We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.
Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients.
Modi doesn't seem to be interested in Odisha. I certainly feel that.
We have, essentially, a worthless democracy.
A society run by bureaucrats issuing diktats can’t function, because there is no recourse to these apparatchiks. There is no remedy for reform.
At a certain point, particularly in his third term, Mayor Bloomberg lost touch with the people he was serving.
When the Department does respond to telegrams it is invariably to recommend evasion of issues that cannot be evaded.
The ambassador complained to the President about the State Department's lake of response to his cables:
Even to me, as I was trying to tell the government what had happened, it just didn't seem to matter.
Another cause for the increase in alienation and cynicism is a feeling that too many policy decisions that affect individuals have been taken out of any system that has accountability or that they can influence.
I would not vote for the mayor. It's not just because he didn't invite me to dinner, but because on my way into town from the airport there were such enormous potholes.
Congress is a middle-aged, middle-class, white male power structure. No wonder it has been so totally unresponsive to the needs of this country.
When you have a general election result you don't like, you don't have another general election.