ATHEIST

The 'informal creed' of atheism. An Atheist loves his fellow man instead of god. An Atheist believes that heaven is something for which we should work now – here on earth for all men together to enjoy. An Atheist believes that he can get no help through prayer but that he must find in himself the inner conviction, and strength to meet life, to grapple with it, to subdue it and enjoy it. An Atheist believes that only in a knowledge of himself and a knowledge of his fellow man can he find the understanding that will help to a life of fulfillment. He seeks to know himself and his fellow man rather than to know a god. An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated. He wants man to understand and love man. He wants an ethical way of life. He believes that we cannot rely on a god or channel action into prayer nor hope for an end of troubles in a hereafter. He believes that we are our brother's keepers; and are keepers of our own lives; that we are responsible persons and the job is here and the time is now.”

APPEASING THE FOREIGN INVESTORS

IN his speech introducing the 2012-13 budget, the then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee had declared his intention to introduce a General Anti-Avoidance Rule (GAAR) to counter “aggressive tax avoidance schemes”. What GAAR means is that even if a transaction appears to be legally valid, if it is entered into for the sole purpose of tax avoidance, then the Indian tax authorities can deny tax benefit to the concerned entity. GAAR had become necessary not only because of the enormous tax revenue lost to the country, but also because India had acquired the dubious reputation, normally associated with “banana republics”, of being a country at whose tax administration multinational corporations could cock a snook with impunity. The bulk of India’s foreign capital inflows for instance was routed through Mauritius, which is a “tax haven”, but with which India has a double tax avoidance treaty, stipulating that taxes must be paid in the country of domicile (not operation), so that no tax need be paid on gains made in India on FDI or FII so routed!

Even the Indian Supreme Court has been benign towards such malfeasance: in 2003 a two-judge bench of the Court had held the adoption of this Mauritius route as a legitimate act of “tax planning”! And more recently when HTIL sold 67 per cent of an Indian company’s share (Hutch Essar Limited) to Vodafone and the Indian tax authorities asked Vodafone to pay the capital gains tax on this sale (which it could then pass on to HTIL), the Supreme Court upheld Vodafone’s contention that it was not liable to tax since it had purchased the shares from a holding company located in Cayman Island!

Mukherjee’s speech expectedly aroused a howl of protest from MNCs and Foreign Institutional Investors, so much so that Mukherjee himself got cold feet and announced that GAAR would come into effect only from April 1, 2013. After his departure, the new finance minister Chidambaram put the proposal on hold, while prime minister Manmohan Singh appointed yet another “slot machine” committee (where you get the report you want) headed by Parthasarathi Shome, a former IMF employee who is currently the director of the most overtly neo-liberal institute in the country, the ICRIER, to go into the introduction of GAAR.

The Shome Committee has expectedly produced a report, hailed by the Wall Street Journal and other mouthpieces of finance capital, which recommends that the introduction of GAAR should be kept in abeyance for three more years beyond Mukherjee’s deadline, ie until April 1, 2016! The apparent excuse for doing so is that GAAR needs to be applied “intelligently”, and it will take that long before the Indian tax authorities acquire the requisite intelligence!

The Shome Committee does not stop there. It recommends that GAAR should be applied only in cases where the tax liability exceeds Rs Three crores, ie the profit on which tax is to be paid exceeds a threshold of 10 crores, by which logic if profits are shown to be dispersed, through “transfer pricing”, then GAAR would never be applied to them anyway. Likewise, if HTIL had sold HEL’s shares not in one lot, but in a staggered manner over a period of time, then it would simply have escaped GAAR totally.

But Shome does not stop there; he advocates an abolition of the capital gains tax altogether! The Manmohan Singh government has in any case done away with taxing what are called “long term capital gains” (ie when securities are held for a minimum period); and even the “short term capital gains” at present are lightly taxed, at a mere 10 per cent. But now the idea is to do away with this tax altogether. This is scandalous since even true-blue bourgeois theorists draw a distinction between “enterprise”, which they laud, and “speculation” which they decry. “Enterprise” earns “profit” while “speculation” earns “capital gains”. In India henceforth while profits will be taxed, capital gains will not be, which is tantamount to penalising “enterprise” and encouraging “speculation”, a situation that even a bourgeois theorist would find utterly bizarre.

