Hi everyone!
Came across a senior citizen recently whose cataract operation was botched up by a charitable eye hospital in the city. An all too common occurrence no doubt, but that's precisely why we need to take a close, hard look at what ails our delivery systems.
If you ask me, there's only one word for what's wrong with all our work-- we're too damn unprofessional in our attitude and behaviour. It's bad enough to be shoddy and lazy in our thinking but it's far worse when we project that in our behaviour as well.
What helps such unprofessionalism thrive is our general laidbackness as consumers. That's why we get the quality we do and have to fight every inch of the way in the courts, which of course are another story.
Coming back to the case in question, the elderly man began to see three of everything, saw flashes of bright light, and generally had disturbed vision. He consulted two eye surgeons, who told him the operation had damaged his eyes. His case papers record the fact that the operation was conducted by an intern of the charitable hospital and not the surgeon himself.
While he sank into depression, I called the hospital superintendent and told him the story. Barely had I completed the second sentence than the manager barked, ``How does he know this surgery was done by an intern? His eyes would be closed. He's talking rubbish.''
First demonstration of offence being the best defence, (a textbook no-no when it comes to customers.)
Having by now understood the score after dealing with so many such cases, I yelled back. He shut up a bit, heard me out and said he needs to see him. I requested the senior citizen to see this gentleman who seemed to be clearly thinking a way out of the mess.
Sure enough, when the senior citizen visited the hospital, he was forced to see the medical director of the charitable hospital, who gave him a clean chit and said there was nothing wrong with him and a change of glasses would do the needful.
When I called again to say there were three expert opinions on record saying the hospital had gone wrong once, and that the hospital could accept and pay up the costs of his future operations and treatment, the superintendent directed me to a trustee of the hospital who had been briefed.
Though, as a journalist, I neednt have done so much calling, I called the trustee and asked him for his take. He turned out to be a shrew. Knowing well he was cornered, he opted for orchestrated aggression. ``You don't have to teach a doctor how to treat my patients. We do so much charity, we treat people free, we get lakhs in donation, how dare you teach me?''
I was momentarily taken aback and said, ``I am not teaching you anything, only asking you if you will compensate him for the damages he has suffered.''
``How can I say that without looking at his case? How can you call me up saying you are a journalist? You're blackmailing me!''
Huh! ``But I didnt- I havent said anything about blackmailing you. I am only saying-''
``I have reputed, US-trained doctors working in my hospital. What do you mean by saying you'll expose me? This is not right. I have 25 years in this field, own a 30-bed hospital, I am..''
``But I am not saying anything about exposing you. I-''
``What do you mean, you are a journalist, So you can write what you want?! You're saying you'll expose me. I will not blah blahhhhh.''
``Will you hear me out? Hello? Listen please. What's your problem? No. Hello? I have to tell you I am a journalist because I am one! How does that amount to-''
``You cant call up and demand compensation. You're going to expose me? We have the best doctors blah blah.''
``But the best doctors goof up. The consumer courts are full of such cases. And here, it was an intern-''
``Oh, so you want to take me to court? You're threatening me? You'll expose me?I dont tolerate this blah blah.''
``But I havent said anything about the court. I only-''
Somewhere during the course of these parallel tracks of monologues, I realised I was defending myself for things I wasnt guilty of! Wisening up to this defence mechanism at last, I began yelling at him as well. This continued for while and when I found I was not getting anywhere with this Shylock, I decided to hang up with these grand words, ``You should thank me for giving your hospital so much time on such a simple case. But since you dont spare any sympathy even for your patients, I shouldnt expect anything better.''
I rest my case. My only worry is I may need an ENT surgeon. The word, ``expose'' keeps ringing in my ears.
Friday, December 21, 2007
We visited another world last week.
It was dense with tall, green trees, the earth was red and pebbled, the horses hawed and neighed and galloped all the time, and an army of monkeys walked along chirping continuously. The majesty of the mist-capped hills held us spellbound, the gentle nip in the air teased and titillated, the snowy sky dropped dew even as the moon slithered away with practised ease.
