!  Nobody bothered Hussain for his caricatures and his lousy art.  Of course this is just an opinion.  Let us assume for a moment that he was indeed a great artist.  Clearly he is no Picasso.  He is no Van Gogh.  So he is a level below those greats?  Okay, so we still haven't produced any true great so we have this guy MF.  That's fine.  When we have no stallions or horses, a donkey can fill in for the post of Fastest Indian On Hooves!  Since India could not tolerate this great artist, why not look at how well the rest of the world was dying for his awesome talent?  So, how good is this guy?  Considering how much he could sell in an international art exhibition, pretty shit.  So, first and fucking foremost, let's accept this guy wasn't any great shit with his art.  I don't understand Mark Rothko either, but his window pane crap sells for millions.  MF Hussain's crap doesn't do even thousands.  In the world of art, he ain't shit, this MF.

All art is appreciated by those who like it.  Some can be made to like it with a lot of bullshit marketing around it.  Modern art has no measuring scale.  I can draw a long straight line and a short straight line, and it can be my interpretation of a fighter plane leaving an aircraft carrier or a male orangutan ejaculating.  I am free to do any of that, and if you like it, you can buy it.  For a long time, people did buy MF Hussain's work.  The guy made a living through his art.  Considering how good he became at this, he was more than making a living.  He was making a killing!

Again, this is purely opinion, but since it is established that he is not amongst the best in the world, we can call his work SHIT.  If a cricketer can be cursed as SHIT for not performing as part of our world champion cricket team, surely, a nobody in world standards can be cursed as SHIT.  But a lot of Indian fools bought his rubbish work and paid him a fair bit for it.  Was he grateful?  He probably was, for there is no evidence the old coot was not.

Then came his controversial crap.  For those of you who don't know what that "Shwetambari" fiasco was, he threw open an exhibition of his under this name, with absolutely nothing but plain white canvasses.  Shwetambari is a celebration of white, get it?  I think the crusty bastard had a sense of humour!  Who can't hang plain canvasses?  But it takes a conman SHIT artist like MF Hussain to pull a con like this, and give it a name!  India did tolerate this, even gave him credit for doing something artistic.

I don't have a problem with super liberal, experimental, modern, edgy, controversial artists and their creative exhibitions and expressions, if they are not trying to make money or making a living from it.  As soon as they depend on the world outside for reactions, appreciation and money, they should know that along with appreciation, they might get some brickbats.  Sometimes, the criticism may not be as simple as, "I'm not paying for that SHIT!". 

I am all for freedom too.  But even for playing loud music, which is my freedom, I suppose, there is a limit where my neighbours cannot sleep.  Now, I'm not asking my neighbours to pay for it, so they probably won't get mad at me beyond telling me to keep it down.  This is purely social contract.  It is not my intent either to get them mad at me.  I really have no business offending them. 

What people can be offended by is wide in variety.  However, a person's religion is deeply personal sometimes.  It is hard not to offend someone when you make a statement, however open to interpretation, that runs counter to all perceptions held sacred in that religion.  It's not hard to see why practising Christians could get mad if I say, "Jesus was a pedophile!".  There will be a few who would just say, "You're mad!" and move on, but if I stood in front of a Church and shout, "Jesus was a pedophile!", it is likely to get some pretty strong reactions.  I should be intelligent enough to know when the line from opinion to offense is crossed.

If an 80+ year old man, after living in India for most of it, does not know he will offend people of the Hindu faith by drawing Hindu goddesses nude, and that too with his SHIT quality of art, then he isn't just a fool, he is a distilled moron.  If he should not be jailed for offensive artistic expression leading to religious and social disharmony, he should be contained from being a lunatic causing nuisance.  So, pretty please, if this kind of moron wants to leave the country, we should be very happy to see the average IQ of our nation's residents go up in one shot.  Book the guy on the first flight out!

It was MF Hussain's choice to leave this country, only AFTER the reactions he got to his work.  If an artist is free to express whatever s/he wishes, then the reactions must have the same expressional freedom.  India allowed those reactions too, like a true democracy.  What is everyone complaining about?

And then, which country did he go to?  Did he go to a country that is known for great artistic freedom?  No!  He went to Qatar!  Not a secular country, but a Muslim country!  Is this just a coincidence?  I can understand Qatar must be happy that there is at least one Muslim in the world of contemporary art - kind of like the one cross country skier India had at the Winter Olympics.  Who cares if he is any good?  He's got our flag there!  Make some noise!  Chances are, those Qatari rascals must have perceived some value in a guy who could get all the fundamental Hindus riled up. So, pretty please, Qatar, keep this son of our horse shit and his remains.

I'm all for a guy who had his fun, lived a full life, enjoyed the blessings of the journey, and tried his best to be a good artist.  But if he got into trouble for being stupid, for being insensitive, I don't have a problem if he got dragged down to earth by a bunch of hooligans.  Someone had to do it.  Resentment doesn't wait 70 years in most cases.  India has been mighty patient.   So, enough already about not treasuring this fool.

MF Hussain was a celebrity just because he fulfilled to some extent India's home grown pseudo liberal farts' need for someone to throw hurrahs at.  Most of them wouldn't recognize art from a horse's ass.  Except maybe, that of one of the horses MF did.

- BSK.