This is the second time that one of the best known figures that India looks up to and reveres, has come out in the open and said his bit regarding what he thinks about the MNS motto in life. The person who dumped MNS concepts before Mukesh Ambani was India’s God of Sport, Sachin Tendulkar. Sachin had also openly expressed his thoughts that he is an Indian first, then a Maharashtrian or Mumbaikar.

Raj Thackeray arguably, could not really do anything at that time. He was a friend to Tendulkar, was the funda loudly proclaimed and accepted at that time. However, wisdom in not responding or making a scene about it was the larger picture. Sachin, who India reveres as an Idol for generations to emulate and rise up to in terms of capability and cult levels, is placed far, far above the MNS. Leave alone for the nation, this holds true for Maharashtrians in general, and Mumbaikars specifically. A single slur or outcry against Sachin Tendular would have seen public favor go away from MNS, Marathi or not. Rank and file would have edged, stormed and walked their way outta the MNS into wider open spaces. For cricket is one area across the Indian Diaspora, that does NOT tolerate politicians interfering with their Gods.

And now comes Mukesh Ambani into the picture.

Ranked in the top notches as far as list of world’s richest people go. Head honcho of the largest org that India has ever seen. Owner of the Mumbai Indians franchise (Tendulkar is Captain here, too). Arguably, the largest employer that Mumbai and Maharashtra has today.

This is a good time for people to see whether the MNS is truly convinced in their cause, or wish to just rabble rouse.

Any cause that people hold to their hearts, cares not for status, popularity and other things. Causes are people. People are causes. One man may believe in something and take his belief to the skies in terms of acceptance and popularity cuz he believes in it hugely enough.

Will MNS actually dare take on the commercial and industrial might of an Ambani and the clout of a Tendular combined? They should, if they so seriously believe in their cause.

Instead of harassing and making life miserable for people who can’t even defend themselves, the MNS should actually take “panga” against people like this who with one word could turn their entire follower clan inside out. That will prove that they are actually concerned and serious about the cause that they propagate with so much vim, vigor and gusto.

Go Raj and MNS. And fight Ambani if you have the balls. Throw him and his industry out if you dare. Cuz when he says that he doesn’t care for your thoughts, the hundreds of thousands of people, Marathi or not, will stand by him. Entire environs that he buys and sells from will be with him. Obviously, he provides them the means to run their homes and businesses, not you. And believe you me, Ambani saying this is a far bigger threat for you than a poor taxi/auto driver not learning Marathi through the books you’ve thrown at them.

I’d like to actually see that you care, Raj and MNS. And I will believe you, if you go and whack an Ambani or a Tendulkar.

All subject of course, to you caring enough. You may of course, continue what you’re doing and keep whacking poor people who can’t defend themselves against you.

This is the sound of inevitability. On 30th December, 2009, bridges will appear across mobile service providers. Bridges, that for a princely toll fee of Rs. 19, allow you to transition from one mobile service provider to another.

And if all happens as planned, this is one of the most disruptive events that would have ever happened to the Indian Telecom sector since the Mobile Boom. The Indian Mobile Market spaces would be free of monopoly from service providers, who hold you to ransom over prices and schemes for the very simple reason that you cannot move away from them without losing your mobile number.

I personally have been a very, very early adopter of Mobile Services. And ever since I picked up a number, I have been with a single co, that has changed its business avatar as Orange, HutchMax, Vodafone and so on. A single mobile number has been printed on hundreds of thousands of visiting cards, websites, contact forms, proposals etc, and has been unleashed across industries, sectors, people, domains where I ply or intended to ply, or intend to ply, my business. In a good number of cases, it has paid off. Calls made to potential customers 3 years ago, have resulted in orders even last week.

I have stuck on to a single service provider, whatever be the cost, worries, joys, encumbrances, headaches, promises not met, commitments over-fulfilled and so on.

I am now happy, that this enforced “stickiness” will be done away with, leaving me with the choice, at an extremely affordable rate of Rs. 19 per change too, of shifting to another provider who offers better pricing, quality of service, higher level of customer responsiveness, and so on.

I am finally a number free, not bound. 30th Sept, shall set me free.

Sanjeev Sarma

ps. As I write this, my numb brain explores various vistas and avenues of changes this could mean to market places and spaces. Hope I’m not too lazy to document them.

And by a whopping mandate it has declared the 100+ year old Congress party as capabale enough to manage this great country for the next 5 years. It has done so without ambiguity, and has left no room for shakiness at the centre in the form of volatile driven-by-need coaltions or by power hungry time serving politicians.