We came back to earth every few hours for replenishment. And the lavish Gujarati thali seemed to soften the blow.
Afternoons were spent on nowhere land as the peace and quiet within and without grew to lull us into a satiated slumber. A sharp zing of ginger in the tea, sipped on a swing, would equip us for another road of discovery. Each time we walked to an end, the visual tapestry unfolding before us would hit us anew. Mostly, it was the ridged terrain that compelled awe in our highly unyielding selves. Sometimes, it was a quaint, old dam that defined one side of the green waters framed by lush trees, or an ancient temple which was all yours for all the time you need.
I have been a virtual resident of this many-splendoured land in my childhood, when a week-long vacation was a must for the family every few months. We travelled first class, stayed in the best hotel in peak season, rode horses like maniacs till the horse tired of us, and, then, ran with their hooves till dusk broke to dawn.
When we did walk, we locked arms and blocked the road, chanting in sync, ``I left, I left, I left my wife and 48 children in the ....'' (for the penultimate step, you took a step backward, and psyched everyone around out of their wits.)
All the while, we would be bathed in the red dust that continually rose and settled on the stony paths all leading to some panoramic points. Echo Point, Monkey Point, Sunset Point, Sunrise Point, Charlotte Lake, Louisa Point, Rambaug Point, and some ten others-- each sharply rivalling the other in the regalty of the view it proffered.
As kids, we had to reckon with the monkeys hanging close to our rooms, waiting for a half-chance to swoop on the mangoes in the crate that inevitably accompanied us in the summers. Outside the hotel, they hopped around you, and, making a mockery of your self-belief, scratched and snatched that peanut packet you had held in a tight fist. I firmly believe that we have a huge hand in the continuation of this ancestral tribe.
Riding was a high that has never since been breached. Our loyal horseman would pick some thoroughbreds, who were either preparing for the Mahalaxmi race track or were done with it, and we'd set off for a wild run, winding up on at least one occasion each time with a heart-pounding gallop on the deserted race course of the place.
At times, the horses got moody and wanted to nick at you. Mine tried that once mid-trot, stopping right in middle of the bazaar and turning its long neck to have a go at my legs. Even as I tried reining him in, someone cut across the road and took charge of my wayward ward.
I am loathe to be back in this concrete hell even though I no longer sit on horses, or do I covet monkeys as much (I see enough of them in the city). What I do miss are the red soil, the imprints of hooves on it, and the smell of horse and horse shit in the air. I miss the easy ambience where nobody cares what you wear because it all looks red anyway. I miss the lazy walks and the tread along the edge of endless cliffs. Most of all, I miss watching the sunset without feeling guilty for doing so.
In case you still dont know which place I'm talking about, it's called Matheran.
It was dense with tall, green trees, the earth was red and pebbled, the horses hawed and neighed and galloped all the time, and an army of monkeys walked along chirping continuously. The majesty of the mist-capped hills held us spellbound, the gentle nip in the air teased and titillated, the snowy sky dropped dew even as the moon slithered away with practised ease.
We came back to earth every few hours for replenishment. And the lavish Gujarati thali seemed to soften the blow.
Afternoons were spent on nowhere land as the peace and quiet within and without grew to lull us into a satiated slumber. A sharp zing of ginger in the tea, sipped on a swing, would equip us for another road of discovery. Each time we walked to an end, the visual tapestry unfolding before us would hit us anew. Mostly, it was the ridged terrain that compelled awe in our highly unyielding selves. Sometimes, it was a quaint, old dam that defined one side of the green waters framed by lush trees, or an ancient temple which was all yours for all the time you need.
I have been a virtual resident of this many-splendoured land in my childhood, when a week-long vacation was a must for the family every few months. We travelled first class, stayed in the best hotel in peak season, rode horses like maniacs till the horse tired of us, and, then, ran with their hooves till dusk broke to dawn.
