Our government is considering a fine upto Rs.one crore or jail term upto five years for persons indulging in cruelty to animals, including domestic dogs.   The Ministry of Environment and Forests has proposed the hefty fines in its Animal Welfare Bill, 2011 (TOI, 3 July).

In a country where almost half of the population cannot make both ends meet, where a large section of people is deprived of shelter over their head, potable water and electricity, where healthcare facilities for majority of human beings are negligible, where cruelty against women and wife beating prevails, mostly unreported and unpunished, a fine of Rs.one crore for cruelty against a dog is a joke.

I do not how many people in India can afford a fine of Rs. One crore.  But I know that those who formulate such policies sitting in air conditioned rooms, unaware of the ground realities in the country, also do not know.

I am glad that at least one top industrial tycoon has come forward to talk about the profligacy of the rich.  Speaking about a the 27-storey billion dollar house in South Mumbai, the Tata Group chairman, Ratan Tata said, “The person who lives in there should be concerned about what he sees around him”.  He also said, “We are doing so little about the disparity” and “India needs people to allocate some of their enormous wealth to finding ways of mitigating the hardship that people have.” (TOI, 22^nd May).

While top businessmen in America and elsewhere routinely donate a large portion of their wealth for the poor, most of the richest people in our country  continue to find means to make more and more money and to spend more and more on themselves.   We should be ashamed that while some of the richest people in the world live in India, majority of world’s poorest also live here and half of our population do not have proper food, shelter and healthcare.

In the pre-Independence days, inspired by the freedom movement, most of the industrialists in India, including the great G.D.Birla had a very simple life style and spent most of their wealth on charity purpose.  But these days, except for a very few rich persons, like Narayan Murthy of Infosys (who has always lived in a two or three bedroom flat), the neo-billionaires are in the habit of showing off their wealth.

Our government seems to be constantly harping on the growth rate.   But whether the growth rate is 2% or 10%, the lowest in the developing world or the highest, it does not affect the common man.  Benefits of economic growth have never reached the common man in the face of continued rising prices of essential commodities and the growing gap between rich and poor.

Unless some drastic steps are taken to lessen the disparities of income and to alleviate the poverty of more than 50 crores of people, our all economic progress is meaningless.  

As per news reports (TOI, 15 April), uterus of about 226 women have been removed by the private hospitals in Rajasthan to extract money for each operation, even though it was not necessary.  They persuaded the patients on the pretext that if they do not get the uterus removed, they would die.   

Sometimes back, there had been reports that most of the tests prescribed by doctors are not necessary but the doctors do so to earn their commission.  In fact, medical profession has become a big business and majority of doctors seemed to have forgotten ethics of their profession and pledge of serving the humanity.  Most of them charge exorbitant consultation fee and prescribe costlier medicines and tests.  Healthcare is becoming costlier day by day, and thus beyond the reach of common man.

The materialist lust has entered into all walks of our life.

Yet another film has been released today on the subject of a new lover helping his girl to unite with her original lover.  There are striking similarities in the main plot of today’s  ‘Tanu weds Manu’ and Ranbir-Katrina’s  ‘Ajab Prem ki Gajab Kahani’, Shahid-Kareena’s ‘Jab We Met’ and Ajay-Kajol’s  ‘Pyar to Hona hi Tha’ (which also did not have original plot and was influenced by Hollywood’s ‘French Kiss’).  While we don’t know about the fate of today’s film, all the earlier three had been super hits.

I don’t know why our film makers can’t think of original plots.  For decades, Hindi films have been following hit formulas and get their main story line either from foreign films or from the hit Indian films.  Except for a very few bold directors,  the film makers do not dare to attempt anything new.  They don’t lack in film making abilities or techniques.  Technically, our films can compare with the best films from Hollywood.  They just lack in originality.  It is perhaps because the main aim of our majority of film makers is not to make their statements about life, but to earn money by making films on the well tested plots.     

In contrast, producers and directors of the bygone era,  V.Shanta Ram, Mehboob, Vimal Roy, Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, B.R. Chopra, Hrishikesh Mukerjee, Basu Chatterjee and many others, went for the original story line and some of their films were based on great literary works.  Their main aim was to produce excellent, socially relevant pictures and they were passionately devoted to the medium of film to make their statement about life.  Money-making was only the by-product.

