Breakfast In Amritsar Lunch In Lahore

The PM's wish list of having breakfast in Amritsar and lunch in Lahore is indeed an interesting dream. The thought of a hot aloo parantha with a blob of butter with thick lassi in the morning and delightful kababs for lunch can make anyone drool, gourmets, gourmands and cardiologists. Dr. Manmohan Singh could always wrangle an invitation from President Musharaf, for himself but this dream is likely to remain at best a dream for the rest of the country.

Relationship with Pakistan is based on a foundation of distrust. In both countries and more particularly in Pakistan a significant part of the establichment will have no role if they do not foment trouble for their neighbour. This is the case and will continue to be the case so long as the process is political.

Long term peace will only be possible with economic exchange. Only if producers and consumers in Pakistan and India see each others markets as compelling, for goods and services, would there be real peace. So may be the economist in our Prime Minister did get it right when he talked about breakfast in Amritsar and lunch in Lahore.

A Dogs Life

The other day a young girl of 9 was mauled to death in Bangalore by stray dogs (not rabid dogs). The BMC predictably suddenly were "seized of the menace" and swung into action trying to catch and put strays to sleep. Equally predictably animal rights activists raised a shrill cry against man's inhumanity to beast. There were suggestions that the dogs could be neutered instead of being killed. Which sounds like punishing murder with castration.

I have mixed feelings here. The child that was killed was the daughter of a construction labourer who was playing around on the roads while her parents were at work. She should possibly have been in school if our society and powers that be had any interest in universal education. The protesters are predictably drawn from the middle and upper classes, who possibly never see a stray dog except when it is being taken away by the BMC.

I am against the killing of any animal for sport or for similar purposes. That is an act of cruelty. Removing dangerous stray dogs (or rabid dogs) is not easy to classify as a sport. Catching them and keeping them in cages in the Municipal Pound may be a solution but again in a country where we do not have adequate resources to educate and feed over 300 million people it may be difficult to find resources for dog shelters. We need to find a solution that is not cruel but is also practicable in our socio-economic context.

Murder Most Foul

Have been following the Nithari slaughter case with both horror and anger. At one level the case is a reflection of the madness that afflicts some of us and is in some way a universal phenomenon. Such mass murderers do surface from time to time in various parts of the world and are often a subject of curiosity, fear, awe and revulsion. Very soon they fade away from our memories and life goes on. Such cases are few and far in between since a vast majority of us are by and large normal individuals.

The revulsion stems from the manner in which the case seems to have been handled or not handled by the police. The inability of poor migrant workers to have their cases registered reflects the feudal nature of our society. In all societies the rich and the powerful have greater access to state services than the poor and the weak, that unfortunately is the reality. Shamefully in ours it seems that poor people's access to state services is minimal if at all. The callous remark of a senior politician that such incidents are insignificant only reinforces this feeling. That such incidents are much more likely to happen in certain parts of the country as compared to others is a reflection of the different stages of social evolution that different parts of the country experiences at a given point in time.

India may be shining but it shines very dimly if at all in Nithari and Khairlanji.