It is impossible to have an argument among friends nowadays

With the lock-down as a result of corona pandemic, one of the WhatsApp group that I am part of suddenly got reactivated.  Given the fact that there is slightly more time on hand, I got involved into a conversation that I generally don't get involved in. Here is how it went.
It started with me posting a link to the following tweet.

Doctor at state run hospital in Mumbai says, "the other day 6 patients with severe acute respiratory distress syndrome were brought in dead. We didn't even test them even though we suspected them of being COVID19 positive." If this is widespread in India, it's extremely worrying. https://t.co/guaoUCB1nP

— Rupa Subramanya (@rupasubramanya) April 14, 2020

A gentleman P1 quickly responded with following link which was one of the comments on the tweet.

On the one hand, you keep asking about sample size to make a conclusion..on the other hand, you go by such reports from BBC where they talk to a couple fo doctors here and there..You are better than this, madam

— Sathish (@sathishpgw) April 14, 2020

P1: BTW, I  saw this  just below Rupa's post. So Twitter is the truth, eh ? 😉😉
Me: I don't know about underreporting, but we are undertesting, that is a fact.
P2: But that is to be expected in a country with 1.2B people.
Me: I am talking about testing per million of citizens
P2: But there are so many millions of people! Testing kits and apparatus is not cheap
Me: Yes, agree, None of that is cheap. But then we should not be claiming that we have done a great job. As per out doctors, a good percentage (some say upto 70%) of our corona positive cases are completely asymptomatic. But our testing protocol says, they should either have symptoms or have been in contact with somebody who was positive. We are also, in most cases, not testing dead for corona virus. We should be clear that we are not testing because we can't afford testing while we are building a new parliament building costing us 20,000 crore.
P1: Yeah, most reporters forget that -- everything can not be ideal, it has to be practical within constraint we as economy have, and also expected cost to be incurred later depending on situation which might change its course dynamically + economic recovery. Best example is -- that their report is not putting across a practical view point. They tend to benchmark with Ideal system / comparing our systems wrt more advnaced country. Now, if I look at our school level educational system -- they tend to instill the thot in children -- that you have to be ideal, parents also do. So, bechare reporters ki mistake nahi hai. Hum shayad unki report ko 100% complete/ correct/ holoistic na mane to acha hai.
Me: Forget per million tests, in absolute terms we are testing well below Italy and Turkey.
P1: ref my point above, rest is your view.
Me: Nothing to do with economy, if government decided to postpone that stupid new parliament building, they can buy 2-3 million tests. Till date we have tested total 250,000 people, that is abysmal.
P1: One reason why we donate to Relief Fund is to help governement fund all this in situations of maha maari. Even my maid donated one months salary. So... Anyways -- views are views, each one has their own
P2: Patriotism runs very high in India. Anyone admitting or exposing reality of not being able to test will be declared an enemy of the state. The narrative must stay positive. That's why I believe all -isms are stupid.
P1: chalo discussion chaloo hua, Ek dum shanti thi.
Me: Government should not be asking for donations. If it needs money, it can legitimately tax us. This is just to make everybody feel good. The point is we can not test to same level of per million population as US but we should be able to do at the level of Turkey. Also We have one of the strictest lockdown in the world. The experts are very clear, lockdown is only going to delay spread unless accompanied by aggressive identification of hotspots and selective isloation of those groups. We are only doing first because it is easy to do.
P1: Advise achi hai, PMO ke site per bhej de. chal kaam karne ja rahai hoon, ab, Bye.  call starting in 2 min
Me: Within India Delhi is testing 683 per million, Rajasthan 455 per million, Kerala 445 per million, while UP 68 per million, and Bihar 71 per million. Never send anything to this particular PMO. It is a guarantee that that idea will be thrown in the dustbin. The idea has to come from them, then they will implement it. So people who have their ear, should say it to them.
P3: Another perspective: confirmed cases per 100 tests is 4.2%; rate of increase in # of tests is higher than rate of increase in +ve cases. So something to feel good about, I guess.
Me: That perspective is wrong. That only shows that there is a linear relationship between number of tests and positives. If we test 100, we will find 4 positive, if we test a million, we will find 40000 positive.  We will be good if this number starts declining, that would mean we have started saturating the testing. I also added following tweet.