When we did walk, we locked arms and blocked the road, chanting in sync, ``I left, I left, I left my wife and 48 children in the ....'' (for the penultimate step, you took a step backward, and psyched everyone around out of their wits.)
All the while, we would be bathed in the red dust that continually rose and settled on the stony paths all leading to some panoramic points. Echo Point, Monkey Point, Sunset Point, Sunrise Point, Charlotte Lake, Louisa Point, Rambaug Point, and some ten others-- each sharply rivalling the other in the regalty of the view it proffered.
As kids, we had to reckon with the monkeys hanging close to our rooms, waiting for a half-chance to swoop on the mangoes in the crate that inevitably accompanied us in the summers. Outside the hotel, they hopped around you, and, making a mockery of your self-belief, scratched and snatched that peanut packet you had held in a tight fist. I firmly believe that we have a huge hand in the continuation of this ancestral tribe.
Riding was a high that has never since been breached. Our loyal horseman would pick some thoroughbreds, who were either preparing for the Mahalaxmi race track or were done with it, and we'd set off for a wild run, winding up on at least one occasion each time with a heart-pounding gallop on the deserted race course of the place.
At times, the horses got moody and wanted to nick at you. Mine tried that once mid-trot, stopping right in middle of the bazaar and turning its long neck to have a go at my legs. Even as I tried reining him in, someone cut across the road and took charge of my wayward ward.
I am loathe to be back in this concrete hell even though I no longer sit on horses, or do I covet monkeys as much (I see enough of them in the city). What I do miss are the red soil, the imprints of hooves on it, and the smell of horse and horse shit in the air. I miss the easy ambience where nobody cares what you wear because it all looks red anyway. I miss the lazy walks and the tread along the edge of endless cliffs. Most of all, I miss watching the sunset without feeling guilty for doing so.
In case you still dont know which place I'm talking about, it's called Matheran.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
What is the point of all we do?
Hey, does it ever hit you that we are all caught in a web of our own making, that we strive and strive endlessly to meet ends that we need not have set in the first place. And at the end of the day, what's the fuss all about?
I often wonder about the number of people who go around saying, ``I was determined to do this..'', ``This..award..post..blah blah.. means the world to me,'' ``My children are my world,'' ``I can't think of giving up what I have,'' ``I had to prove a point..'' etc. etc.
Does anyone of them pause to think: what is all this effort and involvement in aid of? Like everyone else before us, we too shall perish, and with us, shall perish our priorities, our pet peeves, loves, lifestyles, everything.
All we shall be left with is Shunya, Nothing. Except your soul and your karma, if you believe in both or either. So, why chase a mirage? Your material world may or may not disappear but you will. That's a given. So why spend so much energy figuring out whether your neighbour's having an extra-marital affair or not, whether your children will stand first all their lives, whether your face will radiate the same glow forever, whether people like your cousin more than you, whether your colleague earns more than you. Why agonise over ways to make it big, ways to be recognised, ways to scheme your way up the corporate ladder when all of this will come crashing down one day-- the day you are not there. Believe me, even our precious children will not be there forever, terrible as it sounds.
There's no one on this planet yet who has never gone away. Unless you're talking of the cockroach (Now there is a strong possibility It will endure).
I must be some kind of a freak that I keep pondering over this facet of life --our deaths-- and never cease to be fascinated by the amount of effort we put into irrelevant things completely believing that, like diamonds, life is forever.
I am often berated for never remembering everyone's names, lives, what they told me, what they were wearing, and what they do for a living, etc. etc. And I automatically blame my disgusting memory for behaving so peremptorily that only I seem important in my scheme 0f things (and sometimes not even I.)
But over the past few years, I have begun to appreciate my lack of interest in people and their lives as a tacit acknowledgement of our transient lives. When nobody will last, why take the pain of behaving as if everything everyone does is just so important? What, seriously, is important in a world of make-believe where the only permanent thing is change?
