To be or not to be.

That’s the question the Indian State should be pondering deeply right now. To be or not to be a client-state of the United States of America, to be precise. Thank the Comrades for bringing it to our notice. At the latest count http://faculty.washington.edu/majeski/decline-pap-5.pdf, i.e. as of February 2005, the self-appointed Leader of the Free World had 81 client-states (43 per cent of the countries in the world). This list is based on the US State Department information on Treaties in Force and Fiscal Year 2006 Budget Justification. Around 1945, Great Britain, France and Russia had about 50, 30 and 20 colonies/client-states respectively. The vacuum created by the decay of European Imperialism was filled by the US propensity to acquire and maintain client-states for strategic reasons of its own including its self-determined roles as the Leader of the Free World and the Global Peacekeeper. It is in this community of 81 would-be peers that India is likely to lose face were it to try to renegotiate the 123 Nuclear Treaty. That’s a fate worse than Death, I guess, if one were to judge from the headlines in the Indian Press. When India chose to remain “non-aligned” and Pakistan enrolled as a US client-state after partition, we know what happened. As is well-known, the relationship between the “central star” (the US) and its satellites (say, Pakistan) is identical to the mother country (Great Britain) and her colonies (say, British India) under Imperialism. The leader of the pack offers the satellites goodies (Green Revolution in Pakistan in the fifties, two decades before India got hers) in return of flooding her markets cheap made-in-the-US goods. This involved large-scale mechanization and capitalization of the agricultural sector and the generation of a huge market for the based-in-the-US agribusiness (seeds, fertilizers, pesticides). Our brush with WTO has already taught us what to expect in the future. Even then, I wonder why the US wants to add to its liability by getting hold of one more client-state. All the biggies among US businesses have already made it to the Indian shores. Having got into the habit of acquiring more and more clients, maybe it just cannot deny itself the pleasure of getting one more. I’m being facetious, of course. The US white culture is a culmination of its history of stealing land from the Native Americans, slave trading, dehumanization, exploitation and Imperialism, as even a casual observer of history can vouch. In view of this backdrop, Imperialism may now almost have become life blood for the Leader of the Free World. And, the supreme imperative to be the ultimate arbiter of Truth, Justice and the American Way to the rest of us lesser mortals, most likely.

Change, change, change.

The more I think about it, the more amazing I find it. I must have been born under a forward-looking star that ordained that I would see so much change and so much history in the making in a single lifetime. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/04/pain-and-suffering.html. For instance, as a child, I saw MK Gandhi at fairly close quarters at one of his prayer meetings in Mahabaleshwar. I wrote about it in my still unpublished novel http://www.addgandhi.com/original/ on Gandhi and Hollywood, The Last Gandhi Movie. A few years later, I listened to Nehru’s famous eulogy at his funeral (“the light has gone out of our lives”) on our 5-valvr Bush radio. http://www.eulogywriters.com/ghandi.htm. So even if I rank among the lesser mortals who do not make history, I have been a mute witness to history in the making. Some of the late 20th landmarks I watched at more than six degrees of separation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation were Nehru’s death, the infamous Emergency interlude, Operation Bluestar and its aftermath, to mention the most noteworthy. I witnessed India’s progression from a colony to a state capitalist economy to a free economy. I saw at least one hack Victoria driver being butchered from my third floor terrace at 233 Khetwadi Main Road http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/07/morgue.html in the 1946-47 riots as well as Muslim houses behind as well from across my present residence in old Thakurdwar being put to flame in the 1992-93 massacre following Babri Masjid’s demolition. Apart from these, I saw my own family graduate from the coal choolah and the kerosene stove to bottled cooking gas and from the coal-fired water heater to electric heater. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/heat-of-days-long-past.html. I saw the valve radio making way for the transistor powered one. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2007/03/clueless-in-mumbai.html. I saw my portable typewriter making way for the PC in a span of forty years. http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/my-portable-typewriter-tale.html. And, I also saw myself graduating from the milk in a bottle and later in a plastic bag that needs boiling every morning http://popgoestheslop.blogspot.com/2006/06/neo-luddite-relents-sheepishly-shame.html to the milk in a carton that needs no boiling at all. The Internet, e-mail, IM. SMS, Wen 2.0, cellular phones, CDs, DVDs, the likelihood of the end of the civilisation as we know it and of the institution of marriage … good grief, Charlie Brown, where are we headed?