Hi. Very nice blog. I\’ve been reading your other entries all day long..lol….

Hi. Thanks for the good read….

Good post… hope you won’t be next on the list

I tend to think that asking us to move on is triviliasing the issue. The issue is not blogs. Frankly, blogs are as yet not very relevant to the country in any significant way. The issue is bigger – it is the freedom of expression and the government’s right to stifle what it does not like.

In countries with wimpy, easily-swayed, reacitonary, and majorly-illiterate populations like India, ever government does that, albeit in different forms. Some do it by changing textbooks and “saffronizing” them. Other “detoxify” the same. Some hound media houses till they shut down (Tehelka). Others ban blogs. (Incidentally, whoever said the ban is lifted is incorrect. I can’t access a single blogspot site still.)

The latest is an attempt to censot ALL ‘A’ rated movies on TV. All these movies will be snipped by the TV censor board and converted to ‘U’ ratings before being shown on TV. Get it? The censor board will actually edit for content. There will be no late night relaxations etc.

This ideological stifling is dangerous and we have to be concerned. So I’m sorry but it’s not possible or desirable that we just “move on” because what the heck, a few blogs have been blocked!

@Soubhagya Dash:
You talk bloody too much. That’s the basic problem. Not your arguments, but the endless mind-numbingly boring repetition, and the unquenchable desire to get a last word in…uff

I mean, look you, if imperial china with one of the most organised bureaucracy could only produce ONE such person in about 3000 odd years, who are we to complain?

Anyway, even the cultural revolution and the excesses of the gang of four left that temple untouched.

Sapienti sat!

Waiting…..

Its quite possible that there is a political equivalent of Gresham’s law – “Bad politicians drive out the good”

the trouble with governance is that it takes a legion of good leaders and administrators to make it run well, and with the inefficiency in the system goes up exponentially with the complexity, requiring more honest and efficient people to run it.

Even a handful of good IAS/ IES/ IFS officers or ministers cannot undo the bad done by the handful of bad ones in an environment full of mediocre people. Mediocrity makes it impossible to weed out the bad ones.

I remember witnessing a case when I saw a state party chief pressurising a junior IAS officer to sanction funds for a non-existant project. The best the IAS officer, who is one of the clean, efficient officers in the system, could do was to say, ‘I will not sanction the money – talk to my Joint Secretary.’

I don’t know what happenned later – but if the JS had been corruptible, the money would have been sanctioned, all set to be siphoned off into party pockets, despite the honest IAS officer in charge of the sanctioning.

This money was for the upliftment of poor rural people in the North-East. If the money is siphoned off, and much of it is, the people who it is for will be neglected to the point that they will feel alienated from the state – and with a bit of rabble-rousing, can turn into tomorrow’s terrorist. For illustration, look at Punjab, Kashmir, NE states, Maoists etc.

Why am i discussing this in this forum. Because i firmly believe that the type of propoganda the government is trying to ban will not work unless the people targeted are alienated from the state in the first place.

That will happen, despite many many good officers – it will happen as long as there is a preponderance of mediocre/ inefficient administrators whose inefficiency hide the bad apples.

The GOI, in its most bumbling way seeks to block the propaganda, and not reverse the alienation. Do we have a hope that it will be more effective than it has been before?