From Vijay Mujumdar

India could have been a deterrent to China but for incompetence of leadership from 1947 to date & lack of public interest/knowledge in geopolitics. There is more expertise in theatrics rather than anything of substance among our leaders. Defense Minister tieing Rakhi to Chinese soldiers & Chinese making Shaheeds of 40 Indian soldiers or making Chinese leader sit on a swing in Sabarmati are the high points of Indian disfunctional diplomacy. That is why not only historically but even now India is seen as a soft target, very easy to trifle with.  China on the other hand rose from the ashes of civil war, Japanese occupation, atrocities, broken infrastructure & ruined cities to fight the US in the Korean war from 1950-53 & challenged India from the early 1950s. Today it ranks as an industrial, economic, technological & military superpower. There is a tendency here to ascribe China's rise to dictatorial communism. May be so to an extent but not entirely. Otherwise cou...

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Indian investment in Afghanistan! Has all that India invested in Afghanistan gone down the drain? It would appear so. Exact amount is not known but one media report mentions a tidy sum of Rs 23000 crs, including Rs 2200 crs for Salma Dam near Herat city. Wonder whose diplomatic dynamism caused such a huge loss to Indian taxpayers? Is it not enough for us to subsidise Indian farmers, backwards, toilets for assorted poor, NPA of the rich and powerful so that we must now subsidize Afghans? Who has blown our scarce resources on bloodthirsty tribals and crazed Mulla's in a hornet's nest? Who made us lose our money?

Value of Rupee Value of currency is inversely proportional to the degree of a leader's incompetence, policy of reservations, corruption, freebies, loan waivers, crony capitalism & sheer crookedness. These qualities are not the monopoly of any one political party, but have been the core values of all. Hence nosedive of Indian rupee from near parity with US $ in 1947 to precipitous fall to Rs 74 now.  War ravaged countries like Japan, China, Thailand and many more have seen their currencies rise ever so often. In the 1980s one Indian Rupee was equal to 2 Thai Bahts. Now one Baht equals 2.22 Rupees.  Anyone sneezes anywhere & our rupee catches cold! Why so? Is the quality of leadership post independence responsible for taking away the shine of our beloved Rupee? Conversely, have the leaders in the neighbourhood done better in managing affairs of their countries bringing economic prosperity with strong exports and currencies? Perhaps they spent more time at home for hands-...

Right, Center & Left Late Hugo Chavez destroyed a beautiful, resource rich & prosperous country like Venezuela, giving humongous freebies & reservations to buy votes. His successor Nicolas Maduro continued this policy rendering the country corrupt, bankrupt, lawless, and violent. We have our own Chaves-Maduro combine almost everywhere, at the centre as well as in every state. Will we ever win freedom from our Chavez-Maduro duos? We infact have a triple whammy, our leftists are leftists, centerists are leftists & and the rightists are also leftists. Everyone has the same formula for winning elections.

"Pegasus" What is all this hoopla about Pegasus? Does it affect only the Pigs & Asses? How does it bring harm to them? From the hullabaloo in that community one can assume that it is indeed very bad. All this is very confusing and unclear to us simple folks. From time to time such balloons are released in the media to divert the attention of the masses from real issues. For example not long ago we were glued to our TVs/Phones watching the story of gelatin sticks planted opposite Antilia in a SUV in Mumbai. It created the excitement of a suspense movie, clever among us tracked every move of police, CBI, ED etc speculating arrest of top policemen, politicians even collapse of a state government & much more. Emotions ran high for a while but the fiz petered out on arrival of the next scam. Now there is not a squeak in hyper active media about the gelatin affair. Now what is holding public attention is Porn in the film industry of Mumbai. A sleazy subject that has fired t...

Sherni (Amazon Prime) A movie that held us in thrall.  This is the story of a committed Divisional Forest Officer (Vidya Balan), acting in the capacity of a Wildlife Warden. It takes us through trials & tribulations of foresters duty bound to protect our forest, flora & fauna. How rapacious politicians, kowtowing officials, poachers & a ballooning population encroaching on forest lands undermine our ecosystem, is portrayed with objectivity.. It is a sad saga of tigers & other animals engaged in a losing battle for survival. And a fast paced drama of a female officer trying to do her job consciously. The settings, scenes & issues seem surreal. The end had a sobering impact on us & may be on others too who have watched this movie.  How the forest department functions now is obviously quite different from what it was meant to be & had been so from its formation around 1860, and continued to be so in the first few decades of independence. It used to be ...