The country has also voted succinctly and clearly against the left and has left them stumbling and incapable, even in their own bastions of Kerala and West Bengal. Not to be left behind, the bourses, when they opened on Monday, lauded this decision by two successive upper circuit breakers as the index spiralled up to glory, leaving no one in doubt about their decision to vote.

For me however, this brings in a huge diaspora of mixed emotions. The happy ones have been listed above, as I shared people sentiments of a stable govt, and market sentiments of faith leading to rises in indices. The ones that really irk me as of now are:

1) I see that we are heading back towards a regime where ruling party reins are handed down in the family, irrespective of capability or qualifications. Takes me back to eras where maharajah’s were elected at birth.

2) I see a weak opposition now, a much needed facet of any democracy that prides itself on being driven by mandate. An opposition that risks the danger of standing leaderless, and probably missionless too.

I have also spent the past 3 days skimming over regions, people who won, margins they won by and so on, and I have these points that hit my face when I look at an inch below the surface of this victory.

1) That the Congress has won on a purely minority vote aggregation. Sounds ridiculous ? Check out their strong bastions as of now : Kerala, TN, Andhra, where Xtian conversion activities are gathering force daily, and plague the very fibre of a really ancient culture. Check out UP and other bastions, where the Muslims have voted en masse for the Congress.

How can I really call a party that has focused on pure divisive strategies to polarize communities and win, secular? Just because they keep their minority forces satisfied and leave the rest of the country to its own devices?

2) Hindu (the majority) votes have been divided and dispersed by regional parties, star power, etc, to the point of being absolutely miniscule and unaccountable.

The bastions that remain with the BJP today in the form of states are ones that firmly protect culture by keeping away minority appeasement policies and by keeping conversions at bay. Staunchly, firmly Hindu with no move or trend to garner those “minority votes” through appeasement. (Many may of course choose to view this as “communal.”) But this is the stark reality that stands out today.

That Varun Gandhi would win, I had no doubt of. That he would win by such a whopping margin surprises me, given especially that he made “communal” speeches.

While I welcome this Govt and the immediate sense of stability it brin’gs to the country, I am worried about the long run. Especially given the ruling party’s leanings towards minority appeasement in various forms. And by its approach to define leadership of both the party and country in terms of Family.

I think its time I joined the BJP. If of course, it changes its fence sitting stand and decides to go and proudly label itself a Hindu party without being communal.

I for one would love to live in an India thats HINDU. A country where all religions from time immemorial have been tolerated and encouraged in terms of practice (not in terms of rsions, mind you). A country where I can go to a temple with my head held high, and not be labeled “communal.” A country whose culture I protect by not permitting conversions or allowing appeasements that lead to nothing but polarization.

Sanjeev

This Wikipedia article, and Wikipedia is MY fav for getting definitions, has this to say about Social Web. “The Social Web is currently used to describe how people socialize or interact with each other throughout the World Wide Web.”

I don’t think a huge number of people would disagree to the first line of this article. There are people who have told me over time, that Social means “interaction” and has nothing to do with software or the web. I agree with them in toto. Yet, a “Social CRM” did not come into the picture till Social Web got firmly rooted in minds and actions around the world, as a part of people’s lives.

With the Social Web, came a new level of interaction and interactivity between people. They discovered that this was a brilliant way to work and share their lives continually with a range of people, known and unknown. As part of sharing lives, trials and triumphs, discoveries and doubts, cusses and praises, started flowing across the internet stream.

People discovered, that somewhere here, was an influencing trend that needed to be tapped.

CRM,  or Customer relationship management (CRM),  as Wikipedia says in this article, “consists of the processes a company uses to track and organize its contacts with its current and prospective customers.”

CRM (the software) has been around for a huge while now. It has moved from a cumbersome book-keeping process to a finely tuned piece of automation, that does allow companies to service their customers better.

The prime functions of a CRM are typically

1. Prospecting & Lead Generation
2. Continued touch-point with customers towards need fulfilling, trending & forecasting, and a higher level of structured engagement.
3. Complaint redressal and churn forecasting

A structured CRM process is a brilliant source of secondary data for marketing research services of an organization. And thats just the tip of a blasted huge ice-berg. Companies have fine-tuned CRM processes and systems to work in tandem for huge boost in efficiencies.

So why sCRM now?

As mentioned earlier, sCRM or Social CRM was born to tap a growing Social Web as a key point of continued interation, that served as a phenomenal pipeline of prospective customers.

