Flush!

Click on the image on the side. There are two headlines highlighted using red ellipses. Thats TOI-let
paper today. If headlines are arranged by priorities, someone does not have a sense of priorities.


Flush flush!.

Vande Mataram

"So what do you think about the controversy?" , I was asked. "I don't."

This is exactly the kind of controversy you should stay away from if you want to see your country progress. This is the stuff dirty politics is made of -- drumming up arguments around things that do not matter, and building controversies around matters that are irrelevant. Most Indians (like me) do not even understand Vande Mataram which is in Sanskritized Bengali (Thanks to Deepa for pointing out that the song is not in Sanskrit). Many of them, however, would readily have a strong opinion on the subject.

I believe that for the first time in decades India has something to look forward to. We are moving fast and people who look back would fall. So instead of spending time debating the controversy, an average Indian should be debating the best way, he/she can catch up with the average Chinese. Why show the kids of India the past, when you can show them a glimpse of the future ?

When I was a kid, I read in those history books that we had a glorious past. "Really!!", I thought to myself, "How did we screw up so bad?" , I asked my teacher. "Because of the English", she said . That was 15 years back and it took me while to figure out that she was wrong .

If my kid asks me that question, I would say "Sorry, we did that to ourselves". If he/she asks me whether to sing Vande Mataram, I would say, "You see that Chinese kid running with determined concentration, you need to outrun him. After you outrun him, you will find the Europeans and the Americans. They are not running, they are driving. So sing Vande Mataram if you must, but don't go out of breath, because the Africans are not far behind. "