The BlankBored™

You may not know who I am, or what I do, but one thing is for sure. I am not a Chinese soldier. I am not one of those 2.3 million who are banned from blogging or creating their own websites, as a soldier or not, in China.

The great internet censorship in China is sometimes dubbed as "The great FIREWALL of China". And they are not joking.

China is a country with extreme dictatorship. Everything is state-controlled. Sometimes good comes of it.

My uncle who had been to China told me that all land in China belonged to the government. You can't own houses. You can only lease them for a specific period. This means that the Chinese, unlike the Indians don't waste their life's earnings in buying a site, building a house etc. They buy other things like fancy cars and (duplicate) gadgets with the same money and help grow their country's GDP. In the end no one loses anything and everyone (who is Chinese) stands to gain from this.

Honestly, that's one heck of an idea. At least to me.

But sometimes, the dictatorship isn't so good. The internet censorship is one example. They have minimal contact with the outside world, meaning that all deals go on in Chinese when you go to China. Unlike India.


The government wants the media to say something that only it wants to hear. And that my friend, frankly speaking, stinks.



It got me thinking...maybe if India didn't have democracy, if the British never invaded India, if we still had (by magic) one country under one (hindu) king, how different would things be?

I guess we would be a bit like China, only better. I guess I would still be blogging, probably in kannada or hindi (or sanskrit??). And parts of my blog would be censored... :P

Yes, life would stink...no controversial books to read, no neutral opinions in the media..but that's about me and you.

What about the non-blogging, non-media savvy type of common person? I guess he would be happy. If the king was not of the villainous (dushtabuddhi) - type that is.

Overall, the aam jananta, the common man (who is poor) would get benefited. Most probably. A brilliant example being the Maoist Kerala.

All our materialistic aims would have gotten fulfilled. Not the intellectual ones. Some of them atleast.




Maybe its true when they say that democracy is not for a poor country like India.


                           

Maybe.

It was a news item occupying a relatively small space in the newspaper today, but it is an issue that is definitely not small.

Professor Frank Fenner of microbiology at the Australian National University, direly predicted "homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years,"!

He says that we won't be able to tackle or shake off effects of population explosion and hence result in massive consumption and further depletion of resources.

The guy who said this, Fenner, 95, was incidentally one of the persons involved in the eradication of small pox and he was the one who announced that to the rest of the world.

While I do agree that 100 years is quite a short time-span for anything like that to happen, its not like we aren't seeing its effects today. Living in a country like India makes you realise that fact each and every second that you live. And its not like I am a microbiologist who knows his biology better than Fenner.

The thing is, even if this IS true, we are not ready to accept it, as we don't have any plan-B as of today. No one believes him.

Even if not in the next 100 years, things will begin happening in the next 200 years and it will again narrow down to the Darwinian theory of the "survival of the fittest".

Due to depletion of resources, wars will CERTAINLY take place and only the fittest will survive.

While it is still not clear who the "fittest" are, It is probably anybody's guess that the "fittest" are those who are able to do EVERYTHING. Today's gadget freaks and the rich and spoilt kids don't exactly fit in that category.

The city will probably be at a standstill and (my guess is that) village life will rule again. This means that atleast 200 years from now, India- the land of villages might rule the roost after all. Not exactly as how we imagined.

Or, we might end blowing up ourselves and only a very few people from isolated parts of earth (or people who have managed to isolated themselves) will survive.

Yes, it is unlikely that humans will be extinct, as they have BRAINS (lol), but what will happen is that civilization will probably have to start from the scratch again.

There's nothing we can do about all this now.


Except think.