I almost NEVER express my views about politics. I am in general an apolitical person and also regard most politicians as rogues and scoundrels…and I like writing the small stuff, as there are others, far better than me, who write about suchlike earthshaking topics…

But I do have SOME opinions and one of them is that the “123” agreement on nuclear power that our Prime Minister wants India to sign with the US is a Good Thing, as would put it.

So the editorial in a daily newspaper really riled me…. it was about the Left parties opposing the signing of the “123” treaty with the US, and the Prime Minister adopting a stance of “either we sign, or I go”. The editorial talks about the necessity for “all the parties concerned” to shelve the project as of now, and “discuss pros and cons” until a consensus can be reached. Does not the learned editor know that delay is often death in politics? Many of us feel that the Prime Minister has really achieved a remarkable, pragmatic agreement and has worked towards it..we cannot be sitting in our nationalistic cocoons and yell that in all our dealings with the world, we might get taken advantage of…and they seem to suffer from some kind of US-phobia, even as only the worst of that country, in the form of burgers and coke, invades our culture and not the good things such as the great work ethic or the lack of casteism in general society.

Every time India wants to take a step forward, we have short-sighted, jingoistic, visionless politicians who want to keep the country mired in the morass of imagined self-sufficiency and protectionism, citing “dangers to the country” as the reason for not going ahead and taking bold, realistic steps to make progress out of the dark ages of the socialistic, licence-raj days that have cost us so many decades and put us so much in the rear of the race to be a power in the eastern arena. We are making progress in India in spite of our politicians…I wish some of them would try and experience the loincloth poverty that their blind policies relegate the common man to. And waffling in the way the editorial suggest will only add hypocrisy to the list of sins that the politicians are guilty of.

I am so glad to get back to my birds and animals and trees…politicians rate far, far lower than the nastiest slug that I could find under a stone. The slug is just being itself and causing no harm…a better comparison, actually, would be with the leeches that stick to us when we are on a wildlife trek.