How I wish that golden period to come back again!

The Times of India’ has called for voting on ’50 Most Desirable Women’. I do not like the word ‘desirable’. It is a great insult to the personality of women and turns them into objects of desire. Earlier, they used to select ‘most beautiful women; which was quite decent. I do not have any qualms about the ‘sexiest women’ too (as routinely polled by foreign media), since being sexy is also a quality, but the word ‘desirable’, involves a person who is desiring and appears to be undignified, at least to me.

Amid the gloom generated by various scams, particularly the 1.76 lakh crore loss due to 2-G Spectrum Scam, there is some cheering news.  Azim Premji of Wipro has announced $2 billion (Rs.8846 crores) donation for improvement of school education in India. Generally, the Indian billionaires have only one aim in life:   to gather more and more.  Unlike their counterparts in other countries, they hardly spend on social causes.  Here and there, we hear about donation of a few lakh rupees by film artists with full publicity and fanfare, which is just a tiny drop of their ocean of wealth.

Azim Premji was the only big industrialist who came out openly against the wasteful expenditure of Rs.70,000 crore on Commonwealth Games, which money could have been better utilized on providing better roads, education and healthcare.

I salute the kind hearted Azim Premji and hope that other top billionaires would follow his example.  They must realize that their all the wealth is not going with them after this short span of life and only the portion donated by them would go with them.  Swami Vivekanand has said that while donating,  you should be grateful to the person who has given you  golden opportunity to become the donor. India is perhaps the only country in the world where world’s richest and poorest reside.  While a large number of our crorepaties can be counted amongst the wealthiest in the world, almost half of our population are among the poorest and can hardly make both ends meet.  They do not have access to proper food, education and healthcare facilities.  Various agencies of UNO have repeatedly pointed out about the alarming income disparities in India.  With their all attention on increasing the growth rate, our successive governments have failed to tackle the problem of depravity.

Sometime back, I had read that forty of America’s richest persons have requested their government to take a large portion of their wealth and spend the same on social welfare projects.

Would our own wealthiest would follow Azim Premji’s example or of their American counterparts?

The Rediff Blog has been having a quick downward slide.  Earlier, the Rediff Iland used to be one of best blogging platforms.  Almost daily, I used to get at least twenty e-mail alerts regarding new posts of my blogger friends.  After the inception of the new Rediff Blog, e-mail alerts to friends were stopped.  Of course, there were friends’ updates on My page as well as on Home page, but they continued declining as many of the blogger friends left for the greener pastures.  Presently, I am receiving updates about only one or two posts by my friends.  On some days in succession, there are none. It means use of Rediff as blogging platform has been reduced to almost about 1/20^th of the earlier use.

Likewise, on each of my new posts, I used to receive more than twenty comments.  Now the number is shrinking and has gradually come down to one or two.   

When new Rediff Blog was introduced, I wrote to the administrator to restore the unique features of the old Iland.  I posted write-ups too, enumerating about the lost features. In trying to become like other social networking sites, it had lost its uniqueness.  But there has been no improvement.  In desperation, most of the bloggers have considered it more convenient to leave Rediff than to impress upon the administrator.

Thus all and all are gone the old familiar faces.  I am left here, stranded with a very few friends, hoping against hope that someday Rediff would regain its lost glory as a blogging platform.

Sachin, Sehwag, Dhoni, Saina Nehwal, SRK, Amitabh, Amir Khan, Salman Khan and many others have got product endorsements worth more than a crore.  Many CWG medal winners have also become crorepaties.

Our companies are bent upon making more and more crorepaties.  A time may come when India would have more crorepaties than any country in the world. 

But at whose cost?

When a company is  paying crores of rupees for product endorsement to celebrities, it  is not paying from  the pockets of its managers, but from the  general public   -  by increasing the cost of product.  All advertisement charges are reckoned in the cost of production and distribution, thereby making the goods costlier.

Ultimately, the cost of making crorepaties is borne by general public, the common.  customers. 

And we should not forget that we have more paupers, more hungry people than anywhere in the world.  World’s richest as well as the poorest reside in our country.