Germany🇩🇪
500,000 tests a week
34 ICU beds per 100,000
Mild symptoms are treated

UK🇬🇧
200,000 tests in total
6.6 ICU beds per 100,000
Mild symptoms not treated

➡️ UK has 3 times more #COVID19 deaths than Germany

My @BylineTimesSubs article. https://t.co/bhI1lzawYV

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) April 9, 2020

P3: How do we explain the fact that the rate of increase in # of tests is higher than rate of increase in # of +ve cases. Point I had already acknowledged was that, we are not as resourceful as the examples you would like to compare against.

P3: Am referring to this map for not missing the context of the scale we are dealing with as a country with resources that just aren’t comparable
Me: How can you say that. Look at this chart attached. If you compute percentage of increase as a percentage over last period, they are almost in line.

Me: Replying to the picture with map.. What does that prove really? As of now the number of tests that we have done would have costed the country less than 100 crore. If we just put a stop to that 20000 crore project of a new parliament building, we can test 200 times more people. Nobody is saying that we can test at the same level as western world, but you can't let people die. Some countries doing more tests per million than India:  Kenya, Niger, Bolivia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Guyana, Morocco, Brazil, Mongolia, Mexico, Pakistan, Cambodia, Togo, Caribbean Islands, Philippines, Jamaica, Rawanda, Paraguay, Argentina, Ukraine, Iraq, Vietnam, Bhutan

P4: Then another member, not involved in discussion told me I should stop talking about this nonsense.
Me: Chalo think hai, ab is group par nahin karunga. BMKJ
P4: Baki grp me karte rahoge??
Me: yes, I like that quantitative analysis stuff, but that is just love for numbers
Then P3 came back.
P3: Did you factor exceptional events that have negated the fundamentals behind the social distancing? No attempt to prove anything Vinay. Just to point, like you suggested to avoid unnecessary spending and set the priorities right. Our resources are limited. While it is important to expect Govt to do all that it is supposed to do right, the attention must not get divided and diluted due to rogue elements and agenda driven narratives. BMKJ
Me: I asked what did he mean by "rogue elements" and "agenda driven narratives"  and who is responsible for Did you factor exceptional events that have negated the fundamentals behind the social distancing?
P3: I guess you would like to hear that Modi & BJP government responsible for all that has happened and will happen until we bring back the old order led by Congress and someone from the family to lead us. Right?
P1: Point Hai
P3: You guys need to read up on logical fallacies. If someone doesn't like A than they must like B is illogical.
P3: Priority today is not to find an option to replace govt, as per democratic process a govt has been given a mandate and let’s respect it. And focus on finding option to save lives of countrymen
P2: Agreed. But not accepting flaws in the current administration is not right and I mean in a general sense for many countries, not just India/Modi.
Me: I am just saying this current government and our honorable prime minister who has such good relations with so many heads of state can get some more tests and increase testing. We are a democracy, last I checked, not a banana republic. The power changes in elections and they are far away.
P2: The journey towards improvements begins by first recognizing what is wrong.
P3: Let’s honestly reflect, any amount of valid points we make on this forum, will it really make any difference to how Modi or this Govt will react or respond. In my view we just cannot. I do agree that efforts need to be made by elements of our democratic system that have the responsibility to make the Govt accountable.
P3: Why should we do political debate?
P1: ts not like my belief is truth and others belief or view point or perception is false. So... I have a view, while you also have a view, We can agree to have our respective views. If I do not subscribe to your view, then nothing happens, you still have yoyur view. So... you may try to re-educate me, but so may I. After sometime, we accept -- the situation, Going after the situation full tong and hammer -- does it deliver anything ? Think over.
P2: It is perfectly alright to have different views and opinions. As long as those views are not illogical. For what is illogical, see the well defined logical fallacies. They have stood the test of time. It is not something that I or ***** or someone else cooked up for their convenience.
Me: Exactly, I just posted a chart with publicly available data and somebody made it about the politics. Contrary to what politicians might like to believe, everything is not about them.  I saw some data, did some analysis, thought the group might be interested it, looks like it is not.  I am not in the business of educating anybody but when something is written on this group, my belief was that it was to elicit a response. Looks like that was not the case. Anyway, my last word in this topic.
P1: Agreed *****, I still may choose to have a differnt and logical thot process, which is different from someone else. I am not bound to follow a certain view point. I listen, evaluate and see what can be used, and what does not make sense to me in my sitauion(s). Same is true for you ( or others in world. ). People publish their views, some believe in those, others believe in mythological, social, fantasy world. There is place for all type of people. That is the view - having made a point, why keep pushing it ? I would leave it here, no more to say without repeating myself - in one or orther way.
P5: I was going to bring up logical fallacies myself. I see a lot of strawman attack and ad hominem attacks going on.
P6: Thumbs up