Not only prospective customers, sCRM also looked to mine “influencer” patterns to decide what makes or mars a product or a service. Without really knowing it, this continued mining of various media online started revealing trends, patterns, structures, and bodies that probably at some time could be linked to a sale or lack of.

Where was sCRM actually born?

I would probably look upon Google’s context sensitive ad serving, as a FIRST in sCRM. Google actually understood that levels of interactivity and communication exchange would always be an exponential parameter to keep tapping, and introduced Adsense to address this constant interaction.

It monitored what you’re searching for, what you’re talking about, what you have discussed, and linked advertisers contextually to you. Thus, it provided much needed basis for monitoring HOW MANY PEOPLE ACTUALLY DISCUSSED A PRODUCT AND SERVICE OF YOU AND AROUND YOU.

And how was this addressed? Simple. Your communication just got displayed more than others depending on how many people shared a universe around you.

Now this was not really DIRECT, was it? It had to move into higher levels of commercialization (or keyword bidding, ad slot bidding etc).

Which meant that if you were in the, a domain, and ran a campaign to tap this universe that used your domain, you also had to contend with peripheral “chance” units that tried to eat into your domain. Finally things were always about buying keywords, related or unrelated, and displaying your communication on the off chance that it might result into a positive zap for you.

sCRM in todays era?

It’s all about monitoring social interactions on social sites. Its all about monitoring content and possibly, “adjectives” within content. For eg, I think PRODUCT X is NOT GOOD. It revolves around knowing spheres of influence that such innocuous statements can spread to. It revolves around knowing residual or “spread” points of such spheres of influences and influencers.

IMO, and I really haven’t evaluated any “sCRM” a brilliant sCRM should do all the above. And since it’s really the “S” that’s the hey here, some of the key matrices should include an emotional engine, an expression engine, and an adjective engine.

Finally, finally, finally. Till we actually figure out WHERE this has impacted a topline or a bottomline, we are just doing what my dear friend Bob Thompson calls  “Stalking”

In the next article, I’d like to discuss a really interesting debate I’ve been having with myself, and with some others on Twitter and other forums “Whether Recruiting on Social Web can be managed by an sCRM”.

One of the key things that came across is that there now seem to be a lot of entities who feel that brands can be made or marred online, via threads starting out from a simple 140 char string that goes “Product X is bad service, ppl, don’t touch it, #fail” or something like that. The people I met / interacted with over the last week all seem single-minded in terms of focusing on measuring the impact of such statements, and if possible, curbing or enhancing the impact that a negative or positive statement may have.

The key issue I keep wondering about is that of “monitoring” the impact of such statements. The tech aspects of collating or mining keywords related to a product / brand / service is not something that confounds me; anyone with half a grey cell can do it. What I really fail to understand is HOW such a statement and its impact on actual market spaces are measured. I can follow the threads of connect or discord around a product or service, but how do I actually check whether it has resulted in a SALE or LACK OF ONE.

One of the key posts that I HAVE to mention here in terms of its utter lucidity of thought and expression is Prem Kumars blog post on Social CRM. There seems to be a good thought stream out there, in terms of attempts to define spaces, approaches and potential outcomes.

Sugar CRM, the big daddy of all open source CRMs, in one of the versions I last checked, allowed you to run and track a (mailer or ad-serving) campaign online, as part of its offering. Now, while this cannot really be called “social CRM”, it does indicate a larger capability for a user to PUBLISH content to what goes collectively and even “loosely” under the garb of Social Media. Oracle, with their Social CRM App Suite seem to be prime, aggressive movers in this domain. As of now, it seems to be more of Sales prospecting and lead generation function.

So why has this become important?

It is kind of more or less accepted that 6 people out of 10 who spend at least 8 hours in front of a machine, are connected to a group / circle / network through a “social networking” site.

To most people, such sites serve as a connectivity platform, a “solidarity definition engine” or “recommendation engine” (I am buying X product, do you think I should go ahead?), a “Catharssis engine” (I HATE X or Y  services / person / product, and I think you guys should NOT use them).  And such innocuous posts sometimes show tendencies to spread, as the thread that permeates through venn diagrams that support inclusions or exclusions of people respond to it with myriad expressions of connect or disconnect.

Brilliant to do trending and checking.

But then, (as asked earlier) how do you actually monitor whether this has DONE  a sale or DENIED a sale ?

