Obamacare Law Upheld – America’s March towards Darkness Begins – Caricature & Cartoon of President Barack Obama.

Click here to view President Obama rejoicing upon winning his second term 🙂 (Posted on: November 09, 2012.)

Thursday, June 28, 2012 was an important day in the History of the USA. On this day, America took a giant step towards assassinating free will.

This, of course, is the opinion of a caricaturist. Caricaturists are infamous for exaggerating stuff, but in this case, I think I am reporting it exactly the way I see it. It’s Mr. Obama’s way of gaining political mileage by ensuring that about 30 Million votes come his way.

Caricature of Barack Obama - 2012 US Presidential Elections - Health-care Bill Upheld

Penalty or Tax? Whatever!

About the Health Care Law and its Long-Term Ramifications:

The US Health Care Law a.k.a. the Obamacare Law has been upheld by the American Supreme court with a majority of 5:4! 5:4? Yes. The bill that passed the house with a 219:214 majority and which was voted down not just by all Republicans but also by 34 democrats. If it’s a panacea of all medical evils, then why almost half of these intellectuals voted against it? Who is to say, which half is the smarter lot?

I’ll leave that discussion to those who know more about law than I do. I’ll just sit here and wonder, why does Mr. Barack Obama think that this is going to really help America and the American people? While I am still to read a convincing argument how it’s one of the smartest things ever done, here’s why I think it’s one of the dumbest.

If I work hard to earn what I do, I’d like to decide what “charity” I’d like to give my money to. You can’t hold a gun to my temple and expect me to put my money into charity, and then feel good about it too. Fine, fine. You say it’s not charity. You say, I “might” end up using some of it too. Right. But I might not. I think that I should be able to decide whether or not I want to even use a hospital at all.

I see “red” when I read or hear about the Health Care bill. It smacks of communism. I see the beacon of freedom fading. I see America marching towards a future that will make people question the value of hard work and merit.

In fact, I do see some people dancing about and making merry now that the healthcare bill’s got the Supreme Court’s nod. These are the medical practitioners, the Insurance companies, and of course, those who wanted health insurance but couldn’t pay for it. Those who couldn’t pay for it, would’ve earlier tried to work to pay for it, but I hear about subsidies being given to them now (so, the young who don’t need insurance – except in the rare instance of their being in an accident, and the rich who don’t want insurance, or even the upper-middle-class who’d earlier rather fly to a cheaper medical treatment destination instead of paying the premiums, will all now pay for the 30 Million or so uninsured among which you’d have the children of the illegal immigrants too. Great idea!)

Earlier Obama’s team vehemently denied the “fact” that they accepted in the court, which was that the penalty would be a sort of tax. So in principle, US has accepted that it’s fine to impose additional tax on those who work hard to earn an honest living, because they didn’t want to buy “insurance” that they believed they didn’t need, to help provide insurance for those who wanted to buy insurance but didn’t or couldn’t work to earn it. It makes me believe that Ayn Rand had predicted this a long time ago, when she had written Atlas Shrugged. Mr. Obama has opened a Pandora’s box that will continue to spew newer schemes to make it shameful to work hard. The healthcare bill may well be a soft beginning with a delicate touch. Anyone who stands up against it would be called heartless and inhuman, and suffering will be sold in the garb of equality and affordability.

There might be a time, not in a very distant future, when Americans will look at one-another with suspicion. Distrust will grow, as will Xenophobia. The seeds have been sowed already. And while it’s been presented as an innocuous, do-good policy, yet in the years to come it’s going to spawn many more of its kind. In time, with repeated exposure to the evil of Need over Merit, Americans will lose their edge, which comes from their individualism. They’d become a collective whole – the good never aiming at greatness, and the bad never needing to leave their badness. Unless, of course, the other half that voted against it, stands up against it. Unfortunately, populist measures aren’t easy to rollback, so whatever Mr. Romney may be saying now, he might find it really difficult to actually uproot it completely.

