Valentine's Day n Other Days - II

The name of this post is ‘Valentine’s Day n Other Days’, so it would be gross injustice if I don’t write anything about The Day. I think if there is anyone who is really happy on this day are the greeting cards and chocolate companies and not to forget about the mobile operators as they merrily play the cupid and mislead young couples that this was the only day worth eating all the chocolates, presenting each other with cards and of course talking to your loved ones on the phone, in the event of having a gulf of distance between the talking parties. Looking from another perspective, as a matter of fact, the Day is also a pretext of shedding your inhibitions and go and say whatever you have always wanted to say to that someone special. You could do this animatedly some other day as well, but then it would only be animated and devoid of all the sheen and hoopla surrounding the Day. As John Paul Young once sang..

Love is in the air

Everywhere I look around

Love is in the air

Every sight and every sound

And I don't know if I'm being foolish

Don't know if I'm being wise

But it's something that I must believe in

And it's there when I look in your eyes

And so on..

Again, if things really didn’t go the way that you had wanted them to go, you could always say that you were just plainly invigorated with the love in the air :o)

Au revoir

Valentine's Day n Other Days - I

The clock says 2:30 am. I reached home a few minutes ago and I think that today I must have spent the longest time in office in my entire working history of eight months i.e. 15 & ½ hours. AND today also happened to be the Valentine’s Day. It’s not that there is any correlation between the two events; it’s just that when I am in office and I happen to have any good plan to go out and spend some good time, most of the times or rather every time I would be drowned in work. I would try my best to finish all the work by the evening and just when I would stretch with joy at the prospect of leaving from office early, right then before even the thought flies of off my back, I would be given some new work to do. Sometimes I think I don’t even have the right to complain, at least with the work, because irrespective of the nature of the work everyone in my office is overworked. I am feeling too sleepy now, so this post will have to wait for sometime :)

To be contd..

Au revoir

Whose World Is It Anyway? - II

In my last post, I wrote about the containment of information. Almost all the mainstream newspapers are very eclectic in choosing what to publish and what to hide. And one can’t really blame them also. All they are trying to do is to maximize their profits, which is of course their primary concern otherwise they will soon be out of the business.

Nowadays, you can find people espousing socialism and you can find people arguing in favor of capitalism. I am going to do neither. Rather, I will try to compare what Noam Chomsky has said in his book, Understanding Power, with what would Ayn Rand have said on those issues. Noam Chomsky has severely denounced the USA for its attacks on much weaker countries like Vietnam, Libya or North Korea, to name a few. He has also criticized it for its imperialistic, highly monopolistic and world-economy distorting market tactics or its trade policies, in a subtler term. He has also presented an incisive analysis of its foreign policy, which was pursued zealously, earlier on the grounds of anti-communist propaganda and now on the pretext of exterminating terrorism from the world, but somehow the ulterior motives have always been the economic gain. Now, when you attack somebody, there are basically two reasons for doing that – firstly that you want to prove your supremacy over the other and secondly, that by winning over the other you can plunder it of its resources. And more often than not, when you have regained supremacy over the other, even then you end up stripping the other of its resources. In either case, one is guided by his greed for the economic rewards and in my opinion, this is the one & only plausible explanation for any war be it a one-day battle or a hundred-years war.

One of the tenets of Objectivism theory propounded by Ayn Rand is that no individual & no group have the moral right to initiate the use of force against others. Force is permissible only in retaliation & only against those who have initiated its use. Considering each country to be an individual, in this context, she would have clearly demonstrated her disgust with the US attacks because after the end of the WWII, almost all the US attacks on other countries have been preemptive rather than reactionary. In Understanding Democracy, Noam Chomsky has said that the foreign policy of the US or for that matter any country, is largely governed by the interests of the top mega-corporations of the world and the super rich, who comprise just 1% of the world population. The trade practices followed today in general are so distortionary that the rich are becoming rich and the poor are becoming poorer. He has proposed to keep experimenting with new forms of economic models that will help in minimizing the gap between the rich and the poor. But, when you look closely, any economic model that proposes to do so runs the danger of antagonizing the rich and prospering the poor, which more or less rests on the socialist principle – ‘From each according to his capability and to each according to his needs’. And this is what is in complete contradiction to what Ayn Rand has argued in her book, Atlas Shrugged. According to her, if I have the resources and I mobilize them and hire some people to create some manufacturing or a services firm and then it goes on to become very successful and I move into that top income bracket, someone could easily argue that my riches are the result of the exploitation of my employees but that will be untrue. Because in the first place, it was I who had enough sense and foresight and decided to invest and in the process if some profits start trickling in, nobody especially the government has the legal or the moral right to partake a share in it. Now, this would seem to be rather ridiculous in today’s world. The simultaneous involvement of the government, the people and the market forces make it too complex for anyone or any organization to come out unscathed and proclaim that his/its money does not have the slightest trail of any government intervention or subsidies. Not surprisingly, if there is anyone who is really getting benefited through government subsidies are the rich and not the poor. As a matter of fact, if someone is getting rich someone has to get poor. And if everyone became rich, who would do all the work!!

