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Links of the Ebooks are as below:
Convoluted: Tales of Mystery and Terror-1
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Although the Ebook is not marked as a part of a Series, it tells us this is the first Tale which means the author must be having several plots up his sleeve!
The Ebook is also available on KindleUnlimited that can be read for free! Here is the link to the Ebook!
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Millions of Indians have lost their jobs or regular sources of income, fully or partly, in the two-year slump and are now desperate to generate some sure income for sheer survival. Apart from causing more shortfalls on the demand side, these people are mostly trying to take up any casual jobs and try doing their best. Therefore, it’s no surprise that people like us, in some level of safety in terms of survival, are getting marketing calls from such desperate casuals, accounting for more than 90% of the daily phone calls. Invariably, these calls are designed to make you part with your income/savings or to give you income in the way of personal loans.
The casuals working for the telecom companies, the banks, the insurance companies and the like daily sit with their phone database and call up one and all at a daily basis. They want to convince you cutting a deal like get a new connection or to port the existing connection, purchase a policy, go for a new credit card or confirm for a personal loan so that they can earn their commissions to justify their temporary occupation and to generate some income. I’m appalled that they don’t even spare the retired people, offering loans or cards or policies without bothering to find out if they were eligible at all. On getting a call like that I ask them what I am going to do with a personal loan now, because a retired person normally doesn’t have too many plans for new purchases and that it’d be like just paying back the loan every month, losing a sizeable amount of money in the process. But they insist that all are eligible based on their credit score or something like that. Add to this the food or the cab or other aggregators who shower you with repeated messages/promos/discounts to go for it. With obstructed and declining economic growth such kind of desperation is not going to end soon.
The desperation is visible in other fields too. That day, being almost roasted alive inside the house by the grueling humid heat, I decided to go out for a relief in the evening. As I entered a restaurant cum bar the somewhat emaciated valet assigned to open the doors for every customer, leaned toward me while opening the glass door, and to my great surprise asked me in a low tone, “You’ll eat something inside?” I stared at him, not facing such a situation ever in my life and asked him, “What?” he repeated his question. Angry now, I told him that I was going to decide after browsing the menu only, and went past him, not courteously.
Taking a seat I complained to a waiter about this peculiar behavior. He didn’t look surprised, but assured me he’d talk to him which he did later. I ordered a beer and as I started relishing the cool relief going down my throat I couldn’t help wondering about that valet. I felt sorry for him, standing out there in the heat, God knows for how many hours a day. ‘Maybe, most of the customers enter here just to cool off a little without ordering pricey dishes and thus depriving him of a tip’, I thought. This, in fact, got somewhat confirmed when, paying the bill, I left a tip the waiter told me to give it to the valet outside and that from there the money would be distributed to all of them. I took the note back and went outside. Unfortunately, he was not there, perhaps taking a break for himself. I waited a couple of minutes looking around, and then left sadly.
While taking a flight at times, out of absolute necessity, I’ve been observing the airports too, and was always surprised to see a lot of un-uniformed people loitering around, offering help to one and all like the railway porters. And recently, I got a shocker.
An elderly lady in perfect health and posture had just got down from a cab at an airport, offloading her baggage. She was traveling alone, apparently. A sickly elderly person approached her immediately, offering help till the boarding is completed for a little over a thousand bucks. The surprised lady was not yet able to decide what to do when the man while arranging a trolley for the baggage unfolded a wheelchair and asked her to occupy it. The lady got very offended and angry now. She stoutly refused and taking hold of her trolley set off for the airport entrance.
Those heinous and offensive things that the currently-raging Bulli Bai app tried to project are universally condemnable and it should ideally have ended with that condemnation, particularly after the hosting web platform which was misused banned the app along with the links to it like they did last year too. However, it is a different issue altogether as to how the same platform could be misused again and again without its knowledge. But unfortunately, the media upsurge continued unabated, and even now they are spiritedly continuing with the update headlines with the arrests of some of the culprits behind. Why? Well, obviously because they know that the people of our haplessly vulnerable country are much more attracted by negative news rather than positive developments, and the ‘names’ involved here really were so mysteriously bewitching that they thought this could generate wonderfully lucrative TRPs.