It’s funny that I should feel so strongly about it. In my country, health insurance is a personal choice, and for more than 90 percent of its population, it doesn’t exist. I think it would be safe to assume that a large majority of the population doesn’t even know what health insurance is. Whether you get medical attention or not is determined by whether or not you or the ones who love you have earned it or not. For instance, if something really terrible happens to me, I’ll die swift and quick, because I really didn’t earn my right to health care by being able to buy a policy. What’s so wrong with it? It’s completely moral. Anytime when death comes visiting, I’ll die happy, knowing that I lived a life that I wanted to live. I understand how it’s hard on people who care about you, but it’s just one of those things that we accept and it doesn’t make a ton of difference to the population in general.

I think I am concerned because for me the US has been a lighthouse in the darkness of a world that I don’t understand. I’ve always understood the value-system of America. I’ve admired the freedom that the country gives to every individual so that he may write his own destiny. This is the freedom that leads to other freedoms – the freedom of speech, of doing business, of making money, of keeping money, and to help others make money. It’s this freedom that has made America the greatest nation in this world. What America does, others emulate, yet this once, I find myself hoping that others don’t follow suit.

But as I said earlier, this is the opinion of a caricaturist – and caricaturists exaggerate. Go home, sleep well, and forget all about it.

Some More SEO Humor and… Who is Shafali the Caricaturist?

Dear Readers of all varieties (quick, fleeting, or lingering; medium, rare, or well-done; well-read, well-meaning, and curious,)

Once every few months, I sit down and scroll through the searches that’ve brought people to my blog.

Here are just a few of these terms.

Humorous Women Cartoons

“Humorous Women” Cartoons? I’ve told you earlier and I tell you again. Women aren’t built to be humorous. When God’s engineers were busy  putting women together their operations were sabotaged by Men (who by the way, were already built and ready to be launched.) The men stole the vial that contained humor and replaced it with another vial that contained the potion of tears. That’s why women cry and men laugh (often at the same time.) Got it? So stop searching for humorous women cartoons. The only humor we’ve got is of the sooty black kind.

Cartoon Nazi Girl Angela Merkel

So which part confuses you? Nazi or Girl? or Angela Merkel?

Beautiful Pic Men Caricature

Did you mean Pacman? or Pokemon? If you meant Beautiful pictures of men…I am sorry, dear – but you are looking for something that can never be. No? Okay…then I have the right image for you, I think.

Ghost of you(r?) my chemical romance sketch:

Chemical Romance?
Really?
Please postpone the romance until you are out of the Chemistry Lab. I beseech you. There’s never a more dangerous place to get mushy (umm…wait. Perhaps there is. How about the Forge Shop? Imagine that one of you is holding the sledge hammer and the other person is struggling to hold the red-hot iron piece using the tongs! PS: Don’t assume this happened with me because it didn’t or I’d not be here warning you against it.)

Cartoon Sketch on Sports of Shafali

Shafali doesn’t play sports, so this has to mean something else. Perhaps a sketch of a sportsman by Shafali. I hang my head in shame. I’ve done only a few sports caricatures, but you can check out Troy Polamalu, Tiger Woods, and Sachin Tendulkar.. An unlikely combination – but that’s all I have on this blog right now. Sorry.

Pakistani Caricaturist Cartoonist

Now this is important. I am an INDIAN Caricaturist Cartoonist.

Caricature of Women with Mustaches

Ho, ho, ho! hee, hee, hee! Tee, hee, hee!
Gone are the days, Sir, when you could see women with mustaches. With Laser hair removal techniques, every woman’s upper lip is as smooth as a baby’s! Why mustaches? Women today have no hair anywhere except on their heads and in their brows (OMG! what did I just say? I am going to be killed for giving this secret away.) But it gives me an idea… a real good one too 🙂 Thanks.

And finally…

The questions that have been asked many times during the last two years, but are being asked more frequently these days.

Who is Shafali the Caricaturist? Who is Shafali the Cartoonist?

Shafali is an artist with a temperament. Let me begin this information capsule with a quick demonstration.

