Madness in the name of Our Lord - The Indian Way

It's Holi today. For people unfamiliar with the word, it's the festival of colors where people in this country and their genetic protoplasm spread all around the world like a virus, shed their inhibitions and emerge like the Lochness Monster that's been lying dormant throughout the year spraying color and drinking unbelievable amounts of 'bhaang' (Indianized alcohol, that is deemed and believed to be holy, quite conveniently of course).

Here's a more, real description of what this day usually is like for Indians all over the world.

It's funny how we Indians believe that if there is an occasion to be happy about, they need everyone around them irrespective of caste, creed, and sex to be involved in their happiness. Well, 'forced to be involved' is more like it.

Loud music, unruly behavior, drunken stupor, creating a nuisance, disturbing the peace, forcing down one's beliefs and faith down other people's throats - these are the features of any Indian occasion. How and why are these such important elements of celebrating a festival? You're happy - good. Stay happy in your own home. Mess up your own compound, make a noise in your room, play loud music with your earphones on, spray color on yourself, your family, heck...even your dog. The fact that you're happy doesn't warrant you the right to impose your happiness on me.


Naturally, the rowdier elements of society use this opportunity to threaten the innocent passerby & demand money. But then that's an entirely different matter and doesn't even deserve a separate post since that's really their nature and enough has been written and said about it already.

Funnily enough, this is a day when the lower working class of the Indian population forget which religion they believe in and all of them make it a point to be punctual at the households they work in, are at their best behavior, with a smile upon their faces which is otherwise a contorted countenance on most other days.  There is only one factor that brings about this sea-change in their behavior - 'baksheeh' or money. They consider it their right to partake some money that they feel is rightfully theirs on this auspicious occasion. It is the same set of people who in times of national crises or when it's important for people to keep their wits about them, are up in arms citing religious differences as their main grouse and go about killing people in the name of this sudden attachment to their religious selves and texts alike. Hypocrites - all of them.

Every coin has two sides and if you think about it, this is one festival where this madness results in unity of some sort, where people don't distinguish between each other in terms of skin color or just color in general for that matter.

Coming back to the point. If you're happy about something - keep it to yourself. If someone wants to be a part of that happiness, they will come to wherever you are and join you in your reverie. If someone doesn't feel the need to, or the want either to be part of this artificial day-long craziness, leave them be. Stop that loud music, irrational behavior, crazy drunkenness, and make life normal for people who prefer to celebrate their festival in peace and in the comfort of their own homes. In short (and generalizing it a little bit), GROW UP!

"Average Indian spends just Rs.440 on food per month" - bah, humbug!

Yeh main nahi kehta - yeh woh kehte hain! Funnily enough, when you click on the link that is supposed to be their external website...ha!

Here’s a link to the entire story...

First of all, the headline of the post itself: Average Indian spends just Rs 440 on food per month

Right - and I spend just 30 p on electricity. I mean, first of all - who is an ‘average Indian’…and secondly, what constitutes ‘food’? Who is considered to be an ‘urban’ citizen (is mumbai = jaipur)? Who is a rural inhabitant?

Let’s look at this in a different light. What is the average per capita income of an Indian? Ans. INR 29,642 (according to this article). That means the average Indian earns approx. INR 2500/month. That means they spend ~ 17% of their income on food. That sounds slightly believable, but if I were to take things into consideration via percentages, then either I am underspending like crazy or I am malnourished and keep my family that way as well. The percentage spend on food in my case stands at approx. 11% (and I have a family of 2 and I have discounted eating out - which I am sure even the calculations above must have taken into consideration).

The NSSO data showed a rural Indian spending just Rs.12 per month on fruit, while his urban counterpart Rs.28.

Please show me where the hell such a fruit-seller is, or are these people surviving on a diet of a bite of an apple a day? Further, I feel that this data is again misrepresented because they have taken into consideration the entire population who eats fruits and who don’t eat fruits as well. In a sense of the word, it’s not an oranges - oranges comparison (no pun intended).

Basically, this is a very open-ended article which leads to a lot of questions and leaves the reader with a lot going on in his/her mind, as to whether we are being conned in our daily lives with regard to food prices.

And as always, one Mr. Jaiswal says the following - blame it on the Government, no matter who it is.

“”It is an alarming situation, which will lead to severe malnutrition, and will subsequently weaken human resources. The government must reorient its policies.”

And for those of you who are wondering, here is a breakup of the sample size, once again, very very ambiguous:

NSSO survey results relate to July 2006 to June 2007, and findings are based on a randomly drawn sample, 63,729 households spread over 5,573 villages and 7,698 urban blocks countrywide.

Here's testament to the fact that prices are rising multifold than what the government is projecting. Courtesy: http://www.rediff.com/getahead/2008/apr/09fm.htm

Are these guys doing to the per capita consumption what the government is doing to the inflation figures, and what women do most of the time….Faking it?