--- On Thu, 18/12/08, Perry E. Metzger <[email protected]> wrote:
> From: Perry E. Metzger <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [silk] BW: How Risky Is India?
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Thursday, 18 December, 2008, 12:46 AM
> ss <[email protected]> writes:
> > On Wednesday 17 Dec 2008 9:50:48 pm ashok _ wrote:
> >> I would suggest that you start a private fund to
> raise a mercenary
> >> army / hit squad to do what you desire.
> >
> > Er you seem to have decided that a mercenary army
> would be able to "do what i
> > desire". That assumption is wrong.
> >
> > You think you know a lot of things that you don't
> know a great deal about.
> >
> > What puzzles me is your desire to expose all that you
> don't know in one go.
>
> All that said, people seem to be taking you to task for
> ignoring the
> fact that terrorism is a very small killer which is very
> hard to
> address, and much bigger killers which are cheaper and
> easier to
> address go unanswered. Do you have a good answer for them?
>
>
> Perry
> --
> Perry E. Metzger [email protected]
I doubt it.
Everybody seems to have a favourite gripe, and that is clearly the only thing
worth talking about. For some, it's health-care; for others, it's terrorism;
for yet another, very special segment, it's terrorism as done by peculiarly
perverted neighbours.
For me, at the moment, it's imbeciles who write 'a history' instead of 'an
history'.
The whole thing makes sense at some weird level. Nobody wants to spend any time
on somebody else's obsession; it's kind of obscene to look at these
trivialities, right? when the 'real' problem, as realised in an epiphanic
moment by me and by me alone, is oh, so obviously the only one worth working on.
If it weren't for the evident fact that this particular discussion seems to be,
in Eugen's rather vivid description from some place else, about jumping up and
down, grunting "Ook! ook!" and flinging poo at each other, and rather enjoying
the whole thing, it would rapidly dawn on us that, for instance, terrorism by
our neighbours (substitute your favourite subject here) isn't getting solved
because that's not what people want. People seem to want their local problems
solved; a few candle-light vigils have irritated the pols, and one or two have
reacted, in coarse, unlovely ways (what's with male pols the world over and
lipstick?), but by and large the political classes have caught on and stopped
worrying.
To give you an example, they aren't giving up their huge security entourages,
in spite of public outcries and fairly widespread media publicity; their
constituencies, the people who vote them in and therefore are the only ones who
really matter, are interested in a whole different set of things.
Except when under observation, and feeling patriotic in an embarrassed,
self-conscious 'smile-you're-on-candid-camera' kind of way, people in
Darjeeling, for instance, aren't really bothered about Pakistani terror;
they're bothered about those stupid Bongs going on grinding them down, stealing
all the development money instead of letting Gurkha boys steal it, and grabbing
all the jobs just because they belong to the Party - not the Gurkha flavour of
the month, but those reds down in Calcutta.
And people in Chhatisgarh want something done about Salwa Judum, while the
Karbi Anglong freedom fighters want commercial traffic from the rest of India
stopped until they get their local problems out of the way. People in Singur
don't want to give up land for factories because they aren't getting paid
enough for it.
They'd like to fix that, not deaths due to polluted drains, or Pakistani terror
camps and Jihadi attacks, and the pols get it, although others (guess who,
Mabel?) apparently don't. So that particular set of pols will happily put up
their hands in Parliament in support of a pablum kind of response which keeps
everybody emotionally gratified without really achieving anything, and equally
happily block any kind of real change, like for instance cutting out corruption
and allowing bullet-proof jackets to be bought that allow bullets to be stopped.
And Shiv thinks his book is going to change this? Or, for that matter, you
thinking that looking at the greatest single problem around at the moment, and
tackling that first with all our attention, energy and resources is the answer
and people will do it once they realise what they ought to be doing?
Yeah, right.
How did we get to the conclusion that more education means people get more
educated? Silly thing to think.
Wake me up once it's all over, and we can get back to discussing something
really useful like how many rooms have been booked for the next FoU meeting.
And happy hunting, Shiv. There's a coonskin (the animal, not the suntan) cap
coming to you by courier, if you can hang on a day or two longer. Hope you make
it back to safety with a LOT of scalps. Ears will do, if your saddlebags get
full. Give Davy Crockett a strong, manly hand-clasp from me if you meet him,
but don't let him get behind you. Look what it did to Wild Bill.
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