An Open Letter to Shri.Rahulji

Dear Shri Rahulji,

This is an open letter of unvarnished truths. You may not like it, but you will have to accept it as it is precisely the people’s perception of you.  Modi has had a head start with all his half truths and half lies and pathetic lampoonery of you, your mother, the PM and all the PM’s men. You seem to be a late riser and even the feeble attempts you have made to catch up with Modi have failed.   Look at the comparisons given below- unfavourable but true.

Modi speaks,  Rahul mews.

Modi roars ,Rahul  bleats.

Modi rants, Rahul whines

Modi lies, Rahul is straight

Modi is uncivil, Rahul is refined

Modi regales, Rahul bores

Modi plays to the gallery, Rahul fails to impress

Modi laughs like a hyaena, Rahul has a cherubic smile.

These are facts with no bias for or against either of you.  You two are poles apart. Modi mocks at civility, courteousness and politeness, you conform to conventional standards of manners and behaviour. Modi looks strong and sturdy, you look mild and boyish. Modi exudes strength behind his grey beard, your strength is invisible under your black bristles. Modi is fearsome, you are attractive. Modi arouses strong emotions negative and positive, you arouse pity and a feeling of sadness.

The question is whether the strong man with no finer disposition, refinement and genteelness will be the winner or you with your honesty and mild manners?  What does India want? We have never voted for ruthless men and women- even your grandmother was voted out when she switched on the emergency. But we also do not want any namby-pamby person to preside over our destiny. This is the 21^st century and we in India after almost 65 years of independence yearn for a strong India with a faster rate of development, the fruits of which are not limited to the affluent classes. If you can provide decent living standards to the vast majority of India, we shall certainly vote for you. What can you do for us? I give below my suggestions- gratuitous no doubt- but given out of desperation and fear that the nation may be in the hands of an egoistic, narcissistic, self obsessed individual who has nothing but contempt for everyone around him including all those who fawn upon him.

1. Kindly confine yourself to organizational work which in itself is humungous. With your passion for clean politics, you have a huge responsibility to select worthy candidates who can hold not one but a thousand candles before the blinding sarcasm of Modi.

2. Everyone need not be an orator. You are not cut out for giving public speeches. You are a silent worker, self effacing to the extent possible. Modi says you are born with a golden spoon, but that does not mean you are a silver tongued orator like your grand -father. Leave speech- making to some of your younger colleagues who are more articulate and who by virtue of being in the government have all the facts with them to refute Modi’s gobbledygook.

3. Thank Modi for giving you the compliment that you are born with a golden spoon while commiserating with his poor nativity. The fact that you are born with a golden spoon is that you are one of those blessed children of God to be born into a family that boasts of the Nehrus and the Gandhis(not the clan of the Mahatma). This implies that you have to shoulder the huge responsibility of living up to their ideals. Modi has deftly put you on a pedestal and asks you to live worthy of that status.  Further anyone who commiserates with his own nativity cannot be expected to show genuine leadership. A genuine leader has to be like Obama who never spoke about his origins when he sought the President’s office. He asked his people to vote him in on the strength of his personal credentials that showed him to be a man who thinks with his heart and feels with his mind.

4. Kindly declare that you are not seeking the PM’s chair. If the Congress and its allies are voted back to power, let them decide who they want to lead the country. All sniping about dynastic rule will cease at once. Your mother has been the finest exemplar of successfully guiding coalition politics and being the intermediary between  the people and the government- what they  need and what the government should do. RTI, RTE, Food Security Bil and keeping the coalition group together have been her great contribution to Manmohan Singhji’s government. Please take up the reins that she has allotted to you and form your own NAC with the best Indian minds from India and abroad.

5. You have to make yourself heard through the social media. Since you have honest intentions and desire transparency on all issues, express as often as possible in clear terms what you stand for and what kind of governance you want your party to give to the country.

6. Tell your party cadres that the art of governance must be based on the ethics of governance and that they should make sure that means are as honest as the desired goals.  With your team prepare the Congress manifesto that is visionary and yet practicable, where the goal is to provide food, water, power, health and education of the highest quality to the largest number of the population. On matters of internal and external policy, simply use Polonius advice in Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar:
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in,
Bear't that th' opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.

In all matters, don’t stop with what your party wants to accomplish, but go beyond that to spell out how it can be accomplished.