Social CRM and Reputation Engine Evangelists have their work cut out for them. The High Road for these people is not the trending and tracking, nor is it the mining of data and presenting an output.

Its the ACTUAL conversion to dollar matrices that are going to decide the KEY movers and FIRST players in the market that is BEGGING to be robbed.

Sanjeev Sarma

ps. I am currently exploring thoughts and concepts what SOCIAL CRM means to India and how Indian networks currently work in the digital space. I’ll share them soon as I’ve arrived at some gibberish I can pass off as intelligent.

SIC !

I mean, how DOH can people get?

On the Govt side of the fence, the esteemed home minister has said NO to IPL happening because of election season. And given that security will be spread out to ensure that the election process goes off peacefully, the Govt will not be able to spare enough security for IPL.

I think thats fine.

On the other hand, we have statements from the Cricket side of the fence to the tune that IPL is as necessary a process as elections are, and that the people might not be pleased if its put off.

That’s not fine, guys.

Yes, I am aware that lots of monies have been pumped in into making the IPL happen, and happen as gloriously as last year. On the other hand, doesn’t one feel that an election process, leading to a stable Govt at the centre assumes greater importance in the scheme of all things to do with this country, including Cricket?

I fail to see a “clash” between the two, unless of course, Cricket has really assumed political garbs, and is really in a fair position to sway minds of voters for or against a party or a govt.This, would be a fairly depressing scenario in a country where the centre is shaken because an unrelated entity called the municipal corporator with allegiance to a party has not performed or whatever.

I personally feel that the guys who call the shots in cricket should pull off the IPL during the election process, in the interests of elections conducted fairly and peacefully.

Better than it could have in a Ludlum or a John LeCarre thriller.

The story was being read all these years, the characters and events were unfolding slowly, methodically, without apparent connections or relations to each other.

And once it happened, all  events / characters / thoughts / ideas fell into place with the rapidity of a digital jigsaw puzzle being solved in auto-mode, with pieces seen/remembered/thought of earlier sliding into their respective places and forming a complete picture.

The world, beyond all doubt, understood in the space of the last three days that Pakistan and Taliban are truly one, and that one is not different from the other.

These thoughts did cross the mind of many over so many years, through unexplainable sixth sense or predictability fundas. But there was always a link here or an event there, that was missing in the world terror map. These seemingly unrelated links and events erected a friend or foe maze, peppered with cleverly disguised, even hidden markers, a maze confounded by contradictions ranging across extremes, and of a face put forward that was not a face at all but a mask!

I personally saw inklings of this for the first time, when the Dictatorship, Army driven functioning, of Pakistan was replaced with a “civilian” one. This obviously happened “around” the time the favoured daughter of the Pakistani soil, Ms. Bhutto was assassinated.

It was then that I kind of understood that the true forces that puppeteered Pakistan were calling for a show of hands.

Mumbai 26/11 happened, a war like stance was assumed, belligerent Paki threats tried to draw a raring to go India to war, to mask this as a “this happened while we were away protecting our borders” thing, the Taliban publicly announced its support for the Paki army to fight any Jihad against Indian armed forces, and then, SWAT happened.

Times Now (a channel that I seem to have come to admire for lotsa reasons) made some pointed remarks yesterday in a newscast in the nite:

1. That a British media has gone ahead to say that Obama favoured a Pakistan – “Moderate” Taliban link to weed out “extremist” Taliban, this would apparently lead to a “compartmentalization” and easy “management of terror”
2. It was also drawn attention to the fact, that this “peace agreement” happened barely a day or two after Sentaor Richard Holbrooke met Pakistani “leaders”.
3. (Amazingly, its just around this time that) A UCLA professor has tracked Osama to a hideout, in the Kurram region of Pakistan, not more than a dozen Kms from the Pak Afghan border.

Today, the Taliban is just less than 500 kms away from Amritsar, India. Officially. Not counting all the infiltrations they may have made into India under various garbs, guises and so on. What is really scary is that the euphoria among people to welcome a Taliban there is high, and dissent against various extreme Talibal Sharia Laws are few and far between. After all, the US has allowed that Sharia law is permitted as per Pak constitution and norms. How extreme, is up to the People of Pakistan to agree to or be forced into.

What does SWAT mean to us, to India?