So, that's why, in today's era, it is impossible to have an honest argument even among friends. 

Fact checkers in India

Finally somebody has taken it upon themselves to start fact checking the claims made by politicians. Just read an article in Mint about claims made by Mr. Narendra Modi in a speech yesterday.

Here is the summary.
Mr. Modi made two claims, 1) only 23% homes have latrines in Bihar 2) 16% homes have electricity in Bihar. Both facts are right from the census data.

What is bothering me is the fact that Mr. Modi is truthful but is being economical with truth. Have a look at chart below.

As we can see Mr. Modi is right about Bihar, it is really at the bottom of the ranking, but I have two questions in my mind. Mr. Modi's party was ally of Mr. Nitish Kumar till few months back and why did they not do anything about it and Mr. Modi is running Gujarat for last 15 years and why did he not do anything about it there. To put it is perspective, as per 2001 census data, Gujarat was 18th in the list and in 2011 it is 21st. So I would say it is hard to believe Mr. Modi when he claims that he can fix the problem in Bihar.

As we can see from the chart above, Gujarat ranks 16 th in Electricity availability as per 2011 census. The same census data suggests that it ranked 11th in 2001.
So, Mr. Modi is right when he claims that Bihar has not progressed enough under the government of Mr. Nitish Kumar. It still lies at the bottom of the pool along with UP. He should take the share of the blame since his party was running the government with Mr. Nitish Kumar till some month ago. Mr. Modi is not so right when he claims that he can fix it because on these two accounts, Gujarat has gone down in the ranking of states.

Food security bill and middle class hypocracy

Off late I have decided to disengage myself with political conversation because the political discussions are so polarized now-a-days that any time you express you view which does not tally with somebody else's view you hear back abuses rather than arguments.
Today being the day when Lok Sabha passed the Food Security Bill is another such day. The argument went something like below.
A Gentleperson: Why this UPA government is destroying the country, now this food security bill, 2G, Coal Scam...
Me: I think we need food security bill because there are people who don't have food and it is a shame that in this country people don't get sufficient food.
AG: This is all for corruption, what good has come out of the PDS system. Whole of the food is diverted to blackmarket. It is our tax payer's money....
Me: Those need to be fixed, but somebody who is not getting food, if he has better chances of getting food, I think it is worth it.
AG:No, we need to stop all these things, till the time we fix corruption, we can not give these subsidies, all the tax payers money....
Me: Ok, so since there is black market in gas cylinders, should the subsidy be stopped there as well. Let's stop that subsidy as well and when we can build a corruption proof system, we will give gas subsidy.

At this point, the discussion turned into an abusive slanging match which I had feared to start with. I think I will stick to my stand of now having political conversations.

How gullible are we as a nation

I have been wondering of late, how gullible are we as a nation? Anybody can tell us anything and we start running behind them. Only thing we don't trust is ourselves. Here are two instances that incidentally happened this week.

