Staying hungry and staying foolish

I always wondered as to how the preacher of the so called satya & ahinsa with his pious platitudes and tokenism which always never gave the concrete solution to any problem was able to exercise such a popularity among the masses of India to enjoy a god like status. The puzzle was that how this instant saintly acts crash course was so readily lapped up by the bovine millions to ultimately go to their doom of losing one third of their country and yet have the audacity of calling it independence.

All of these answers were found when Anna & Co began their soap opera of Lokpal hunger strike, first for five days in April (which conveniently started after India won the World cup on 2nd Apr 2011 and ended on 8th Apr 2011, the day IPL 2011 began) and the next, more popular one that lasted for two weeks in August of the same year, which caused some ultra sensitive people to name the event as the second satyagraha or the second fight for independence. It was a tough choice between whether to enjoy the entertainment or grimace at the pathetic mentality of the Indian sheeple. It ended as it had started, abruptly, with the propped up saintly figure dissolving his team due to some "issues". The so called crusaders for justice did everything from pandering to extremist minority clerics to shifting the focus from definite names from the ruling party to the nameless corrupt politician.

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And how did it end? The second in command ‘’Mr Honesty” Arvind Kejriwal used this moment to leverage himself to the forefront, formed his political party AAP and in just three years was elected the CM of Delhi. What happened to Mr Kisan Hazare? Well he found other temporary causes for a hunger strike. At the time of writing, no one cares. A lot of former comrades in arms found themselves booted out of the party by Mr Honesty for not towing the line.)

The answer is that inspite of suffering a millenia and half of barbaric invasions and disasters, we still dont know what is good for us and what is bad for us. We are always ready at a drop of hat to put anyone on a pedestal who is big on talk and slogans rather than being big on action.

In classic Gandhian style, the whole show revolves around a propped up figurehead who looks saintly and provides the much needed sacred face

It was a case study in Gandhism and its followers, the bovine millions. The only difference was that in the 1920s it was the unlettered peasants and in 2011 was that it was the educated fools of the middle (actually muddle) class.

Tokenism and Symbolism which are the very foundations of Gandhism are absolutely futile things at their face value which however have an appearance of being something great.

Therefore, going shirtless because so many poor don't have clothes looks sweet but it doesn't do anything to alleviate poverty.

Spinning one's own yarn to promote swadeshi was a surely nice gesture, but in the end, all the cloth spun by Gandhians with their charkhas was not able to clothe a single poor man dying of hunger or cover the battered and bruised naked body of a Hindu or Sikh woman gang raped by Muslim League rioters.

Calling lower caste people Harijan doesn't do anything to allevate their status in the society (no wonder that you cannot utter the word Harijan in public today unless you want to be beaten black and blue). Joining the work of manual scavenging calling it the greatest service to mankind did not make the life of manual scavengers easy. What was needed was implementations of sanitary measures. But then, Gandhism never revolved around concrete action and remedy.

The biggest illusion of the hunger strike fuelled movement was that it was for removing corruption. It wasn't. It was for passing the Janlokpal bill, which according to the thinking of Team Anna is going to make corruption vanish like a tail off a gorilla's posterior.This claim that Janlokpal is the answer to every corruption ill in India is nothing short of mass deception.All the public anger is purposefully being diverted from known guilty faces to the nameless neta. This will result in confusion which is too easy to spread in a bovine mob like us and see the old criminal entities being reelected again.

So to end the corruption in the government agencies which is largely due to the gigantic bureaucratic setup that sucks up the public funds like a black hole, the Janlokpal will set up a parallel bureaucratic network to monitor the bureaucrats who are corrupt. And this parallel network will need to very large to monitor the existing babus.Its like creating a gang of pedophiles to monitor child molestation incidents, a reminder of the adage that sometimes, cure is worse than the malady itself.

Shouldnt we look to curb the bureaucracy itself, make it less numerous, more accountable, less all powerful instead of creating a brigade of superbureaucrats to see that the existing ones behave?  Are you solving the problem or creating a bigger one? And what about the corruption in private sector? When is that going to be addressed?

Plus the inclusion of socialists and progressives in the committee does not make it seem any prettier. Everyone in the team seems to want India to go back to its license raj days when Made in India was a shameful label and shortage was the way of life. They seem to stress on the fact that economic liberalisation is the cause of India's ills when in fact its absence was the very cause. You can find any of them sitting on an agitation trying to derail any new project which aims for power generation, always in the name of "the poor and the downtrodden".The same bunch of people talk of revoking the Armed forces special powers act in areas where secessionism is rife like Kashmir and the North Eastern states like Manipur and Nagaland. Do we want such people to decide India's destiny? People who are mysteriously funded by shadowy organizations, whos sympathies lie with left wing extremism and anti national elements, who are against any kind of development in any field and spit on any symbol or act of nationalism. Do we need the trojan horses funded by dubious sources and having shady agenda and origins to decide our destiny?