That however shows the absurdity of the Manmohan Singh government’s thinking. It is so keen to start another stock market “bubble” which it thinks will stimulate growth, that it wishes to make every possible effort, no matter how bizarre it may sound, to attract speculative finance capital into the country. And it sets up “slot machine” committees to legitimise every such effort, no matter how outlandish and how ethically repugnant such effort may be. The story, however, is by no means going to end here. All these efforts, in the context of the current world capitalist crisis, will come to naught; so, we shall be seeing even more desperate and reprehensible measures to appease foreign speculators on the part of the Manmohan Singh government.

HUMAN RIGHTS OF TERRORISTS / NAXALS AND EXTREMISTS

To, Those Saintly
Souls Whose Heart-Beat
For
Terrorists N Naxalites Rights
Dear Concerned Citizen,

Thank you for your recent letter expressing your profound concern of treatment of the LASHKAR-E-TAIBA and INDIAN MUJAHADEEN terrorists and Naxalites captured by Indian Forces, who were subsequently locked in prisions awaiting hanging .

Our administration takes these matters seriously and your opinions were heard loud and clear here in New-Delhi. You will be pleased to learn, thanks to the concerns of citizens like yourself, we are creating a new department here at the Department of Home Affairs, to be called 'Liberals Accept Responsibility for Killers' program, or L.A.R.K. for short.

In accordance with the guidelines of this new program, we have decided, on a trial basis, to divert several terrorists and Naxalites and place them in homes of concerned citizens such as yourself, around the country, under those citizens’ personal care. Your personal detainee has been selected and is scheduled for transportation under heavily armed guard to your residence , next Monday.

Kasab is your detainee, and is to be cared for pursuant to the standards you personally demanded in your letter of complaint. You will be pleased to know that we will conduct weekly inspections to ensure that your standards of care for Kasab are commensurate with your recommendations.

Although Kasab is a sociopath and extremely violent, we hope that your sensitivity to what you described as his 'attitudinal problem' will help him overcome those character flaws. Perhaps you are correct in describing these problems as mere cultural differences. We understand that you plan to offer counselling and home schooling, however, we strongly recommend that you hire some assistant caretakers.

Please advise any friends, neighbours or relatives about your house guest, as he might get agitated or even violent, but we are sure you can reason with him. He is also expert at making a wide variety of explosive devices from common household products, so you may wish to keep those items locked up, unless in your opinion, this might offend him. Your adopted terrorist is extremely proficient in hand-to-hand combat and can extinguish human life with such simple items as a pencil or nail clippers. We advise that you do not ask him to demonstrate these skills either in your home or wherever you choose to take him while helping him adjust to life in our country.

Kasab will not wish to interact with you or your daughters except sexually, since he views females as a form of property, thereby having no rights, including refusal of his sexual demands. This is a particularly sensitive subject for him.

You also should know that he has shown violent tendencies around women who fail to comply with the dress code that he will recommend as more appropriate attire. I'm sure you will come to enjoy the anonymity offered by the burka over time. Just remember that it is all part of 'respecting his culture and religious beliefs' as described in your letter.

You take good care of Kasab and remember that we will try to have a counsellor available to help you over any difficulties you encounter while Kasab is adjusting to Indian culture.

Thanks again for your concern. We truly appreciate it when folks like you keep us informed of the proper way to do our job and care for our fellow man. Good luck and God bless you.

Cordially,

P. CHIDDU

Cabinet Minister

Ministry Of Home Affairs

Govt. Of India

NEW - DELHI

P.S. : kind attention - Swami Agnivesh and Sh. Shanti Bhushan

THE UN - BORN GOD DIED LONG BACK

Certainly, it is possible for you to live without God. However, an individual with God does not live, he hesitates at every point of living, he is just half-hearted.

He is making love and worried about hell. How can he love a woman when the Bible goes on saying that the woman is the gateway to hell? He is making love, and thinking about the sermon on Sunday: “The woman is the gateway to hell. What are you doing?” So neither can he love, nor can he live without love. God has made man very schizophrenic, half-hearted in everything.

You are earning money, and at the same time you know that your greed is a sin. If you don’t earn money, you starve. Your whole nature rebels against starvation, forces you to earn something to feed yourself. Nature pulls one way, God and his representatives pull you the other way. You are in a strange position.

In Hindi, we have a beautiful proverb, " DHOBI KA KUTTA - NA GHAR KA NA GHAT KA " . Here, donkeys are used by the washerman to carry clothes to the river, this donkey is accompanied by a dog all through the day. And then after the washing, he again puts the clothes on the donkey and takes them to different houses of his customers . So ."our life is just like the dog of a washerman.” He is never at the house nor even at the river, always in between, going from house to river, or river to house.