STEN LINDSTROM comes out this year on the 25th anniversary of bofors scandal and says that he was the whistleblower and he saw his leaks being used selectively (in content and timing) by The Hindu at that time and did not do much about it. Now 25 years laters he is talking again.

Then coincidently the same week S&P downgrades India's credit risk to negative and Moody's goes ahead and writes a almost political report on India.

The report termed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as an "ageing technocrat who now appears tired of the rough and tumble of Indian politics" and added that the UPA didn't have the numbers or the leaders to push through tough-minded reforms needed to drive the next wave of growth.

Now what moody's and S & P are saying is nothing new, everybody agrees that business and investment climate in India has taken a beating but we (the mainstream media) wakes up only when foreigners tell us to do that.

I expect our media to do much more homework rather than just listening to STEN LINDSTROM, Moody's or S & P whose credibility it not really great anyway.

  

FDI in Retail

The big question being asked now a days, FDI in retail is good or bad. I really don't know so I decided to verify the argument of pro-FDI groups that there are lots of inefficiencies in the supply chain and that's why we need FDI. So I looked at the prices of certain vegetable items on 26-November-2011 in one of the Karnataka Mandis and compared it with the prices that I paid on the same day with one of the retailers. The chart on the right shows the price markup that I was subjected to the price between one of the Karnataka mandis to what the retailer charged me. As we can see that in most cases the markup is upwards of 50%, much closer to 100% with highest markup being 400%.
This is the case with vegetables which are perishable goods and have to be sold by the end of the day, one would assume that the prices of these goods would have least markup.
For people who want to verify, here is the data that I compiled and used.

	Store Price	One of the Karnataka Mandi
Tur Dal	89.9	39.25
Onion	18	11.5
Brinjal	30.49
Capsicum	36.9	20
Potato	16.5	13.8
Tomato	15.9	14
Bottle Gourd	35	7

So, there is definite markup, in many cases it does sound un-reasonable but whether bringing FDI in retail really solves this problem, I am not so sure. Anti-FDI people claim that MNCs are just for profit and they may squeeze everybody. So looks like complicated issue but in my experience, additional competition has always helped customer.

What Team Anna needs to do?

Over this week, Team Anna seems to be in complete disarray. It had to happen. Earlier it was easy, bunch of guys, with very strong point of views and different opinions about many topics, came together on a cause for which all of them agreed. Corruption was the issue that was common to all of them and they all agreed.
As Team Anna started diversifying into other issues and plunged themselves into rough and tumble of electoral politics, although from sidelines, they broadened their scope and all of sudden the issue of them not agreeing on all issues started coming to fore.
For last three days, I have seen comments from, Kejariwal, Kiran Bedi and Bhushans contradicting themselves and each other.
I think Team Anna needs to take a step back, make sure that one issue that they have taken up is taken to closure before opening up the field.

Why I think "Civil Society" drafting laws is elitist

My understanding of democracy is that it is off the people, for the people, by the people. In any decent sized country, people are too many so they chose their representatives which are legislatures and executive.
In India member of parliament (and assemblies) are law makers and ministers, prime ministers and chief ministers are executive.
Now if people of the country want something to be done, they will chose people who would get those things done and that's how democracy works.
We see ourselves in a situation where a section of society thinks that they are better than rest of the people, who are too naive to understand the stuff that is going on and they assign themselves to be protectors of rest of the people. They go ahead, blackmail the government and become pseudo-lawmakers without any responsibilities. This behavior is driven from the belief that rest of the voters who peacefully go and vote in every election are fools and idiots and do not comprehend bigger and better things.
Just think about it, if government drafts a bad law, after five years they are answerable to the people and can be voted out, but "civil society" is now answerable to anybody.
If the "Civil Society" was really representative of society and believed in democracy, they would just go ahead and fight the next election, get elected and then do the right thing.

Science Minister of Odisha

Here is something interesting, the Science Minister of Odisha state tried to clear 12^th standard examination and failed. That did not deter the chief minister in making him the minister of Science.

