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Showing posts from July, 2012

The Fragility of Morality

The society, we live in, is obsessed with labeling things either black or white. It plays the moral police for each of its individuals. Since our childhood we are made to see things as either good or bad. There isn't much scope for grey. Grey, which is in fact the reality but we live in pseudo realities which are much more comfortable to accept. The moral uneasiness which comes with accepting the evil in you, is hard to accept. Probably the most difficult thing to accept, morally, would be that the murderers, the rapists, the goons; are just the humans that we are. Their morals and ideologies are similar to ours. When the (fake) wall of morality that we build between THEM and US falls, our moralistic self will get a shattering. We are so comfortable feeling and believing moralistic that we fail to see the evil in us. The evil is always in others while we have achieved moralistic zenith. Gitta Sereny, a journalist known for her unflinching studies of Nazis and child crimina

Food Security of India

India, by virtue of its population, offers massive opportunities and challenges. The manpower and human resource that remains untapped presents myriad opportunities and providing civic amenities to such a large population poses vast challenges. The opportunities as well as the challenges go far beyond just these. One of the major challenge is ensuring food security for the 1.2 billion Indians. This basic necessity for human life is still at bay, six decades after our independence. In a country where almost 50% of the children are malnourished and their mothers weak and anemic; one would have hoped that food security would be one of the priorities of the government. But six decades after the independence, 12 five year plans later, we are still "debating" a Food Security Bill and our expenditure on food subsidy has been less than 1% for the past 5 years. At times when food inflation is at its peaks and the poor are struggling to make ends meet; its quintessential that