Dr. Abdul Kalam’s Letter to Every Indian

I received this e-mail from friends and feel I should do my part in spreading this great message (even though I don’t really know if it comes from our beloved Ex-President) so that more people can read this and may be (I hope) try to take at least some steps on our own.

APJ Abdul Kalam Speech

Why is the media here so negative?
Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements?
We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?
We are the first in milk production.
We are number one in Remote sensing satellites.
We are the second largest producer of wheat.
We are the second largest producer of rice.

Look at Dr. Sudarshan , he has transferred the tribal village into a self-sustaining, self-driving unit.. There are millions of such achievements but our media is only obsessed in the bad news and failures and disasters.

I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the picture of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news.

 

Here we go AGAIN..!!

A good friend of mine in class has made an uncalled for error in including the Northeast Indians and Gurkhas in a news report that happened in Shanghai, mistakenly reported to be in Navi Mumbai. I feel I need to clear some dusty adage long forgotten.

This is what he wrote:

Navi mumbai – my ass…..$$@##……..Its SHANGHAI
Check out the UPI site.

Here are the real pics………so what are these men ? migrant workers from North east ?…some gurkha regiment?

Could have burned down a few govt buses for this and manhandled some MHADA officials…….sigh
Anyway I salute that free mind which doesn’t comprehend international boundaries….mighta’ taken ‘Hindi cheeni bhai bhai’ too deeply

Look before you leap, guys

And I replied:

I really appreciate you taking the trouble to correct the mistakes, but I dont understand why you choose to use the phrase “migrant workers from North East?…some gurkha regiment?.” Now what do you intend to say here. Are u segregating the people from those regions, as always it has been all over the country, or are u just out of sheer ignorance clubbing together the Northeast race with the Chinese?

When will we learn? When will we accept the fact that people from the Northeast are also a part and parcel of India as much as the rest of INDIANS were? What have we done to receive this fallacy of labelling that hinders us to live and think freely as a FULL/COMPLETE India, whatsoever this term implies?

So, lets us be careful in the words we use as it can hurt the sentiments and values of others. Jai Hind.

Since this is not a kind of affaire d’honneur and my intentions are just to highlight the plight of discrimination meted out to the aforementioned groups of people, I refrain myself from taking the issue further. And losing a great and informative friend is not the way to start a new week full of opportunities. But, I too have observed that everyone in India feels discriminated on the basis of caste, creed, colour, and region. The Southie feels so in the East and North; the people from Central and East India (read UP and Bihar) finds no solace in subsisting in Maharashtra. Then the inevitable question arises, “If we feel discriminated in India, our motherland, our land of birth, does it imply that Indians as a whole are racists?”

The answer to this lies solely on the reader, which brought me to an article written by one of my friend whose writings I have long since admired. Check it out here!

and another ONE.

 

Desiccating SOULS – I

(This poem is written to garner attention to the Govt. and personnel concerned to the plight of thousands of hungry people in the hilly region of South Manipur, caused by MAUTAAM.

“Mautaam” can mean two different things namely, the mass dying of bamboos causing scarcity of it or, famine caused by or associated with the mass dying of bamboo. To me, the latter seems to be the more appropriate meaning. In the affected area bamboos flower, produce seed and die. The rat population multiplies wreaking havoc particularly on the paddy crop.

 

They dug their claws in,
At raw flesh, tearing and ripping.
The hands that hold the tender infant.
Now get to cradle the dying skeleton.

Hunger eating up their heart and soul,
And bit by bit their life, their whole.
Destroying everything that’s inside.
The will to live has long since died.
Stuck in their private cocooning hell.
And there is no one who can tell;
How they really feel inside their head.
How they wake up every morn filled with dread.
Scared of what the day will bring,
Their mood sat on a giant swing.
Time infinitely stretches on forever,
Apprehension ceasing never.
All the while living in a makeshift reality;
Trying to survive with no sense of morality.

 

The Demon Called CORRUPTION

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implementing it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evil dose… we are ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generation.”  – Anon

WHAT IT IS (as if nobody knows !!):
CORRUPTION is a behaviour, which deviates from the normal duties of a public role regarding personal, close or private clique, violating rules against the exercise of certain type of influence; behaviours such as bribery (use of reward to prevent the judgment of a person in position of trust); nepotism (bestowing of a patronage by reason of an ascriptive relationship rather than merit) and misappropriation (illegal appropriation of public resource for private uses).