Beware the Black Swan
Rakesh Ahuja concludes his article on CWG, “Salvage India’s pride...” with these lines (from ToI; emphasis added):
…The bottom line is that a systemic, nationwide malaise has been exposed. It could be a catalyst for declaring independence from incompetence, corruption and the arrogance embedded in DNA of the ruling class. Postponing the Games will give unambiguous notice to the tainted to Quit India.
It would be a non-violent Dandi moment for the aam admi. It would be a fitting homage to Gandhi’s birth anniversary is October 2. And in the spirit of his values, Delhi’s citizens could be forgiven for hoisting the national flag and writing to their elected representatives to declare: “We will not take it any more”.
How I wish…
But knowing the powers that be, knowing the deep indifference and apathy of the well-read, the well-fed and the well-travelled, knowing the choking stranglehold of money and muscle on electoral politics, knowing the cynical arrogance of the “ruling class”, NONE of this is likely to happen…
Very likely, we will stumble on, miraculously manage to restore some semblance of order and host a somewhat embarrassing, memorable-in-parts event in the capital city of the world’s third most powerful nation.
There must be some reason why a particular phrase uttered by Aamir Khan in the movie “3 Idiots” (beginning with *Aal*…) became so popular. Now I know.
But of course, ALL is NOT WELL….Somewhere, someplace there is a fire smouldering…the sparks are lit…the rumble is unmistakeable to those who care to listen…
Beware of the volcano…beware the rage and the fury of suppressed emotions and hurt pride...beware the one who has nothing to loose since (s)he has lost everything...beware the brewing storm…beware the black swan.
Image Courtesy: Wikipedia
Comments and thoughts welcome, as always.
P.S. Pl note I am travelling over the next few days so there may be some delay in moderating and/or responding to comments. Thank you for your patience and support.
They could have kicked out the corrupt, incompetent and morally bankrupt lot when they first noticed something is wrong. But they played mischief and said that action will be taken after the game knowing fully well nothing is going to happen after the game and everything will be forgotten.
Now many of the participating nations may choose not to participate. Perhaps only India will be left alone with some minor nations. Even in India selected few may only participate. Hence they can award the medals to their favorites. Is it not an achievement that all the medals are won by India in the Congress Wealth Games ? The organizers can also be bestowed with some medals/titles which are usually granted to their cronies for bringing laurels to India !!!
Dandi Yatra to punish corrupt and homage to Gandhi. This is all the more rubbish than the Corrupt’s Windfall Game. Ahuja the writer needs to come up with better. The ruling class is in one way or another Gandhi created who himself was a big time filled with fanciful ideas of My Dear Hitler/ Kneel to Hitler/ Fight Hitler/ Participating with British Army in Killing of Africans
CWG organisers are the greatest patriots. They are making sure that foreign athletes do not come and do not compete with us. This way, we get to keep all the medals! What an idea sirji!!!
Look, stop being concerned about CWG. Majority chose Congress in the election. Now enjoy their loot because that is what we have chosen. If Congress can not loot, then they would not bother to fight in the election. And if they would not fight in the election, who would form the government (because BJP has long given up on itself)? What would happen to the beloved secular democracy then?
Did anyone see the news about crap being floated in basins in CWG village? That is rich in symbolism. Congress has offered that to us as a reward for choosing them. Suck it up.
C.M. Narendra Modi correctly said in one of his speech. It is Congress wealth game. It was estimated 650crores during P.M. Atalji time but now it has turned to the budget of 80,000crore and still cannot…make it.
The hated political class does not exist in splendid isolation. IT IS WE WHO ARE EQUALLY CORRUPT, PATHOLOGICALLY AFRAID AND LIVING ONLY FOR OURSELVES EVERYDAY.
G.B.Shaw’s essay on democracy are very clear and some points are noted here:
DEMOCRACY
———
1) If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.
2) Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
3)Democratic republics can no more dispense with national idols than monarchies with public functionaries.
4) Government presents only one problem: the discovery of a trustworthy anthropometric method.
Reading Nani Palkhivala’s many books reveal the rot of that era. This present era is merely based on that rotten era.