I may be pardoned if I had exceeded my right as a citizen of the country to proffer you this advice. For me as for many of my countrymen and women, the overarching desire is to restore to our nation  civility, honesty, transparency and good governance that is enshrined in the one word ‘Dharma’ in our sacred texts. If India is to be saved, we need good and blemishless leaders. We do not want demagogues and charlatans to gain power. Kindly select the Best candidates who are intelligent, well read, honest and committed to the service of the nation. The induction of Raghuram Rajan as RBI Governor has been the first step in winning people’s confidence. Get persons like Nandan Nilekeni and even some of the top corporate chiefs to be a part of your team. Chanda Kochhar, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Shobhana Bhartia, Aziz Premji etc will make a fine team. Select such people, get them elected and make them mInisters. India needs such people apart from those like Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jairam Ramesh, Sachin Pilot, Milind Deoras, Priya Dutt etc who are already with you.

Build a dream team and bring India back into reckoning as a country whose glorious heritage is not a thing to be displayed in the Museums, but a reality that is to be seen and experienced today.

With best wishes

Tu Jee le Zara

Tu Jee le Zara, is a refreshingly new serial on Sony channel presenting the love story between a 34 year old woman with a younger man, seven years her junior. The theme is different from the otherwise drab TV serials that present an eternally suffering woman who puts up with hardships and sacrifices her personal happiness, desires and talent to keep her marriage intact. The central character in the new Sony serial is a confident, independent woman who has taken over the responsibility of looking after the business of her late father’s strawberry farm and the responsibility of taking care of her family consisting of her paternal and maternal grand -mothers and her two siblings.

The serial has reached the flash point when a young man declares his love for the older woman. She gets piqued at the young man’s temerity to woo her since it goes against the conventional notion that men should marry women younger in age.  The serial presents society's shock and its  negative gossip about a relationship that defies accepted tradition. Had it been the other way, with the woman younger even by ten years or more , it would not have raised a hornet’s nest.  The coming together of the two as per the run of the TV script-  an incompatible proposition according to traditional views- will open a new chapter in the history of TV serials.

Every matrimonial site and every matrimonial page in the newspapers  carry  ‘wanted bride’ advertisement  giving  partner preference for the bride to be younger at least by two years that is extendable to even 10+years in age difference. Older men at 60+ seek younger women at 30+ because for men there's no age limit when it comes to fathering children while for women, age plays a huge factor in the ability to get pregnant. It does not matter if the sexagenarian cannot run around the baby or tend to its needs so long as the young wife is at hand to shoulder the responsibility. So it has become an accepted convention that women must marry young and men must go on and on. If God forbid, the woman does not conceive during her childbearing age, she is hounded and blamed. The gender divide is at its worst, heavily tilted against women if she cannot ensure progeny,  in particular male progeny. 

Our seers and astrologers quote Manu Smriti that a woman should always remain dependent on her husband. "In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, and when her lord is dead, to her sons; a woman must never be independent.” On that ruling, it is made out that a woman cannot be older than her husband; otherwise how can she remain eternally dependent?

Again it is a convention that a woman after marriage adopts her husband’s family. She gets a new identity that wipes away her genetic or inherited identity. Her links with her parents are limited to meeting them twice a year-during Rakhi and Bhayya Dhuj . These occasions are special for her as she receives some form of gift or money to take back to her husband’s family.  The rest of the time her obligations are only to her adopted family while no such obligation exists for the husband towards his in-laws.

In Tamilnadu where importance is given to horoscope agreement over all other factors, girls born under certain stars cannot get married as they are branded as star-crossed vampires who will suck the life of their husband or husband’s father or brother and cause untold misery to their mother-in-law. It does not matter if there is any logic or not, these irrational beliefs are sacrosanct and they are always weighed against the fair sex. 

If marriages carry such bizarre notions, it is worse when a woman loses her husband. While the in laws would curse the wife for being the cause of her husband’s death, the rest of the family including her parents will be worried about the stigma of widowhood on her. If a man dies, all hell breaks loose.  But if the woman precedes her husband, she is forgotten even before her ashes are collected. Such is the gender logic in our country.

Can we ever break free of such absurdities? All talk of women’s lib, women’s security, women’s independence are empty words. The Khap panchayat will go on and since the women of the Khap men cannot beat them they will have to join them. Sati, the formal practice of wife immolating herself on her husband’s pyre may have ended, but women continue to be living Satis even in enlightened and educated homes as they endure suffering and humiliation heaped on them in the name of widowhood.

Tu jee leZara asks women to let their hair down and live life fully- a serial with a refreshingly new approach far from  the stereotyped projection of suffering women. Hope this sets a new trend for the 21^st century woman. For the first time the serial shows two grandmothers –maternal and paternal- living under the same roof-an absolute anachronism as far as tradition goes. In our customs- (I hope there is no reference to this in Manu Smriti)- after marriage the bride’s family members cannot even sip water in their daughter's adopted home. This may have somewhat changed in recent times, but what remains unchanged is the view that

                      Bride’s family is bride’s, Groom’s  is groom’s

                     The Two shall never meet.

