Friedman has a beautiful piece on America’s priorities and the precariousness of the national psyche. In his OP-ED in times, Friedman talks about

“my president, whose agenda can be derailed at any moment by a jihadist death cult using exploding underpants.”

And

what does the war on terror give us? Better drones, body scanners and a lot of desultory T.S.A. security jobs at airports. “Sputnik spurred us to build a highway to the future,” added Mandelbaum. “The war on terror is prompting us to build bridges to nowhere.”

This dangerous balance of the nation’s priorities was not reached in a day. The military-media-government-industrial-religious complex works the 24 hour news cycle, 365 days a year to push the society to a nervous state of fear. I think this article is very important in an American and Indian context. Policy makers should have the courage to make decisions which may not go well with the mob’s opinion, and the mob should understand that every news story is trying to prepare them to go to war. Such an understanding might help in realizing why the Indian left opposed making a missile man the country’s president, why Narendra Modis are always wrong even when they build spectacular highways, why every speculative article about Chinese aggression in India’s cess-pool broadcasters is not harming China but contaminating our national psyche, why we shouldn’t fight terrorists ourselves in our drawing rooms and facebooks and twitters, but leave that jobs to men who are paid for that, and why we should switch off the television sets and burn that copy of Times of India. The fight between the right and the left is not about 542 seats in the house, but about half a billion young minds in the making, and that’s why the Republic Day parade where missiles are displayed should be banned. Then may be we will create a country where the ‘mind is without fear’.