Reforms in Governance

This is wishful thinking in areas of governance that give the common citizen great amounts of irritation, if not angst.

All government services must be home-delivered at the customer's (citizen's) convenience. The government can employ people with minimum levels of education and lots of common sense to do the home-delivery, and charge customers for it if necessary-if the fee already charged is not enough. This can boost employment tremendously-it does not have to be in rural areas/farming. Could be a part of the govt. employment schemes, too.

There must be a fixed time period in which the delivery must happen, if not, the service should be free (or discounted appropriately).

There should be visible penalties (like a transfer to the boondocks) for non-compliance by the government official responsible.

No citizen should stand in a line begging for any favours. Approval of most things can be done online, or not depending on merit. A copy of the request can go to the Lok Pal of the respective jurisdiction, and maintained for a certain period until the window for complaints runs out.

You will see wonders happening, and bureaucrats lose their swagger in no time.

If I were Santa Claus...

If I were Santa Claus with the power to gift things to kids of all ages, these are a few things I would gift-

1. A pin to all those powers-that-be who are puffed up with imagined glory, greatness of their selves. All it would take is a tiny prick of this pin, and they'd be normal again.

2. A tape of old songs to all new/budding/upcoming music directors, to remind them that music can be melodious too.

3. An auto-edit machine to Hindi film-makers that will cut their films to (2/3rd) their size.

4. A cut-and-paste software that doesn't work, to students , so that they put on their thinking caps. Caps will be complimentary.

5. A boomerang that will bring back all negative thoughts to the thinker with twice the force. That will usher in positive thinking, better than Dale Carnegie and all the others.

6. Automatically turn all silly TV programs into something meaningful. That might get people to do other things than TV watching, which would benefit humanity, besides keeping everybody healthy.

7. Eliminate 2012 from the calendar, and skip to 2013, so the world need not end- not sure if that's a good thing to do though!

8. Ability to produce flowers at will, so you can't forget them on important occasions. May save a few lives.

9. Auto-reminders of birthdays...no, sorry, Facebook's already done that!

10. Make playing a game/playing with children mandatory for all grown-ups, for an hour a day. This may kill the anti-depressant drug industry.