How nice it will be if such foolish conventions that create a shadow line between the girl’s and the boy’s families are given up so that the coming together of the bride and the groom signals the start of a new camaraderie  between the two  families.

Maybe Tu Jee le Zara is a fantasy but it is certainly a welcome serial as it allows a ray of hope to  free our societal mindset laden with prejudices against women’s status in family and society.

Comedy Circus @ Delhi

                                       Comedy Circus @ Delhi

There are three types of audience- audience who listen and who analyze, audience who hear but not listen and accept that which appeals to them and is in their interest, and audience who love to have a hearty laugh at the expense of others. The second type is sandwiched between the microscopically small number of the first and the humungous majority of the third.  The last mentioned comprises men and women both from the educated and the semi-educated classes that include the youth in their salad days, green in judgement and looking for all time fun and amusement and the middle class that fawn upon  Don Quixotes who offer them  impracticable utopian dreams  spiced with ridicule and contemptuous laughter at their opponents. They all love rabble rousers who provide them diversion and entertainment from the daily hassles of a pedestrian life.

Modi’s talk in Delhi struck a chord with his audience precisely because he has the art of demagoguery. His strong physical appearance and his roaring address interspiced with - ‘bhaiyo and Behano’ -give him an undeniable appeal to the masses who have assembled only to see him and not hear him speak. For them it is all dramebazz and fun and they don’t mind loose talk, exaggerated fibbing, uncivilized language and uncultured mockery of all those the speaker despises.  They love half truths and three quarter lies, they love derision and sarcasm , they love savage rhetoric and they love stand-up comedies. Modi provides them free entertainment with his personal attack on all those who he claims are asardars.

He appeals to them to vote for a dream team- not knowing that dreams evaporate when one wakes up to reality. Even if we take Modi’s phrase ‘dream team’ at its face value, who is his dream team in Gujarat? No one hears any name other than Modi in Gujarat. So what is his dream team except himself-and what is the mantra for his  dream team- ‘namo modi’. Then he talks of the ‘dirty team’ “Throw the dirty team and bring in the dream team” roars Modi.  Have we ever heard of any politician-including his Sangh parivar- abusing all those in the government as ‘dirty team’? I am sure with admiration for all things Gujarat, he cannot say that Nirma wash is only for him and not for others.

His heart goes out to the “asardar’ who heads the country and he sheds tears that our ‘asardar’ has been insulted by the Pakistan Prime Minister –on the basis of what the twitterati had  spread through the social media. Modi does not need to check and verify facts as he claims himself to be a twitterati.  Moreover his job is only to inflame the masses with his cheap jibes. But carried away by the social media trash, he forgets the fact that he had been insulting the PM  by not attending the meetings the PM convenes and by calling him names  such as Maun Mohan Singh leading a ‘dirty team’. After all Namo is an honourable gentleman full of respect and regard for his Prime Minister and his dirty team. He is a patriot whose patriotism is best evidenced in his contempt for our western neighbours who will be provoked to escalate proxy wars along the LOC and carryout terror bombing in the country.

Coming from the land of Gandhi who lived the truth of “satyameva jayate’, Modi then without a shred of evidence talks about Gandhi Bhakti as collecting tons of currency notes and laying at the gates of 10, Janpath. It certainly creates laughter ripples among the audience who does not care to check if Modi had actually seen the currency notes flying through the gates of 10, Janpath.

He attacks a fellow CM who has scored like him a hat-trick of wins. He calls the Delhi CM‘ a ribbon cutting CM’ not knowing that you cut ribbons only after the work is completed. What a right-handed compliment he has given to a woman CM who has given him company as the three-times returned CM. Incidentally all these derogatory references to women  -in particular to  Dehati aurat’ is an indication of Modi’s attitude to women. The dehati aurat is  no doubt a village woman, but who says she is illiterate or uneducated or an whining idiot? It is certainly an insult to all women- and to rural women in particular who make a large majority among the females.

 The media reports say that the crowd applauded this brilliant performance by the great showman. They must have gone laughing all the way back home. They  were seized with Saturday afternoon fever with  an overdose of comic entertainment. Who cares if they are truths or half truths or quarter truths? Who cares for cultured language as what they had come to witness was only a comedy circus?

Modi has certainly won over the comic instincts of the majority of his audience. Has he won over their hearts? Time will tell.