Re: more: Two questions to IPI members

[Chetna & Umesh Tiwari <chetna.umesh@usa.net>]

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Dear Abhijeet & Dr. Sanjeev Sablok,

I don't think I am going to spend much time debating my point when you seem to
have already firmed up your opinions and everything that doesn't fit in your
perspective is considered garbage. Even arguments are twisted out of context
to make them look ridiculous.

For your kind information, even though Bill & Hillary Clintons are Rhode
Scholars, they are not millionaires (rather they have negative income thanks
to the debt they have acquired due to various things, their drive to get into
to public service being one of them), and it is not lust for money that drives
such people into politics.

Dr. Sablok calls our ideas utopian, even though I never opposed the suggestion
of compensating government officials well. The only logic I was opposed to was
to assume that making better pay for a politician was going to solve lot of
problems and attract good people to politics. Abhijeet ridicules my arguments
by suggesting how "caring" is not enough for a heart patient.

Unfortunately such simplistic fixes don't solve problems of ethics, public
morality, and sense of public duty. On sorry to notice such a superficial
sense of understanding of public service and politics among people who claim
to discuss future of India. Unfortunately being a doctor, an engineer, a babu
(clerk), a computer programmer and being a politician are two very different
things. While every human being has physical needs and everyone needs money,
wishes to earn it by providing service to the society, politicians don't
exactly fit into this zero sum game, neither can you really publish and
advertisement and hire able politicians to run our country. If that were so,
you wouldn't have elections and democracy spreading across the globe.

I live in a capitalist (yet still a democratic) country myself, practice a
fair level of capitalistm, favor fair compensation to all, and yet the twisted
arguments of mixing democracy, politics, people's representation, welfare of
masses with pure capitalism by neo-capitalists sometimes makes me sick.

Dream on folks, it doesn't cost you anything. What's is lost is substantive
debate.

Umesh Tiwari

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