Sunday, October 31, 2010

Spirit of Bhaigiri




Captured behind an auto driver's seat in Bangalore.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Pride and Prejudice

Proud of CWG '10 opening ceremony and the way we stood up as a country and portrayed that we can do it as well as anybody else can, albeit with some extra money and a lot little less time. It was stupendous, awesome to say the least and one of those moments which made me feel proud and my head held high.

Having said that, as pointed by one of my friends, "Indian public memory is used to being 'healed' by displays of extravaganzas like these. It could only be called a miracle if people are even half as angry as they were a week ago, once the games conclude with minimum hassles". Just hoping that we nail the guys with the same ferocity with which we went after them pre-ceremony. Hope the media atleast makes it a point to come back and shower some spotlight again, else this temporary 'healing' as you mentioned, will set a precedent for even more corruption. Politics it is, after all.

While I feel proud that India stood up on its own on the world stage, my mind keeps reminding me that at one side we have infrastructure problems, hunger and poverty, half a million people without toilets in their homes - how fair and how shameful it is to put up such shows of extravaganza with 70,000 crores. Shouldn't we be spending it on the needs of the people, so as we call a 'third world power' or a 'developing' country.

Isn't it just a exterior show to bid for such costly games, to brand ourselves as 'Incredible India' while on the backstage we arrest beggars and hide the homes of the poor migrants so that the 'foreigners' do not see the real picture?