Taking on the neo-liberals of this developing country

Several months ago, I received the following forward. Besides, desperation, the forward stunk of racism, stupidity, ignorance, arrogance, and scant regard for human rights. So, to set the record straight, I am writing a take on the forward, only taking care not to sound as crass and obnoxious as my ‘inspiration.’ Read on friends….

Dear Friends,

Here is a story that you can pass on to our Indian friends who live, work and prosper abroad.
Best Wishes and Regards

An Old Story:
The Ant works hard in the withering heat all summer building its house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The Grasshopper thinks the Ant is a fool and laughs & dances & plays the summer away. Come winter, the Ant is warm and well fed.
The Grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.
Indian Version:
The Ant works hard in the withering heat all summer building its house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The Grasshopper thinks the Ant's a fool and laughs & dances & plays the summer away.
Come winter, the shivering Grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the Ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.
NDTV, BBC, CNN show up to provide pictures of the shivering Grasshopper next to a video of the Ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.
The World is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be that this poor Grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
Arundhati Roy stages a demonstration in front of the Ant's house.
Medha Patkar goes on a fast along with other Grasshoppers demanding that Grasshoppers be relocated to warmer climates during winter.
Mayawati states this as `injustice' done on Minorities.
Amnesty International, UN, EU and World Human Rights Organisations criticize the Indian Government for not upholding the fundamental rights of the Grasshopper.
The Internet is flooded with online petitions seeking support to the Grasshopper (many promising Heaven and Everlasting Peace for prompt support as against the wrath of God for non-compliance) .
Opposition MPs stage a walkout. Left parties call for ' Bengal Bandh' in West Bengal and Kerala demanding a Judicial Enquiry.
CPM in Kerala immediately passes a law preventing Ants from working hard in the heat so as to bring about equality of poverty among Ants and Grasshoppers.
Lalu Prasad allocates one free coach to Grasshoppers on all Indian Railway Trains, aptly named as the 'Grasshopper Rath'.
Finally, the Judicial Committee drafts the ' Prevention of Terrorism Against Grasshoppers Act' [POTAGA], with effect from the beginning of the winter.
Arjun Singh makes 'Special Reservation ' for Grasshoppers in Educational Institutions & in Government Services.
The Ant is fined for failing to comply with POTAGA and having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes,it's home is confiscated by the Governmentand handed over to the Grasshopper in a ceremony covered by NDTV.
Arundhati Roy calls it ' A Triumph of Justice'
Lalu calls it 'Socialistic Justice '.
CPM calls it the ' Revolutionary Resurgence of the Downtrodden '
Ban Ki Moon invites the Grasshopper to address the UN General Assembly.
Many years later.....
The Ant has since migrated to the US and set up a multi-billion dollar company in Silicon Valley,
100s of Grasshoppers still die of starvation despite reservation somewhere in India ,
..AND
As a result of losing lot of hard working Ants and feeding the grasshoppers,
India is still a developing country!!!
Hows that ?
____________________________________________________________________
Dear Friends
Here’s a story that you can pass on to all our sisters and brothers (definitely only a few of them will have access both to computers and the English Language), so that they understand why our country is still developing…
Read and pass on for annihilation of caste and for building a new society…
An Old Story:
The Ant works hard in the withering heat all summer building its house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The Grasshopper thinks the Ant is a fool and laughs & dances & plays the summer away. Come winter, the Ant is warm and well fed.
The Grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

Indian Version:
The Ant works hard in the withering heat all summer building its house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The Grasshopper thinks the Ant must toil in the fields that he doesn’t own, clean the toilets of grasshoppers because of the ant’s past life sins, and laughs & dances & plays the summer away.
Sometimes, when the grasshopper meditates he remembers what a great game his ancestors have played and crushed the hardworking ants under them!
Come winter, the shivering Grasshopper, as usual, calls for a yagna to please the gods and tries to take away all the resources that the ants have painstakingly earned over centuries, braving the inhuman crimes of the grasshoppers, such as casteism, untouchability, rape, land grabbing, and lies। However, this time, the ants do not come to the yagna; they found a new god!

This scares the grasshopper to no limit! How can the ants go to another God! His mind starts working। In no time, the ants will realize the lies of the Grasshopper’s ancestors. They would realize that untouchability is hogwash! They will also start studying and perhaps even stop doing the ‘polluting’ work. What if they become lawyers, doctors, engineers! The ants have all the labor force; in no time they will build a self-sufficient society. They will have no need for the grasshoppers, who can only after all spout prayers, conduct business, and ‘own’ land!

The grasshoppers realize the imminent downfall of their kind and start plotting! They fall back on their age-old philosophy of divide and rule through lies-mongering!