Many get foxed at my lack of ambition-- for not plotting to become something. This ties up with the same problem-- what do I have to prove to whom and for what? Why pursue some ephemeral end for someone else? Part of the problem, of course, is my comfort level with myself. I have never felt the need to prove anything to anyone and believe it's only those with feelings of inadequacy who have the urge to achieve something.
In my mind, I am what I think I am (sorry, Descartes, but this is not really anything to do with you). So why worry about what others think?
To be sure, I labour over most things I do, but that's because it's a job to be done and a shoddy job is simply not happening. If I do it right, there are no brownie points to be scored or points to be made to any one. If at all, I find a challenge, I do feel kicked, and go all out. But there's never any idea even at the back of my head, or the fringes of my hair, that if I succeed, people will notice me. It's nice if they do, of course, but if they don't, it's fine too.
No recognition outlasts you unless you are a trail blazer like Mahatma Gandhi. And even that will last at the most till the end of time on this planet.
Even the midst of a big project, I pause to think what the worth of it is. I continually ponder over the ultimate aimlessness of our existence. Perhaps there is an aim and we're still to discover it. Or perhaps, as some say, salvation is our goal and we don't know.
I don't know. Do you?
Hey, does it ever hit you that we are all caught in a web of our own making, that we strive and strive endlessly to meet ends that we need not have set in the first place. And at the end of the day, what's the fuss all about?
I often wonder about the number of people who go around saying, ``I was determined to do this..'', ``This..award..post..blah blah.. means the world to me,'' ``My children are my world,'' ``I can't think of giving up what I have,'' ``I had to prove a point..'' etc. etc.
Does anyone of them pause to think: what is all this effort and involvement in aid of? Like everyone else before us, we too shall perish, and with us, shall perish our priorities, our pet peeves, loves, lifestyles, everything.
All we shall be left with is Shunya, Nothing. Except your soul and your karma, if you believe in both or either. So, why chase a mirage? Your material world may or may not disappear but you will. That's a given. So why spend so much energy figuring out whether your neighbour's having an extra-marital affair or not, whether your children will stand first all their lives, whether your face will radiate the same glow forever, whether people like your cousin more than you, whether your colleague earns more than you. Why agonise over ways to make it big, ways to be recognised, ways to scheme your way up the corporate ladder when all of this will come crashing down one day-- the day you are not there. Believe me, even our precious children will not be there forever, terrible as it sounds.
There's no one on this planet yet who has never gone away. Unless you're talking of the cockroach (Now there is a strong possibility It will endure).
I must be some kind of a freak that I keep pondering over this facet of life --our deaths-- and never cease to be fascinated by the amount of effort we put into irrelevant things completely believing that, like diamonds, life is forever.
I am often berated for never remembering everyone's names, lives, what they told me, what they were wearing, and what they do for a living, etc. etc. And I automatically blame my disgusting memory for behaving so peremptorily that only I seem important in my scheme 0f things (and sometimes not even I.)
But over the past few years, I have begun to appreciate my lack of interest in people and their lives as a tacit acknowledgement of our transient lives. When nobody will last, why take the pain of behaving as if everything everyone does is just so important? What, seriously, is important in a world of make-believe where the only permanent thing is change?
Many get foxed at my lack of ambition-- for not plotting to become something. This ties up with the same problem-- what do I have to prove to whom and for what? Why pursue some ephemeral end for someone else? Part of the problem, of course, is my comfort level with myself. I have never felt the need to prove anything to anyone and believe it's only those with feelings of inadequacy who have the urge to achieve something.
In my mind, I am what I think I am (sorry, Descartes, but this is not really anything to do with you). So why worry about what others think?
