Deserving and demanding

A few days back I was coming back from Rourkela to Kolkata by train. I was lying down in my berth when a person selling pens walked by. He was handicapped and I actually needed to buy a pen, but I did not call him. When he walked back, I asked him to stop and purchased a pen. Immediately he took out an unrecognizable photo and started talking about some treatment for somebody. He was actually proclaiming the fact that he was disabled to sell pens! I said I was not interested and asked him to leave. He only left when I threatened I would return the purchased pen. Some might judge me to be insensitive, but the question is should sympathy be deserved or demanded?

All over India we see children, men and women of all ages and physical abilities begging. I do not know what they were actually doing, but I once saw some children actually restraining a foreigner in Kolkata. Why does the government never do anything about them? There are a few schemes like the NREGS which might seem good intentioned but again are aimed towards garnering votes. If the beggars had been part of a vote bank I am sure that the government would have started schemes for them. There is always a lament against any developmental scheme - about funds. Imagine how much money would be available if only our babus and netas sacrificed their unnecessary perks for the benefit of others! I shall give but one example here. In India the President's post has been a largely ceremonial one, and the less said about our current president, the better. The central government has recently doubled the pay for the president. Why? Because the MPs were drawing a larger salary!

Sikkim is one part of India where you will not find any beggars on the road and the citizens there are rightly proud of the fact. In a lot of cases one only needs the resolve to live with dignity to do so. I once saw a disabled person walking on all fours and selling gutkha and pan masala in a train.
There is a well-known sayin - "Give a man a fish, and you have fed him for today. Teach him how to fish and you have fed him for a lifetime.

Extending the logic a little further, why is there always a knee jerk reaction to farmer suicides? I am in no way comparing farmers with beggars. I am only extending the logic of the saying. The government has decided to write off debts of a lot of farmers after the suicides. But a better alternative would be to ensure that the conditions that cause farmer suicides do not arise in the first place. For this probably one of the most important things to do would be to improve irrigation facilities. Leaving aside the stock exchange slump, the economy is doing well. At least some of the money required for improving the agricultural sector can be mobilized from them. But the question is - what about the political will required?

Cricket, fire and a pain!!

Last post on September 15, 2007. Oooh, that's a long time back!! Well, as all of us know the Indian team has been sent to the cleaners by poor umpiring, the whole nation is reeling under the injustice meted out to poor Bhajji. The scheming BCCI while seeming to support the Indians down under has not provided legal assistance to Bhajji...am I the only one or does anyone else feel there has been an overdose of the controversy?

While the umpiring has been bad, it would do good to the team if it analyzes its own performance without taking into consideration the decisions that have been deemed unfair to it. It has been said that the actual Australian pitch will be experienced by the Indians only in Perth. This has been said by Jadeja and a similar statement has also been made by Wasim Akram. Let us see how it holds up against Australian fast bowling on such a track.

Somebody please tell Mr. Sharad Pawar to be more active in what is actually (I hope I am right) his rightful role, that as the union agricultural minister. He seems to be more active in activities concerning cricket than others. One can only wonder at the state of India's cricket today - a selector thinks it is more important to write columns in a newspaper than to do his actual job, a manager who is media-hungry and who runs and poses with the team members whether or not he has had anyting to do with their victory, so on and so forth.

Another item that has been in the news is the recent fire in Kolkata. I have heard one or two interesting theories about it which I would like to share here. One, shared by a taxi driver is that the promoter wants to construct a new building in place of the existing one. The shopkeepers are not vacating their stores and hence the fire. Another one is that the fire loss will be shown to reduce the tax that needs to be paid to the governement!

Lastly, if anybody wishes to write either GRE or GMAT, please be warned that the post-test application process is a Pain with a capital P you know where. There is a saying in Telugu that only a person who gets into the water can judge how deep it is. Trust me, occasionally you will feel like just bashing your head against anything solid.