[Reader-list] Varun's speech blues

[Rakesh Iyer]

Dear Javed ji (and all)

I think one must look at this from the perspective of those onlookers who
may have heard the speech. While what you had said is one brave point, the
fact is that for every person (except today's suicide bombers), the utmost
respect is for one's own life. And while it is true that everybody wants the
law to function properly in principle, in reality everybody tries to save
their own skin, life and sometimes reputation. And those people won't be
protected by your or mine brave points, for this is how our democracy works.


As for hypocrisy, who cares? The UPA and the NDA will break today and will
come back again tomorrow; SP can support or not support the UPA as and when
it wishes; and other things can also happen or not happen depending on the
politicians' importance to it; they have already accepted they are
hypocritic, and when one looks at them, one realizes Indian democracy is at
a stage where the politicians are indirectly saying: 'Do what you can, it
hardly matters'.

It's an absolutely depressing situation to look at where we have reached in
our 60 years of independence, with very few achievements, and huge disasters
in democratic functioning. And when the people know the system will never
work properly, by stating the truth, they would only be doing what failed
suicide bombers do: just die themselves. And the cost of a life in their
eyes, is more than the cost of obtaining justice.

After all, 'jaan bachchi to laakhon paaye'. And not for nothing, are movies
like 'Gulaal' true.

So any attempt at improving the system can't be introduced through
encouraging suicidal tendencies of people (where they disregard their lives
in order to obtain justice), but would have to come by providing incentives
to politicians to work towards reform of politics and Indian democracy.

And so in todays' case, we would have to go with these recordings,
unfortunately, instead of evidences by people themselves, in order to take
justice. It's these which could begin a set of good practices to be followed
up during election speeches, though I agree that this is not the way things
should go.

Regards

Rakesh