Taking on the status quo

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Friday , March 21, 2008 at 2226 hrs It is Holi, the beginning of spring, and soon we shall be sweltering under the scorching heat of the northern Indian plains. After 60 years of development and many decades under the command of government-led “growth”, India has not been able to guarantee even a minimal amount of regular electric supply to farmers for irrigating their fields, or to small-scale enterprises for running their factories in an effort to achieve optimum production. It is a failure of gargantuan proportions and only goes to prove the complete lack of respect our rulers and their minions have had for the citizens of this great subcontinent. When will elected representatives and the administrative machinery of India begin to deliver the goods that make for simple, dignified living? When will those men and women mandated to govern, to enforce the law and keep the peace and social order, be true to themselves and their responsibility? When will we have a top ruler who is not going to be tied down and incapacitated by the bungling bureaucracy and ineffective political balancing acts to keep the status quo, thereby endorsing the corruption of our civil values and ethics?

Will we be assaulted with pain through a bloody revolution or will a strong and determined, selfless and practical person, infused with integrity of purpose, pull us out of this suffocating stranglehold? The situation has deteriorated to such a degree that it seems to need a radical overhaul. If the ruler at the helm means business and is committed to a restoration of dignity by intelligent and obvious measures, if the individual in command does not bow to pressure and blackmail as Gandhiji did not, the change, bottom up and top down, could be quite quick and positive. Just as innovative businesses have taken “risks” to change the course of corporate and economic history, the time has come for the leadership in India to cease bickering about archaic ideological differences and petty political gains, and instead just do and deliver, regardless of the possibility of being ousted from power.

India will stand by such a person. Indians have had enough of status quo politics, of weak and simplistic coalitions that nurture the average and failed. This country is ripe for risk and adventure, wanting to attain a small measure of their dreams by taking on challenges without the rusted and creaky government machinery weighing it down. A messiah could trigger another movement using the sane methodology that got us our momentary independence from colonial rule.

Momentary, because the native coloniser, the politician/administrator of today, instilled with greed, and with a lack of intellectual understanding of the ground reality and clearly unable to unravel the knots that constrict entrepreneurial growth and a movement out of abject poverty, has managed to misuse old and archaic laws to lash out at any person or institution working to bring about change. With the State machinery at their disposal, the laws that should protect citizens are being misused against their better interests.