From The Book Of Ecclesiastes of The King James Version of The Bible & apologies to Thomas Hardy: I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Thomas Frank in his path-breaking books, “What’s The Matter With Kansas?”  and “The Wrecking Crew” explicitly spelled out how the bigoted, ignorant, unthinking majority of the populace are railroaded into voting against their own economic interests by appealing to their racial and religious prejudices against minorities based on race, religion or philosophical outlook. The rich and powerful have used regulatory capture to emasculate and disenfranchise the majority and there is no stupider electorate in the world than in the US and India.

In India, the ruling passions are anti-incumbency and current bribes and promises which help to fool the greedy poverty stricken, unthinking and uninformed, but ignorant, uneducated, unsophisticated and ill informed populace to vote on the basis of caste, religion, promised reserved seats and quotas in jobs and education, to the detriment of clean, effective and honest government. 

The irony, which intellectually and ethically challenged  Manmohan Singh and his whip-holding dominatrix handler, unfamiliar with linguistics and devoid of introspective thinking ability, despite her Latin background, fail to see is their choice of the slogan “Incredible India”, which one sees advertised in media ranging from TV to travel magazines like Conde Nast, catering to the affluent West.

The English word credible has the same origins as credit and comes from the Latin “credere” meaning believable and trust worthy. Thus incredible can also mean unbelievable, which is what most things about India are. There is rampant corruption, no rule of law or order from traffic to government.

India is probably the only country where one has to pay bribes to pay one’s bills, file income tax returns, obtain legitimate tax refunds, get justly due pensions and access one’s own money in post offices and government insurance companies, or even file a criminal complaint with the police.. The even more disgusting irony is that the whole country, its universally corrupt political parties, and its general ethos and culture mouth bogus platitudes of religion in the words of Dharma and renunciation while institutionalizing graft, corruption and bribery.

Thus India is destined for disaster with corruption hampering its ability to defend itself, develop infrastructure, provide equity and justice for all and the apathy, ignorance, stupidity, superstition and blind faith of its idiot citizens of all religious denominations, generally bordering towards fanaticism and bigotry.

The pandemic virus of rightist gobbledygook is spreading to the developed countries equally rapidly, as what is happening in Romania, Hungary, Finland, France, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, UK, Austria, prove. The rich and powerful have used crony capitalism to garner obscene and undeserved riches in India, China, Thailand, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, GCC countries, Tunisia, Jordan, Morocco, Egypt. Interested readers should Google the writings of P. Sainath, the rural correspondent of the newspaper Hindu to see the subsidies provided for the rich corporate sector in India and the constant carping against basic food and education subsidies for the locally indigent and looting public finances by political parties and leaders for personal enrichment, while half the children of India are malnourished and destined to increase the total number of our retarded fellow citizens. The largest democratic nation is a loathsome farce where one of the most circulating national newspapers shamelessly indulges in and even boasts of defending paid news without shame or regret. 

In the US, we have shameless, brazen, corrupt idiot like Gingrich, without any ethical moorings, who has made money by selling himself to the highest bidder and would qualify to be labeled as a political prostitute, implying that the government should curtail food stamp payments and starve the indigent, while he spends ill begotten millions at Tiffany’s to seduce his myriad wives and mistresses in serial monogamy. We have the intellectually handicapped Santorum, who milked the system of thousands of dollars by home schooling his children and made millions by being a paid hack for Fox News being a serious contender for the presidency.

The US public is so dumb, stupid, apathetic and ignorant that it does not even try to challenge the shenanigans of its corrupt two parties and their flawed electoral process. It anoints a Romney who got rich by reducing American jobs and Obama, a lying, phoney without principle or character, as the contenders to lead the nation to destruction by wars and policies to enrich the privileged, and devastate the citizenry. Maybe the citizens of India and the US are so retarded that they deserve extinction, the fate of many a species in the long running soap opera called evolution.