Left wing with BBQ sauce

The Great Gatsby
Not a mean break to comment on F.Scott Fitzgerald's take on the "American Dream" and its "destruction". Just another dollar chaser's dream crashing and burning. A journey through the seven seas, to get to a land diametrically opposite, to find something, while trying to lose all that is your own. Bequeathed by generations, destroyed by us. There is irony here. India is a mini-america now. You are never too far away from it. I'm preparing for a reverse cultural shock. Something I love to brag about, something I am going to go through soon, when I land, I hope.

Moored
Am looking at Micheal Moore's take on America. Branded left-wing, anti-American, anti-capitalist, socialist, his vitriolic style and method of getting his point across has won acclaim among the foreign press (French poster boy). It's all boiled down to name calling : traitor or not, rather than have a healthy debate on the points he has raised. But to be fair, if I were an American I'd be baying for his blood too. Its interesting to see a rabid left-winger trying hard, to push for a paradigm shift in politics in America today from popular right-extreme-right convictions. In fact Moore has a parallel in indian intellectual circles, in the form of a frail woman, Arundhati Roy, who wields the pen, and talks about her books and convictions from time to time. Her take on the genocidal tendencies of successive Indian governments, using "terror" as an instrument of subjugation and putting down civil rights, may seem to be the case of unbridled vitriol and paranoia, to us seated in the middle class, but you cannot dismiss her lightly. We tend to gloss over gross rights violations, partly due to impunity on the part of the police and the failure of the judiciary in convicting just about anyone guitly beyond reasonable doubt. It's ironical to call America the land of the free with just under 1% of its population in jails, and sharing 25% of the world's inmate population. Which begs the question : Is crime rampant in the more poor countries , or is it worse in the country which has and controls 3/4th's of resources available to mankind?