RIFLE RANGE BOY

Like clockwork, not even dust had settled after the Earthquake measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale hit Myanmar; numerous announcements have emerged over the new social media outlets of well-meaning organisations offering services to collect donations for its victims.  We have had all these so many times before. The earliest of these must surely be the Great Tsunami of Boxing Day 2004, which measured 9.1. The world saw a plethora of bodies going hyperdrive, bending backwards, trying to extract money from the well-meaning but unassumingly naive public. The collection, it seemed, was quite overwhelming. Ten years down the line, a documentary was made about the towns hit by the tsunami. It revealed that only one pledged housing project saw living daylight amongst all the broken promises; that too by the personal effort by an individual, the world-famous singer Ricky Martin. The same thing happened in Haiti following its devastating 2010 hurricane. The Clinton Foundation jumped in to hel...

More than enough people are quick to sneer at India after Vikram's successful soft landing at the Southern Pole of the Moon. On one end, people were quick to say that the whole exercise was a hoax. It is an illusion. Then, others blurted that a country that cannot provide toilets to its citizens and whose population mostly live below the poverty line should not be sending rockets to the Moon (and playing with nuclear bombs). One even threatened to stop monetary 'aid' to India, conveniently forgetting any discussion on repatriation monies after years of looting from India.  Firstly, everyone knows there is no way for everybody to prosper in sync before society moves up one notch higher. Things happen in tandem. There will be people who will have to do catching up, and there will be those who will lose out in the race for prosperity anyway. The only people who believe that the world needs equity are communists. Again and again, it has been proven that human greed surpasses an...