I am a woman so I am not Mr. Shaf Ali. When anyone calls me Mr. Ali, I get my knickers in a twist, my eyebrows in a knit, and my arm in a splint! Shafali is a the name of a beautiful flower that’s offered to Lord Shiva and is called Shivli (Shiva’s friend) in Assam and Shefali in Bengal. While my name is Shafali, I’ve learned to live with people addressing me as “Shefali” in their emails and snail-mails – at least they don’t change my gender. One should be thankful for small mercies.

More…

I like to read, write, and draw. I love dogs, cats, and squirrels. I am selectively ambidextrous and can reverse-write with the same ease with which I write normally. I am good at both manual and digital drawing and painting, but I gravitate towards black and white drawing because it’s faster 🙂

Oh..move away and stay there! I can feel that wave of temperament wash over me again…

…And to those men who keep asking me about my age, all I have to say is – if you could ask that question, you weren’t brought up to be a gentleman; and my Grandmother would revive herself just so that she may put me under house-arrest for talking to you. And you must disappear before she comes back or I won’t be responsible for what happens to you!

(Psst…she once set her two dogs on a young man who had the temerity to send me a card…I am just say’n…)

MIB 3 – Men in Black vs. Men in the Back Row a.k.a the Crop of Alien Engineers

Here’s the story.

I watched MIB 3 (that is Men in Black 3). The stress that I put on the word “watched” is deliberate. It is to emphasize that the four engineering students who sat in the row behind me talked so much that I couldn’t hear what Will Smith said to Tommy Lee Jones, nor what Josh Brolin (the younger and more talkative agent K) said to Will Smith…at least during the first half of the movie.

I am curious.

These engineering students (their loud conversation would have me believe that they were studying engineering in one of those zillion weedy engineering colleges of the seedier kind, that have been mushrooming around the country at the rate of 1 college a second.)

This group of Fantastically Foolish Four was there spending money on a movie that none of them understood (yes, I say this despite knowing that there isn’t much to understand in it,) and that they didn’t know anything about (what’s there to know, any way.) The concept of the MIB movies was completely “alien” to them, and for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why they took the last row tickets, sat there for 102 minutes in the dark, if all they wanted to do was giggle (yes, I know girls giggle, guys guffaw – but these guys were experimenting with some sort of role-reversal..don’t ask me why.)

I am not being mean. I am just curious.

While I know that in their kind of engineering college, no engineering is taught; and while I also know that if the education ministry has its way the IITs would soon follow with their crop of half-witted endlessly-giggling students bunking classes to go to movies that they don’t understand – yet, I am not being mean. I just want to know why four guys want to sit and giggle in the last row of a dark auditorium?!

My Take:

  • Every girl who they asked out for a movie, turned them down (individually, I mean…and hope.)
  • There’s no better way of bonding with the guys than to make everyone else in the auditorium miserable.
  • Their Profs are handing out extra points to students who stay out of class (…and away from them. Frankly? If I were their Professor I would. But Internal Combustion Engines are out of fashion now – so I escaped that fate. Thank God!)
  • It was a holiday for them and their parents didn’t want them in the house, so they were given a wad of black-money a kind of currency that’s abundantly available in the country) to splurge.
  • They are planning to emigrate to the USA and they wanted to hone their language skills for a better TOEFL score (Does the TOEFL still exist? I guess it does or I wouldn’t have found the link.)
  • Devil had set an Entrance Exam for them. If they could torture people in the theater, they could join the University of Hell (Do you see? Even the University of Hell has some standards!)
  • It just struck me. Actually, they were preparing for the CET, which is going to replace the esteemed JEE, so that they could get into one of the IITs. Cracking sick-jokes about the MIB is what it takes to crack the CET…right? No pressure…Not at all…Sir!

Summing up:

The saving grace was that the hall was only three-fourth full…so when despite our request the four jokers refused to shut up, we found another place.

MIB 3 – Review:

It’s a good movie…worth-watching. Tommy Lee Jones has aged a lot, so they did a good thing by bringing in Josh Brolin as his younger self. While there weren’t enough new aliens, yet unlike the previous MIBs this one had a better storyline. If you are a fan of the Men in Black, you should definitely watch it. Just make sure there aren’t any alien men behind you – there are…believe it or not…some dialogs in the movie!