Sunday, April 27, 2008

MENopoly

I hate monopoly. I hate the word. Except for the board-game with the same name, I hate everything about it. The Monopolistic and Restrictive Trade Practices Act in India represents abuse of market power in the production and marketing of goods and services by eliminating potential competitors from the market. It's about taking unfair advantage and control over the market by superior guerrilla marketing tactics or by charging unreasonably high or low prices and preventing competition in the same field.

For example take the ipod. 'Creative' was one of the first companies to produce MP3 players but has lost out to Apple which dominates the market. I hate it. I agree it's got a brilliant design. It's a good product. All other mp3 players are technically good or even better than the ipod. Ipod doesn't even have a FM radio. But somehow it has managed to magnetize the world. Apple fanatics might disagree. This outcry from one in a billion blogs cant change a thing. Which is precisely my point. Monopolist corporates and individuals are extant parasites. Nothing can be done. The customer might be the 'King' but corporates still rule the planet. They even decide how our environment should be.

The probability of you reading this on a PC which runs on a windows operated system is 8 out of 10. Microsoft is another giant that secretly allowed counterfeiting of its own software, so that everyone uses it. We don't know any other operating system or any other way our computers could work. Here, I would like to thank Apple for their rebellious marketing effort. The list goes on. Coke. Pepsi. P&G. Unilever. USA(at least for the time being). etc. Mammoth wolfs in sheep's clothes.

But I'm not here to talk about them. I'm here to talk about someone else of a similar nature. He's the most perceptible Monopolistic Monster of them all. Yea, it's a 'he'. The Man. The male species. The person who belongs to the sex that cannot have babies. From time immemorial, 'he' has ruled the world. Men framed the law. History was written by winners, mostly men. Theories, philosophies, stories were mostly written by men.So if they wrote Adam came first and then came eve, then Adam came first - for that's how it was written. It was always the evolution of Man because a man wrote it. Knowledge is knowledge as we know it. In other words we know it the way it was written by men.


So you might think whether I'm still caught in a time wrap. I agree that women have excelled in every field. It's good thing that the line is also becoming a cliche. Women have been accepted as equal partners and men have let them do whatever they want... to an extent. Unfortunately, we, the so called new gen people think of all these in a closed air-conditioned room. We only see what we want to see, living in metros or big cities. The rest of India or the rest of the world(sans the metros) is where the major population lives.Did you know that 75% of the people who live in Bombay live below the poverty level. Try looking there and you will see the real world. We are still fighting for 33% reservation for women in our parliament. Sexual Harassment, abuse, rape, abortion, infanticide, foeticide, son preference still exist. If things have evolved, we wont be needing 'Women's day' in the first place. It's still a man's day 364 days a year.

Men have to travel a lot... in their mind. Perceptions have to change at an individual level. Not just men from villages and small towns. There are such guys everywhere. Women should also not let men take advantage. It's easy for me to write these things. They should do this. They should do that. People should think like this. I know I cant do a thing unless I have a wireless remote control to all their minds. I'm just airing my views here. To me, it's not just Men Vs Women. It's A vs B. Or X Vs Z. One cannot overpower the other. I hate monopoly. I hate monopoly. But unfortunately, my world-views end with me.

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