Monday 13 June 2011

What India could buy with all the black money



And this was inspired by: http://www.visualeconomics.com/what-bp-could-have-bought-with-all-the-money-they-lost/

Right click on the image to save it. It won't popup as a full size image immediately. But you can zoom in.

Wednesday 8 June 2011

Of Gods and Godmen


Religion, lets face it, is simply a means to control the people of this world. It was invented, yes invented and not discovered, in order to make humans feel a little less insecure about their place here on Earth. It was a convenient fiction, cooked up by over zealous raconteurs as they looked to the sky, and deduced the existence of god from nothing more than a few strands of lightning, and stars shaped like bears. What it meant however, and the people who invented this realised it soon, was POWER. Unbridled, untrammeled power. Because, humans, you see, are suckers for a good fiction, and like to feel warm and cozy in the belief that there's in fact an invisible man in the sky..watching over us and so on...

These rather deceptive people managed to rule over us, for a couple of millenia. But then something remarkable happened. God was replaced, just like that. He was replaced by what some have called the biggest force known to man, MONEY. And these people, who had hitherto had the utilitarian value of money, POWER, found their power to be a derivative of, rather than a function of money. And no matter how much they'd cry, no matter how they lambasted the apostacy of the common man, it wasn't coming back. No chance.

But they had hit upon a concept here. A large number of people equals a large number of money. This concept has been highlighted very recently by an enterprising young baba. This enterprising young baba owns half of the hearts and minds of this country, and also a considerably large Scottish island. This baba owns 8 companies registered through an intermediary which do not employ anyone or produce anything. But lets rewind, this baba controls a lot of people. Consequently he has a lot of money. Consequently he believed he had a lot of power. Until now of course.

Now he can just make threats about the number of people he can raise at short notice. Now he can just bandy about numbers like 11,000 and pretend like this rag tag militia can conquer the world. Baba Ramdev then, is acting like a typical teenager, who just got his ass kicked by the neighbourhood bully. Baba Ramdev, then, has suddenly received a culture shock, and a massive one.

You see, he got his concepts wrong, and massively. The reason why he has money is because of the power he exerts on people. Not the other way around. He doesn't have enough money to change the world. He has a shitload of money, but that just isn't enough, he can't go around throwing money at people, recruiting them to the army he is building. Most people who join his army would do so out of quasi nationalistic fervour, or as is more likely, out of coercion. They would be good for just one fight, and would disperse rather than destroy anything.

Most news channels have launched a propaganda war against him, which means now he would have to recruit from places which do not have televisions. This also means he could now brainwash people against popular media, and call it a conspiracy theory. He could now tell people he is going to be murdered, and end up being martyred, for the sake of the nation.

All for what? The issues that he has brought up, of black money and the like, were brought up as recently as a month ago. This has been resolved, and concrete steps have been taken. The public was swayed, and most people denounced the government as being weak and venal. Now, out of nowhere, comes this almighty preacher of yoga, and decides, all of a sudden to become the only means of salvation for Indian black money stored abroad. An issue which was suspiciously close to the pulse of the public two months back.

Why isn't he championing AIDS treatments, which he says can be cured through Yoga, or a cure for homosexuality, which he says is a mental disorder caused by that perfidious perpetrator of all evil, the WEST. Either of those would earn him the Nobel prize for sure. Why does he now insist on coming up with an equally ludicrous scheme for a problem which is already on its way to resolution?

Banning of 500 and 1000 rupee notes won't solve anything. And neither will rebellious civil wars involving 11000 armed men. There are no shortcuts to power, and this is what he has to realise. In order to gain any real power, he has to stand up and contest proper elections, just like every other thug, crook and vandal in this country.
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