The very act of hunger strike until death is used as blackmail by Gandhians. Hunger strike till death can be undertaken only by the very bravest who are totally committed to their cause, someone like Jatin Das in 1929 and Bobby Sands in 1981, both of whom went on a fast for 70 days before losing their battle with death. Never in a million years can Gandhians have such courage.

Never will a Gandhian go on a fast unto death if there are chances of him or her really dying. Because that requires total committment to the cause. Gandhism is an ideology of convenience.Convenient nationalism. Convenient principles. Convenient agitations. Convenient causes. Everything is convenient, with loopholes and escape at the last movement is always available. That is why the country was partitioned inspite of tall claims of it could only happen over the so called great man's dead body.

Ofcourse, people like Indians who have no interest in knowing history, let alone learning something from it and avoiding further mistakes, will never realize this or never look beyond what has been projected to them. Escapist and shameless as we all are, we are so very glad to point fingers at civil servants , criminal elements and politicians, conveniently forgetting that it is us who create them and put them on a pedestal for our own short sighted aims and petty desires.

Corruption is not merely the act of giving something under the table. Corruption is mainly moral and ideological. And we suffer from it enmasse. Financial corruption is just a puny offshoot of it. Corruption thrives in a special kind of environment where the gains of the individual and the gains of the society and country are totally opposite. Inspite of all our self proclaimed morality, we have not been able to merge the two. Unless we can build such a society which can be very assured that the gains of the individuals that constitute it are no different from that of a greater good, all this talk of ending corruption is nothing but a third rate script of a slapstick comedy.As long as we beleive in tokenism instead of permanent remedy and pious platitudes and empty talk instead of concrete action towards a greater good, Bharat Mahaan will never progress beyond being a bickering society of little people.

Laughing Stock

Every four years, the world conspires successfully to make a laughing stock out of India.

Its called Olympics.

It is not an exaggeration to say that India has got the most shameful record in Olympics compared to every other nation on earth. Looks like we find building an intercontinental ballistic missile and putting a satellite in a geostationary orbit is much more easier than developing a medal winning athlete.

 

To begin with, lets be fair to India. It has only participated in a few disciplines like hockey till very recently so hence being a multiple medal winner was a far cry. Even today India has one of the smallest contingent (83 athletes in London 2012, its largest yet) from major nations and participated in only half of the sporting disciplines in Olympics. Contrast that with USA which always has a 500+ strong contingent in all the sporting disciplines. China too has close to 400 and tiny Netherlands too has a contingent of 200+ in any edition of the Olympics.

But then, isn't it unnerving that countries which are a fraction as big as India are sending a bigger contingent of quality athletes and being more successful? They get a medal for every five to six athletes they send. India traditionally got one per twenty or thirty. Most shameful part were the three Olympics of 1984,1988 and 1992 when India's medal tally was zero.

Some of the cliched reasons given for our pathetic track record:-

Cricket has more money and hence noone wants to takeup other sports.

Cash rich Cricket as we know is a very recent phenomenon, stretching back only to the last three decades, while other big sports have got there millionaires for as long as one can remember.Cricket has sustained itself admirably in India,with BCCI now generating 80% of the total cricket revenue in the world.

 

But blaming cricket for this debacle is very unfair.In every country or continent, there are just two or three sports which tower above the rest monetarily. None of the American Olympians can earn even a tenth of what a baseball or a basketball player during three or four seasons nor any Olympian in any European country in can earn even a tenth of what any footballer earns in two or three seasons. But there is no dearth of young sportspersons there, both quality and quantity who want to be athletes.In poorer African nations of Kenya and Ethiopia or the Caribbean, the stakes are even more against people taking up any kind of sport which doesnt pay as well as basketball or baseball. If we go by this logic then the Carribbean young guns should all be going to America to join the Major League .But they dont. Jamaica is an equal competitor to mighty America in sprinting.
 

There is dearth of facilities and funds

The problem is not the dearth of funds but their use. More money is generated from a ODI cricket series than what is allocated for Olympics and coaches for athletes.The ninth largest economy in the world has got its priority wrong in all fields, from public amenities to national security and hence the shameful condition of even public sanitation not available in most of the places. How can sports escape any apathy then? We are more interested in doing Commonwealth Games scams than building a good sporting culture.

