[varun.ppl]

A common man's common plight! Poor salary, poor work, no holidays. In short, poorly screwed! And when there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel, the Indian Authorities seem to screw up things.

When I was home during Independence Day, I was pondering over the thoughts that when would be the next time, I would be able to gorge on Mum's Aloo Paranthas. I surfed the BB and checked the emails from HR and my eyes were constantly searching for one email - The List of Holidays. Finally, found the mail, read the attachment & announced to my folks that I would be at home during Diwali. Great!

But Diwali was still 2.5 months off and flight tickets were hovering at around 8-8.5K return (regular carriers), so a common man's thought - "Why book it now, shall book it next month. It would be a thousand more at best". But today, what i saw was a real shock to me. The minimum return fare to Delhi is 13 grand and that too I am not getting the dates as per my plan. So, checked out the Railways, though I had no hope of getting a reservation - and so was the scene.

So, my first question to the junta is that why do these authorities take us for a ride and isn't there any check to curb these practices? I know that the first answer would be that we are living in Capitalist society but still it doesn't mean that you can rob the customer in daylight.

Be it fuel prices, be it consumer goods, aviation tickets, anything and everything under the sun is governed by a Cartel and the consumer is just a puppet obeying the orders of this puppet master. Whenever a person goes on to book a railway ticket - it is always not available even when the ticket booking process for that day has just begun (IMO, e-tickets booking process begins 90 days earlier than travel).

Secondly, is the government answerable to this? What happened to the support free pricing of petrol. When there is a hike in crude prices, I do witness an increase in petrol prices, but when crude was tumbling down in the world market - never did I even hear about any decrease in petrol prices. During my recent analysis of petrol prices with UK & USA - even if we consider the same tax structure in UK & USA we are still paying 24% more than the Western countries and this is the scene when the car density in India is 9 per 1000 people. Petrol would become the most expensive commodity in India - much more than gold if the car penetration rate increases which it is going to be in the next 5 years.

Thirdly, what is the problem with our legal system. It is so lethargic and slow that it can even put a snail to shame - at the pace of its movement. Out of the millions of RTIs courted last year, only 13.4% have been answered - and out of those 13.4% also, only 35.6% have been satisfied with the answer/verdict. The people who were dissatisfied with the answers and then resubmitted another RTI have not received any notifications as of now.

I know that I am sounding too crossed - but I believe this is the plight of every common/average/middle class/upper middle class person atleast in India (I cannot comment about abroad because I have only been to UK, and I didn't witness anything like this - though it is also not all glossy and rosy). I want to know what happened after the "anshan" of Anna. The news channels only want to hog the limelight so that their TRPs don't go down, the politicians go only to rural areas so that their vote bank remains stabilized and we as common man go on running our lives so that the bread and butter levels don't go down.

There are only two ways you can live your life - one which we all/most are leading right now - fighting our own daily battles, concerned with the well being of our family, lost in the crowd and the second be the master of our own lives, be the face of the crowd rather than the crowd, change the ecopolitical system.

I have realized what is my goal in life, its not to be a regular joe with tucked in shirt, a day full of number crunching, ppt making - its much bigger, I am going to change the system (Maybe big words) - but first I would change myself.

P.S. - Before writing this, I had thought that I would be asking t-bhpians about their plans for Diwali and if anyone is planning on a roadtrip to Diwali, maybe we can plan it together but during the process of writing, I realized that today's incident is an enlightenment situation in my life. Team-bhp is definitely radical.

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Thanks All!