Instant 'Achche din' dont happen

In the age of Twitter, Instagram, Fast food, we are all getting used to the idea of immediate results in everything. On the May 16^th Mr Narendra Modi was announced to be the next PM thanks to the popular vote he got for his party and the alliance.

From that minute, people wanted him to deliver and I had noticed enough and more posts about his silence for the first 60 days on various social media forums and live TV debates.

While people missed out on few key changes like, Babu's going to office on time, self declaration/ attestation instead of running to a Notary or a Judicial Magistrate or a Gazetted officer for attesting etc. Maybe the 'India' doesn’t see these as significant, but 'Bharat' would have been happy to see these in place.

Finally our PM spoke, from the ramparts of the Red fort, he spoke quite decisively, called for the safety of the girl child, need for toilets and clean India, and also chided the parents of boys for not questioning them enough and pampering them vis-a-vis a girl child. His outreach never stopped from that day, be it on the Radio or TV or Madison Garden he went on and on, now we started to look forward to his next initiative everytime he speaks.

Many a time opposition is finding it difficult to question his ideas and have started looking for other ways to point a finger at him. Of course there is always this communal card, which they can use against him n his party and to make matters worse some of the fringe elements keep raising issues which keep our TV debaters in 'India' busy.

Black Money, is the big bogey which Mr. Modi had effectively used during his election campaigning, however extracting black money is not the easiest things to do. Days have gone where money was being stashed in foreign bank accounts and nobodc was there to ask, today thanks to very innovative methods (designed by financial experts who are familiar with international laws), money simply flows bank into the country through the so called Pnotes and Mauritius based funds after being technically taken out through Hawala route.

Today practically every other politician uses this method to route his ill gotten money and they are clean because they don’t have any assets in their name and the assets are in the name of various companies floated and which are funded by the funds which are actually subscribed by their ill gotten wealth.

Businessmen who teach politicians these methods would always be a step ahead and probably have more innovative methods in deployment. Please do not expect miracles to happen in regards to black money coming back to India and don’t get carried away by the various 'Documents/certificates about money stashed in international banks and tax heavens', these are all nothing but a figment of imagination by innovative creators and popularly circulated by people like us without questioning the same.

While we can keep waiting for the 'Stashed black money to come back into India' the task on hand is to ensure there is no fresh generation of black money in our economy. Common areas where white becomes black are, Bribes, property purchase, Tax evasion (VAT/CENVAT/Customs) our penchant for not asking for a bill, buying the so called cheaper imports from China and elsewhere, which are apparently under valued for customs purpose. If we can desist from these then probably we will do our bit in reducing the generation of black money and ensure growth of our nation too.

Coming back to Achche din, we had enough rot and lethargy that has steeped in to our system, because Babu's were never questioned and never made accountable. Our PM wants to bring in the systematic change by institutionalise the way the govt is run. By ensuring digitalisation, we could have more open access to the functioning of our govt. RTI or no RTI.

Achche din are something like planting a Mango tree, which will yield the fruit after few years of planting it, and it is certainly not like instant coffee, where you put the powder in milk and there it is unlike the filter coffee which needs overnight percolation of the decoction. So if you want stashed money from abroad to comeback, allow the govt to pro-actively work on it with or without Supreme court.

Are we ready to back our popular leader, do we give him enough time to break the shackles of the bureaucracy and make things to move. Achche din to ana hi chahiye our ayega bhi.

Picking n choosing

In the increasing competitiveness and with social media being very active, there is one danger that is flying all around us, i.e., ‘misinformation’.

Our media is picking, in their hurry to be the first to ‘Break the news’, selective words from a speech, statement of a politician, celebrity etc., and going to town with that selective message. This message gets in turn picked up by the social media and there comes the whole world of opinions, views, innuendos and abuses.

Let us look at the context of ‘Toilets before temples’ statement by Narendra Modi, I cannot understand what is wrong in saying in the 21^st century our women are still forced to faecate in the open and our men do it brazenly, all this for want of proper toilets.

Now, we have statement from leaders condemning, NaMo’s statement, how can he equate toilets to temples, someone saying, now, why don’t you criticise him because you criticized me when I spoke about toilets. What is the context in which this statement was made, who the audience were, listening to the speech, how relevant was this message to that particular audience, no one is bothered about all these material facts. Either you abuse or praise based on which bank of the river you are seated on the selective information that has been flashed in front of them.

Today unfortunately media has its own agenda, and are sometimes found pushing their agenda at any cost. This is the biggest problem we as people are confronted with. When information is provided in a twisted manner, you will read n understand the message as conveniently presented to us. This can result in dangerous outcomes.

We as people also are actually not bothered about the facts; we simply do not care whether what we read is true or can be a propaganda thrown at us. Let us look at the forwarded messages/ mails. Some of these will say, if you like/share a picture, some organization will pay money to the unfortunate kid/person in that picture, do we even give a second’s thought, how come this message is not actually coming from the owners of the site, instead coming as a forward/shared message. Particularly funny

when we have friends forwarding a message in popular chat app in smart phones, which says, if you forward this to 10/20 of your friends you will not be charged/account will be retained etc, lo I have sent it, now my account is secure. Sometimes I ask such senders, did they get the promised benefit, reply is always in the negative. This is also used in a big way in creating the fear of god, such messages do not get forwarded/shared by me, and here I am still breathing, in fact writing this piece.

It is important in this age of high speed social networking, one spends couple of minutes to actually verify the news before hitting the forward/share buttons.

Our politicians whenever they are put in a spot by a media person, first thing they do is pick up an issue related to the other party and divert the subject and there goes the entire debate for a six, unless the moderator is a smart guy, we do see the moderators too getting carried away. This is when those statements which have been used in specific context, will be conveniently misused.

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