Tag: Commonwealth games

Senti-mental

Senti-mental

Remember ‘Compromise‘?

Human mentality doesn’t cease to surprise. Astound even.

We all have come to believe that the stock markets seem to move much more with tiny human sentiment, and less due to company or industry fundamentals.

Lets have a look at the Sensex movement in relation to ‘sentiments’.

I’ve taken the Sensex merely as a representation of the fluctuation of such sentiments.

When the world was hit by the sub-prime crisis, the all-famous Global Meltdown, Indians saw the Sensex “melt” over the next few months, as shown below:

The markets were beaten down to about 60% of their August 2008 levels. And it took the Sensex about 9 months to go through the meltdown to regain those August 2008 levels.

And August and September of 2010 saw not one or two, but a series of scams happen at home. If we start with the CommonWealth Games scam of (I say ‘start with’ to define a period I’m talking about, as many of us have literally grown up hearing about one scam or another, and have taken them as inseparable parts of our lives); around Rs.70,000 crore. Some magicians seem to make the Taj Mahal or a big truck disappear. These folk must have thought, ‘what the hell, let’s make unimaginable amounts of money disappear’, and that, under the watchful eye of the authorities, who then managed to brilliantly gasp when the scam was brought to light.

Anyway, after that came the 2G scam of around Rs.1.76 lakh crore, and the even harder to digest news of involvement of the Tata Group in the same. Around the same time, we also had the Adarsh Society scam, where shameless, soulless individuals deprived war widows of homes in an attempt to satisfy their own greed.

So, lets say between September 2010 and Jan 2010, we’ve seen three shameful scams involving ridiculously high values. Lets have a look at how the Sensex moved around this time while we all sat in front of our TV sets eating popcorn and swallowing scam after scam:

Surprisingly, the index didn’t fluctuate more than a 1000 points. Despite the fact that such news dealt a hard blow to the economy. And to the image of India and that of every Indian the world over (not necessarily in that order).

Guess all we Indians would say to this is, “who the hell cares about scams or whatever, they’re part and parcel of life. All we’re concerned about is our money. And image, err.. What image?”

And foreign investors observe and learn fast; so tomorrow it’s just business as usual.

(like ol’ times, these are my views, and you are free to comment/ disagree/ discuss).

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India – The State of Affairs…

India – The State of Affairs

Just when we Indians thought things couldn’t possibly get any worse…

We got an opportunity to host the Commonwealth games. But instead, Kalmadi and his cronies stretched their luck way beyond the Milky Way with corruption. And the Prime Minister’s office magically stretched a sanction to several multiples of the same. Wish someone would do that with my pay too. How Rs. 70000 crore of hard-earned money vanished over a span of a few years. And into how many Swiss accounts of how many politicians, we’ll probably never know.

Yet somehow, the poor are still poor, people still pay taxes in the hope of betterment of the country, and politicians still spend it thinking its part of an inheritance their grandparents left them.

And while the CWG scam unfolds, next month it’ll be 2 years since the Mumbai attack.! Two years.! That’s seven hundred and thirty days. And with our judiciary system sitting with their thumbs up their ass, we’re still trying the terrorist responsible.

Perhaps that’s why most crazies (terrorists n many politicians) have the impression that everything they shouldn’t be doing, can perhaps still be pulled off with ease and gotten away with, if it’s in India.

Left to the citizens, we’d have tried and sentenced the terrorist in less than a week after the attack. Who the hell cares about the defense. He is a culprit. He killed nearly 200 innocent Indians, and the legal system gives a f@(& about what he has to say about anything? News channels still manage to keep debating. Courts will have hearing after hearing. And before we know it, we might even be talking about it at the third anniversary.

More than anything else, it’s an indirect way of humiliating those brave Indians who faced the terrorists in that fateful attack.

At the bottom of it all, guess more than anything else, we Indians lack self-respect.

Take any small attack on Israel or on Israelis in the past. It would tell you what or how a nation should be towards its citizens. They’d hit back so hard, not only would it not instill fear in the enemy, but also cultivate a sense of belonging among their citizens.

Reminds me of a hilarious dialog from the movie ‘Bad Company‘ which describes the incompetence, if I may, of the concerned authorities. In the movie, the hero, Chris Rock tells the head of an FBI team, “Man, you guys can’t even find Saddam Hussein! If you told a woman at 8 in the morning, that her husband was sleeping with Saddam Hussein, she’d find Saddam by 8 that night!”

Look at it from the point of view of the brave Indian cops who nabbed the terrorist in hope of a trial and execution. To witness or read about the inane tantrums of the damn terrorist, two years after the crime.

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Look forward to your views. And if you liked this one, consider following/subscribing to my blog (top right of the page). You can also connect with me on LinkedIn and on Twitter.

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