Monday, February 3, 2014

Sons and Daughters of India

I was watching some awards ceremony last night and was struck by how many sons and daughters of filmi personalities were now filmi personalities. From Salman Khan, Hritik Roshan, Shahid Kapoor, Ranbir Kapoor, Karan Johar, Vivek Oberoi, Abhishek Bachchan, Farhan Akhthar, Tushar Kapoor, Arjun Kapoor and so on and on the list is endless in the male side with few exceptions of a Shahrukh or a Ranveer Singh. On the female side also the ring is somewhat packed with Karishma Kapoor, Raveena Tandon, Kareena Kapoor, Sonakshi Sinha, Kajol etc with some exceptions like Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra, Vidya Balan. I mean wherever I saw I could only see fathers and mothers and their sons and daughters, cousins and relatives. Makes one wonder why everyone screams so much about meritocracy here in India.

It's not much different when we look at the political scene either. From the Rahul Gandhi, Sachin Pilot, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Akhilesh Yadav, Uddhav Thackeray, Raj Thackeray, Jaganmohan Reddy, Kanimozhi, Stalin, Alagiri, Kumaraswamy and so on, the list of fathers and mothers and sons and daughters goes on and on. Food for thought really.

I doubt if it is different in business either. How many companies are family run and how many are professionally run? Take the Birlas, Tatas, Ambanis, Mahindras, Infosys and others and check out how many sons and fathers, daughters and mothers one finds. There are many cases there as well. In fact in business circles they also marry carefully, so the wealth only increases and every one's interests taken care of. So we have uncles and aunts in the government, in the judiciary, in the press, in the industry and everything is under control and taken care of.

In this context it's nice to see the AAP guys, mistakes and all. They may also have some vague form of bias I am sure.

But just goes to say that all this talk of meritocracy is a lot of humbug. Us, ours, is the mantra. The joke is on the rest.

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