AYON'S Thoughts

Demonetization - It made me feel so poor, so inferior these days. I am a central government employee with my salary as the sole source of income. Every year I pay tax which pinches my pocket dearly, still I had a sense of satisfaction I was honestly paying more taxes than many of my more affluent friends who earn from other sources. They manipulate the records to pay much lower taxes than me. But damn Modi. My superiority complex is now threatened. Why on earth did he have to take such a drastic step? The status quo would have been better. We Indians are programmed for status quo. We resist changes and we love to see things stagnant. So, whenever there is a change of any sort we protest. We don’t want better emission norms because that would mean our old cars need to be changed. We don’t want changes in the education system, for those yellow notes that have been preserved over the ages will be trashed. And how can these be trashed, after all these are a part of our heritage. Actually...

As I was watching an advertisement of some car tyre, this thought crossed my mind – do we always need to be politically correct? In that commercial a kid writes about his day out in his Dad’s car where he goes for an adventure and meets a monster that smiles at him. So far the visuals are fine. But in the next visual the monster is shown as a dead branch of a tree. That makes me ponder, do we need to kill imagination of kids in order to be politically correct. I ask this question because when I was a child I used to listen to stories and fables. In those stories the animals, birds and trees used to speak, there were giants and elves and gnomes and fairies and blood thirsty monsters. In tales of mythology there were Rakshasas and Asuras. Even a few years back there was the Harry Potter series with wizards and witches. But then some voices could be heard, some religious leaders on one hand and rationalists on the other opposed these books, though their reasons and domains were absolu...