Does this argument claim that Kenya, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Kazakkhstan, Belarus, Iran, Azebaijan etc are wealthy and have unlimited funds to train their medal winners? What excuse can we give when olympic medal winners emerge in Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad &Tobago which have lesser populations that any locality of any Indian metro?

Sportsmen, except in sports like Tennis or Golf or swimming come mostly from working class or poor background. They face the same difficulty in their lives that their counterparts face here, sometimes much more if we take the African or Central Asian republics into consideration. No amount of medals or accolades is going to cause a sporting revolution in the Indian middle class or in Indian metros. The next batch of athletes will come from the backwaters and not the suburbs. Its not glittering Gurgaon but the non descript town of Bhiwani in the same state that has seen the rise of Olympic boxers.

South Africa, a country rife in violent crimes with a population less than Gujarat produces excellent sportspersons in every field, cricket included. This, even after being banned for thirty years due to apartheid. China had no medals before Los Angeles 1984. They had not participated in the preceeding eight editions. Since then, slowly but steadily they have replaced erstwhile Soviet Union in the medals tally. The Chinese sporting model has taken the world by strong and cruel as it may be, it is giving results and a better life for the young people that it is training. The Chinese are already masters in badminton, gymnastics, weightlifting, table tennis and diving. They have now excellent swimmers second to none. The only field that they are left wanting is in athletics but knowing what they are, one is assured that they will bridge this gap pretty soon. The point here is that China had non existent sporting culture and facilities to speak of  four decades ago and today they have left that period of history far behind.

Talent is not being tapped

This argument assumes that there is no effort being made to find new talent and that even a TV viewing layman is more intelligent than a coach in this regard.

However third rate the sports scenario in India may be, one has to understand that the coaches are no fools. They painstakingly detect sporting talent going to places which us urban animals dont even know exist. Yet the results have been far from satisfactory. Its not just enough to ponder that how a country of billion and a quarter cant get even a dozen medals. Just population isnt important. Quantity has to be converted into quality. China has managed that. We havent.

Every state in India has a wrestling tradition. Every village in India has atleast ten "pehelwaans" and India has close to six hundred thousand villages. So there are potentially about sixty million wrestlers to choose from in India. Yet, there is a difference of sixty years between the success of Khashaba Jadhav and Sushil Kumar. If you cannot be a world leader in a sport where the talent pool available exceeds the population of most of the countries on earth, then something is seriously wrong.

Poor Infrastructure

India indeed has a poor and a non existent infrastructure in sports. But then, infrastructure is not so very impressive in most of the nations other than USA, Russia,China or the European nations. Most of the medal winners from these countries have had only the most basic facilities. But that doesn't stop them from getting their well deserved glory. Why cant our people do that knowing that succeeding will bring them riches beyond their dreams and will bring golden days for their sport in India?

There are enough economic incentives now for any medal winner in Olympics (even national level players have jobs in sports quota in railways and other PSUs) so the arguments of poor monetary rewards does not stand any ground. Things are much brighter than the dark old socialist days.Even in the mighty USA are the parents of any young athlete driven to the very end of resources going for the training of their wards.It has more to do with poor quality, our best not being there with the world's best. As it was said by a former tennis player from India on India's dismal performance in Olympics "If being on the biggest stage does not spur you to go for the maximum, then probably you shouldn't be here".

Its high time now that we stop harping about India's eight Olympic gold medals in hockey after each dismal performance by the hockey team. Hockey in India began its demise when the country failed to adapt to the fast play due to the astroturf surface which was introduced in the mid 1970s. The last gold medal in Moscow 1980 holds not a very special value as the entire NATO block had boycotted it, making it a truncated competition.It only prolonged the demise. If after four decades, we still are struggling to cope with the changes, then it is noone else's fault but ours. Indian hockey is the perfect example of what state's corrupt system can do to a beautiful thing.