One of the arrested accused reportedly said that he wanted to have some good publicity generated about him through this venture that could eradicate the stamp of ‘nonentity’ from him forever. And the media upsurge fulfilled his wishes to the fullest extent possible. We witness in our ‘digital India’ nowadays numerous instances of the ‘vulnerable’ citizens taking selfies with dying victims of accidents or for that matter any victim of any tragedy rather than trying to help those fellow human beings, and they also videograph the lynching of unfortunate victims with unrestrained sadistic glee, and the visuals later find the mainstream media and the social media where these are welcomed with matching glee, showing the horrible clips in loops endlessly. Therefore, we must amend our earlier dictum of ‘vulnerable people being more attracted by negative happenings’ by saying that most of the news channels are equally attracted more by the negative incidents.
We referred to such perverts of our countries as the ‘Zombies’ much earlier in these pages, and very disconcertingly, the Zombie class has been growing steadily over the last few years. They are becoming mechanized or programmed animals rather than human beings, and they venomously loathe the human values and the society. Shockingly, such perverts are being nurtured and looked after by a lot of other mechanisms of this unfortunate country. Some of the Zombies are real wizards as far as the digital media is concerned, and perhaps due to the lack of enough opportunities during the raging pandemic they have been devoting their idle brains more to such sullying or bullying acts that bring them instant ‘fame’ (notoriety being synonymous with fame for them), thanks to an obliging media, social media and the vulnerable netizens thereof.
Why oppose this inevitable move as it traces back to 2013 and only thanks to the verdicts of the Supreme Court of India in the past few years responding to pleas against the moves, the linking could be accomplished only partially till now? The Election Commission of India (ECI), a supposedly independent constitutional authority, has been asking for this reform since long time in a bid to eliminate bogus voting and duplication of voter cards. The Government justifies this move by standing with the ECI and adding to it that the said linking is still ‘voluntary’; that it proposes to be ‘gender neutral’ changing ‘wife’ to ‘spouse’ that will allow both husbands and wives in service vote from the same location; that the voters can register for voter cards four times in a year now instead of just once so far; and that not providing the Aadhaar Card does not necessarily mean that the applications will be rejected.
The opposition political parties and some other stakeholders are saying that this is a ‘dangerous’ move leading to deletion of the names of many voters the likes of which had been seen after the ECI decided upon the linking in 2015, enrolling more than 300 million citizens already; that the Government is set to resort to ‘target’ the voters having the profiles of the citizens thus stored in the ECI data base in view of the forthcoming assembly elections in five states; that the fraudsters can have a very good time thanks to possible exploitation of the same data base; and most importantly that the country still not having a Privacy and Data Protection Law in place this might lead to breaches and leaks of personal data. The last point carries a lot of weight, and ideally, the Government should’ve first ‘rushed through’ the Privacy and Data Protection Bill, and then could’ve made the elections reforms bill fool-proof.
However, leaks and breaches in the personal data bases have been taking place all over the globe from various sources quite frequently in these digital days—the banks to the social media—and fraudsters have been in the act of resorting to various ‘creative’ measures to cheat people. While as per the Supreme Court orders that submission of Aadhaar Cards cannot be demanded by private entities, the banks, public or private, and the telecom companies have been making the card mandatory for accounts, credit cards, SIM cards, address proof or for change of address and so on. Besides, the linking of the Aadhaar Card to the PAN card has been made mandatory for Income Tax purpose. Of course, the Supreme Court has given some relaxations to some of the above and more for the purpose of digital payment gateways; but the distinction between ‘voluntary’ and ‘mandatory’ disclosures of Aadhaar Card details through the biometrics often gets blurred. We would say there is actually nothing wrong in going for the Card by all the citizens of the country and thus release the outlets for a range of benefits and conveniences.
Politics has always been the mainstay in a democracy like India, and the ‘brute majority’ enjoyed by the ruling party has been the real concern for the largely disjointed opposition political alliances. Now, all the opposition parties are alarmed about the possible benefits through this ‘linking’ law for the ruling party in the forthcoming assembly elections rather than the justifiability of the ‘linking’. As far as we the citizens are concerned both the ruling party and the opposition must focus on the real issues of concern rather than indulging in petty and electoral politics.
In the midst of repeated disruptions in the winter session of the Parliament over issues, prominently on a union minister and his on being involved in the Lakhimpur-Kheri incident in Uttar Pradesh where at least four farmers were mowed down by the son’s vehicle, another bill, the Prohibition of Child Marriage (Amendment) Bill has been presented in Lok Sabha today, aiming at making the marriageable age uniform for both men and women, again leading to opposition protests. The proposed bill wants to raise the marriageable age for girls from 18 to 21 which makes it uniform with the boys. Some of the opposition political parties are protesting against the move saying that at the age of 18 one becomes an adult, eligible to vote also, and therefore, the girls attaining the age of 18 should have the right to decide about their future in choosing to get married if preferred. Such was the ruckus in the lower house that finally the bill had to be referred to a Parliamentary Panel for scrutiny, and with just two days left for the winter session it may not be possible for the ruling party to ‘rush through’ again.
