Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Sacrifice?

Its that time of the year when the media does the annual academic results dance and props up all and sundry e.g. Seen on NDTV..a girl chose to not do some dance with SRK and concentrated on her studies ..when interviewed she said thus "My sacrifice really paid off...." Sacrifice?? Hello?
On a related and more serious note the IIT-JEE results are also out. Those lucky few who made it are of course happy and should be. The news stories point out that about 250000 applicants vie for the ~4600 seats and then go on to how difficult it is to get through the test blah blah. None however raises the more serious issues of why in our country is there a shortfall of quality education. Why should we be able to grant the best engineering education to only 4,600 students every year in a country of a billion people? Where's the rot? What's stagnating the education industry? Who benefits from this constricted supply? Why do most of the engineering colleges in the country have a politician connection? These are the questions that they need to probe and air rather than the banal stuff that they dish out yearly.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Modi, Art and Lions

A lot of the (very few remaining) Asiatic lions in Gujarat's Gir sanctuary have recently died raising alarms with the conservationists. Some therefore asked for some of the lions to be moved to another sanctuary. But the Gujarat govt said that these lions are the pride of Gujarat..well that is true you know...a pride of lions living anywhere would be a pride of that place then won't it :-).
Elsewhere in the state right wingers called out an attack on an art exhibition alleging obscenity. We all know that our tradition and religion "was open" in matters of sexuality. Go to Khajuraho towards the north, Halibeedu and Belur temples (Note: _temples_ ) towards the south and plenty more I guess and you ll know. (I hate to repeat these examples again and again but in the interests of contributing to the collective liberal voice I shall do it anyways.) Look at the site Kamat's Potpourri for a collection of images and essays describing our rich and open heritage. But we are digressing here..
I want to add another reason for the movement of lions out of Gujarat. Given the ideas of obscenity that some people have in Gujarat I am afraid that the lions there might soon stop fornicating..what if some wild VHP-BJP animal takes objection about the pride of Gujarat indulging in indecent acts and gets them jailed or killed :p. I say get lions out now.