Sunday, December 19, 2010

I protest !

Why there is a Julian Assange at all ? Reason: watchdog journalism is dead. The media is bought and paid for the PR work. We have to be careful to distinguish between the man and the institution since confusing the two can lead to the unfortunate mistake of shooting the messenger for delivering an unpalatable message. Its the individuals who had changed the world by creatively destroying the old institutions and building new ones.

We need more people speaking out. This country is not overrun with rebels and free thinkers. It's overrun with sheep and conformists. This country suffers from an excess of civil obedience. As Oscar Wilde said: “Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”

The right to protest clears the path to progress and inclusion. There is a short term sacrifice of protest. Every person is the beneficiary of a long line of protesters stretching back through the centuries who has stand up for the unprivileged and oppressed. Every worker gets minimum wages, every woman reading this can vote and every pensioner gets enough to survive because protesters demanded it. What what life would be like if all those protesters through all those years had been frightened into inactivity?  We were left at the whim of an elite, whose priority is tax cuts for themselves, paid for with spending cuts for the poor.

When two entities exchange value for mutual benefit, it is symbiosis. When two entities exchange value with one gaining more than the other, it is exploitation. When two entities exchange value at the cost of the third, it is…yes, drum-roll the word we Indians love to hate, talk about and practice the most, Corruption. The measure of corruption is not just the exchange of money. It is the distance and dissimulation rulers exhibit in relation to their own governments. To be always honest and aware about ground realities is enough in the fight against corruption.

India is a nation of sheep walking in herds and try to stick as closely as possible with the caste and enclosed community with not willing or able to break rank or file for anything. Opportunists align themselves with changing beliefs to temporarily form identity-based groups in order to achieve political or economic objectives subsuming the manifest differences between their identities. This country needs large numbers of anarchists and entrepreneurs for the progress and mobility across various groups.

Examples of this unbreakable code of silence are prevalent everywhere around us. Our moral compass tends to be so tilted in the favor of strongly armed with money power than the needy. Then, we justify lack of emotions and sensibility to each other with by the name of Immunity or barbaric I ask? Ours society punishes the victims and ensure that the torturers or criminals roam free without any sense of guilt.

Our various fortune tellers think one day some of us will rise and bring about some sort of revolution led by a savior to end all our evils. Well newsflash! Saviors come from people who are determined to save themselves. They don't arise from those who keep their heads down in the rat race making sure not to be noticed, because  if someone stops them and asks, they will have to say something which will challenge the system, and then their lives will stop as they will become aware of their own soullessness because they are the system.

It's the nature of a human that when you get neglected somewhere you want to go back and prove a point. I don't give respect to do-gooders as they are idiots who actually believe that everyone is trying to do their best and don't have an intention of harm. Squeezed between well-intentioned stupid people and the essentially criminal, I am pissed. I have a foolish head that does not abide by the moral values of everyone and absurd traditions of honor. I am a emotional and over aggressive as well as because I can't cover up the truth. The power of truth and transparency will surely unveil the hypocrisy around and in us.

 It is to hard to pigeonhole the man in any identity or role as Jonathan Swift, author of the English classic Gulliver’s Travels (1726), had pithily observed that “when a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.”

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