1. I find it mighty strange to believe that the Pakistan Army, that just recently promised to launch a HUGE offensive if India declared war, caved into a few hundred or even thousand hooligans called the Taliban. So there is much, much more that the Indian army will need to address rather than just the Pak army, if war (God forbid) is declared.
2. That a war may not be necessarily an Indian offensive, it may be declared by a “high on Jihad with Taliban” Pak too.
3. That the US might not step in to curb such events, given as per reports on media that it actually “favours a Pak-Taliban Truce”.
4. That a major amount of threat exists within India too from the Taliban, who may have penetrated and infiltrated various areas, sections of the country. And that WE, THE PEOPLE, must be ready and on alert to attend to and quell such inside worries.
5. And last but not the least, Pak’s Nuclear Facilities can easily be taken over by these forces. Pak doesn’t seem to have either the will or the verve to prevent this.

And herein, within point 5, lies the TRUE threat for not only India, but the World too, and this WORLD includes countries and agencies who at the moment, are funding/siding with Pakistan and Taliban for their overall immediate/near future geo-political gains.

Sanjeev Sarma

The concept of “Right Wing” has come a long way from the time it took birth in during the French revolution, representing people who sat on the “right”, indicating their support of Monarchy, and other status quo components, of those who did not favor change in past / existing systems.

Current day political definitions define a Right Wing as positions that are conservationist and reactionist. And here’s Wikipedia’s definition of Right Wing Politics, India

Coming back to today’s concept of a Right Wing in India, so liberally used by media, people, and so on, it indicates anyone who stands up and says they are Hindus, and that they refuse to accept certain expressions, representations and so on, that go against their cultural, moral and other (often religious) values. Going by these definitions (or my interpretations, misrepresentations of them), I’d love to go ahead and declare here, that I belong to the Right Wing.

Definitively, I am a Right Wing cuz :

• I love to go around and proclaim that I am a Hindu
• I love my culture, my festivals, my Gods and my celebrations
• I have no qualms in shouting out Jai Shri Ram or Jai Bhavani in a crowd that comprises different religions and cultures.
• I wear a tikka whenever I can, and go to temples to participate in aartis and worship my Gods.
• I teach my children, and generations after me what it means to be a Hindu and why I am proud to be a Hindu.
• I tolerate other religions, so long as they don’t come in the way of my religion, and tell me how their Gods are better than mine.
• I don’t like being told that the country I love and live in, is not Hindu but “secular”. My country has been far more Hindu and far, far more secular that it ever can be today, before these “definers and upholders of secularity” came in.
• I am aggrieved when I discover that Govts are taking control of Temple Trusts and using (part of) such monies to subsidize Haj pilgrimage, and levies a Pilgrimage tax on Hindus on a pilgrimage in India.
• I am sad when I see that other communities are being given sops and benefits that I, as a Hindu, am not entitled to, in the name of “secularism”
• The above two points smack purely of minority appeasement and I oppose and reject them from the bottom of my heart.

I declare that the above has nothing to do with my extremely “liberal” lifestyle. That I am not compelled to follow dictats by any person, organization or entity to remain a Hindu. Therein lies my freedom of thought, and my secularity of my expression.

As a Right Wing entity, all I ask that India be declared a Hindu nation. Other countries are not lacking or wanting in calling themselves an Islamic or Christian nation. Why should my country hesitate in calling itself a Hindu nation?

Proud to be Right Wing. Proud to be a Hindu.

Sanjeev Sarma

Wherever there is ADsense, there seems to be ADvani, promoting/projecting himself as the next PM. Whatever site I go to has Advani’s picts, messages, domain name plastered on it.

Advani / the BJP are the actually the first in India to cash in on a burgeoning media called the internet. Hate ‘em, Love ‘em, you have to see them at least once before you block ‘em. Sites ranging from the tacky to the pure click-through have recorded Advani’s footprints. Sites related, non related, contextual or not, are seeing the results of what is probably the BIGGEST keyword purchase from India for quite a while. Why, even Paki sites promote Advani as PM.

And why not? I remember reading someplace that Rs. 230 Cr. have been earmarked for the Advani as PM ad campaign. Safely assuming that 10% of this is spent on online advtg, its is a WHOPPING Rs 23 Cr campaign. Or roughly, $5M USD spend. And obviously, adsense is going berserk in deciding where you’re coming from, before showing you ads earmarked locationally for you.

All links lead to lkadvani.in, a cleverly designed joomla implementation. The team that has designed this and the content team thats handling regular updation and interactivity seems to be doing a pretty good job. Also the site is doing pretty well in terms of eyeballs, posts and so on. What’s more, the site reveals a well networked presence into YouTube, FB and Orkut and of course Advani’s own Blog.

