Want some hope?

Casino Royale with all its glitz and glamour dragged us in to 2007. Daniel Craig being christened as the best bond after so and so. Discussions about all the new gadgets,guns,gases,lasses and all those sun glasses. Bond is a fancy show piece; he has always struggled between his suaveness and his credulous amorousness. He made us (or at least me) think, that almost all girls are vulnerable. All you need is to dress up well and talk a bit squarish. I stopped watching movies for their action, style and its slickness. For all that matter James Bond doesn't bother me anymore. All he did in the late eighties were to run behind a Caucasian; who always wanted to torpedo some philanthropic activity By United States. I did gobble a lot of that shite but eventually i am out of it. I know that though he might run a long way more and might seduce a 100 more girls. He is not worth watching. For he is immoral or rather those stories don't hold any kind of scruples to relate to. Bond never saved us; neither will he do in the future.

When Bond hatched his plans to bust another bearded terrorist holding a glass of shaken Martini (In a Noida Multiplex) ; we had mothers of 40 children crying outside a paedophiles house. A gulp of martini and fell down a drop of tear. There is neither bond nor the local superman- The police, to address their problems. Well, in the same city with beefed up security and the compound walls reminding alcazars sat Naresh Gupta’s 3 year old son nibbling some pop-corn watching James Bond' swashbuckling stunts. The bitter truth to confront is that; he was also missing for some days but was back in a week or so, probably a lump-sum amount was paid. Media was there scouting for him; It turned out to be a bloody mark on the investment scenario in India. I don't remember though; the stock market would have plummeted some marks on that day for sure. For the mothers of 40 children who were brutally murdered did not have the nifty points to plummet and all their missing children was pushed in to a septic tank. The chief Minister did not visit the area because he believed in a superstition. These issues never bother the bulldozing stock market or the investment scenario. Amar singh the pumpkin headed realtor of Mulayam would have been busy attending a sassy party thrown by some obscure socialite and was probably having a stirred martini.

Rang De Basanti Thronged the Indian Silver screen with a thud. A masala cleverly weaved out of the historical struggles and the present scenario did some serious blood boiling for the multiplex going crowd. Then came the reservation ruckus; the Indian audience who were catered with the usual boy-girl love affair and the complexities involved in it; were easily gullible and RDB clearly exploited it. A RDB inspired crowd expecting to conjure a valid struggle against reservations thronged the streets of Delhi and other parts of the nation. Emails poured in; asking for help and support for this struggle for equality. Effigies of Arjun Singh was burned all around the nation; ludicrous comments like "making the boundary short for a reservation candidate" started spreading around. The up market, illusion-ed new rich in India rarely understood the nuances of this issue. Mere selfishness and inspiration gathered from a movie made them protesters.They claimed, no one in India is persecuted anymore in the name of caste, People who availed reservation in education stood galaxies away in their quality and what not. The ruckus was brought to an end with some stringent measures by the government.

Barely 6 months after this fiasco a Dalit family in khairlanji was butchered in the name of caste. Where were all the equality champions? Nobody protested nor talked about equality excepts Dalits who torched the Deccan queen Express. A drunken coot ran over some construction workers sleeping on the pavements of Mumbai; an old man who got injured was lying in front of a Govt hospital as it did not have enough space to accommodate him. He was shown on the T.V; don't know if anyone came to help him out. Champions of equality seemed to be uncannily busy. No effigies, no road blocks but just some visuals on T.V. Then came the battle in red bastion; the battle of singur. A struggle mired in mystery; A struggle by the peasants for their land in a state ruled by the communist party of India. People who believed in opportunistic politics did not wait long; they joined the bandwagon. For sure anything detrimental for agriculture will effect the nation , According to Boucher, 22 percent of India's gross domestic product comes from agriculture, but two-thirds of the population work in agriculture . Fast developing nations are always strangled with these kind of problems; after a decade or more of land grabbing the Chinese government has brought out policies to refurbish their agriculture sector. Mass discontent over the land grabbing and increased number of protests against these policies forced them to reverse the tide. We tend to realise bitter facts in a slower pace than rest of the world. Considerable increase in the contributions by Service sector and Manufacturing sector is not forgotten. Mass migration from the hinterlands towards burgeoning cities is not a new trend but this has happened on a large scale in the last decade due to our sloppy concern for this sector.

India; essentially a conglomerate of states, rolls over because of a constitution and a democracy which most of us decry about. But this electoral system has been the thin line that has moved this country ahead; if it was not in place, a country like India which incorporates so many languages ands cultures could not have succeeded. Progress and growth has been slow but a decently transparent system which ineffectively/effectively works helped this country to stay together than disintegrating. But regional jingoism has never been on the low in this nation. Increasing disparities and living conditions has forced many of this issues a bloody ending. Professionals migrating to different parts of the country in search of jobs has been a trend for long; Many a places have choked out of this influx and many despise this incoming crowd. The irony involved in this issue is; we only restrict our views to the migration of the middle class; to square it up - The migration of a doctor or an engineer or may be in lesser terms; a Professional . What goes unnoticed is a barrage of crowd that crosses their village boundaries in not so plush state transport buses and on their foot to the nearest burgeoning metro. Bangalore; a city rife with discontent about this influx has so many construction workers from all over India and i suspect their numbers to be more than that of any professionals and dogs that loiter in this city. Travelling to the outskirts of Bangalore in State run buses will reveal this fact. The decline in the rewards offered by agriculture has pushed many a lives to toil in the construction sites under rugged conditions.

Came 2007 and came articles on glossy pages about the lingering hope. Hope about a booming market, justice to everyone, no discrimination or torturing in the name of caste and creed, about a million healthy babies being born, more and more cell phones and what not. We had 2 bombings, some communal rives; an ayodhya shoot out, An-Afsal to be hanged and very few number of farmers around the country suiciding (Lets not forget, in Maharastra the government has prescribed "art of living" courses for these "suiciding farmers"). For sure there has been growth in some sectors and this has been beneficial for some who are not exactly the part of majority- Including me. Hope is quintessential for life, for, without it, life will be seemingly abrupt but glorifying the glimmer of hope and extrapolating it in a unreal way is not the answer . Nor is articulating about it in a way that it does not touch any issues on the periphery. I went through so many magazines that came out with their year ending issues and none of them differed in the contents they carried; It was all about hope and the hopeless confined to small columns as snippets. Are we evading the truth?

Read the magazines.