My Election Manifesto

I am not a political party, just a common voter. My election manifesto (resemblances to other manifestos is coincidental. No politicians were harmed during the writing of this) if I were one,
would read-

1. No speeches..what a relief!
2. If elected (a remote chance, but you never know- Deve Gowda became Prime Minister once),

• Free education and healthcare. Everything else, you do on your own steam
• Where will the money come from? From taxing the people who have excess money and don't know what to do with it, for the first few years..after that, maybe other sources. Simple maths will tell you that you can save around 50,000 crores by removing wastage of various kinds..enough to start with.
• No personal income tax..(resemblance to other manifestos is coincidental!)...instead, any other scheme which taxes consumption, but at a reasonable rate).
• Free Swiss citizenship for all who have Swiss bank account- and a one-way ticket. Same for other tax havens.

More promises only after these have been implemented.

I Think.....

I decided that I would write a thoughtful blog. Therefore, I sat down to think. The only problem is, whenever you decide to do something, that something eludes you. So the thoughts which otherwise run riot, ebbed to a trickle, and after a bit, completely vanished.

So then I decided I will write something thoughtless. And promptly, my thought process was back where it used to be-on track. I now have a wealth of thoughts on conventional wisdom, and what it does to all of us. Will share a few.

Conventional wisdom says that we have to grow up. That childhood and its glory are at best ephemeral, with a life of a few years. Grown up life is the majority of our life. The impact of this is that there are too many grown-ups, acting, well...grown-up, all around. And the wars and the competition grows by the day, and innocence and fun are hard to come by.

Conventional wisdom tells us that one must categorise people- by the clothes they wear, the cars they drive (or whether they do) how they smell, how well-groomed they are, by their skin colour, by the amount of degrees they accumulate, or their accent. This deprives us of some valuable interactions that can teach us a lot about life. And in the worst case, results in hate crimes.

Conventional wisdom says that you must be loyal to any member of your family, even at a cost to the non-family members of society. A lot of times, this results in nepotism, and a loss of meritocracy and a possible fall in living standards of society as a whole.

Conventional wisdom says that one must put up a show for the outside world, in terms of achievements, material or otherwise. This may result in losing sight of inner happiness, and a loss of peace. Not to mention indebtedness through spending beyond your means.