Right

What is righteous? who is righteous? who is not? and who decides that? These questions can only be answered by subjective introspection.What we believe to be good or evil is only our skewered perception of it.It varies with people, their history, and I hate to say it but their race.

Even Osama bin Ladin thought he was doing the right thing by killing thousands of people. How does that work?.How could he possibly convince himself that what his actions were righteous. To his mind, his actions were somehow going to defend Islam from the US. Does that mean he did it out of self defense? Hardly.

The question is how do people define whats right and whats wrong on a personal level. The closest answer that I've ever got to this question is given by GDR in Shantaram.He says that the only way we can say for sure if something is righteous, is to think about what would happen if everybody starts doing it. For eg. if everyone starts donating to the poor, bye bye poverty.Similarly if everyone starts robbing everyone else, bye bye everyone else.

I think there is this broken side in all of us, filled with hatred, misery and sadistic virtues, that makes us evil.Why do you think we cant get rid of corruption.Its because we blame a certain section of the society (politicians).What we do not realize is that the politicians do not drop out of the sky.They live, grow and come out of the same society that we live in.Its not just them, its all of us. We are inherently evil and try to find ways of convincing ourselves otherwise.

We believe what we want to believe.

Ballad of the prodigal Indian

Yes.Its exactly what you think.
I'm actually surprised I haven't written about this yet.The other day I went over to my cousin's farm house.Along the way I saw hundreds of those white-kurta-clad-self-appointed-neta-assistants that we are all too familiar with.I couldn't help wondering...who the fuck are these people?..where the fuck do they come from?...who the fuck are they supporting?...or representing?...or opposing?
Truth is, more often than not,they don't have a fucking clue!
Later in the day, I was hanging out with my cousin in the election area (it was some zila level election crap).We were supposed to vote for one of the candidates who happened to be related to us.I asked one of the "karyakartas" (party workers) :
"kaunse pe thappa marna hai?"
"khadi deewar"
"heh?" (I thought he was naming some b grade movie)
"khadi deewar"
We exchanged puzzled looks.The party worker was giving me the stink eye like I was the dumb-fuck!
My uncle came and explained that the sign we were looking for was a "standing wall".I wanna meet the genius who came up with this one.
I cannot blame people for being cynical about Indian politics,I am, in fact, one of them .Heck! I don't even expect people to try and change things, because I know it cannot be done.What I do want however is for us to get these dimwit-biker-boys off the 100 bucks a day payroll that they thrive on year after year,only to support both sides of the election.There are just too many of them.
I think there's a reason they have the same dress code for politicians and funerals.

Jai hind