International news is abuzz with news about the OWS movement, gori mems and unclejis holding up hoardings and similar andolan-type stuff outside tall, fancy buildings and people kicking it in tents outside those buildings. Important people making rehearsed statements about OWS, people yelling OWS and stuff that looks straight out of a period film in a modern setting happening is just not an everyday thing, which begs to be asked, ”What is the OWS movement?” Is it some new Oh-what-superness dance move, some Al Qaeda hooligan sister, or some revolutionary protest movement in good old America? You have to be quite stupid I have to tell you it’s is the third one. It’s, what they call, Gandhi/Anna – giri back home.

I’ll be a little more informative now. OWS stands for Occupy Wall Street. According to its dictum, a bunch of jobless hippies occupy parking spots at Wall Street so poor innocent stock-brokers can’t get to work. Alright, no I was kidding.

Okay, note to self: must get serious now.

So, what is the OWS movement you ask?
That’s not exactly the right question.

I’ll pitch you the right question and answer it for you.

What, in the name of the flying spaghetti-noodle monster, is going on?

You know about the recession even if you’ve been living under a rock. I shall skip the mumbo-jumbo and tell you that greedy people borrowed too much, didn’t give it back, and for people who lent it, was quite a bummer because they borrowed it from someone else and couldn’t give it back either, and people defaulted millions and millions of dollars, stock markets crashed, real estate was hardly real anymore, and people were paying their mortgages out of their lunch money, and one thing led to another and before you knew it, half the world has bent over, and the other half are living on the money they saved up to splurge on their extra-marital affairs. Consumerism shook hands with Uncle Sam, and they both gave the rest of the world a few years to remember.

Europe isn’t far behind, some of the worst hit countries are European actually. Greeks are going back to wearing towels, the Spanish are begging Real Madrid for money to pay their $5.1 billion udhaar, and the Portuguese actually thought about transfer-selling Ronaldo to another country, before they realized it wasn’t really THAT great an idea. But you know it’s getting worse when entire countries start acting like that. The only reason we aren’t screwed as much is because we have millions of stingy Uncle Scrooges(which isn’t such a bad thing in hindsight) in our country, and the poor were, well as poor to begin with.

For more information, google “sub-prime debt crisis”

I hate preachy monologues so here I assume you’d go, “Ok, so I get the drift, but stop talking about fancy international stuff and tell me how it affected the average Joe and Jane!!”

That’s what the last question’s answer’s last line was about, the socio-economic divide, and that’s where I’ll tell you exactly what this movement is all about.

The world’s become a mean place for the not-so-rich section. The rich have become rich enough to buy out countries whereas the poor cannot even buy a burrito. A major portion, 1% of the population control 99% of the resources, whereas the other 99% of the population have to squabble, bicker and kill for that 1% they did not manage to ‘snatch’. This maybe an exaggerated number, but it is not far from the truth. People behind the OWS movement are protesting against this social and economic divide, which in their opinion is unfair. On a more specific paradigm, greed, corruption, high unemployment, unpunished frauds, and the almost parasitic and undue influence they have on the government are their protest agendas. “We are the 99%” is their war-cry, and they’ve camped at Wall Street, which is the exact symbol of this greed, a la Gordon Gekko.

This movement was started on September 17, 2011 by a Canadian activist group ‘Adbusters’ at Zucotti Park, located in New York City’s Wall Street financial district. No no, no malicious videshi haath here. They are nice bunch of people, actually famous for their advertisement-free anti-consumerist magazine ‘Adbusters’ (Adbusters FTW!). It all began with a blog post on July 13 2011, proposing a peaceful protest against absence of any legal action against erring bankers and frauds and a sickening corporate on the ‘democracy’. The protest is more of the sit-down-and-naare-lagaon kind. People from all over are there, living on the street. People supporting the movement have donated everything from food to sanitary facilities. And this is a gist about the movement, and I ain’t your mommy so I shall not spoon-feed you.

Look at these links:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street
2. http://occupywallst.org/
3. http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-we-ruined-occupy-wall-street-generation/

And Google some stuff of course.

All this sounds all too familiar from an Indian perspective too, doesn’t it?

Quite eerily so. The corrupt Babus, the bureaucratic sluggishness, the ‘kharcha-pani’ mindset, the consumerist ‘he-has-it?-I-want-it-too’ attitude and so many other things make us quite vulnerable to these kinds of problems. Maybe we didn’t suffer so much this time, but recessions repeat themselves repeatedly, and the social decadence is conspicuous enough for us to feel vulnerable the next time around. You know the world is going crazy when stuff like Economics and Technology becomes more important than Arts and Humanities, at least that’s where the craziness begins, in our education system and then consequently in our economic system.

Take a look at this: 

And about the Indian impact of the OWS?

Of course we have these kind of things springing up here, what them firangs can do, we can do better, no?
A similar protest against social and economic inequality has begun in Hazaribagh, Bihar.

Why can’t I tell you myself instead of giving so many links?

Because you are a bum if whackk is your only source of political reading, and we ARE your daddy, so it’s our job to show you what all is out there.

Hmm, all in all, at least we are well-off but not enough to not have our own version of the OWS, the Anna movement is bordering on the circus right now, and the junta, don’t be apathetic again, Pleej?