It was the last event of Rome 1960 Olympics, the marathon, Abebe Bikila did not find any shoes that fit him perfectly from the event's sponsor Adidas. Two hours before the event, he decided to run barefoot, just like he had trained. He won the marathon in record time, becoming the first ever gold medal winner from a sub saharan nation. He won the marathon four years later, in Tokyo 1964 as well. When asked why he decided to run barefoot, he replied "I wanted the world to know that my country Ethiopia has always won with determination and heroism". Sports they say, reveals character more than building it. What could be a more apt example than this? This win laid the foundation of athletics in Ethiopia which today makes country the king of long distance running,only Kenya being the other equal. On the other side, Khashaba Jadhav's bronze in Helsinki 1952 couldn't bring golden days for wrestling nor did PT Usha missing and Milkha Singh missing the bronze narrowly in Olympics bring any bright future for athletics in India. And they had trained in facilities which would make today's look like five star in comparison.

The writer is no way is undermining India's medal winners, may it be in Olympics or any other tournament. Each and everyone of them is a hero who has dared to rise above the third rate lethargic system that surrounds them knowing all the risks involved. They must be cheered and cherished. We can always hope that however limited our successes are, they will ignite some spark among the kids who have the potential.

It isn't about having a state run inefficient infrastructure for everything other than cricket. State run infrastructure gave brilliant results in the erstwhile Soviet Union and the Communist bloc and is giving great results in China. Private run sponsorships are giving similarly great results in USA and entire Europe now. Even a merger between the two in India will not give the desired results.

   

It is about having abysmally low benchmarks.We gloat over our achievements in Commonwealth games and Asian games, forgetting that the other strong contending nations like China or South Korea dont even send their best in such tournaments.

It is about the nonsense of "participation is more important than winning" and "padhoge likhoge to hoge nawab, kheloge koodoge to hoge kharab" (If you study, you will be a king, if you spend time in playing you will be a waste). There is no importance given to physical development in India. In most schools, there are just 45 minutes alloted out of 8 1/2 hours of school time for games and sports. Fifteen minutes are spent in searching the sports teacher's cabinet as to what is available to play and so its just half an hour remains to make the most of it. Many a times, this "wasteful period" is substituted with extra classes as exams are so very important.

  

Lets face it, we are a sporting midget except cricket is concerned. And we don't care watching any other sport except cricket. The percentage of people who know about sports track and field events, swimming, gymnastics etc and watch them can be counted in decimals. Except cricket statistics, people do not want to know anything about sports. And we dont want to change it. In the recent London Olympics telecast in India, there were only three major sponsors whose ads played again and again. Tedious as it was to see, it reflected the apathy very conspicuously.

Other nations give full support to their retiring athletes by giving them an option of resuming their education and having a shot at a very decent life after their playing days are over. But not us and hence we see the ugly scenes of former athletes living a life of penury or in extreme cases, Paan Singh Tomar, the national champion in steeplechase who became a dacoit.

It is amazing then, how we expect India to win medals in Olympics while doing absolutely nothing to make that happen, by neither building the training facilities nor athletes and most important by neither building an environment to nuture sport. It is like expecting a child from one's wife without doing the needful.

The fastest runner, the longest and the highest jumper, the farthest discus and javelin thrower, the strongest weightlifter and wrestler have zero value in the eyes of the great children of Bharat Maata.

What excites them most is third rate Bollywood fare, a good marklist, a substandard cricket tournament copied from EPL and medical and engineering seats in dubious institutes.As long as this remains unchanged, India will continue to give best performances yet like six medals and being in the sixtieth place in the medal tally.

I write this as the London 2012 games close with India winning six medals, not exactly great but still a glimmer of hope. In four years time, I want that what I'm writing now be proved redundant and that I have to eat every word that I have put here, but I sadly know that we are notorious for relapsing to our old ways.

   
http://theviewspaper.net/laughing-stock/

Can we deal with adultery like adults?

The public humiliation of a man and a woman by stripping and beating them publicly in a village in Udaipur district for adultery is not the first incident and neither will it be the last, sadly.

I am not going to join the progressive clichés of "what a barbaric thing to happen in the 21st century" or "barbarism, inhuman treatment of two lovers which prove that we are still a feudal society" and so on.

Adultery indeed is a grave crime. Isn’t it painful and humiliating to find out that someone who you love has been cheating behind your back all this time? Isn’t a deterrent needed, something which can give justice to the aggrieved party, regardless of whether its husband or the wife?

Adultery is dealt in two different ways in India at the moment, as a matrimonial and as a penal law. It is a criminal offence under the penal law, but under matrimonial law it only exceeds till giving the divorce (but it has an impact on the wife’s right to get maintenance/alimony)

But on the other hand, although it is a criminal offence in penal law, only the adulterer stands to be punished and the adulteress goes scot free. In case of matrimonial law, both the spouses can use adultery as a reason to get divorce.

