The Taliban of north India

Name the word Khap panchayat and modernists and educated in India will forget Taliban in tyranny and will start a cacophony of atrocities. Well, if you compare a firecracker with a nuclear bomb and get scared then nothing can help you. In December 2014, the law minister of India had condemned Khaps as unconstitutional bodies. How many social bodies belonging to different religions and communities will he declare unconstitutional that come under criticism on account of their deviation from the mainstream conventions??!! The basic mistake committed by khap critics is that they put these social bodies under the sledgehammer of their judgement on the basis of gross generalizations on account of few abstract cases. Obviously the worst critics of khaps are urban based intelligentsia who do not know how things work in rural areas where people are forced to take shelter under a common sky, unlike the urban individualistic mode of life where you need not bother about anybody around you. Rural ways and means of life, particularly in Jat society in Haryana, are too simple and too complex for city gentry to understand and comment upon. It is very easy to compare Khaps with Taliban, but all of us know that it is grossly unjustified comparison. Khaps are not judicial bodies. These are social units that cover the administrative loopholes in rural areas where people agree to certain social norms for common benefit. By surrendering few individual liberties, this system provides proportionally larger common gains. Had Khaps been that bad, dissent against them would have surfaced from the ones who live under Khaps. Quite surprisingly, people under Khaps are almost contented with them, while the whole world around them is crying foul. See any debate on television, you will have some educated super-conscious individual fretting and fuming against Khaps...and who he/she happens to be...somebody who has possibly never been to a real village where Khaps operate...damn funny!!

Vertical towers of prosperity or the horizontal spread of reservation benefits?

Something on caste based job reservation. The issue is politically so sensitive that just an off-hand remark by RSS chief was enough to decimate BJP's hopes in the last Bihar assembly elections. So nobody dares to touch the issue at the practical level.

The so called ‘lower castes’ have been systemically exploited for the last 5000 years in India. There is no doubt that they need institutional support to bring them into the mainstream. Not that the government cannot give them positive incentives in other regard. Reservation in itself is not the end. It is just one of the means to the end. However, in the present system of reservation there are flaws that need to be corrected if the real cause of Dalit upliftment is to be achieved.

I have seen three generations of elite Dalit families reaping reservation benefits to rise on the socio-economic ladder. Like someone’s father is a class one officer in railways. He raises his family comfortably ib Delhi, provides best education to his children. His son, born, brought up and educated in Delhi, becomes a police officer. The police officer’s children born, brought up and educated in the best set up get reservation benefits to get governmental jobs. On the other hand, I am surrounded by poor educated Dalit young people in the countryside who haven't benefited from reservation in any way. They have the qualifications, but in the fight within the reserved category they are easily beaten by the elite Dalit families. So does it really serve the purpose. The cause is served if the reservation benefits spread horizontally across the social strata instead of creating vertical towers of prosperity in the same families where the reservation benefits pile up across generations.

The solution can be: Let reservation be a first generation benefit only, i.e., the children of a reservation beneficiary will not be eligible for the scheme anymore. When a Dalit gets a job on reservation, he/she is supposed to bring up his children in a way that they can compete against the best. It will help in spreading the reservation benefits horizontally to the other poorer Dalit families rather than the vertical compilation of benefits in the already rich Dalit families. Unfortunately it has been the trend so far. Job reservation is supposed to provide more and more people with basic amenities of life rather than some particular families reaping the benefits on account of the already existing benefits.

Love the bad road of your life

Thank God life is not just a smooth road, taking us uninterestingly to a plain destination! Guys be thankful that it is pot-holed and bumpy. The vehicle of our life gets jolts and jerks which are in fact the lifelines for our material and physical being. It tests the vehicle of our being. The latter responds and this see-saw battle releases energy for the engine of our survival. Seen rotting, rusting vehicle chases in dump-yards? They re at rest. The don’t move and aren’t thus part of the expansion of the cosmic energy. One is alive as long as one is connected to the threads of cosmic expansion, be it a leave on a twig, or a tree, an elephant or a mosquito. It’s only the movement. You are relevant as long as you are moving in the scheme of things. So guys if your road appears bumpier than others, just feel the sea-storm of energy your system is creating not just for your own survival but for the common cause of creation and survival at the universal level as well. As a struggler you contribute far more to a great unseen cause than it appears on the common plain of our material existence.

