Watching a train wreck in slow motion!

The situation in Iraq is getting worse every day. Things are so violent there. Formerly, a VIP from USA could sneak into the Green Zone in Baghdad for a few hours, and get back without his hide being blown off. Not any more! That probably explains why, later this month, President Bush is gong to Jordan, instead of Baghdad, to meet the Iraqi Prime Minister al Maliki. Meanwhile, the Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is threatening to bring down the shaky Iraqi government by withdrawing his support.

I feel like I am watching a train wreck in slow motion!

As long as there is sports and sex ...

I am shocked and angry about the brutality of the UCLA campus police in subduing a student who refused to show them his student id. The videotape of the incident was shown numerous times on T.V. But there is hardly a ripple in the student community of UCLA. I just cannot help comparing how the students in an Indian university would have reacted to a similar incident. The whole campus would have exploded in uproar with massive protest demonstrations and boycott of the classes. Inevitably, the demonstrations would get out of control with the police manhandling or arresting some students. That would trigger off a chain of protests and demonstrations by students from other colleges. Things would have settled down only after the dismissal of the policemen and the resignation of at least one top official of the university! While I do not want such an overreaction, I am disappointed at the lame ‘mind my own business’ nature of the students here in USA. They seem to be quite withdrawn from the current political and social issues. Their attitude is ‘why bother if it does not affect me now’. Other than studies, sports and sex appear to be their only interest. It is a shame because an idealistic young generation, bold enough to challenge the establishment, is the future for a society conscious of the rights and well being of the people.

Long live democracy!

My faith in democracy was restored yesterday. Until 2004, I was a firm believer that the general public is much smarter than what politicians take them to be. Most of the time, people would see through the posturing and slandering of politicians, and support the right person or right cause. But in the 2004 USA Presidential election nothing of that sort happened. At that time, President George Bush had already proved himself to be a lightweight, and a stooge of the extreme religious right and the rich. He ran on a platform of fear, warning that Democrats under John Kerry will not be able to protect USA. He projected himself as a tough guy while the real war hero John Kerry was ‘swift boated’. Public apparently bought all this, and re-elected Bush for another four years in the office! That was a hard slap on the face for me, and it took me many days to recover from shock and disappointment. (I still suspect that something funny happened in vote counting that year, as all early exit polls showed a resounding victory for Senator Kerry). I became more and more despondent about the way things were going on in this country. The detention of prisoners in Guntanemo without any trials, the torture pictures of Abu Ghraib, spying on U.S. citizens without any court authorization, approval of torture as means of interrogation, etc. confirmed my fear that the noble ideals of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are fast becoming obsolete. I got the impression that the U.S. public is no longer smart and can be influenced by five second slogans like ‘war on terror’, ‘stay the course’, and ‘cut and run’. Also, I feared that there would be a massive election fraud in 2006 election also, favoring the ruling party.

The stunning election results yesterday proved that I was wrong about my misgivings. This time people spoke loud and clear through their ballots. They had enough of the lies and fear mongering of the Bush administration. Since they cannot vote President Bush out of the office, they did the next best thing they could do. They fired ruling party, Republicans, and gave total control of the Congress to the opposition party, the Democrats. We now will have a check and balance in the Government, like the founding fathers wanted. Thank God, Almighty!

You can fool the public sometime, but not all the time. Long live democracy!

A lesson for Desi's

I was thinking about Sanjay Kumar the ex-CEO of Computer Associates who was sentenced today for 12 years in prison for corporate fraud. Originally from Sri Lanka, a neighbor of India with similar culture, he moved up the corporate ladder rapidly and became the CEO of Computer Associates at a very young age. He was a shining example of how one with an Asian background, can rise all the way up in an American company. However, I feel that his cultural background was the reason for his undoing. In India and Sri Lanka, he could have gotten away with his shenanigans with corporate accounts and reports. Even if caught, he would have survived without going to jail, as it takes years for anything to happen with the judicial system of those countries. In USA things are quite different. The justice here is swift, and lying to legal authorities is the biggest mistake one can make (Martha Stewart and Gordon Libby will attest to that!) I wonder how many ‘desi’s (people of Indian origin) here realize this.