Wednesday, July 12, 2006

on speeches and speech writing

Theory:
Hear one speech.......and you have heard them all.

Evidence:

1. Award acceptance speeches and acknowledgements:
these are the worst of the lot:
everyone including me thank:
mother,father,uncle,aunt, my brother bunny, my sister billie, my freind funni ,my pet munni, my neighbourhood puncturewallah, my imaginary freind ingellford etc etc.
Some people also just might thank other random things:
a clever mouse researcher thanks his mice.

2.Speeches with political overtones:
These occupy a special place altogether.One would be forgiven to think that there has been no novel speech in a century.The last great political speeches were reserved to the Churchills and nehrus and hitlers and kennedys.One almost feels that all great speech writers after that seemed to have migrated to Sirius B.
Typical phrases: "Axis of Evil" !!! oooooooooooooooooooh! this is just so original. George Bush along with other mediocre non-sense seems to have accrued a speech writer who is no better than a novel writer from 1984.
Another great example is the almost exceptional speech is the one made by President Bill Pullman in Independence day- "we will not go into the night without a fight".Yeah! it might be goose-pimpling etc.However, it almost sounds like a prize poem in Class 4 where you predominantly predispose your poetry to rhyme. THis sounds like the "blood toil sweat" speech of Winston.(We will fight on the beaches, in the fields etc etc...but never surrender).A speech given by Gandalf in LOTR also sounds shadily like the "battle of britain" ( Gandalph: the battle for helm's deep is over and the battle for middle earth is about to begin. . . Churchill: The battle of france is over and the battle of britain is about to begin.)

However, all is not lost.Not all speech writers and speeches send you down drowsy lane.Some of the greatest speeches i have ever heard live- were from Field Marshall Sam Manekshaw.You know...that he is seen it all.
Giving due credit, Laloo's speeches are quite entertaining.Vajpayee....at times shows promise-before ofcourse you fall asleep.

I think i have proved to quite a reasonable extent that my hypothesis is right.Signing off before i sleep.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

On liberals and liberalism

Liberals and Liberalism have been seen by many to be a case of the middle path:A path chosen by cowards and ambivalent individuals to run from either extreme. I agree, its true-that many a man have used this as a transition phase while moving from one wing of thought to another.I have seen more than one freind who has swung from left to centre to right and back again.

Their reactions seem to be dictated to some extent, by which wing of society is acting in a more extreme and irrational fashion.To this extent, they are niether of the wings nor are they liberals- but are humans driven by emotional instincts.

Liberals in essence, are those, who choose to solve problems-innovating solutions unhassled by dogma of either wing of thought. Liberals are driven not just by ideology or theory but by a synthesis of rational thought and the values of human society.Liberal societies are those- which embrace free thought and free action, but act responsibly -knowledgable of the value of both. A liberal society is capable of evolution-in a stable fashion- rather than through leaps and jumps of societies seen through large chunks of history. Liberalism is continuous evolution and not revolution.

Liberals need not be moderate. Liberals can be extremists.Extremists in a way, thats subtly different to the present day connotation of the world. An extremist can be defined as a person who chooses to make a statement or to propel an event rather forcefully. We have numerous examples of such people.They include a Medha Patkar, who agitates for the millions of te displaced in the Narmada Valley.They include a Joeseph Rotblat and a Robert Oppenheimer- who gave up a promising careers to speak out against the atom bomb and the arms race. They include a Mordechai Vanunu- who gave up most of his life- to expose the Israeli atom bomb program. They include a Gandhi,a lone man in front of the tank at Tiannanmen, a technicianin a Polish shipyard and a million other men-well known and unknown.

Liberals, today, have been masqueraded as apologists for the various "outlawed" societies in this world. In other places, they have been seen as preachers of the outlawed gospel.that assumed, I would be inclined to see a particularly misled man two thousand years ago also as a liberal.

Liberalism, as I have known, extends not just to political thought, but to all other areas to where the human mind may stretch its long reach.Science is a prime candidate.On many fronts, science has been obstructed by the lack of free thought. Dogma has prevented the advance of science at speeds it could have gone.Free thought, liberal thought- the foundation of science is always not as universal as one would have thought possible.Anyway,thats another issue.Frustration i suppose, something which every dreamer in science has complained about.

The description of liberalism may well sound like an ideal arm chair idea. However,unlike previous experiments, liberalism is not a pure mechanical machine run by a irrationally rational computer or a machine run by pure emotion. It is the ideal synthesis of both.Here in may lie hope- to make make the world leap longer, faster and higher.

-a hopeful liberal