Taking no chances, the minister had duly reached the centre 20 minutes before the scheduled start of the paper at 10 am. He was, however, allotted a separate room for the exam. As many as 235 other Plus-II students are appearing for the exam from the same centre

So he was allotted a separate room for the exam. Why? I would say.

Curious case of Dr. Binayak Sen

I don't know whether the judgement in Dr. Binayak Sen case is fair or not. I don't know all good or bad that he did. But current competition in intellectuals to support him seems very unfair and in my view doing more harm to his cause then good.

A day after 40 Nobel laureates from 12 countries called for Dr Binayak Sen’s immediate release, the Chhattisgarh High Court on Thursday denied bail to the civil rights activist. Sen, charged by the state government with sedition, will now appeal against the high court order in the SC.

Do these intellectuals expect courts to agree to their demand and be seen to be giving out an judgement based on pressure put on them. I don't think that is going to happen. The best these people could do is to leave him along and if the judgement was really unfair, based on the merit of evidence, it will be quashed by the higher courts.

Now, China to read, censor SMSes

Here is an interesting new article. What I found interesting is the typical government wording of the article.

Nine government departments have listed 13 undisclosed criteria to judge text messages. An automatic filtering system will pounce on improper messages by honing in on key words.

EVM/EC and attention whores

The circus with electronic voting machine has come full circle. I know little bit of technology and I always believed that the fact that the voting machines are made by only two public sector manufacturers and has a set of handling procedures that are physically verifiable makes it pretty much tamper proof.

• The voting machine has a physical lock that makes sure that it has not been physically opened.


• The voting machine has the software code in a non-writable ROM makes sure that once the software has been validated, it is tamper proof


• The voting machine is a unconnected device i.e. there is no chance of somebody hacking into it remotely.


• The voting machine has no knowledge of the order of candidates on the machine. This is just a manual mapping that is made outside of technology. The machine in the end just tells the number of votes for candidate at each position and the candidate to position mapping is an offline mapping and is maintained using a ballot paper look alike.

The only way the voting machine can be hacked with is somebody opens it, replaces the software code running. Even that is harder it do with well defined results because the the order of candidates on the machine is assigned much closer to the polls.

When somebody as responsible as Saigal who has been a senior bureaucrat in government makes an alligation, people will have to take him seriously and political parties will take him seriously because it is a question of bread and butter for them. But when election commission of India gave them an opportunity to demonstrate the tamper-ability of the machines he did not do much.

Saigal refused to demonstrate the points raised by him, using any of the 100 actual ECI-EVMs he was offered to choose from. He wanted certain arrangements for him and his team of hardware and software professionals from a private company before coming to demonstrate about the tamperability of the EVM. He also offered to show what he claimed as possibility of tampering using his personal computer and a look alike of the ECI-EVM, that was privately manufactured, and is also seen on several TV channels.

It was pointed out to Saigal that the ECI-EVM was not at all comparable with what he had brought. EC officials declined to deal with, what appeared to be an imitation machine, so as to avoid creating any confusion in public mind.

So in nut shell, he never claimed that voting machines can be tampered with, what he claimed that one can make a machine that looks like EVM and that machine can be tampered with. Nobody will argue with that. Actually I will even make another allegation that somebody can make a machine that looks like a EVM and it can be used to fly rockets.

Anyway, the net result of election commission hackathon was as follows.

On Saturday, the Election Commission asserted the infallibility of EVMs citing the failure of persons who had claimed the machines could be tampered with. This has come after a demonstration of 100 EVMs in the EC office that lasted for six days from August 3. These EVMs were randomly obtained from 10 states and kept for scrutiny to establish fallibility. The outcome of this exercise was that none of the persons, who were given the opportunity, could actually demonstrate any tamperability of the ECI-EVM, in any of the 100 machines put on display. They either failed or chose not to demonstrate, said an EC statement.

I hope this matter can be put to rest now. But one never knows.

Atleast UP police redeems itself

Few minutes after I wrote this post about the UP police, they have managed to eliminate the dacoit.  Now only if WB police also can do something, I would be happy.