I think that the subject I am discussing here is just interminable and to an extent pointless. At the end of the day what does matter is to make money, and help others also make it. If you can also be happy with whatever you make for yourself, there is nothing like it.

Au revoir

Whose World Is It Anyway? - I

A few minutes ago I finished reading this book – Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky. Well, one of the first things that struck me is the way he has described media’s role in disseminating information. First of all, the basics - Most of us know that newspapers do not earn a penny (relatively) form their readers i.e. from their actual sales. Instead, their cash cows are the big corporations and many small industries who advertise their products and services in their papers. The profitability of the papers, at least the mainstream ones, is directly proportional to the number of advertisements they get to advertise. And advertisements are going to knock on their doors only if their newspaper is widely circulated and read as well. So, looking at it from another perspective, any mainstream newspaper is basically selling its audience (readers) to all those big corporations, who pour huge money into the paper through advertisements. And because of this, they will never write anything malicious about those bigwigs, which could hurt the company’s image, simply because for the fear of losing a wealthy client. If they can’t write anything good about them, they will not write anything bad either. And the story is not very different when it comes to reporting of the political matters. They might be affiliated to some political party or the chief editor will be particularly inclined to one or to some ideology and then, the news you get is also polarized to some extent and the cover up is so subtle that you will hardly doubt the veracity of its contents.

Well, in the first place why do you need to know all what’s happening around your country or all over the world? Do you really care if there was an earthquake in Antarctica or if there was a war in some obscure country, say, Zaptanistan? Not unless if you were directly involved in some way or the other. Maybe you were a relative of someone fighting in the war, and then it might be a Zaptanistanian or someone from the opponent’s Army. And of course in the former case, all the big companies would be scared out of their wits if suddenly it was discovered that there were some real big oil wells in Antarctica and because of the earthquake, they have all been rendered economically unviable. Now pondering a little over this, you will realize that the oppressor (or the victor in fanciful terms) in the war will always try to control the information flow in such a way that its actions are going to appear justified. Then, it is immaterial if the Zaptanistanians’ casualty was in the order of hundreds and thousands. What does matter is the fact that the Oppressor’s forces were successfully able to thwart off the natives’ rebellion with an iron hand and that too for their own safety and well-being. This is what you will get in mainstream newspapers of the oppressor’s country or even in some papers from around the world, if the oppressor happened to be a world superpower. Now, who was to decide what was good for Zaptanistan, the Zaptanistanians or some outside bugger. The outside bugger came into picture because Zaptanistan was a rich country, rich in natural resources and it was doing nothing with them. Well, it was not doing anything with its natural resources because it decided not to but it didn’t mean that it was never going to and even if that was the case, that was nobody else’s business. But, Mr. Bugger is a benevolent man. He wants to develop not only his country but the entire world and sadly enough he’s the chosen one to carry out that mission. Here come the mainstream papers again. First of all, they have to be accurate enough, actually to the finest detail, about the economic or the natural resources of Zaptanistan, so that those figures might take Uncle Bugger’s fancy and he starts showing real albeit fake interest in the development of that tiny country. And now, they have to be inaccurate enough that too to the minutest detail, so that they could drum up enough support for Uncle Bugger’s imperialistic dreams. After all, Uncle Bugger is a democratic man and wants to keep everyone on his side by disseminating false information. So, apparently and invariably, we can see that every information or misinformation is to a large extent dependant on the economic factors. Like, if ever any potential oil well were to be discovered in Antarctica and an earthquake were to come there, I am sure the news is going to be absolute truth as then, it would be a matter of millions and billions of dollars.

To be contd..

Au revoir