Hello Bastar
Hello Bastar , a book by journalist Rahul Pandita is a story of the Maoist movement in India. The author presents a vivid and firsthand account of how the revolutionary movement started and is shaping up and the way they are gaining support among the poor masses. No surprises then that the Prime Minister of India recently termed the Maoists as the biggest danger from within to the country.
This is a story of an India hardly seen or perceived by a majority of us in this country owing to the illusion created by economic development that in fact is enriching only a few. This tells us how the poor in this country survive on wild berries they collect from forest and how some poor women around Delhi earn 60 paise to rupees 1.25 after a day of sifting through paper garbage for making a kilo of cardboard.
The book details the ideological and strategic thinking of the leadership of the movement. The revolution they believe should start from rural bases and gradually spread to the cities. The genesis of the struggle lies in unfair distribution of land and exploitation of the mineral wealth and natural resources.
The sordid tale of the atrocities committed on the tribals and the downtrodden by the State’s repressive machinery – the security forces, and the apathy shown by the civil authorities by ignoring their genuine demands makes a rational mind think many times over before dubbing the movement terrorist.
An eye opener indeed
Addiction is the opposite of choices?
ReplyDeleteWhile addiction to wine, women, alcohol, religion or any other destroys health, wealth and relationships; it is people who have the knowledge to make better choices whether in food, or relationships or place of work ..etc. who grow in health wealth and relationships to leadership.
How long can our political systems last as it is now?
“We are indeed in the early stages of a major technological transformation, one that is far more sweeping than the most ecstatic of ‘futurologists’ yet to realize, a greater even than Megatrends or Future Shock.
Three hundred years of technology came to an end after World War II. During those three centuries the model for technology was a mechanical one: the events that go on inside a star such as the sun. This period began when an otherwise almost unknown French physicist, Denis Papin, envisaged the steam engine around 1680. They ended when we replicated in the nuclear explosion the vents inside a star. For these three centuries advance in technology meant as it does in mechanical processes – more speed, high temperatures, higher pressures.
Since the end of World War II, however, the model of technology has become the biological process, the events inside an organism. And in an organism, processes are not organized around energy in the physicist’s meaning of the term. They are organized around information.” Peter Drucker.
Modern management has been organizing itself around very advanced Decision Support Systems. And study DSS is a branch of computer science which is specializing on bringing more and more technology that helps managers make competitive decisions – choices while those who remain in poverty as those who are addicted to what others don’t need.
How long can politics as we know survive or compete with the power of modern business management is also a question that raises a lot of fear. Modern management now relies on down to top evolution of strategies, whereas most of socio political systems are all about few people ‘knowing’ what their followers need.
Isn’t it time that these people learn to organize knowledge and think for themselves.
This addiction to power is so strong that no amount of reasoning will ever prevail over our political class. The worst is our sociocultural ethos of treating those who are in power as gods. Power makes you merciless and this absolute (without an iota of responsibility or sensitivity) power Indian politician enjoys has made them immune to any reasoning and rational expectations. Maoists are not wholly unjustified.
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