From a day in Ahmed's life to discussing Mars, a camera friendly PM and all the digitization.

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! 

As is the custom, we get carried away by emotions and easily succumb to the gimmicks exercised on us politically, socially and some that hover around our religious sentiments. Talking about the unjust and inappropriate actions taken against Ahmed's playful innovativeness, can we erase the blood stains from the pages of history and the ugly truth masked in between the lines? Can we forget - that terrorism involved Muslim perpetrators began in the United States with the 1993 shootings at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, followed by the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York City?  It has been established that discrimination towards Muslim Americans was prevalent even before the attacks on September 11, which may relate to Islam being frequently portrayed by the media as intrinsically intolerant and violent, nevertheless, post-September 11, 2001, the attacks by Muslim terrorists have irrefutably worsened the general public’s outlook towards mainstream Muslim Americans. The numbers tell a distressing tale. In October 2001, a survey revealed that 47 percent of Americans had a favorable view of Islam. By 2010, that number had reduced to 37 percent. And today, alarmingly, only 27 percent of Americans have an unbiased or a congenial attitude towards Muslim Americans. If the figures have to speak for itself, during the 9/11 tragedy, it was nineteen alleged highjackers alone who claimed lives of 2,996 people; barring them the rest of the two million Muslim population were absolutely innocent, peaceful and clueless about what catastrophe was awaiting. Who to put the blame on then? Meanwhile when you mull over this never ending universal turmoil, why not squeeze in a minute's good laugh over something light hearted? 



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?