Furthermore, reading G.I.Gurdjieff’s opinion of the “journalists” of his era gives one a clear view of who or what these creatures really are.
Is is too simplistic to attempt to change our own selves before approaching anything else?
Did you say ‘ Hurt Pride of Indians’?? You must be joking. Indians and pride?? It is a nation of Eunuchs and no one minds anything if he is paid. It is a nation of slaves who were rightly kept enslaved for so many centuries and got independence from a race few thousand of whom
from 8ooo thousand miles and ruled these slaves. It IS a slave race
who got independence by an error of history and will lose it soon. How can Eunuchs rule themselves. I hope the eunuchs do not take offence to be compared to such a spunkless breed.
This hugely obese Kalmadi is leading the nation in common theft games. Shame on the Congress party which is allowing it. Shame on Indians who are allowing it. Actually the silly Indians deserves nothing better than such insults. If you can chose a fraud like Congress ; you got to bear and grin too; And just wait. The hope of mankind Sh Rahul Gandhi is ready to be inflicted on this silly Indian Race
Chetan Bhagat says ‘please don’t cheer the 2010 loot fest’.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-toi/all-that-matters/Please-dont-cheer-the-2010-loot-fest/articleshow/6453682.cms
The electoral compulsions and one’s order in the hierarchy determine distribution of wealth-making posts in the UPA.
For a moment keep the CWG aside. We will come to it in a while. Notice the various looting departments that have been”outsourced” by the Congress government. Unimaginable wealth flows to the DMK and the family of Muthu Karunanidhi via the Telecom Raja and Fertiliser Azhagiri. The chemical and fertilizer ministry is not a small ministry, by no means. It sits over the allocation of huge subsidies to various fertilizer companies. The government’s fertiliser subsidy spend for 2009-10 stands at Rs 64,932 crore. This payout generates huge amount of return bribes. Moreover, the Muthu Karunanidhi family is known to have stakes in several chemical-fertilizer domain.
Similarly, Kingfisher Patel has bankrupted IA/AI and ordered huge aircrafts. This was covered in your blog as well. Over a period of seven years, Kingfisher Patel has swindled thousands of crores of rupees. His party president Cricket Pawar is way above the rest. Only he know what he has accumulated in the past years by controlling sugar mills.
The CWG is thus another outsourced mechanism of adding to the Swiss economy. Even simple Dilli circles say that Commonwealth Kalmadi is a frontend of the Family. All in all, a simple money swindling operation.
The only sad issue i sthat only twenty years back, scams used to be in crores of rupees. The Bofors was about 60 crores. Nowadays, Telecom, Aviation, Fertiliser scmas are said to be in the range of 60,000 crores!
Surely MMMS has made India progress!
I have been enjoying the CWG stories. I was looking at the shots of filthy rooms on BBC news and reading a few blogs and articles. Makes me wonder why nobody noticed this before. We have had the same IOC chief for last 14 years. After all, facilities for sportsmen have always been that bad. You only have to see a few rooms in the Nehru Stadium to get what I mean. Nothing has changed this year or this month.
The only thing that has changed is that foreign players have been treated at par with Indians – that is, they have been treated the way the Indian players have always been treated all these years. Lo and behold, all the nationalists are up in arms. For once, this untouchable subject of sports finds mention in the saatvic blogs that usually discuss noble stuff like vedas etc. Good for India. Good for Indians.
As I always say – if you wish to focus on some of the ills common Indians and not so common Indians have to routinely face, just get a couple of UK or US Nationals exposed to those conditions and you will have a revolution. Kya baat hai.
Once again, I really wish to congratulate the present CWG organisers for treating all sportsmen – Indians and non-Indians alike while providing lodging facilities.
Meanwhile, take a look at “world class” residents at CWG village.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/commonwealth_games/delhi_2010/9025907.stm
If this event would have been successful, all credit would have been used to catapult Rahulbaba into the chair of administrative head (much the same way Asiad was used for Rajiv Gandhi’s image building). The problem is that there are no Arjun Singh style loyalists anymore , loyalists like Kalmadi are more loyal to themselves than the family. So the family has unleashed their great media hounds upon Kalmadi (however, Raja was protected by the same media dogs). My best guess is that in few weeks, Kalmadi would go underground by following the exemplary paths shown by greats such as Shahi Tharoor and Nadha Dhila Tiwari.
