Benny's blog

Benny is my best friend from college. He is an aspiring author and talented artist. I introduced him to blogs a few weeks ago when I visited him in Holland. Benny took to blogs like a fish to water. He has already made over 70 entries in his blog. (Benny). While my blogs are sporadic and talk about simple day to day events, Benny’s blogs discuss heavy topics like the ‘Oneness of the Universe’. I enjoy them, although I have to read them a few times to understand! Here is a sample:

Progress at what cost?

Yesterday I happened to read a shocking news. It concerned a young mother of 32 who in desperation killed her four babies. It happened in a quiet Austrian town, Graz by name; and it could have happened anywhere in Graz or Littleton anywhere. Let us face it. Families are all under siege. In one way or other. What made that mother react in panic and dispose off her newborn babies in a gruesome manner? It goes against every natural instinct of motherhood. What brought such an uncharacteristic response from a woman has to be explained from our age. Lives of quiet desperation on an overdrive. It makes such a din here and there. Such acts are the symptom of the present age fragmented by the very progress which the world was made to believe in. Science and technology for the progress of mankind. Modern technology makes life easier for some. But would that be Progress? Poppycock!

As we know technology divides rich and poor; technology in order to work well would require infrastructure firstly and it requires money. (In place where there are no proper roads or steady supply of electricity technology shudders to stop over.) Individuals and small entrepreneurs cannot hold their against big money and mega corporations (which are weighted in their favor by the very government that is duty bound to be fair and equitable.)
In Europe at present governments are all in a hurry to copy the free market economy as practised in the USA; so we have EU constituted like an exclusive club with 25 members. The EU has both poor and rich nations set to run at a high speed and against headwinds. The fact that France and the Netherlands rejected the draft for the new constitution underlines their fear of being sold down the river by politicians in the name of free market economy.
Why should not Europe or for that matter any nation look well to preserve social welfare of her citizens as the central plank of progress? But progress like juggernaut shall not be stayed. Only that wise governments shall by effective checks and balances protect those people ( who are weak and underprivileged) from caving in.

Benny

The Netherlands