To be sure, I labour over most things I do, but that's because it's a job to be done and a shoddy job is simply not happening. If I do it right, there are no brownie points to be scored or points to be made to any one. If at all, I find a challenge, I do feel kicked, and go all out. But there's never any idea even at the back of my head, or the fringes of my hair, that if I succeed, people will notice me. It's nice if they do, of course, but if they don't, it's fine too.
No recognition outlasts you unless you are a trail blazer like Mahatma Gandhi. And even that will last at the most till the end of time on this planet.
Even the midst of a big project, I pause to think what the worth of it is. I continually ponder over the ultimate aimlessness of our existence. Perhaps there is an aim and we're still to discover it. Or perhaps, as some say, salvation is our goal and we don't know.
I don't know. Do you?
All my endearing Anonymouses!
I didn't know there were so many people in the world called Anonymous. If you take a name poll, you'll probably find this name dominating the list. There are at least a dozen on my blog, all with interesting comments to offer but for some reason, anonymous.
All my life, I have been told the temptation to see your name in print, like Adam and Eve, is primordial. But, the said temptation probably exists on Earth and my blog, I suspect, is drifting in outer space, where aliens suffer from no such evil Apples.
So be it, guys!
I didn't know there were so many people in the world called Anonymous. If you take a name poll, you'll probably find this name dominating the list. There are at least a dozen on my blog, all with interesting comments to offer but for some reason, anonymous.
All my life, I have been told the temptation to see your name in print, like Adam and Eve, is primordial. But, the said temptation probably exists on Earth and my blog, I suspect, is drifting in outer space, where aliens suffer from no such evil Apples.
So be it, guys!
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
The typical victim can sometimes be the stereotypical villain..
There are so many default victim categories entrenched in our minds-- the poor, the downtrodden, the worker, and of course the woman. In any given situation, we readily believe that the rich and mighty are the villain. No CBI inquiry is needed to establish their guilt, nor can it change our minds on the matter. The guilt is firmly established in our minds and that's where it stays for the rest of its life.
The only attenuating circumstance which can make us condone a wrongful act is if the perpetrator is a film actor. Sanjay Dutt not only gets special treatment in jail, he also gets hugged by the law-enforcers, never mind that he is convicted of possessing an illegal weapon that could kill several in a blink, and that he has barely escaped a stiffer conviction of being a terrorist. Saif Ali Khan and Salman Khan can kill people and maim them but when they step out of their homes, the world awaits their next step.
Typically though, the underdog is perceived to be the victim. So, if a tabloid newspaper in Mumbai, respected for its laidback, old Mumbai flavour, shuts down because of a dispute between its CEO and the owner, we can clearly see the CEO, who was playing journalist, is the victim. Especially since she wrote a moving account of the owner forced her hand.
All owners in the world are rogues, especially newspaper owners. This is our a priori understanding of the world. (For the benefit of those who shun philosophy, let me explain. Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, divided all our knowledge into two groups: a priori and a posteriori. The first was what we are born with, is immutable and unchangeable while the second is derived from experiences.)
I am not saying here that it's the other way round. No. I am not privy to what's cooking at this tabloid. But I am sure the owner, rightly or wrongly, has a point of view which few care to hear out.
It is true that a journalist is an extremely powerful person and most powers quake at the thought of taking him on. But in this one instance, inevitably, he changes sides, and becomes the wronged --when his owner takes him on. History is unfortunately replete with instance of journalists being crucified by their paymasters.
It is therefore a given that everyone sides with the journalist, who is unequivocally seen as a crusader Ram against owner's Ravana. So, in this instance, the media's most enduring creation, Shobha De, expressed solidarity with the CEO; the media at large tut-tuts in sympathy and the owner never gets asked if he has a say.
Please be advised that I have used the example for illustrative purposes only. It's grave irony that the media, which places a premium on fair play. has decided to play such an unfair game. My point is a crib about how if it's journalist vs owner, the latter is always wrong. It doesn't have to stand to reason.