Jai Ho, India. This is what we call national sports: playing “pass the blame” game.
“Cynical arrogance of the ruling class ” – a wonderfully befitting description …
I am pretty sure the ‘pride’ will be salvaged … and we will never learn because the media will just say how it’s been a grand success … I always felt we Indians are never trained in school for team-work, hence the concept of a nation is proving to elusive … because of an entrance-exam culture we have !!!
http://is.gd/fsgTb
@flawsopy
Even if it is too early to speak of the failure of the games, they are certainly a reminder of the incompetence of India outside the areas of IT and business outsourcing in which the Government and politicians have their grubby fingers. This is a lesson to those business houses who have sat on the sidelines while a thieving bunch of crooks seized power in the Government.
If Hinduism preaches anything, it is for people to work for the common good. How else could its billions of people could be enslaved to the indignities of the caste situation. Actually, the lessons on Hinduism taken on board by the countries of East Asia show that they can work together for the advancement of their countries. They were in the fortunate position of selecting only those elements of Hinduism that were positive for the common good. The Hindu package that we have in India has led to our failure in just about every way possible.
My advice to Hindus is to go by the teachings of Sikhism and to closely ally ourselves with them.
Just like the Asiad in 1982 a lot of work seems to have gone into the CWG 2010 organisation. The pictures of venues are quite impressive. Eventually, this will turn out to be a great event.
Because of advances in Communications and Technology, world media have had a chance to preview facilities. There was little chance they were going to show India in good light. That would not have been good business. On the other hand, showing CWG in bad light would definitely have benefited many. At whose cost, I leave it to you to think about.
As one of the CWG officials said on the TV, it was like Mansoon Wedding (movie) chaos. He went on to say it would be alright in the end. I guess it will!
@R V Raghavan: Is is too simplistic to attempt to change our own selves before approaching anything else?. Well said.
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@Prakash: The point about facilities for sportsmen is valid and well taken.
The central issue for me though (and the reason why I put it on the blog) is that the scale of incompetence, mis-management and scandal has made a mockery of all our claims of being an aspiring “global player(power?)”…and exposed the root cause of all this: an utter failure of leadership and governance – at multiple levels.
I would lay much more emphasis on the symptoms rather than the ‘scale’. After all, when the foreign sportsmen get affected, one could conveniently declare that the scale of (incompetence, corruption, negligence whatever) is high enough for us to get worried. I would rather that everyone thinks of the poor Indian sportsman first. No need to wait till the scale is large enough. If you wait for the scale, the Indian sportsman, even the best of them, will be put up in shabby rooms and nobody will ever notice.
The truth is harsh. Most of the Indian media (and most of the bloggers) are far more concerned about a foreigner than an Indian. I would be happy to be proven wrong.
This would be a Black Swan moment if the incumbents of the present political establishment are being compelled to transform themselves to something they have they will never do. So what is going to force them apart from moral approbation? Anna Hazare promises to die if they refuse to make the course correction. The sad story of Hindu history has been that countless people gave their lives for the country but their sacrifices were in vain because they they did not carry the whole country with them. This is why the only resistance Gandhi could offer India was die through a hunger strike. This may have terrified the British fearful of loss of control but does it terrify the Indian Government? The people who run India are even more detached in the unique Hindu way. Anna Hazare’s death to them means nothing very much except some embarrasement that he put them on the spot about their lack of moral basis of their government. When the US war of independence broke out in 1786, the first thing General Wassington wanted to know was whether his men stood up to the British fire. This willingess to make the final sacrifice was again proved when the British tried to retake America with their attack on Fort McHenry in 1812. The Americans who died in their droves held up the American flag to affirm their independence from British rule. Hindus of India have died in vain as victims has been the longest suicide note in the annals of history. But will they ever stand and die to a man for the cause and honour of the country remains to be seen. These so called Indian leaders want them very much to be cowards and shirk the fight to do right. It is so much easier for one man to put his own life on the line as Gandhi did, but that has not done India much good in inspiring fighting spirit in India’s people.