A Grand Nothing:

July 26/2011: Politics never seems to sleep. Those who are sick and tired of it shall be blessed with the current scamsters’ season. Like the National Baseball League seasons, India’s scam season has, in reality, not been dampened by the monsoon. From behind prison walls those, who did many naughty and nasty things to this country, are still full of surprises. This may be a nation full of people who , mostly, do not even comprehend what happens, yet the very fundamental understandings do not escape any inpidual. They are not, repeat not, ‘cattle’ as one of the UPA’s former flamboyant minister tweeted in his very classic ‘class’ based opinion.

For instance, the former IT and Telecom Minister, A Raja, stated before a Court in New Delhi Monday, 25 July, that the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram knew all along how and what was happening in his ministry in relation to the allocation of the 2G spectrum. The electronic media went gung ho and had Raja’s mouth covering every tv screen, uttering those impossibly believable words implicating all those who matter in the Union Government now.  Half an hour of this. Or, at the most for some other slower channels, an hour. Then all of a sudden there descended complete silence on the small screen. All those who were screaming and pointing fingers at the Delhi Court house went mum. It was eerie but very palpable. Some went back to terror attacks, others to Cars and Bikes and Yeddyurappa shows. Very few, if any, stuck around to tell their viewers what really Raja told the Court, which by the way, was not in-camera. The tv channels could, of course, tell us that if Kalmadi could be diagnosed with dementia, than why not them. Reason tells us amnesia and dementia are diseases that all of us would like to suffer from at this very point of time in India’s history. No sensible citizen of this country actually wants to suffer further and remember these terrible days of scams and loots by the rich and the powerful of this nation. However, all of us are not as blessed by the Lord as Kalmadi or his attorney who blatantly says that since dementia has been proven, he (Kalmadi) cannot be prosecuted and sentenced. That much all of us understood.

Along with all this trash being thrown on us by the electronic media, we are also being subjected to shock treatments by them. When they shriek about Raja for a while, we get glued. When they stop for no reason, we fall flat.

Yet, let us assure ourselves that we are all NOT cattle.

Had this nation been all cattle class, it could easily be said that the average newspaper reader or tv viewer would have believed that it is really Manmohan and not Sonia and Rahul who got the chunk of benefits from these current spate of scams. Or even that Kalmadi has suddenly lost all mental faculties for which he should be set free forthwith. All of us know how doctors are willing to give findings convenient to their clients (not patients, mind you). Similarly, how Manmohan is willing to be the ‘fall guy’ for Sonia and her Gandhi clan just to enjoy the chair of the Chief Executive of the most populated democracy of the globe, that too without ever having to fight a single election, is not so very incomprehensible to all us hoi polloi.

That we may consider is the beauty of the Indian intellect. It may seem stupid. It may look non westernized. It is poor and uneducated. It is everything, all kinds of rubbish could be heaped onto it. Still, it should never be under estimated.

The Indian intellect is like blotting paper. Limp, colorless and with no virtues of paper like write ability, it retains all blots and gets colored by anything that falls down. It may seem useless, but let everyone remember that the Indian soaks up everything, just like blotting paper, and retains everything also.