Thursday, November 20, 2008

Sauce Wars, Embarassing Typos and my ruminations on Democracy!!!!!

I have nothing else to do today so i am clearing up my backlog of posts and now i have settled on writing this too. Interesting things have happened in the last 24 hours.
When I went to Pizza Hut last night, fighting with a bottle of tomato sauce was not on my agenda however i landed up doing just that. For about 2-3 minutes I struggled to get a single drop of sauce out of the bottle while my whole body jerked up and down to the rythmic movements of my hand. The sauce finally yielded to my repeated attempts and finally, out came from the bottle some fresh, tasty looking tomato sauce to go with my Garlic Bread Exotica... yummy.. which brings me back to the question... is there is no standard viscosity for tomato sauce ??? shouldn't somebody look into this matter!!!!
Standardisation also involves weeding out the errors to maintain conformity. I was never a fan of proof reading, blame it on my impatience, but this stance has changed over the last couple of hours. If you have been patient enough to read through my story "Coffee Machine" i have used the word "pantry" a number of times and a crazy typo, in JUST one place, left one of my friends moist eyed, flushed and out of breath, because she (yeah SHE!!!! can you believe it !!!)couldn't stop laughing... If you have understood the whole situation I expect you to be in a similar state as she was and I am now the newest member of the "Proof Reading is Essential" fan club !!!
Tragedies apart, there is an eerie air of political activism in my surroundings for the past few days. Suddenly the most insignificant members of the group are becoming the most-soughtafter souls and words like agenda, responsibility, voting, lobbying and parleying have become common day parlance. Welcome to the world of elections and democracy!!!
The strength of democracy rises from the representative nature of power in the system, "Of the people, by the people, for the people" as it is often referred. It, of course, goes on with the assumption that all people have equal access to the power and the utmost willingness to exercise the same. What this idealism discounts is the inherent self-centred nature of the people and the various "facilitators" that thrive in the system, acting as if on behalf on the masses while in fact serving their own agenda. These "facilitators" are whom we call the politicians and should not be confused with the great leaders of yore, instrumental in envisioning the system. The great leaders of previous era have been replaced by this self-serving polity because the next generation of kurta clad, dreamy-eyed, ideological evangelists could never graduate to leading from following and were promptly replaced by a breed of sycophants, weak on idealogy and unyielding on ambition.
Thus, the failure of democracy lies in a short-sighted bourgeoisie, a legion of self-serving, power hungry polity and most of all, the inability to create a stream of leaders, who are ideologically lofty yet grounded hard in political reality.
It might intrigue people as to my ranking of the three major causes of democratic failure. It has been debated quite frequently, and none less in management circles, as to the procedure that will ensure a steady stream of leaders. Leadership has been mystified over the times and worse still, deformed. However, in its original form, it is the primary responsibility of leaders to envision long term goals and help the bourgeoisie understand the same while marginalising the self-seeking political class. With the advent of leaders, a dramatic power struggle is imminent. The bourgeoisie has to play its part in this drama, no doubt, and so will the incumbents, the current holders of political power but as of now, the stagnation in democracy is resulting from a major crunch in leaders and huge influx of politicians!!!!
Hope the times throw up some good leaders. Amen!!!!


PS: Article has proof read. If you still find typos, please feel free to slaughter me!!!

2 comments:

  1. Looks like end terms, especially Eco, can make people do funny things like delving into history ;).
    And you'd better get better with the proof reading. "has read" in the last line should be good proof.

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  2. "For about 2-3 minutes I struggled to get a single drop...... while my whole body jerked up and down to the rythmic movements of my hand."
    -Parasuram 21st century Indian philosopher.

    lol :P

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