Penal law allows the guilty wife to go unpunished, not even accusing her of being an abettor. It puts the entire blame on the third person, who invades the sanctity of marriage. The adulterer is considered 'an outsider to the matrimonial unit who invades the peace and privacy of the matrimonial unit and poisons the relationship between the two partners constituting the matrimonial unit.'

This is unfair as it makes a laughing stock of the husband and puts all the blame on the other man while vehemently denying that the wife is the part of and equally responsible for the whole scenario. This makes the husband take everything out on the third person and not considering any culpability on the part of his equally guilty wife. This is like if your child gets hit by a table while walking, you ask him/her to hit the table instead of teaching him/her to walk carefully.

 

Till the time such lopsided laws remain, these things will continue unhindered. Justice only prevails when there is equal culpability regardless of things like gender.

Before the bleeding hearts call for my head, I want to make it clear that no way can such a thing as public beating and stripping be allowed to happen in any human society. Its a trauma for life for the victims even if they survive unscathed and puts a very question on our claim as one of the greatest civilizations on earth. What difference remains between our people and the delusionary desert apes who gleefully stone women to death for adultery?

These kind of lynchings are mostly carried with the dictates of caste based panchayats who are linked to their counterparts throughout the state. We can therefore forget about any action to be taken by politicians as it means endangering their caste based vote bank. Policemen in rural areas too largely come from the same kind of mindset. Civil servants from the same caste will do everything in their power to prevent the law from reaching the guilty. Therefore these things will continue because the people who have been elected and deputed to prevent this find their benefit in looking the other way. A few arrests here and there will not change anything.

But the bigger problem, which causes these incidents, is the definition of manhood defined by tribal culture or conservative societies.

The infidelity of the wife is looked upon as a question mark on the manhood of the husband. He is a coward if he lets her escape with anything less than dozens of mutilating scars or a few broken bones. He has to reclaim his honour, to wash his face clean which has been blackened by the accusations of his jaat and biraadari.

Surely, you arent a man enough that your wife has to quench her thirst elsewhere, the honourable jaat/biradari sniggers, thoo hai teri zindagi par (we spit on your very existence). The man who is having the time of his life with your wife is a challenge for the very being of your masculinity. Dont be a namarad by letting this bastard escape.

Yes, the aggrieved husband says, I will teach the bastard and that whore of a woman who happens to be my wife a lesson that noone will ever forget. I will reclaim my izzat. 

Bravo Son!!! All the blessings of the elders are with you!!!!

So what follows as a result are mercifully blurred images of the victims crawling and tottering on the ground, images which make cultured and sensitive people like us spill their morning coffee on the table. How dreadful of these village folk to spoil the taste of our breakfast. Don’t they have better things to do, like organic farming?

Now back to the question of adultery, which in the opinion of yours truly is a crime .Crime because it is deceit, betrayal and the theft of dignity from the life of the the families of both the perpetrators. It is a humiliation for the perpetrator's spouse which lasts a lifetime, which can make him or her lose confidence in fellow human beings. The cases of murders done to avenge or to conceal infidelity are aplenty, even in the jungle of us civilized creatures. 

Matrimonial law in these cases is better as it gives the right to the wronged spouse of whether to continue the relationship or not. But hate as we might, it is a bitter truth that the writ of law does not run as soon as one leaves the cosy urban surroundings and enters places where clan and community rules are placed above everything else, even humane justice. And if one has to change all this, the laws in this regard have to undergo a serious change to inspire confidence in everyone that they will be dealt fairly by law.

And no, it is not about education that will be decisive in preventing these kinds of incidents. It is the change of mindset. As long as we have these ridiculous definitions of manhood, honour and glory amongst us, this will go on. No use crying hoarse about the lack of human rights. You will have to have a society of humans first.

http://theviewspaper.net/can-we-deal-with-adultery-like-adults/

Kyunki Mard bhi Kabhi Mard thaa or No Man's Land

When was the last time when one saw a man who looked like a man and who had manly qualities  in a TV serial?

Someone with masculine qualities like leadership, agression, protectiveness, assertion, being the man of the house and pure old anger which are deemed as terrorism by the feminists.

Someone who had rugged looks, who wore a man's clothes and not some pansy embroidered stuff, who had traces of facial hair, who didnt have carved eyebrows, bleached skin, manicured hands ? Someone who walked and talked like a man and not some kid terrorized by the neighbourhood bully? Someone who made decisions and made others follow them instead of just cowering behind someone?

Dont stretch your brains. Because manliness became extinct from TV in the 90s itself.

