As the parliament elections are approaching, crazy political scenes are already unfolding. This election will witness the highest degree of usage of technology in election campaign but only to spread the animosity, hatred and unrealistic promises. Social media is polluted with the campaigners of all political parties but BJP campaigners are pursuing their goals with greater confidence and hope.

As a citizen of this country, I am disillusioned with the current political set up as winning election takes precedence over leading the country to prosperity. Any progress can begin with sound appreciation and admission of our current inadequacies and flaws. Any progress is possible only with the realistic action plan evolved based on our competencies and realistic time frame. Our political parties are good in exposing the inadequacies in the system . But they promise people that they could solve the problems if they vote them to power in no time. They could not accept that the problems are too deep-rooted to be fixed in a shorter time.

Another reason for our democracy not maturing is our own people. We are not intelligent enough to understand the country's problem and we are not willing to make the sacrifices required for solving them. Many are educated but education never imparted any skill and attitude required to appreciate the challenges of globalized world..As a society, we marginalized any leader or scholar who spoke truth which could only be unpleasant. Most of us are fond of living in fools paradise, tolerating the illusions painted and propagated by various politicians.

Though we lived in past with such insensitivity, we need to pay huge price in future if we continue with same insensitivity. We must define our political and economical realities and find out the best method to communicate to common citizen. What are those realities?

1. Our lives are tightly integrated with the economic fortune of many other countries and any challenge faced by those countries will impact us.
2. We depend on other countries for our energy needs such as fuel and there is no easy options available to reduce our dependence.
3. We as a country do not have any core competency that provides competitive advantage and export earnings.
4. We have a big challenge in providing access to quality primary education to all children.
5. Our education system cannot produce employable candidates.
6. Our infrastructure is inadequate and we need lots of foreign capital to construct them.
7. No single leader can address all the problems of country. we need a team of  capable leaders .
8. Each one of us need to make sacrifices to develop country.
9. Nothing can be given free and people will only bear the cost indirectly.

Today people are not willing to accept the above realities and no political leaders have courage to talk about them . They continue to over promise to win elections.  Each election is complicating our path to progress and weakening our democratic institutions. Last parliament never conducted its business properly as opposition parties stalled the proceedings for various reasons. This conduct will be replicated by political parties in future too and destroy the purpose of having parliament. 

So the change must begin with people only, in the way we think and respond to the political assurances. Time to make people aware of the realities and that will enable them to demand reasonable behavior from politicians. Creating this awareness is a big task and need of the hour in this society. There are institutions fighting against corruption but that is a fight against a single issue. The awareness movement required to communicate the above realities must be similar to spiritual movement where the focus should be connecting with Individual conscience. The objective is to make them understand the questions and realize that finding answers need significant efforts.

This awareness will slowly kill the nonsensical component of our political system and must encourage politicians to be more honest with people.This awareness will  people to collaborate and  more than to question and protest. There are issues that can be categorized as non debatable and collective energies can be spent towards addressing them instead of politicizing them. Today trivial politics is possible because there are fans among people for such politics.

How will such movement shape up? When will it happen? Will it ever happen?

Let us be optimistic about finding answers.

 

Fate of IPL 2

Great things happen in Cricket but Greatest things are possible in Indian Cricket administration.BCCI managed to shift and stage IPL 2 in South Africa fighting all the constraints successfully. What eventually mattered was to have a match for telecasting live to the global audience and the revenue associated with it.The capitalist in my heart salutes Modi for his fighting spirit and resilience but socialist in my heart mourns the absence of such characters to fight crippling social issues.

Government shamelessly admitted that it could not extend security for IPL matches. Though initially everyone thought that the response could be politically motivated, it is a real status of existing security situation. When Naxals could kidnap a train with 700 passengers, it refelects the magnitude of danger that we are forced to face due to the poor governance of successive Governments.

Let me come back to IPL 2. If it is a pure cricketing event, South Africa is the best place to host as the pitches really test the cricketing skills of players and expose their limitations.But IPL is a Cricket tamasha. It consists of more elements than cricket such as glamour, crowds,etc and Hosting such tamasha in SA is no match to what happened last year in India. The Climate is adding fuel to the fire as the matches are getting badly affected by rain.The points gained or lost due to rain will be playing a vital role in determining the semi-final contestants.

Yesterday Modi gave an interview to Ravi shastri proudly claiming that the event took off in a big way and TRP ratings were very impressive. But today's article in Economic times is projecting a diffrent scenario.The decision of moving the event out of India really affected the interest of general Public on IPL.The success of IPL during last year was because of its ability to capture the interst of general public besides cricket fans due to 20:20 excitement.In order to get their attention, the quality of competition needs to improve with some close finshes and extrodinary batting/bowling performances.

Let us see as to how it unfolds in the coming days.