Walk ahead to be a social phenomenon and not just stay a natural phenomenon you are born as

Contradiction is inherent in nature. Positive–negative, acidity–alkalinity, dark–light, etc., etc., these are all manifestations of a homeostatic balance. You know stars are held by this same dual, contradictory force of nature. Gravitational force pulls the molecules to the core; at the same time super-temperatures force the molecules to stay away from the core at a feasible length. The stars smile and shine just because of the contradictory chemistry of these two opposing forces. Remove either of them and the star meets its end. Remove gravitational pull, the star will explode as a supernova. Remove the escaping force born of high temperature, the star will suck into its own core as a black hole. So survival means a fine zone in the twilight of creation and destruction. Natural laws apply to humans as well; they hold the same validity if we treat an individual as a system. A human life is a wonderful phenomena sizzling like a shiny star in the twilight of humility and pride, altruism and selfishness, good and bad, faith and atheism, etc. So greatness lies not in casting off one side of this undercurrent. It lies in just tilting your balance just a bit on the side of so-called good aspects in the pair. Why? Because we are social phenomena as well, apart from being the natural ones. Our consciousness equips us to shine and survive like a star–but with a definite purpose. The purpose of general well-being; of helping others in maintaining the same balance of survival; of contributing proactively to the overall balance hung between two contradictory frames. We can contribute more than what our natural states have defined for us. Believe me! It works. Just help someone in need. It can be a tiny bit. As tiny as an unconditional smile! You will feel yourself elongating your natural self a bit to the positive side. This is what it takes to be being human in the social sense, which is a degree higher than existing humans just as a natural phenomenon.

How can China avoid a sudden demise like the former USSR?

The more I read the facts and fiction of communist dictatorial regimes, the times when humanity faced a roadblock, the more I forget my own collective as well as personal pain. I feel blessed to be born beyond the communist shadow. If God has been merciful enough not to cast you into a communist land in either this or previous births, then you have no right to as for more. It’s already the best blessings from the Lord. It's a divine gift not to be born under a communist regime. Biggest pains you feel in a non-communist regime appear like luxurious sprouts in comparison to the horrendous systemic tortures perpetrated on the masses under the communist regimes. So to me, as part of democracy, the smallest of gains look like the biggest boon. Not that democracy is perfect. It has its own sweet set of nuisance. But these are lesser symptoms of non-fatal diseases like cough, cold, running nose, sneezing etc., etc. Communist dictatorship on the other hand is simply a terminator like incurable cancer.   

Communist ideology is an all-pervading fire which doesn't spare either good or bad. Intended to burn the evil, it stretches the definition of evil too far and turns fiery evil itself. It's a huge stone hurtling down-slope, squashing soots, saplings, petals, thorns and all. A fire needs fodder to burn. The communist ideology needs hordes of victims to survive. There is an endless chain of imagined enemies. Waves of purges. It's human industrialization. Humans just machines and cogs in the production line. And the looking at the ways and means of the emerging international bully, I’m afraid, at the end of it, the human civilization, despite its efforts at capitalist systems, will perish as a machine age managed by the communist system. But still that cataclysmic end should not make me skip my enjoyment of life in a democratic system.

Very often I wonder how communist dictators built cult status with millions of blind followers? It's a simple technique. First they rob people of their faith, turning them atheist. But we are genetically inclined to have faith. In the vacuum they plant their personality. Thus starts the cult of a dictator. Propaganda is used for the dictator's deification. And we have crazy, blinded masses, happy over having their God nearby.

However, the communist edifice which gets soaring high in the sky, also outgrows its sustainability like cancerous propagation of cells. Too much of laws, rules, regulations, legalized forced discipline creates a facade that goes too perfectly to soar too high to sustain its elevation. It then crumbles, perfection rarely sustains. That's why communist societies crumble. Like a castle of cards. It crashes. Like it did suddenly in Russia. To survive, a society has to have its pitfalls, imperfections. The facade doesn't go too high. It sustains. There are plus and minus which cancel out each other like in a democratic system. Oh, the glorious imperfections of democracy. That's why it thrives. In the same way, the well managed, rigid facade in China will crumble. It will collapse. Well, unless they voluntarily introduce some imperfections themselves, some traits of democracy, to make it pliable, some allowance of mischief, some humour, some criticism to bring down the upper stories of the facade which has gone too high. It won't fall then.