Regrettably, I have seen the other side of the coin. Yes, I have seen several corporates exploiting their woman employees, even high-ranking executives. I have seen women journalists facing sexual harassment at the hands of their male colleagues. I have also seen how the office suddenly becomes hostile to a woman who complains of sexual harassment. She not only faces finger-pointing, hostile stares and much shaking of head every day, she is persecuted even professionally and often forced to leave her job. Most men happily point to her smart dressing style as the culprit. The man's libido, it appears, is a God-given gift to be unleashed on anyone who remotely interests it.
At the same time, I know of at least one instance when the owner, always a symbol of rich/powerful and therefore the `sinner', is actually being exploited. I know of a sexual harassment ccomplaint by a woman against her boss only because he wouldn't show any interest in her and was, possibly, very tough on her. It's another matter that she had to quit her job and suffer ignominy as well. But the fact remains that the case was motivated.
Typically, the company has conducted no inquiry against either. And her boss today is one subdued man who walks with his head down and baulks at the prospect of speaking to a woman colleague. Justice, anyone?
The all-important domestic help, doubtless, falls in the Always Victim category too. I used to know this maid who cried on my shoulder about a family she was working for. She told me the man of the house had attempted to molest her once when his wife and mother were on a holiday and had told her to keep coming at the same time every day before his child came home from school.
I bought into her story promptly. I told her to simply stop working there and offered to find her another job. I not only found her another home to work in but also gave her a decent advance out of sympathy. Since she earned a piddly sum from that household anyway, I didn't see why she would want to stick to it. But she did, and whats more, I found she was visiting him the same time every day too. When I confronted her with it, she expressed shock, ``What?! I stopped going there after that day.'' Since I don't like being taken for a ride, I decided to get to the bottom of this.
I visited the household at the time she was supposed to be there and caught her there. The wife and mother were present too. And they told me they never left the house together because the man was handicapped! So much for the down-trodden.
There can be other ways of making you look like an ogre, as I personally experienced to some grief. My new domestic help, a shrimp of 19 years, decided to disappear just before Diwali after taking a month's salary in advance, leaving me high and dry. My Diwali cleaning therefore proved costlier with new bais coming in every day till I kept a new one permanently.
The shrimp surfaced 20 days later, to demand why I had kept another maid. When I told her I had no choice as she had not informed me, she began screaming her lungs out and demanded a month's pay. When I reminded her that she had already taken her month's pay, she screamed, ``But that was for the previous month!''
I was speechless and felt a wave of anger rising within me. I asked her again to shut up but she wouldn't, forcing me to yell back. Soon, she had tears in her eyes which drove me completely mad. I slammed the door shut even as she carried on with her victim act.
One look at her pitiable face and it would be easy to be convinced of my act of cruelty. The next thing I know, my new maid was imploring me to give her her pay! I tried to tell her that it was she who actually owed me money as she had taken advance pay. But my logical rants seemed too weak in the face of this compelling performer who had them eating out of her hands.
I didn't give in, of course, but managed to earn the tag of a tormentor for no fault of mine. I haven't since dared to indulge my neighbour in friendly chatter for fear of an inquisition that will eventually paint me all black. I already behave like the guilty party.
Now you know why I sometimes sympathise with the perpetrator. Sigh!
Moral of the story: Appearances are deceptive. The truth is not always out there...
There are so many default victim categories entrenched in our minds-- the poor, the downtrodden, the worker, and of course the woman. In any given situation, we readily believe that the rich and mighty are the villain. No CBI inquiry is needed to establish their guilt, nor can it change our minds on the matter. The guilt is firmly established in our minds and that's where it stays for the rest of its life.
The only attenuating circumstance which can make us condone a wrongful act is if the perpetrator is a film actor. Sanjay Dutt not only gets special treatment in jail, he also gets hugged by the law-enforcers, never mind that he is convicted of possessing an illegal weapon that could kill several in a blink, and that he has barely escaped a stiffer conviction of being a terrorist. Saif Ali Khan and Salman Khan can kill people and maim them but when they step out of their homes, the world awaits their next step.