Pathetic police work -- Two examples

So today I saw two examples of pathetic police work in two different states of the country. The first one being the UP police which engaged in an encounter a single dacoit Ghanshyam Kewat alias Nanhu with 400 police personnel for overl 47 hours and finally he managed to escape.

"Company commander PAC Beni Madhav Singh and constables Shamim and Iqbal were killed in the encounter while IG, PAC VK Gupta, DIG Chitrakoot SK Singh and four others -- Navendra Singh and Akram of STF, Dileep Kumar Tiwari and Rajendra Singh -- were injured," the officer said on Wednesday.

The second incident is the incident in Lalgarh involving local administration and Maoists.  This seems to be total breakdown of any kind of administration in that place. Everybody is doing whatever they want.

Maoist gunmen on Wednesday emerged from their stronghold in jungles along the Bengal-Jharkhand border for an audacious strike near Jhargram town, killing a local CPM leader and two activists in full public glare. As Trinamool Congress activists and Maoists have battled to capture turf from weakened CPM cadres, nearly 25 people have been killed, mostly CPM workers and supporters. At many places, the anti-CPM forces have been supported by locals who see the CPM as a receding force in the face of Mamata Banerjee's electoral surge.

Atleast one news paper claimed that in the past police just outsourced the security to local CPM cadre and finally maoists just had enough and when the came the police, already having abdicated, was nowhere to save them.

The murders today underline how administrative institutions, systematically subverted over the years by the CPM, collapse when there’s threat of a power-shift reducing party cadres to sitting ducks. Nothing illustrates this better than the story of those who were killed: 27-year-old Tinku Mahato; Anil Mahato, 48, the branch committee secretary of the CPM, and 23-year-old college student Abhijit Mahato.

An MA in Sanskrit from Vidyasagar University, Tinku was recently employed as a “para-teacher” in the village primary school. But Tinku Mahato was also the secretary of a “security syndicate” that employed nearly 200 youths of the village as security guards. The other two killed, Anil Mahato and Abhijit, were also key members of this syndicate. Their job: to provide security cover to vehicles on National Highway 6 as they passed the vulnerable Lodhasuli forest stretch where armed robbery is common.

This should have been the job of the Jhargram police but they had, in effect, “outsourced” this responsibility to this syndicate largely comprising CPM supporters. Routinely, armed robbers deflate tyres of vehicles on this stretch by littering the road with “improvised nails” and loot passengers. The police asked Tinku Mahato’s team to take over.

Seems to have another disaster in the making.

Indian Election Results

Finally there seems to be a clear trend at 11AM that UPA (Congress+) seems to be headed to form the next government and Dr. Man Mohan Singh seems poised to form the next government. There seem to be some clear plus points that have come out from these elections.

• Left parties are out, I think apart from their negative politics in respective states, they might have been better served by taking credit for good things happening in the last five years.


• I believe it was a good thing for congress to go alone in UP, atleast they provided an alternative to people


• Nobody believed LKA when he said that there is nothing to give credit to congress for.

I think this would be a good election result for this country.

Varun Gandhi

As I am watching in mumbai airport and listening to the news, it seems Varun Gandhi is in making waves again. He wants to bring back forced sterilization and compulsory military service.
We all know the futility of the first one but the second point is bizzare. If he felt so strongly about that, why did he now bother to join military. He is not too old, he could have joined military before this fulfilling political career.
But then politicians never were known to do sane things.

Indian political parties -- they will say anything to make you happy

It is election time in India and during these times, the political parties would say anything that makes their constituencies happy. Some would even say things that sound outright illogical.
Here is a political party that has declared in their manifesto that they are against computers and English.
So I tried to analyse if these guys really get elected and have their prime minister installed what would be the scene of India at the end of five years. Please add your things in comments if it comes to your mind.

• We will be booking train reservations the good old way. No e-ticketing, no computerized ticket. It the good old large sized register in your city station. What would be real impact of all this? Quotas based on per station basis. You can not book through tickets, you have to bribe the TTE to pretty much every booking and many other things.


• Mobile networks and all the CDOT revolution would be yanked out, you will be back to the manual exchange era where a person would be connecting your telephone lines.


