Day: December 17, 2003

So here is something that does not surprise me in the least: Vajpayee has called for a common currency for the Indian subcontinent.

Actions recommended and taken on the basis of pious hopes are par for the course. Let’s be nice and in turn they too will be nice, that is the pious hope. Let’s take a bus yatra and shake hands and recite some neighborly poetry and they too will respond in kind. Yeah, really. Never mind the fact that a thousand of our miserably equipped soldiers had to die at Kargil.

Let’s have a rail link for people to people contact. Never mind that it also gets terrorists in by the trainloads. And not just terrorists, it also makes it easier to transport the truckloads of fake Indian currency from there.

Common currency? Surely, it already exists: Pakistan prints them already and ships them to India without any prompting.

Pious hopes. Deja vu all over again. Panchasheel and Chacha Nehru and the Chini-Hindi Bhai Bhai. Next thing you know scores of thousands of poorly equipped Indian soldiers are being slaughtered by the Chinese.

The problem is that the leaders don’t have to pay for their folly: only the poor soldiers die in the frozen wastes of the Himalayas.

Forward he cried from the rear
And the front rank died
The generals sat and the lines on the map
Moved from side to side

So sang Pink Floyd. The politicians and netas make the decisions that doom the foot soldiers. And not just them, the costly weapons that the country has to constantly buy condemns millions to a miserable existence.

Cognitive dissonance.

That is what I believe is the primary cause of all this craziness. Disconnect with reality. Not being totally clued in to the real nature of the world, interventions are suggested based on some idealized rosy view of the world.

It is a second best world out there. There are multipledistortions and divides. In such a world, attempting partial solutions can often transfer one from the frying pan into the fire.

Let me save you from drowning, said the monkey to the fish, as he put the fish up on a tree. Good intentions are not sufficient for achieving any utopian vision. More often than not, good intentions without a correspondence with reality, pave a path to hell.

Time for a reality check. Pakistan is precariously close to lobbing nukes at India. At the drop of a hat, there is talk of 1000-year jehads against infidel India. And in this salubrious enviroment, common currencies are being proposed.

Deva! Deva!