Typically though, the underdog is perceived to be the victim. So, if a tabloid newspaper in Mumbai, respected for its laidback, old Mumbai flavour, shuts down because of a dispute between its CEO and the owner, we can clearly see the CEO, who was playing journalist, is the victim. Especially since she wrote a moving account of the owner forced her hand.
All owners in the world are rogues, especially newspaper owners. This is our a priori understanding of the world. (For the benefit of those who shun philosophy, let me explain. Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, divided all our knowledge into two groups: a priori and a posteriori. The first was what we are born with, is immutable and unchangeable while the second is derived from experiences.)
I am not saying here that it's the other way round. No. I am not privy to what's cooking at this tabloid. But I am sure the owner, rightly or wrongly, has a point of view which few care to hear out.
It is true that a journalist is an extremely powerful person and most powers quake at the thought of taking him on. But in this one instance, inevitably, he changes sides, and becomes the wronged --when his owner takes him on. History is unfortunately replete with instance of journalists being crucified by their paymasters.
It is therefore a given that everyone sides with the journalist, who is unequivocally seen as a crusader Ram against owner's Ravana. So, in this instance, the media's most enduring creation, Shobha De, expressed solidarity with the CEO; the media at large tut-tuts in sympathy and the owner never gets asked if he has a say.
Please be advised that I have used the example for illustrative purposes only. It's grave irony that the media, which places a premium on fair play. has decided to play such an unfair game. My point is a crib about how if it's journalist vs owner, the latter is always wrong. It doesn't have to stand to reason.
Regrettably, I have seen the other side of the coin. Yes, I have seen several corporates exploiting their woman employees, even high-ranking executives. I have seen women journalists facing sexual harassment at the hands of their male colleagues. I have also seen how the office suddenly becomes hostile to a woman who complains of sexual harassment. She not only faces finger-pointing, hostile stares and much shaking of head every day, she is persecuted even professionally and often forced to leave her job. Most men happily point to her smart dressing style as the culprit. The man's libido, it appears, is a God-given gift to be unleashed on anyone who remotely interests it.
At the same time, I know of at least one instance when the owner, always a symbol of rich/powerful and therefore the `sinner', is actually being exploited. I know of a sexual harassment ccomplaint by a woman against her boss only because he wouldn't show any interest in her and was, possibly, very tough on her. It's another matter that she had to quit her job and suffer ignominy as well. But the fact remains that the case was motivated.
Typically, the company has conducted no inquiry against either. And her boss today is one subdued man who walks with his head down and baulks at the prospect of speaking to a woman colleague. Justice, anyone?
The all-important domestic help, doubtless, falls in the Always Victim category too. I used to know this maid who cried on my shoulder about a family she was working for. She told me the man of the house had attempted to molest her once when his wife and mother were on a holiday and had told her to keep coming at the same time every day before his child came home from school.
I bought into her story promptly. I told her to simply stop working there and offered to find her another job. I not only found her another home to work in but also gave her a decent advance out of sympathy. Since she earned a piddly sum from that household anyway, I didn't see why she would want to stick to it. But she did, and whats more, I found she was visiting him the same time every day too. When I confronted her with it, she expressed shock, ``What?! I stopped going there after that day.'' Since I don't like being taken for a ride, I decided to get to the bottom of this.
I visited the household at the time she was supposed to be there and caught her there. The wife and mother were present too. And they told me they never left the house together because the man was handicapped! So much for the down-trodden.
There can be other ways of making you look like an ogre, as I personally experienced to some grief. My new domestic help, a shrimp of 19 years, decided to disappear just before Diwali after taking a month's salary in advance, leaving me high and dry. My Diwali cleaning therefore proved costlier with new bais coming in every day till I kept a new one permanently.