• No income tax filing electronically.


• No online banking, No ATMs, No NEFT and RTGS. Everything will be rolled back. You will be back to an ear when transferring Rs. 100/- from Delhi to Mumbai took 15 days.


• Stock exchanges will be closed down. No equity, only debt would be allowed to run the companies.


• Different governments in India will be communicating in their own languages, for example a government in Delhi will write a letter to Tamil Nadu government in Hindi which will be translated in Tamil on the way. You can replace your favorite state with Tamil Nadu here.


• Half of the TV channels will have to shut down because they broadcast in English. Poor Mr. Pronoy Roy and Sardesai will be out of job.


• Malls will have to be shut down

Reading all this, I am wondering why do we blame Taliban in Pakistan. Many of these things sound so much like what they are doing there. Better still why don't they just take us back enough so that we don't have to worry about complex things like currency systems, we can just live off barter system.

I can only hope that better sense prevails in the states from where these morons derive their base of power and people just kick these guys out.

India's horrible neighborhood

As I watch this news update by the NDTV and The Times of India, I come to know that Sri Lankan cricket team has been attacked with guns (probably grenades etc. as well). This again brings out the fact that we live in extremely dangerous neighborhood. Our neighbor have just descended into anarchy. If the country's security apparatus can not guard a cricket team which, everybody knows, is under threat, then one can only assume that there is not control in the hands of police/military.

I have always believed that societies would have to pay for ignoring troublesome elements in their midst. I think it is about time that societies that harbor dangerous elements are asked, they either need to get rid of these elements or they have to pay the price for letting these elements exist.

Hopefully the world will realize, what India has veen saying for all these days and do something about it. But I know that everybody is looking after their short term gains and unless this problem becomes their problem, nobody is bothered.

What is modi upto

Gujarat chief minister has a strong fan following among some of the Indian who seem to see him as the savior against everything. But I don't seem to understand what does modi want to achieve by his utterances on Mumbai terror attack. First he went on to say that Pakistan position on terrorists is justified.
Pak capitalises on Modi's 'Kasab' jibe
Then he goes on to say that there might have been people in India who are involved in these attacks.

26/11 wouldn't have taken place without internal help

Now I can allow for the fact that both these assertions may be true but at a time when the government of country (whether one likes it or now) is trying to force pakistan in acting against terrorists, what is the point of contradicting the line of government. Talk about working on narrow political gain.

Ideology and Political Parties

I sincerely believe that in democracies, ideologies of political parties has not role to play. I would like a party to rule that just believes in ruling and that is its only ideology. Only such a political party would be scared of the voters. Anytime it does something that majority of people don't like, they can let it be known that they would vote against the party because of that issue and it is very likely that the government would not take that action.

Take for example a party that has a ideology, if they really believe in that ideology, they would take actions that match that ideology and even be willing to sacrifice the government. Now as we know, in most of the democracies, the government is hardly voted with more than 50% voters, there is a very good chance, after coming to power they would do things that most of the voters don't agree with. I think that is non-democratic.

So, If you ask me, vote for a party that has no ideology.

CPM goes crazy again

It was peace on the communist party front for quite some time. First they lost the cushy PoPwR (Position of Power without Responsibility) and then all the stuff about Nano. They kept quite for some time except occasional references to dogs. But in the parliament debate they again opened their mouth and garbage came out. Read for yourself.

"What brought the terrorist outfits to our shores? With the Indo-US nuclear deal you are seen as an ally of the US, a strategic partner. There seems to be a total lack of appreciation of this thought from the government's side," CPM leader Sitaram Yechury said in Rajya Sabha on Thursday.

What does he have in his mind when he says that. Should government of India run its foreign policy after approval from taliban, AQ & LeT.

I am not really sure why nice people in West Bengal vote for these idiots. I can understand no politician is great but atleast most of them try to atleast speak right things. Anyway, I give up. Most probably these guys will never be voted out and they will continue destroying this country.Technorati Tags: CPM, Communists, Politics