As the
rare super 'Blood Moon' decides to dominate the skies once again since 1982, I
scamper out in the balcony with the man of the house to catch a glimpse of it.
A much required breather from all the hype that is blown over the recent visit
of our Indian Prime Minister to the United States, the lunar eclipse feels
nothing less of a pearl of great price.
And the news
of actual liquid substance being possibly present on Mars is another addition
to our thought provoking aspects pertaining to the heliocentric system. Mars is
the second smallest planet in the entire solar system, after Mercury, and
considered the fourth planet from the sun. Mars was named after the mythical
Roman god of war and is often referred as the 'Red Planet' owing to the element
of high iron oxide making it appear reddish on its surface. The controversy is,
whether the scientific evidences are sufficient to indicate that Mars is up to
snuff for agriculture or not. Life would
possibly have been a bowl of cherries if NASA could resolve some of the most
crucial issues here on earth before declaring anything on the potentials of
another planetoid in the cosmos.
Currently,
there are 21000 villages in rural India, that is deprived of electricity.
Availability of water supplied through pipelines is a distant dream, and women
from every household can' t help but walk on their bare feet across miles after
miles to procure a jar of water in the remote provinces of Rajasthan. What will
exactly be the utility of wireless internet connectivity in such places? Yet we
are talking about digitalizing India by 2019.
I have
been toiling under tremendous pressure for last few days to comprehend this new
jargon crawling up and down the walls of my social media with all it
pervasiveness - Digital India.
However,
after a decent amount of brain wracking and research, I am now, in a position
to decipher why my fellow humans are so acutely enthusiastic about changing
their Facebook profile picture into a tricolored image. It's with Mark Zuckenberg
changing his own Facebook display picture and updating the same in a pattern of
triple hues, we Indians have been blindly following suit. This initiative by
the particular website and its chairman and CEO is symbolic of showing support
to the saffron brigade's gigantic leap into envisioning a digital India. Ever
since Modi ji's raaj has come into existence, it has ushered us in a cleaner
and more developed India. Sometimes the beti-bachao agenda, at times selfies
and yogasanas - all of it has some way or the other turned up in favor of the
suit boot ki sarkar that has succeeded in melting 19,000 hearts including
Indian Americans and Indian nationals watching and listening to him in San Jose
couple of evenings back. Whoop-de-doo!
What
bemuses me the most about this man is, ever since the independence of the
country nearly 70 years ago, it is his singular and expansive leadership that
has drastically brought forth India's cause in the forefront, to the United
States in specific. After the temporary reforms in the economic arena,
commenced under the Vajpayee rule of BJP era, Congress party could only manage
to continue some of it half heartedly, which moved from a gradual decline to a
permanent termination by 2009. Modi, on the other hand clearly represents India's
global economic outreach as a necessity to battle poverty and rise in new
technology and the business world. If nothing else, the Modi haters at least
can't ignore the fact that criticizing his dictatorial ship will be somewhat
anti-progressive too. The Indian Diaspora estimated over twenty million is well
aware that calling him a mass murderer doesn't discredit his dramatic launching
of strategies and that gushes in a large scale manner. In many ways, Gujrat has
thus remained central to his politics in making India burgeon with various
enterprises.
However critical his oppositional political parties might appear
about his fundamentals, they surely lacked that vision to take the state and
country to such summits, despite they have had multiple opportunities in the
past to do so. In an age of a politically illiterate and emotionally gullible mass,
constructive things are easier said than done in the dictionaries of these
political maestros. Therefore, the circulation of government services amongst
citizens electronically, in a digital infrastructure may very well seem elusive
and over ambitious. Would this renewal of age old India with an electronic
brain serve as the powerhouse for economic growth and prosperity lashing out
impoverishment and eradicating the perennial problem of unemployment from the
heart of the nation? But then again, who wants to pull the country backwards?
It is not entirely a bad day for science : his collaboration with world
high-tech companies such as Samsung,
Ericsson, Media Tek, Opera Software, Nokia and Qualcomm, to introduce internet
to the villages of India is praiseworthy. By means of stirring an unparalleled shift
in the national face and policy, he has compelled us to look into and believe
in his broader and long term perspectives highlighted through a greater nationalistic
view which in due course of time needs to be kept at a close watch for the
outcomes.
Post the
tumult over a series of bans imposed on Indian democracy, the sense of personal
freedom is in question and looks like getting strangulated all over. If beef
and porn be removed from the Indian way of living, does that also not blur the
line between religious taboo, moral policing
and absolute monocracy on the part of the government and our honorable
leaders? There is so much of dubiousness and so many angles to this, no wonder
a non-political person like me soon loses the (saffron) thread. Argh!
Mentioning
of religion, another hot potato doing rounds that baffles me even after the
dust has settled a bit is the story of fourteen year old Ahmed Mohamed whose
homemade clock at the Texas high school caused a national blowback few weeks ago. We hear of
kids breaking some silly rule, and being reprimanded for disobeying the school
authority. But what makes Ahmed's incident unique is the underlying factor of
religious commotion. He was arrested on the charges of a possible sinister
ulterior motive behind bringing something to school that was construed as a
dangerous explosive to an overtly cautious administrator and the security
department. The why and wherefore of the school and police suspecting Ahmed's
invention of a bomb is still obscure and subjected to scrutiny. But what we can
take as gospel is : a ninth grader's usage of the term 'invention' and
'creativity' would never be able to match the lengths to which the U.S patent
office would perceive them and what threats these innovations or creations might
adumbrate as well. There must be many other Muslim American kids who are faced
with the challenge of being derided as Islamic fanatics within the four walls
of the classroom. Ever since the 9/11 attack, the London bombings in 2005, the
Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, we can't help but be misguided by a constant
paranoia about domestic Islamic extremism , and school safety to be precise. As
much as the suspension and expulsion ruins a young life and the prospects of a
future engineer, dispelling stereotypes and bigotry is also not as easy as a
pie or an overnight miracle but a measured process.
Another
side of the story pinpoints the family's obvious capitalization on Ahmed's
treatment. The consequences of his harassment has definitely blown the lid off
the injustice piling up and severely born by Islamic children in America for
more than a decade now. At the same time not every other wrongfully detained
high schooler is charmed by the sympathy and support of the social media and
ends up receiving accolades from the president and a lifetime offer - 'Want to
bring it to the White House?' Hurrah!
The husband being away for next three days on a business trip, my nights are surely longer than usual but certainly no less amusing. Thanks to the uninterrupted 'trendings'. To my utmost glee, I find during the recent Townhall discourse session at the Facebook headquarters in New York City, the Indian PM took his affinity for the lens to a hilarious level. The historic meet was well recorded on the camera until Mark unconsciously blocked the view of the photographers. Modi ji, who is quite an expert in posing away in glory, did not hesitate to hold Zuckenberg's arm like that of a guilty little monster's at the crèche and steer him to the side for going pee-pee without a notice. If we look at it with a grain of salt, it is actually better in fact relieving to have a Prime Minister who doesn't shy away from the camera and knows the art well to entice the crowd with his oratory skills, in comparison to someone who takes pleasure in scams, snoops on Netaji unflinchingly for giving up UNSC seat offers, conspires against contemporaries in pursuit of hunger for power and takes recourse to fallacious appeasement of safe ballots. Yowza! How's that?
