“India was the cradle of the human race, birth place of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great grandmother of traditions: the one land all men desire to see and having once seen, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the show of all the rest of the globe”
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The general elections to the Indian parliament come to a close tomorrow. The voters would be sending 543 members to represent them. Though the numbers are big and the claims are high, the ground level campaigns remained at ground level. None of the thousands of leaders,magazines, dailies, TV channels or e-magazines talked of the most important issues viz the booming population at an abominable pace, the destruction of the environment, the shrinkage of land space available for cultivation, food security for all, education for all, shelter for all, safe drinking water, health protection, ever growing menace of terrorism, the ugly urbanization, malnutrition, road crashes (1,50,000 fatalities per year in India) , sanitation and so on. The ultra elite and the holiest of all the holiest newspaper from the South talked about caste, community and religion and nothing else. ‘Indians do not cast their votes but vote to their castes’.
One of the techies possessing the maximum knowledge of all the human races spent about 8 billion dollars, saying that he would be giving identity cards to all the citizens - which he left half way. Today those who got those cards are ‘unique’ as they have to toil for the most successful, most prestigious program of the day ‘100-days work for 100 rupees’. (What would they do in the remaining 265 days for works? The rates are revised to 170 plus now) and those who are not blessed with those cards are without an identity. This super hero who possesses 1.25 billion U.S. dollars wealth (as per news paper reports) would be seeking the opinion of the public ‘how to spend the 833,900 dollars ‘which he may get as funds from the government for his constituency.
And the some of our fellow men are giving time to the Fortune 500 list of the super rich. Why not they show a little care towards their fellow Indians and share their wealth and show their concern? Today the Rich in India are about 200 million and the high middle class are around 150 million. This 350 million who can share and care is the size of America, or half of the Entire Europe or the twice the size of Japan. But we demand money from tiny nations like Denmark and Sweden to tackle our problems.
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