The washerman’s dog simply means schizophrenia. You are always half in every act, but because the whole humanity is schizophrenic, you don’t realise it. You love but you hate the same person you love. What has created this hate? It is because you love this woman, and this woman is the gateway to hell. You are bound to hate her too. You make friends in the evening, by the morning you become enemies. You go on moving away and you go on coming together. This goes on continuously — the washerman’s dog.

You are asking, “Is it possible for man to live without God?” It is not only possible to live totally WITHOUT GOD , but also to live fully.

Sigmund Freud’s statement is worth remembering. Because he worked his whole life on sex, he thought sex was the root of all problems. But he never understood that it is not sex that is the problem, it is the suppression of sex that is the problem. The priest is the problem, God is the problem, holy scriptures are the problem; sex is not the problem….

Sigmund Freud said: “Priests cannot destroy sex.” But they have succeeded in poisoning it. They could not succeed in destroying sex, otherwise there would have been no humanity…. So you are committing the sin, and you think the woman is the cause.

Reality is totally different; it is God. But as God is only fiction; he cannot do anything. The priest is the representative, the spokesman of God, who goes on creating all kinds of guilt feelings in you. Those guilt feelings don’t allow you to live. Everything is wrong, everything is a sin.

But this is only half the story. The fictitious God has to be replaced by an actual experience of truth , otherwise you will go insane and the truth is HUMANITY .

DEATH OF CAPITALISM

ILL , DECAYING AND DYING CAPITALISM NEEDS TO BE BURRIED . So Friends, Capitalism has failed us, let’s change it.

The Indian working people in on offensive in order to regain their lost rights and thereby commencing a historic All India General Strike on 28th February, coinciding with world wide working class collective movement. Working class across the globe has commenced undulating movement sha...king the torch bearers of satrap Government of capitalism since last 2 years. In Greece, year 2011 observed 7 general strikes, including 2 strikes of 48 hours, by workers in addition to another 7 successive strikes in 2010 shaken the Greece Govt. including 1 country wide strike in early February 2012 in protest of the austerity measures initiated by Govt. In Portugal, workers observed nationwide strike in November 2011, Italy has seen waves of strikes, a...nd last week, workers of Romania paralyzed the streets of Bucharest against the dictatorship of capitalism. Also other parts of Europe, workers rages are escalating against capitalism.

In view of amazingly true facts that world scale capitalist Governments are blatantly covering up the utter failure of their system, has reached in a terminal status. And in this context, 28th February strike gains enormous importance, giving the sharpness of consciousness. Just 17 months ago, we the 10 crore of Indian workers went for nation wide strike on 7th September 2011 and the CWI- India ( New Socialists Alternatives) written that it was the beginning of the masses moving into action under the leadership of organized working class of the country.

So friends, It is proven beyond any doubt that the capitalism has miserably failed in solving the fundamental problems of poverty, illiteracy squalor, disease unemployment, landlessness & housing. It continues the discrimination by caste, class, gender, sexuality and national identity. In fact its greed for profits is threatening the very ecological balance of earth. Environmental concerns can not be left to these “specialists” whose priorities are wealth over welfare, profit over people, greed over green.

Capitalism shows no way out; a fighting, militant, combative approach is necessary in day-to-day struggles of the working class which should collaborate with the struggles of the women, urban & rural poor and of the indigenous Adivasi and Daliths, for a stronger alliance linked to the idea of the socialist transformation of society.

Highs And Lows Of Secularism

              
Different countries and different cultures have followed different shades of SECULARISM - wherever it is practiced.

The Oxford Dictionary describes Secular as - not believing in the sanctity of religion.

Of all countries in the world - France has a very puritanical definition of secularism - they do not allow any symbols of religion in the public space. It has to do with the spirit of the French Revolution and libertarian values that they hold so dear. The French are perfectly within their rights to pursue the secularism they espouse. But their secularism is peculiar and appropriate for them.

When the word 'SECULAR' was being incorporated in the Indian Constitution, the framers of the constitution altered the meaning of the word to mean : equal respect for all religions. It was incorporated in our constitution with this altered meaning.

