Spellcheck 2010

I was excited when I read Sainath's article in "The Hindu" yesterday that "In 1963, the government of Maharashtra ended famine forever in the state". Wow ! I never knew that. Maybe because of the famous green revolution in India, I thought. I have read about it. I have read about Operation Flood. Maybe because of all that.

When I read further, I realized how they achieved this was far more brilliant than that! They did it actually by passing a legislation to remove the use of the word "famine" from all the laws of the state! You close your eyes, open it again and read this. It is true. What a wonderful way, what an out of the box thinking as the modern day management gurus and corporates would say, to remove a problem. Wish the problem away and the problem goes away? Are we watching Shrek, the movie, where there is a fairy godmother to do these tricks? Or are we seeing our legislators in action?

But who among us is going to cast the first stone? A lot of my friends across the world still believe the poor are poor because they choose to be poor. Many friends and leaders across the world have their own definition of democracy. I define democracy, therefore it shall. I remove the word famine, and goest forever famine. I declare that the beggars love begging and therefore the beggars do not want to come out of their wretched lives. I believe that Iraqi's love to fight more than they want what I have defined for them as democracy, and so woe unto them.

Who are we fooling? What happened to the metaphor of the ostrich dipping his head in the sand and the cat closing its eyes and drinking milk. We love our cocoons. It is comfortable. Cozy. No heat, no cold, it is wonderful in here. What if the worm in the cocoon thought that way? Where would the beautiful butterfly come out from?

Can we nurture the various cocoons around, so that we take care that the beautiful butterfly comes out of that? Don't kill the worms around because they are ugly. Don't wish away the real issues because they are inconvenient. Because they make our world different from the shining world we want it to be.

Let us ask Microsoft to come up with a new spellcheck and grammar check that removes all the inconvenient and ugly words? Why not delete the word 'conscience' from our hearts and minds? And then we shall live peacefully ever after.