No reason to celebrate

Another day, another week and in fact another year has gone by in my life and when I look back at 26 years of my existence, I don’t think I have learnt enough about this world to understand the grotesque human nature that drives us to commit crimes that even the Satan would spit at. As I entered the 27th year of my eventless life, I tried to retrospect and summarize my life in this blog. Did I mention “eventless” ? So, I gave up on it, in any case getting older ain’t no fun, and turned to my favourite pass time, that is to read up about wars and battles that has wrecked this beautiful planet. There I stumbled upon the one of the greatest crime this century has seen, next only to the Holocaust in terms of number of people killed or rendered homeless. I won’t even try to rank genocides one after the other, because it just isn’t possible. How can one rate someone’s misery above somebody else’s ? That will be a great disservice to the people who actually suffered to an extent that is beyond our comprehension.

Anyway, I am talking about the Srebrenica massacre that had commenced 15 years back on July 11th. It lasted about 10 days and for that many days I think God was on a vacation out of this world or perhaps He just got sick and tired with the Man and left him to ruin himself. Reading about this incident, I was awe-struck at the sheer cruelty with which young men were butchered, women raped and even children not spared. I am outraged ! What sort of animals are we ? We are not even animals, because even they feel some sort of compassion towards their fellow beings. At least, they will not kill each other only because they belong to a different religion or a race or speak different language or simply don’t agree with each other. We are suppose to be a species with better intellectual capabilities, well, I don’t disagree, we seem to be thinking of creative ways to kill and rape people.

I am just amazed at our ability to not feel sorry for mass murdering an entire population. How can only a handful of people convince an entire nation to do things  nobody could even dream of !? No, I don’t think that is possible unless the majority of the audience is corrupt, now I know you can’t just generalize things in this way but I can’t help but think that there would only be a handful of men in the crowd that feels otherwise. If the collective feeling is one of hostility towards something, the demagogues are just too happy to exploit it and the sad part is people don’t realize that there are being taken for a ride.

You know, Adolf Hitler in his autobiography ‘Mein Kampf’ says something to this effect – Give a man an ideology to fight for and he will fight for it more than he would for his own survival. I guess religion, race, country and all the other things that differentiate us from one another can be turned into an ideology and used to further some personal agendas.

We are blessed with intelligence that has taken us to Moon, perhaps we will colonize some other sorry planet in the future too, but I’d rather trade it for a more understanding, tolerant and accommodating human touch.

A week that was !

So, here I am, just when the weekend was about to end, I pushed myself to post this blog, because I knew, if I didn't do it tonight, I will never ever blog again for the rest of my life. It is like kicking out a bad habit, for example smoking. You may read about smoking and how it ruined lives, watch all the videos that educate people about ill-effects of tobacco, see innumerable pictures of patients suffering from tobacco's gift to mankind - Cancer and feel your tummy twitch, finally convince your good self to kick it and that is when a guy in office turns up and says "Dude, lets smoke", like you don't have any other option you do just that - smoke all the resolutions, you just made, to death. Not with me ladies and gentlemen ! I have decided to blog regularly and that is what I am going to do !! I couldn't quit smoking altogether though, but that's a different matter, not worth discussing really.
Now, this week was quite happening really, I am sure there were a lot of things happening in lot of people's life, things that brought them joy, grief, sadistic pleasure, you name it. But there were three things that drew my attention.

Kashmir on boil again
This saga doesn't seem to end. I mean, we are what, now, 63 years old and we cannot seem to solve a problem that has indirectly caused couple of good kick-ass wars with our "neighbour". We achieved our objective of avoiding war at two fronts in the future. Pakistan will never forget that India sliced it into two pieces and had it for breakfast, lunch and dinner, perhaps evening snacks too. And that has to hurt. Just imagine some other country doing that to us !! We would be up in arms, screaming and shouting like there is no tomorrow. So, their reaction in completely understandable. We kicked ass and we don't want them to kick ours. That's legitimate. And so far we are successful, try as they might Pakistanis haven't been able to take away even a 30x40 site from India administered Kashmir, something that I am proud off. Anyway, coming back to the core Pakistan issue - Kashmir, I see that this is a dead-lock situation. India doesn't want to let go Kashmir, Pakistan wants to rip it apart from India and turn it into another SWAT valley, Kashmiris don't have a clue which way to turn. India needs to be little restrained in its approach though. By killing 9 year olds we are just antagonising a population that is already pissed with us. I understand the cops didn't have an option but to protect themselves, but really, 9 year olds ! I also understand that it would have been completely accidental, its not like there are snipers out there looking for innocent kids for target practice. Some people may also argue that protesters shouldn't have brought along a kid to, what is a virtual battlefield. You also feel for those cops who were just forced into firing, when you see a rogue mob is looking for your blood, first thing that comes to your mind is "how the hell am I gonna save my ass ?". Using arms at their disposal is just a neat, fool-proof escape route. From a protester's perspective, when he sees his pal's guts being spilled out on the ground, he will know exactly what to do and that is to pick up stones and fire the projectiles at the security forces. So, it is a vicious circle, which I cannot resolve sitting in some god forsaken corner of the country, but one that can be broken if the security forces exercise restrain. I can rant about this for hours together, but I have a life and a wife, uncommon combo you may say, so I will post about this sometime later when there is no rioting happening in Kashmir. Obviously, I don't see myself posting that piece anytime soon.

Howard stumped
To people who are far away from the workings of the cricket world, let me give you a brief intro to the world of cricket. Ah ! never mind, please go to cricinfo.com and read it up yourself. "brief" is not a word that I should use. Anyway, now Australians are pissed. So are New Zealanders, at least to the outside world, among themselves they will be drinking, laughing and cracking jokes to their heart's content on Cricket Australia. Aussies vetoed NZ's candidate and ICC vetoed Aussies's candidate. What goes around, comes around. Now the Aussies like Gideon Haigh are livid for no apparent reason. He conveniently ignores the fact that NZ were browbeaten to support Howard, who is despised by Afro-Asian countries. He thinks Howard will bring transparency to the ICC. Nothing can be farther than the truth. Howard is a bloody politician and politicians are always just that, irrespective of caste, creed, religion, race etc. Haigh seem to have hopes on someone who the Aussies themselves don't trust. Haigh hasn’t been able to digest the fact that India is ruling the roost. I don't understand what he expects. There is a piece in cricinfo.com by Harsha Bogle, which basically says people who have power will exercise it specially when their position is threatened by someone. This is true not only in cricket but in all walks of life. Heard of a country called United States ? It basically destroyed another country simply because their President didn't agree with the Americans. Bush lied about Iraq having WMDs, but who the hell cares now ! Not a single country had the balls to stop them back then. What India did in ICC was absolutely nothing ! Howard is a person known to have a racial bias and that is a good enough reason to keep him out.

Paraguay should be given the World Cup
I need not say much here. All the men of this planet, please send in your petitions to FIFA to give away the World Cup to Paraguay this time ! They need it desperately, so do we ;)