Random Thoughts    
An Unexamined Life Is Not worth Living
by Gaurang Bhatt, MD 

The famous words of Socrates can be equally applied to news and events of life. This does not imply a paralysis of action in a Hamlet�s conflict. After all the very purpose of consciousness and reflection is appropriate action. I am not reverting to my background of Karma, but emphasizing the western neuroscience view of the evolution of the brain and its raison d�etre.

In assessing what one reads, hears or senses by any means, it is important to be a filter and not a sponge. A living sponge, to give it its due, is merely an indiscriminate absorber, but then proceeds to filter out its needed essential ingredients from its indiscriminate absorptions. Our gastro-intestinal system has little choice but to consume available food, but it then embarks on selective discrimination to absorb vital ingredients and then discard the unnecessary waste. The kidneys do this in reverse by filtering everything below a certain size, and then redeeming from the filtrate those essential molecules that due to their small size have been lost at the first pass. The very origins of life in the oceans begin by the development of semi-permeable lipid membranes and the sodium pump, to selectively overcome the deleterious effects of osmosis contaminating the milieu interior and keeping it in electrolyte, fluid and pH balance.

On a more mundane note, let us look at some news items. Every Indian following the news knows that India has carried out three successful interceptions of ballistic missiles in both the exo and endo stages in the terminal phase of the incoming missile. It is important to note that the interceptions were not carried out in the launch or boost phases which come earlier. The relative lack of admiring reactions by the US, Russia and Israel which have spent billions towards this endeavor, should raise a red flag of suspicion on the part of all chauvinistic Indians jumping with joy and crowing from rooftops. Of course it is a national paranoia of Indians to feel denied recognition purposely, by the developed nations because of racism, self-absorption and a superiority complex. There may be faint glimmers of truth in the imagined beliefs of Indians, but that should not preclude analysis and examination of the facts.

The US has claimed repeated unverified and false success of its Patriot anti-missile system from the 1991 Gulf War onwards. Those claims have been proved false in the case of Saddam�s Scud attacks on Saudi Arabia and Israel. Later claims in the Iraq war of 2003 resulted in the death of British airmen by friendly fire when the Patriot missile shot down a British Harrier jet. Israel�s failure to neutralize Hizbollah and Hamas Katyusha rockets is another instance of failure of current ABM technology. A few successes reported by the US from its primitive Alaska based and ship based Aegis systems have later revealed that the incoming missile had a homing beacon which the anti-missile could track to locate and destroy it.

In a real war situation no enemy is going to be stupid enough to bear a bull�s eye beeping, �I am here, kill me�. The enemy could launch enough lethal missiles to saturate the ABM defense or launch decoy and genuine missiles to confuse and overcome the ABM defense. Even a 90% success rate would let ten nuclear missiles through to cause severe devastation. The monitoring defense system would be constrained by lack of 24/7 vigilance, malfunction and in the case of India, time constraints as Pakistan (unlike North Korea, Iran or Russia, which are far away from the US) is right next door. Finally Pakistan, thanks to China, has cruise missiles which can be nuclear equipped, which travel at treetop levels and can evade any radar detection.

The last nail in the coffin of Indian aspirations is the latest announcement of India signing a 1.3 billion dollar defense deal with Israel�s IAI and other contractors to develop an ABM system for delivery to begin 90 months after the initial payment of 300 million dollars, which will be made soon. At the same time various Indian defense web sites proclaim that India will have an operational ABM defense system ready in forty-eight months. Doesn�t anyone see the inconsistencies in these two news stories? If we can have our own indigenously developed capable and functioning ABM defense system in four years, why are we wasting 1.3 billion dollars of our precious foreign exchange reserves to get a future system not even on the drawing board now, in seven years.

We earlier bought the Israeli Spyder air defense because our Dhanush anti-aircraft system failed like our anti-tank missiles have failed. Our Arjun battle tank�s failure required us to buy more Russian T-90 tanks and our Tejas aircraft failure requires us to buy the much delayed 126 MRCAs. The real truth is the Indian DRDO is a miserable failure run by inept bureaucrats and mostly useless scientists (with few exceptions) just like most of our government and its enterprises. The delays in our military procurement and their sad litany of bribery and corruption by ministers as in the Bofors, HDW submarines, coffin and other scams is the shameful story of India from the Greek, Muslim, European and Chinese invasions spanning over two millennia.

The newest dilemma, even publicly alluded to by Shyam Saran, the bureaucrat who negotiated a lackey status for India in the nuclear deal at the behest of our puppet prime minister, is Afghanistan. India instead of continuing its friendly relationship with the US, groveled at the feet of �W� and now a tired America is negotiating with the Taliban to extricate itself from the Afghan quagmire without losing face. This leaves India in a total mess. The Taliban and its sister organizations are responsible for terror in Kashmir and all over India, including the Mumbai terror attack. India has spent nearly a billion dollars in foreign aid to the Karzai government which the US is bent on replacing, leaving India with mud on its face. To add insult to injury, terrorist Pakistan is to receive 15 billion dollars from the IMF and nearly the same amount from the US, to become less of a terrorist.

You got to admire Pakistan�s chutzpah. It is like the Menendez brothers who after killing their parents, got mercy from a US court as they pleaded they were orphans! A spineless India unable to stand erect for its own interests and throws itself at the feet of Russia or America and depends on their mercy. It was doomed to colonization in the past, is doomed to neo-colonization in the present and perpetual disaster in the future. Its only consolation, of no value, is that mighty America has similar corruption in defense procurement with lying and cheating defense contractors, on whose money the election of its corrupt scum bucket congress and presidents depends. That doesn�t help, as there is no equivalent word in the Indian languages for �schadenfreude�. 

March 29,  2009

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