IS CORRUPTION ONLY BECAUSE OF POLITICIANS?

“My mother is in hospital and I really have  to go, this call is very urgent & this is the first time I am picking up the mobile while driving". These are the excuses which we use most of the times when caught by traffic police and after that and handing over some bribe, we are released. I want to ask, in these situations, where is the politician plating his role? Is only us who want to save time and get rid of our responsibilities as a citizen .

Not only this, what about our selfish motives and desires. Everybody wants to be an IAS officer, get admission into medical and engineering colleges. There is a never ending list of all evil things which happen in the stream of education, a very well known one is “paper leaking”. I want to ask whether our MLAs, MPs, CMs want to get admission into medical & engineering colleges. WE take the 'first step' and then politicians come into picture.

WAKE UP GUYS.WE are human resources. And do remember that INDIA is still a developing country, not yet developed. It is our responsibility to make it a developed country. Our freedom fighters fought against the Britishers. WE must continue their legacy and fight against the evil 'corruption' so that everyone enjoys the real freedom.

Sitting on the couch, with remote control in one hand, we simply comment on the politicians and their doings. Have WE ever asked ourselves that what are we doing for the country? Everybody is just waiting for a superhero to come and finish all this mess.

ROME WAS NOT BUILT IN A DAY. Just first look into yourself, then your family members, your relatives, your friends. Are they doing everything correct and legal in their life? Correct yourself. I am sure you will find many people around you who are corrupt. First speak to them, correct them. If you can’t make a change on your level then you have no right to say anything related to CORRUPTION.

Shriya Rai
Y14 Undergraduate, The LNMIIT

Is the presence of the United States in the Middle East justified?

An American drone struck North Waziristan located on the Pak-Afghan border at dawn break. Somewhere in the killing fields of the Levant, an Iraqi suicide bomber blew himself up, killing fourteen. And that too before breakfast. Is it a bloodbath today? No, just another Sunday morning.

That is exactly how things are at this moment. These occurrences have become so common that we regard such incidents with a very vocal expression that is a cacophonic medley of abhorrence, disdain and anger. But then let us examine such incidences a bit more closely. Let us ask ourselves a question that is long overdue. Where did it all begin?

Now the Middle East has always been a hotbed of political turbulence. Trying to oversimplify this enormous labyrinth of political ideologies would be tantamount to insulting the intelligence of countless men who have gone before me. Men, whose eminence, charisma and power I cannot even hope to match in this life or the next. All I can do is offer my humble, and very normative (due to the nature of this piece) opinion on this issue.

I see this conflict as a sea which is calm with the pallor of death. And along sails this huge oil tanker, causing ripples in the water. Because this is one word that it all comes down to -oil. The oil must come through, and lives must be traded for it. The only thing I blame Europe for as far as this aspect of the war is concerned is,let’s see, developing the internal combustion engine in the first place. 

Now, I do recognize that all the belligerents in the present war are to blame, and some of the powers opposed to the United States even more so. But as a liberal, I feel that the NATO, as a responsible power has a responsibility to quit acting with such petulant childish anger at every small occurrence in the world. The world has already seen the inefficacy of such devices as sanctions that NATO employs. We have seen how the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions plan against Israel, however uncalled for, backfired. No amount of sanctions could deter Russia from invading Ukraine or Crimea. On the other side of the fence, the American war efforts in Vietnam and Afghanistan proved to be debacles that that cannot be repaired ever even by a generous application of the political antihistamine that is apologetics.

It is time for NATO to come out of its false supremacist ideologue that the world is Eurocentric, and that it must be involved in every little incident that goes on round the globe. They have to come to terms with the fact that they cannot do much if North Korea or Iran develops nuclear weapons. Or the Taliban starts massacring innocents in Afghanistan. They must allow ‘nature’, for lack of a better word, to take its course and carry out timely purges against such elements in the form of civil war.

Events in the contemporary world have conclusively proved that any interference may tip the balance of a war in the short run. But if you stay involved in the long run, or 'camp', such wars end up to be much more disastrous than they would have otherwise been. I can give you detailed analyses of such wars, but as I mentioned, this piece is intended to be normative in nature, and more importantly, short.

