Washington Irving: "The Sketch Book"

Read "The Sketch Book" by Washington Irving a few days back. The joy of discovering a nice book or an author is the same as watching a previously unheard of movie and later realising that you watched a great movie(which everybody else in the world seems to have heard of except you). The stories are humorous, poetical and perfectly suitable for a peaceful and silent sunday.

Are we progressing?

• Why is that we humans are always running on a treadmill whose minimum speed is ever increasing?
• Why is that we feel the life of a jet-setting, hot shot millionaire business executive is more meaningfull, more successfull than a poor farmer tilling his land in some remote village of a developing/underdeveloped country?
• Has all the technological progress made so far enabled mankind to remove all the miseries of life ?
  
• Will technology ever have the capacity to rid humans of their miseries?
  
• Are we really more happy, leading more meaningfull life than people, say 3000 years back?

Better leaders?

I have been pestered for a long time by a well meaning friend to start a blog. But being a lazy person and also having what I suspect a neo-luddite nature, I kept post phoning it. So at last here I am to clutter the cyber space with my ideas and opinions and whatnot...

So my first topic :

I read a few days back that the assembly and LokSabha constituencies will be redrawn and re-organized. The new electoral map will now have more urban constituencies. Now , going by the logic (unfounded & may be unreasonable) that

• Most educated people move to cities in search of jobs.
• The proportion of educated people in urban areas is more than the rural areas.
• Educated people realize that it is their duty to vote.
• Educated people are politically savvy and elect good, honest and able politicians.

Will it now mean that we will have a better set of politicians than in the past????