If one needs to find an example of complete feminist conquest, look no further than Indian TV serials. True, in soaps all over the world, male characters are being pushed into the background but in Indian soap operas the conquest of feminism is 100% complete. This dystopia is ruled by women who have a lot of face on their makeup (yup, face on their makeup. This isnt a typo) and who are adorned with enough gold to make Fort Knox cry tears of shame. The combined weight of their attire and jewellery makes them a weightwalker and not just a weightlifter (too bad weightwalking is not an olympic sport). Their hair has more pins than a porcupine has quills and their minds have more plots and plans than CIA, FSB and Mossad put together. 

Women in these serials come in three categories-

The middle aged heavily adorned and bejewelled ones who are macabre and evil beyond imagination. They can make any crimelord look like a novice and are conspiring against everyone from the cradle to the crematorium.Luckily, their criminal empire extends only till their family which can have between sixty to two hundred members. 

The very old ones who are more devout than all bhakti saints put together, who are instant sources of pious platitudes and doyens of tradition.

The third and the most important is the young woman, the protagonist around whom this whole dystopia revolves around and conspires against. She is young, sweet and mature beyond any scope of the puny human mind with sacrifice, selflessness and goodness firmly embedded in her DNA, thanks to the 'sanskaars' given by her spectacled Babuji in a safari suit and  a purdah clad Mummy. She is shy like a mimosa, innocent like a preschooler, virginial like Snow White, a moral educator for anyone who chooses to listen, an adviser for any situation which can range from someones divorce to someone getting married for the third time, a social crusader...

Infact the TV serial need not even specify that she is a fictitious character.

She has two to three siblings. If its a sister, then she will be a prototype in making of her Didi. If its a brother, well then he will be like any other piece of furniture in the house.

The audience of these shows are overwhelmingly housewives and hence the serial makes these masterpieces comprising of utopian and feminist fantasies, all in the name of showing a woman centric programme.

Men as mentioned earlier, are relegated to the background and one hardly notices their presence, throughly effeminate and without any virility in them. They are of the following types:-

The elders of the house,  the old men speaking philosophically and doing anything else.

The husbands, who are pitiably pussy whipped and henpecked, mere tools for the manipulations of the wily mother and sinister wife.

The only manly looking men in the serials, and hence the villians, chauvinists, having amorous designs on the heroine and the other nubile women. He has to be outwitted by the heroine with the help of her robotic husband. Same goes for the evil mother in law or grand aunt or the envious woman next door.

In trying to create a woman centric story, all these serials do is degrade the woman further and make a caricature out of her. As for the men, it gives the word misoandry a whole new dimension.

Can we even expect to see a hint of reality in these horrid creations?

Why does a family have to look like a brigade dressed ornately? And why do they have to always be never less than twenty or fifty in number?

Why cant anyone dress in normal everyday clothes? Whats the point of the women wearing heavy jewellery in early morning or the men wearing sherwanis or suits during dinnertime?

Why does the house have to resemble a museum or a palace? How many joint families does one really find in urban area? Even while showing a middle class family, the house is as big as the eye can see.

Why cant they actually show men going to work? How can they not show a man earning his living but being at home whenever you see ? Why do they have to hang around their wives all the time, adding value to the already unbearble stupidity?

Why must a widow dress in a satiny white saree? Which century are these people living in? Isnt this a slap on the face of the reformers who spent all their lives for their upliftment?

Whats with this obsession with extra marital affairs and illegitimate children?

Why must there not be a definite script beforehand instead of writing it on the sets? Two years of any of these soaps makes one feel that they have been running since Henry Ford invented the automobile.

Why must the whole universe revolve around the fight between the mom in law and daughter in law? Are there absolutely no more domestic issues to talk of?

And why do half of the women have to shown as some kind of hideous characters full of hatred and envy who can think nothing but conspire and plot the others downfall? Isnt this a mutilation of women in general?

But the most important, being a woman centric programme doesnt mean that men be shown something as dead as furniture or as miniscule as mites. Will it hurt these people to show men who can head the family instead of just speaking flowery dialogues and being a pansy ? Why cant they be something whom their children, wives and parents look at with love and pride instead of  merely some kind of a tailing device which follows the wife wherever she goes?

If this is the general idea of how people want to be entertained then something is wrong with the audience as well and not just the makers. A society is also known by how it likes to amuse and entertain itself. And judging by that, we have built a very lousy identity.

 

 http://theviewspaper.net/hindi-tv-serials-no-mans-land/