Radical Tourism

Swapan Das Gupta is a commentator par excellence. In this OP/ED in daily Pioneer he deals with the bleeding heart types of the country with an in-your-face punch.
The bleeding hearts industry in India is replete with the pseudo-liberals who warm the chairs of NDTV studios in Dehli. They're always up on the roof tops proclaiming there undivided love for Pakistan. For them every indian should leave his work and commit to "loving pakistan", full time.

Kuldeep Nayar, Mani Shankar Iyer, Mahesh Bhatt are the leading lights of this movement. They claim to represent the majority of Indians, who it seems, are dying to hold the Pakistani hand.

For them massacre of Hindus by tacit or at times even direct support of Pakistani establishment and also its people is irrelevant. All they want is to keep 'loving' Pakistan. And if we do not concur with their views we are at best communal and at worst fanatics.

And off course for them NDTV happens to be haven. A god send gift where they can preach and blabber endless on their love for Pakistan.

Read on this wonderful OP/ED by Gupta in his own words...
- link here -

Post-quake tips for radical tourists

Till the mid-seventies, it was routine to encounter a breed of humans who went all gush-gush and gooey-eyed at the mere mention of either China or the Soviet Union. They were not all Communists.
Indeed some of them would balk at the very idea of living in dreary Moscow or spending more than a day in some make-believe Fanshen. They were the Fellow Travellers, the noble intellectuals who worshipped socialism from a discreet distance. Leon Trotsky had an even better description for these deeply gullible souls who saw salvation in evil. He called them the "radical tourists".
The Berlin Wall has crumbled and the mythology surrounding Chairman Mao has been well and truly demolished, but the fellow traveller and the radical tourist have not been put out of business. In India, they have been reborn and reinvented to further another trendy cause and propitiate another ugly icon.
"It is such an unnecessary controversy", rued NDTV's star reporter from Uri last week, after the earthquake. She was referring to the wave of indignation in both India and Pakistan at a report that Indian soldiers crossed the Line of Control to rescue Pakistani soldiers who were trapped under the debris of a collapsed bunker. It was suggested that the Indian jawans subsequently helped the Pakistanis rebuild the bunker.
The story was subsequently denied by Islamabad and modified in New Delhi. The Indian Army says its jawans did cross the LoC in response to an SOS and rescued trapped Pakistani soldiers. There was, however, no question of helping reconstruct a Pakistani bunker.
To the radical tourists nurtured by the sadbhavna industry, it was an "unnecessary" controversy because Indians rebuilding a Pakistani military bunker seemed the most natural thing. To them, last Sunday's earthquake was not merely a natural disaster; it presented an opportunity to embrace Pakistan even more tightly. For them, it was not merely a case of contiguous regions being united in grief; it was an earthquake of peace. Their body language, their lachrymose tone said it all: This tragedy was special because it also touched Pakistan.
We have all decried the tendency of politicians to feast on human suffering. What the media-driven sadbhavna groupies have been attempting over the past week is more despicable. Under the smokescreen of human compassion, they have attempted to exacerbate capitulationist tendencies within India. The argument that Kashmir is a contrived dispute and that what matters is human suffering is calculated to whittle down Indian determination. It is a tacit encouragement to our Kashmiri separatists. The humanitarian agenda of the bleeding hearts conceals a deeply political agenda.
Let us never forget that neither Pakistan nor their sponsored terrorists have been taken in by this sentimental drivel. The throat-slitting of Hindu families in Jammu remained uninterrupted by the tremors on the ground. Worse, Pakistan took advantage of the Indian Army's preoccupation with rescue work to push in armed infiltrators across the LoC. President Pervez Musharraf cited "political sensitivities" for keeping Indian assistance at token level. There is no evidence to suggest that the earthquake forced a mindset change in either the Pakistan establishment or society. The hatred of India still determines Pakistani existence. We can pity this perversion; to deny its existence would be dangerous.
India must continue to offer all possible humanitarian assistance with absolutely no strings attached. If Pakistan is not interested in our help, it is no skin off our back. This is no time to get wistful over the destruction of terrorist camps at the epicentre of the earthquake. Musharraf will attempt to leverage the natural disaster to secure international advantage. There will be pressure on India to be more accommodating but it will be in national interest to let Musharraf stew, like Yahya Khan stewed in the aftermath of the 1970 cyclone in East Pakistan. To assist the process, our radical tourists must be encouraged to travel to Muzaffarabad, report the mess and devastate the enemy.

Money and Happiness

Was reading an article on CNN money today morning. There was a survey carried out in which a group of people was asked the following question.

Option A] You are given a salary package of 100K but your contemporaries get a salary of 120K.
Option B] You are paid 90K but your colleagues get 70K,

what option will you choose?

What option would we have chosen? It is interesting to note that most of us, as in the survey , will choose option B even though it is almost 10K less than option A.

The point that article was trying to prove was the relation between happiness and money. If money was directly related to happiness most of us would have chosen option A.
Bottom line- We are not looking for happiness. We are actually looking for relative happiness. We are not looking for salary. We are looking for relative salary. We are not looking for careers. We are looking for relative careers.

Most of us chose IT (Information Technology) as a career not because we were interested in IT. But because we did not want to be left behind others. Hence there was a factor of relative unease.

I guess one of the greatest needs of a modern man is to be better than others- not better in absolute ways.

Why men? Even countries. They are not happy enough if they are self-sufficient. They want always to be ahead on all fronts than other or neigbouring countries.

May be that's what drives a man. Always to be ahead. Not happy but ahead. So next time anyone asks me, do I want to be happy, my answer should be NO. N,O No. Because I do not want to be happy. I want to be ahead. And if I am ahead of others I will be happy.

How difficult is it to detach ourselves from the rat-race? I would say very difficult. In fact impossible. If we want to remain socially acceptable we need to be on our toes constantly.

I really appreciate those who stay committed to their convictions. Not follow the herd. And stick back with what they really want to do. It takes guts, trust me.

I think most of the success stories of this world will tell you one common thing. The hero never followed the masses. He followed what he believed was the right and the only route. But it is easier said than done.

We can't help but constantly compare ourselves with others. We even sometimes get vicarious pleasure out of others failures and often get uneasy with others success.

The last time I was really happy was when I got a better offer than my colleague's in my previous company. But soon that happiness fizzled out when I came to this new company. I realised I had not negotiated well enough to compare my salary with my new colleagues. So my happiness was short lived.

So if you want to be happy , make friends who earn less or are likely to remain below you as far as career, knowledge and money go. Or keep yourself updated all the time and remain in the rat race for ever. -:)