The flip side is that the orkut interface is cartoonish, and shows a frog and a beetle. Also, The BJP’s site falls FLAT in terms of design, content and interactivity when compared to Advani’s site.

It seems to everyone, that this is just an aping of Obama’s online campaign, where he managed to garner HUGE funds and support. Sadly, I find that the campaign managers here, have not really looked at various aspects that Obama’s team did.

India Elections 2009, Future PM of India, Advani, and even Advani for PM refuse to throw up the site in Google. And terms like Prime Ministerial Candidate return not the site, but a sub-domain, thats Advani’s Blog.

The bottomlime

Advani is 81, as of last November. Come this Nov, he’ll be 82. And while his enthusiasm energy and ambition are laudable, one ponders whether one would want a Prime Minister so far advanced in years. And more importantly, when a mandatory retirement age is fixed at 60 for Govt Services, HOW can our constituion ever uphold anyone beyond that age becoming even a MINISTER, leave alone a Prime Minister?

The AD spends are fine, probably, “the wider seen is the more subscribed to” funda that drives adverts might work out in Advani’s favour. But I don’t think his age will. Its time for him to actually rest and mentor youth in the BJP, and not to push himself to the forefront. Its time for him to draft plans, policies, strategies that only he can in terms of the capability that his experience has gotten him.

Ad-vaani or no, I say NO to Advani as PM. I say YES to a Jetley or a Sushma Swaraj.

It has all the ingredients of being an AMAZING campaign.

• Naughty and Provocative, pure tongue in cheek.
• Doesn’t damage life n property directly.
• Adds value to a flagging economy (chaddi’s sold).
• Doesn’t need a mass gathering, or anything like that.
• Is cool enough for each to do his/her own way.
• Is Rad/mod/etc.
• Has no political overtones except a nice bubbly pink.

This has been the best viral, and public support garnering engine I’ve seen in AGEZZZZ. Be it whatever cause, whatever reaction, this is way too cool.

However, this campaign also troubles me not a bit. I am FORCED to remember other sundry demonstrations of hate against  freedom to be just you, to express yourself, similar to the one that the SRS wrought on people.

I remember various similar incidents that took place by radical, fundamentalist Islamic groups against

• Taslima Nasreen
• Salman Rushdie
• And of course, who can forget the fatwa against Sania Mirza for “not covering her body while playing tennis” ?
• And others.

These incidents were not seen as serious  by people at all … leave alone the people, the Govt of India also did not come out strongly against it in terms of directly denouncing acts like these. Why didn’t anyone come out to send whatever-colored-chaddis, bangles, etc to these bigots who had the gumption to physically abuse a woman, whose only claim to this treatment was that she spoke against percepts/beliefs of a “religion” ?

Since when has India been so Talibanized that one can’t speak their minds out about a religion, whatever religion (remember, we value secularity and democracy above all) and feel free to walk around with their heads high? Or has bashing up any cause driven by Only Hindu / Hindutva forces or brigades become fashionable?

I have been feeling of late, and incidents like these, where Minority expressions of hate are spared, that the biggest bane our country faces or will face, is the slowly ticking time bomb of “minority appeasement” politics. I also have the very sincere feeling, that within this country’s secular framework, there’s a slowly expanding, as yet un-vented, level of resentment against these minority appeasement politics. Its a resentment born out of the underlying fact, that all acts in the names of minorities are tolerated, and people are allowed to get away, while Hindu / Hindutva related episoded are considered worth bashing up.

While the above is not a pro-Muthalik or pro-SRS stand in any way, its a question mark, as to when these entities born out of   “appeasement politics” will wither and die away on their own?

My take is that this will happen, when the Govt stops various minority appeasement policies in the name of religion, caste and creed. And when the Govt and people will start treating ALL such impingement on freedom of expression with equal severity.

Like sending whatever as naughty or weird to those Fundamentalists who slapped Taslima Nasreen in public. Like sending something even more weird to a Sanjay Dutt who’s standing for elections. Or to Ministers / Govt who collect temple funds, and levy pilgrim tax on Hindus to subsidize pilgrimages / trysts with GOD that other religions take.

Simple fundas of misplaced nepotism, driven by Govt after Greedy Govt to get Votes and their share in the organized looting structure of politics, are what have made the Muthaliks of the world raise their ugly heads up. And these heads will continue to stay reared till all religions, castes, creeds, sects are given equal status. Not as members of a vertical, but as citizens of India.

Sanjeev Sarma