Of Gut-Wrenching Poverty

Life in India is full of contradictions, as any visitor to the country will tell you. For someone living in India, however, reconciling these contradictions is essential for survival. It is hard if not impossible, to be faced with crippling poverty on a daily basis and not feel an overwhelming sense of sadness and guilt.
My home state of Maharashtra was recently contemplating changing the rules so that taxi permits would only be issued to persons who had lived in the state for at least fifteen years and can "read and write marathi (the local language)". The move is primarily aimed at keeping migrant workers from poorer states from acquiring local jobs. In a country where a vast number of people are illiterate, where we have failed to provide our poorest and most vulnerable sections of society with a minimum standard of living, where large sections of the population go hungry, this is what the Government imagines up. Perhaps we should soon expect a set of minimum qualifications that all of the urban poor must meet if they want to subsist amongst the more affluent. The irony is not lost on me.

I've seen enough

"I've seen enough, of nothing news,

The blackest stain on history, or last laugh blues.

Not gonna fight not gonna cry,

Not gonna shop around for one flag to fly."

-I've seen enough by The Cold War Kids.

There is a limit to stupidity ... right? Wrong. If you're a right-wing group in India you just keep creating new issues, each more ridiculous then the previous one. (For example, see this or this) But each new issue they raise is just so ridiculous that you have to stop and 'applaud' their creativity. After all, at some point the rational, thinking part of the brain chimes in. It points out errors in your thought processes, it identifies flaws in arguments, it throws reason at you, it hits you with a dose of logic. To reach a point when you can suppress the 'intelligent' parts of your brain and be ruled by insanity takes effort. Lot of it.

What then of the thinking, silent majority (at least I like to think that this is the majority of the population)? How long before they tire under the constant insanity heaped on them by our 'defenders of culture', our 'moral police'? How long before they stop trying to reason with these insane fools? How long before they stop trying to talk sense into the minds of the insane? After all, of what use are arguments and explanations to these mindless and witless few?

Thankfully there are some who haven't given up and who hopefully never will, as this innovative (?) campaign demonstrates. Thank God for them!