The powerful upper castes here continue playing the dominating roles as landlords, politicians, criminals, rapists and mafias. And they work in tandem forming a huge empire of vested interests that percolates down favorably to the local authorities, including the police in particular. Naturally, there has always been an overpowering spirit of mutual protection between them. Whenever any of the feudal lords is under a cloud of doubt or danger the corresponding forces get into motion by engineering cover-ups or the like, finally ensuring their protection against all odds.
All low-caste inhabitants are untouchable for them, except their women. The upper-caste men or their off-springs or their domesticated goons prowl constantly for an opportunity to torture, rape and kill low-caste women, sometimes as measures of punishment for what they decide is wrong, and sometimes just for carnal pleasures. The poor down-trodden low-caste menfolk, subdued in a continuous process of oppression, watch dumb and numb, and if some dare to protest the feudal counterparts in the local administration act immediately, suppressing them ruthlessly. Of course, there would be exceptions always when low-caste individuals manage to infiltrate the upper-caste bastion, assuming important positions of power.
During the last few COVID-19 infested months the notorious state has been witnessing a series of brutal rapes and rape-murders, one after the other as if those beasts achieved acquired immunity to possible action by the administration or the justice system. One of such inhuman acts happened on the 14th of September 2020 at Hathras in UP when a 19-year-old low-caste girl was waylaid, abducted, gangraped and physically brutalized by four upper-caste beasts, almost to the point of death. With her bruised-battered body, her spine broken and her tongue cut the victim just managed to reach home, and was immediately admitted in the local hospital. Later, as her condition became critical, she was transported to a hospital in Delhi. Details of her treatment there are unclear as the media that time were head-to-foot engaged in the investigation of some glam gals.
The media or some of it, hopelessly polarized as they are in India, woke up only when the unfortunate girl died on 29th September. They were forced to stay awake as the UP police hurriedly took away the body to Hathras, and cremated it around 2.30-3.30 AM on the next day, without the victim’s family’s wish or consent or permission. And then only, the media decided to make it a national outrage recalling, justifiably, the horrors of the Delhi Gangrape case in 2012 that shook the nation leading to a mass movement against the rapists and drastic changes in the legalities of crimes against women.
The UP police went on with its brazen act. Some of their top cops even said that it was not a case of rape at all: the girl died due to a neck injury the intensity of which made her bite off her tongue. Their sayings were supposedly based on tests done one week after the incident, and the final autopsy report. More acts followed in apparent haste: the victim’s family was isolated, their phones being allegedly snatched away; the whole village of Hathras was sealed not allowing anybody to enter or exit; political leaders of the opposition parties were blocked, arrested and even manhandled; the now-desperate media were also not allowed to enter Hathras.
First, the police gave the COVID-19 excuse for such coercive measures, and then, as the state Chief Minister announced a Special Investigation Team (SIT) probe, they said no one would be allowed to enter till the probe was over. The family must be protected from outside influence and any possible tempering of evidence must be prevented, they also maintained. The top cops further strengthened the apparent cover-up by saying that it was a conspiracy to fuel upper-caste versus lower-caste community tension.
The nation exploded then: people, women activists and political parties coming out on streets protesting; the High Court giving a notice to state government to explain the hurried cremation; Human Rights groups asking for explanations and so on. But crimes against women in the state continued unabated, at least two more women being brutalized and murdered in the last two days. The feudal status-quo and the brazenness only got heightened, with the state being ruled by the most powerful national political party. Instead of promising stern action and preventive measures the ruling dispensation chose to make mockery of protesting opposition leaders and others. In many instances of rape-murders in the recent past leaders of that political party were found to be involved, at times directly. A well-known former judge added more fuel to fire by building up a theory as to why men rape women, the COVID-induced unemployment being the main reason for such crimes, according to him.
In spite of the fast-tracking justice system in regard to crimes against women that was developed post 2012 Delhi case and the recent executions of three of the perpetrators, there seems to be no deterrent to the enemies of humanity who continue to wreak havoc on the society as they wish. This issue is seemingly beyond laws and the justice system. The society at large must take the final call, to prevent more horrors like Nirbhaya, Hathras and others in future. The society must break out of the exploitative feudal values and the vested interests’ nexus. Governments can only provide more effective laws, if at all; the society only can implement to ensure a protective environment for women.
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| Photo: en.wikipedia.org |
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| Photo: news18.com |
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