Unfortunately, we have not practiced secularism as we had envisaged in our constitution - we ended up appeasing all religions. Moreover, appeasing the minorities is considered as being secular. That may not be what secularism is all about. Equal social, political and economic opportunities for all citizens and security of the life and property of every citizen is what constitutes secularism. That the governance is secular and that religion should not form the basis of governmental action is what can be call as genuine secularism as we envisaged in our constitution.

All mighty religions of this country could experiment with social thought only in the backdrop of a pragmatic Hinduism. In any other backdrop this rich experimentation would not have been possible. Conversely the experimentation by all religious thoughts has only enriched this nation's composite philosophy. Effectively we must recognize the positive contribution of all religions in a spirit of mutual respect.

Deriding or extolling Hinduism or for that matter any religion is no indicator of secularism. In the article what Sir Mark Tully, Sagarika Ghose or Kancha Illiaih say is immaterial - they are speaking from their own stand point. But these debates would not have been fueled only if we had followed secularism as we had envisaged in our founding document. This is not secularism - this is COMPETITIVE MINORITY-ISM. The formations of the right debunk this as pseudo secularism - they are quite right. But then they are following COMPETITIVE MAJORITY-ISM - which again does no justice to the stability of society. The leftists or centrists call this as Pseudo Nationalism. Where then does the debate end - NOWHERE - till we follow what we have accepted.

Finally even in a uni-religion country, secularism should remain the bedrock of governance because of differences in terms of religious sects, ethnicity, language, culture etc. For example : Iraq is made of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds - all Muslim but each differing from the other in its interpretation of religion.

Take the example of India where no two people of the same religion are absolutely the same - differences in language, region, ethnicity, food, clothing, values, culture are different.

Why should governments unnecessarily interfere in a never ending fight where governance and human life suffer.

On Friends And Friendship

              

Two Traveling Angels....... this one will make you think twice!!!!! ..

Keep reading to the bottom of the page -- don't

stop at the feet (You'll see).

Two traveling angels stopped to spend the night in the home of a

wealthy family.

The family was rude and refused to let the angels stay in the

mansion's guest room.

Instead the angels were given a small space in the cold basement.

As they made their bed on the hard floor, the older angel saw a hole

in the wall and repaired it.

When the younger angel asked why, the older angel replied,

"Things aren't always what they seem"

The next night the pair came to rest at the house of a very poor, but

very hospitable farmer and his wife.

After sharing what little food they had the couple let the angels

sleep in their bed where they could have a good night's rest.

When the sun came up the next morning the angels found the farmer and

his wife in tears.

Their only cow, whose milk had been their sole income, lay dead in

the field.

The younger angel was infuriated and asked the older angel how could

you have let this happen?

The first man had everything, yet you helped him, she accused.

The second family had little but was willing to share everything, and

you let the cow die..

"Things aren't always what they seem," the older angel replied.

"When we stayed in the basement of the mansion, I noticed there was

gold stored in that hole in the wall.

Since the owner was so obsessed with greed and unwilling to share his

good fortune, I sealed the wall so he wouldn't find it."

"Then last night as we slept in the farmers bed, the angel of death

came for his wife I gave him the cow instead.

Things aren't always what they seem."

Sometimes that is exactly what happens when things don't turn out

the way they should. If you have faith, you just need to trust that

every out come is always to your advantage. You just might not know it

until some time later...

Oooo

Some people 

come into our lives 

and quickly go.. 

oooO

 Some people

 become friends

 and stay awhile...

leaving beautiful Oooo

footprints on our 

hearts... 

oooO

 and we are

 never

 quite the same

because we have

made a good

friend!!

Yesterday is history.

Tomorrow a mystery.

Today is a gift.

That's why it's called the present!

I think this is special...live and savor every

moment... This is not a dress rehearsal!

 TAKE THIS LITTLE ANGEL

 AND KEEP HER CLOSE TO YOU

SHE IS YOUR GUARDIAN ANGEL

 SENT TO WATCH OVER YOU

____

Right Now -

-somebody is thinking of you.

-somebody is caring about you.

-somebody misses you

-somebody wants to talk to you.

-somebody wants to be with you.

-somebody hopes you aren't in trouble.

-somebody is thankful for the support you have provided.

-somebody wants to hold your hand.

-somebody hopes everything turns out all right.

-somebody wants you to be happy.

-somebody wants you to find him/her.

-somebody is celebrating your successes.

-somebody wants to give you a gift.

-somebody thinks that you ARE a gift.

-somebody loves you.

-somebody admires your strength.

-somebody is thinking of you and smiling.

-somebody wants to be your shoulder to cry on.