Unmuddlings!!

Decentralisation of power is a powerful concept and democracy does it take it to its ultimate logical end. By allowing the people to be governed to decide who will govern the community. Asking a person, what he wants and by whom we wants to be governed, is respecting the basic dignity of human being and respecting her/his innate intelligence. But, quite clearly even if we are voting intelligently individually, we are not voting intelligently collectively. The power that the voters were supposed to have wielded is practically non-existent.  The political parties have been able to use a combination of charisma, lineage, fear, ‘inducement’, caste, alliance arithmetic, poll management, information inefficiency, to get candidates with dubious credentials get elected. As a result sometimes ineffective governments have returned to power [Left Bloc in West Bengal for 20 years] or the relatively effective governments given way to a less effective dispensations [there are many examples in...

Gosh! Its past nine. Looks like I can give a shot at only one of the things I had wanted to do post dinner. The past one hour has just zipped in a moment. So, lets toss-up. Writing is the first want, but a well-made Hollywood thought provoking movie is an amazing way to get the inspiration to express with abandon. Like the other day I watched Midnight is Paris and relished my old hero Hemingway’s arrogant conversation akin to Viv’s swagger and Gertrude Stein’s incisive comments on a book draft. The infectious Parisian abundance of thoughts and time. As if, the characters had all the time in the world and hence could party 7 nights a week. If that was what 1920’s geniuses - – Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Stein, T.S.Eliot and a host of other – did; then when did they work to produce their masterpieces. Did they just ooze genius! ? That, every word that escaped their pen and every stroke their brush produced meant something captivating. Not to mention, the alluring imageries a...

Aam Admi Party: AAP has certainly done a fabulous job. It has forced mainstream parties to take cognizance that corruption is a dangerous, potentially counter-productive word. The voters need not accept it as an inevitable evil forever.  The media is more equipped [unfortunately more belligerent, rhetorical also] to expose slip-ups. The CEC will be more confident to flex its muscles when parties cross the Lakhsman Rekha of propriety. Fund raising, election spending, ticket distribution all will need to be more transparent. In future, the means to winning an election will be more important than ever before. Not very far in the future, means will become as important as the end in itself. All of this will happen, with or without AAP making a dent electorally in the next few elections. This will happen because of voter sensitization and awareness that they deserve and can vocally demand better public values from their representatives. All this is because of AAP – kudos Team AAP. ...

The election bugle has been set off. Karnataka has been to the polls today, almost half the states will be going to the polls in the next 12 month and the general election scheduled in 2014. Poll bytes are everywhere. Of the large numbers of plots and sub-plots in the political jumble, two observations intrigue me the most. BJP is in disarray: We cannot write BJP off now. If luck would have it, BJP may still get to the gaddi next year. And get even with the voters in the inexplicability quotient – i.e it relinquished power in 2004 when it shouldn’t have and if it wins in 2014, it will win when it will have done nothing to deserve it. The UPA is in shambles. It is getting the worst press ever for any Indian government, I strongly suspect they have the worst press in any democratically elected government currently. But even then there is just no certainty that the UPA will lose elections next time around. Why? The BJP has not managed to convert the dis-satisfaction into an anti-w...

Thought deficit is a temporary state of self-perception. How long or short the state persists depends upon how large a role we let randomness to play. We may wait for a probabilistic stimulant to give us a transient boost or we may passively let the mental ruffles to dissipate at the their own pace and ready ourselves for another probabilistic state of exhilaration. Sometime we maybe a little more proactive we may programmatically search for a specific stimulant   to earn a temporary tryst with freedom. The outcomes of all of the above responses are inevitably inter-wined with ‘random’ events, which have their own set of ‘expected’ outcomes based on individual contexts. Stochastically speaking, that is aligning ourselves with our pre-ordianed ‘destiny’. Sometimes, I have a love for the abstruse! And nuanced mental games associated with it. That’s probably another program, an addiction. Shedding the maths or rather stats, in simpler words, whether creativity (or its ...