The bottom line is that the NATO must now realize that every country must go through certain stages of political significance, before it blossoms into a peace-loving and responsible world power. Sometimes this is attained in a matter of years, while sometimes it takes decades, even centuries to come about. Interference if it is at all required, must, therefore be limited to a point till which it is conducive to the political maturing of the country AS WELL AS popular aspiration. It must evaluate the opportunity cost of military expenditure over economic growth at every stage of the war, and should care more about the popular aspirations of the countries they have a presence in.

Vibhor Kashmira
Y13 Undergraduate, The LNMIIT

Why BJP Should Win the 2014 Elections

Time and again BJP's Prime Ministerial candidate Mr. Narendra Modi has been criticized for his alleged role in the Gujarat riots, allegations only with no concrete proof and same is the case with his party which has been accused of seeking communal path to gain victory. It raises a serious question, If BJP by supporting hindus is seeking a communal path then what is Congress doing by granting 4.5 percent reservations to Muslims and what it has been doing for the past so many elections. 

BJP might be resorting to communalism in an attempt to win the upcoming election but at the moment it is our best bet if we are to get rid of the incumbent government which has brought disgrace to the country up till now in its second term and is hellbent to further push the country in an economic depression by its policies such as Food Security Bill. This proposed bill will put more pressure on the overstretched budget (costing Rs. 2 lakh crore). With Modi at the helm BJP has the power and intellect to pull the the country out of the precarious situation it has been embroiled in. 

I don't know much of economics but I know that at this delicate moment when India is staring at the financial depression (thanks to mismanagement and torrential raining of scams in UPA regime) the government, instead of addressing the problem of rising Current Account Deficit (5%OF GDP) is actually focussing on a last ditch attempt to lure the voters and win the election by dumping vast sum of money into the dustbin. If 4 rupees are spent by government in providing food to the destitute people, 1 actually reaches the targeted section and the rest 3 is absorbed in between by the corrupt officials and dealers. The proposed policy has so many loopholes and yet the government is spending more on food distribution system rather than addressing the present problems.

Tonnes and tonnes of food grains rot in the government godowns every year and yet nothing has been done to curb this, nothing has been done to rectify the problems in the public distribution system. At the moment the GDP growth rate has plunged to a decade low of 4.4 percent thanks to congress. Due to blatant corruption and the vested interests of the ruling party the growth is all time low in a decade, Rupee has plunged to 69 (all time low in the history of India), investors no longer want to invest in our country citing the volatile situation and fragile government of the center, inflation is near double digit and yet the government rather than trying to tackle all these issues is busy passing the Food Security Bill and Land Acquisition Bill which will further put more pressure on the overburdened financial structure of the country. 

Lets hope that the Financial System doesn't collapse and there is no further slip up in the current projection of the growth rate of the country till the upcoming election, as it has become an accepted fact that in the upcoming elections BJP will grab more seats thereby snatching the power from the hands of the deceitful congress. Lets hope that we can keep it together till the elections because once the elections are done it will be the BJP government steering the country back to the safe waters and spearheading all this will be the messiah of Gujarat the man of his word, the idol of many and the greatest leader to have born following the end of Nehru-Gandhi era.

Mr. Modi, the one who led Gujarat to the path of unprecedented growth, leading to windfall gains in every sector, his leadership credentials unquestionable and his gains and achievements unparalleled in the history of modern and independent India. Lets hope that this man whose name has become the synonym of development growth and success becomes the next prime minister of our burgeoning and at the moment faltering country and lead it to the same path of development as has been witnessed by his native state Gujarat under his reign. 

Lets hope that a new deserving economist is seated as the PM of this country rather than the incumbent one whose economic policies have failed because IF THE CURRENT ONE CONTINUES TO BE IN THE OFFICE THEN WE WILL VERY SOON BE ACQUAINTED WITH A NEW TERM OF MONEY MILLIONS, BILLIONS TRILLIONS AND ONIONS. These are the famous words of a leading economist of India. 

One of the best Prime Ministers to have served the country, Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee is the lone BJP Prime Minister to have completed the term. We as a nation have brought the Congress to power so many times since independence, now in the face of all this corruption it is time to hand over the reign of the country to someone who has proved himself than handling it to another self proclaimed prodigy of Congress whose only claim to the post is because of his family roots and who had neither been tested nor proved to be deserving for the post of the PM. 

Himanshu Rawat

Y12 Undergraduate, The LNMIIT