They float lies through popular media about how certain religious communities are growing. They cause rifts between happy ant families and make them kill each other! They move from one ant society to another and cause more and more butchery, laughing all the while when rivers run red with the blood of ants.

The World is stunned by the deviousness of the grasshoppers.

Repentant grasshoppers, unable to stomach the violence, demonstrate with the very few enlightened ants. Some try and force their way and write the rules to follow. They finally agree that every one must work to earn their wage. But, what they don’t realize is the grasshoppers are still guarding every profession! And, so they ensured the safety and comfort of the grasshoppers for the next 60 years, despite the special provisions for the hardworking ants!

After 60 years…

The 15% grasshoppers rule the 85% ants! Yes, even after the provisions through affirmative action, the grasshoppers through their lies, which the only thing they are great at, hoodwinked the country to believe in pollution, and in the inherent ‘intelligence’ of the grasshoppers!

The grasshoppers take to novel ways in spreading their lies; they make some totally, lies-based e-mails and forward them to all their no-brain communities.

The ants, who have been watching, especially the enlightened ones have been working and slogging. They set up learning centers, they consciously choose another religion, fight elections, question the systems that subjugate people…

The ants are at work…

Just you wait, the ants tell the grasshoppers…now, that could be construed as a threat and so…

Grasshoppers come up with laws every second to kill and butcher the ants, but, with every ant killed, 1000 such ants are born!

Yes, slowly, but steadily the Indians (85% of the total population) are developing….that’s why India is a developing country!

Affirmative Action: A Beacon of Hope

A couple of days back, Kiddy, our little kitten, had a bad accident, and I had to rush her to emergency care at the Tamil Nadu Government Veterinary College and Hospital. Despite all the talk and negative perceptions about the type of care given to patients in government hospitals, I had to go there because Kiddy’s condition was really serious—she was mauled by two grown-up cats; one them her own mother!

In the hospital, she was immediately attended to. Her wounds were bandaged, glucose was administered, and an x-ray was taken. In about 2–3 hours, the entire process was over and I was told to return the following day when Kiddy’s trauma would have subsided. As a young child, well even as a grown-up, visiting a medical college was something big, even if getting into one was next to impossible, what with the high cutoff marks and the near-impossible-to-crack syllabus, which only the truly brainy can aspire to be part of. And, the doctors who passed out always maintained this steely exterior of the learned, whose mere shadow venerated the ground it fell on.

Well, all my stereotypes of the doctors and medical students were about to change. Yes, there was something very strange and different about these students. They were medical students who would soon become doctors, but lacked even a trace of the hype that surrounds such students. Something has changed, yes, something definitely was different. And, it was unique to Chennai. Because, in Delhi, the medical college students participating in the much-touted, but demented agitation against reservation, were clearly different—they had this aura about being the very learned or brainy students, which only reinforced the stereotype I carried about them. But, I wonder where their brains went when they took to novel ways of agitation; they started sweeping the roads to show what will happen to them if reservation was implemented! Clearly, if I was being treated by these students, I will be treated as if I were a thing to be studied! Not as a human, who had just one life.

So, back to the Chennai medical students, who were very different in their approach—
very methodical, but with a sense of simplicity. They could have easily been a cousin or a relative. One of them was getting a syringe ready when I turned and he quietly said, sorry maam, did I spray the water on you by mistake? Such humility! The chief doctor was equally nice. So well-qualified to do her job, but with such elegance and simplicity that with just her simple hello or how are you, she could reach out.

As I was growing up, there was always talk about how doctors needed to be compassionate when they treated their patients. But, if your family atmosphere always made you feel superior to lesser mortals (the depressed classes) how can you reach out compassionately to, for example, a riot victim, a drunkard, a child rape victim, or a victim of domestic violence? Especially, if your patients come from backgrounds you have no scope of knowing or the backgrounds that you so abhor. Then, those patients will naturally become a lab specimen to be studied! But, how is that medical students in Chennai are so different today? Are they seeing a sister or a brother or an aunt in their patients? Have they become compassionate? Which, I believe, to be the first qualification to be a doctor! Is there a special paper on compassion? Or, have their backgrounds come closer to the backgrounds of the common people? I guess the latter is the reason, and it has happened because of affirmative action. The students today was naturally dark-skinned, come from government schools, talk in the local Tamil dialect (not a sankritized dialect), and do not believe in pollution (because they come from the so-called polluting or backward castes). These students are my hope for the future…a future rebuilt…a past reclaimed. No wonder, Tamil Nadu is one of the progressive states in the country. Am truly happy to come from a state that hasn’t batted an eyelid before implementing reservation. Our doctors are more effective because they combine medical science with compassion, which comes not from sympathy, but from empathy.