The shrimp surfaced 20 days later, to demand why I had kept another maid. When I told her I had no choice as she had not informed me, she began screaming her lungs out and demanded a month's pay. When I reminded her that she had already taken her month's pay, she screamed, ``But that was for the previous month!''
I was speechless and felt a wave of anger rising within me. I asked her again to shut up but she wouldn't, forcing me to yell back. Soon, she had tears in her eyes which drove me completely mad. I slammed the door shut even as she carried on with her victim act.
One look at her pitiable face and it would be easy to be convinced of my act of cruelty. The next thing I know, my new maid was imploring me to give her her pay! I tried to tell her that it was she who actually owed me money as she had taken advance pay. But my logical rants seemed too weak in the face of this compelling performer who had them eating out of her hands.
I didn't give in, of course, but managed to earn the tag of a tormentor for no fault of mine. I haven't since dared to indulge my neighbour in friendly chatter for fear of an inquisition that will eventually paint me all black. I already behave like the guilty party.
Now you know why I sometimes sympathise with the perpetrator. Sigh!
Moral of the story: Appearances are deceptive. The truth is not always out there...
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Here's a long agony-ridden SMS
Have a voice and want to sing? Want to dance with two left feet? Aspire to be a leader? There is an easy road to the hall of fame (and fortune, for the unnamed beneficiaries in the fray). All you need is a healthy bank balance or a wealthy family/ friends who can SMS-power your way to glory. There is a mini-revolution happening out there in which, it seems, everyone has a stake.. you either participate or you SMS. It's another matter that each SMS can set you back by Rs 5 to Rs 7, depending on the deal the producers have worked out with the telecom companies. Every channel and her aunt is prospering on the newly discovered virtues of the Short Message Service. If you think there are only three talent shows showcasing the nation's vocal virtuosity, you are obviously not keeping count. Forget Zee TV's `Sa Re Ga Ma Pa', Sony's `Indian Idol', or Star's `Voice of India', there is the `Bathroom Singer' and at least a dozen more on the regional channels on the SMS spree. Flick up and down the remote and each time, as if by magic, the screen morphs into a new singer, a new set and a new show, channel after channel, language after language. Just when you thought you simply have to wait out these contests to get some meaning back into TV, there comes one more: `Nach Baliye-3'. Aha! This one expects you to cast your SMS vote right from the start. No elementary elimination by the judges. You simply vote and vote after every single episode for your favourite celeb. Celeb? You mean Rakhi Sawant, Kashmera Shah, and someone called Vikas Something. So what if you have never heard of them, or heard of them in wrong contexts? They have partners and will dance. On the time-tested principle of no-one-can-have-his-cake-alone-on-TV comes `Jhalak Dikhla Ja'. Another SMS war that scales up and up in concentric circles to dizzying heights as the competition screams its way to a crescendo. Surf at your peril, there is simply no escape from them. Everyone has risen to the SMS challenge, so to speak and mastered the art of appeal. ``Please, please mujhe vote kijiye,'' they go, moving many a hard-hearted viewer towards his cell. I should know; I have fallen for the bait. Once. Television has utterly and abjectly surrendered to this loathsome technological innovation. Several lakhs of notes... oops... votes change hands and before you know it, some -- not necessarily a contestant -- have become millionaires. The SMS is like a rocket that jet-propels its payload of participants (and several others) into a new orbit. Inevitably, the new orbit enables further movement only through SMS-derived oxygen. Television being the prodigal kin of the print media, I used to arch a brow and scoff at the mindlessness of it all. Dumbed down it may be, perhaps heavily so, but print would never fall prey to such low brow gimmckry. Nah! The print, alas, proved to be dumber -- or, the lure of the lucre proved to be stronger, depending on which side of the fence you're on. A top-of-the-line newspaper is today scrambling for those SMS votes for a `deserving' leader. Yeah, leader, as in `leader of the country'. Go ahead, cast your vote freely. Election Commission, move over, the telecom companies are here. We will no longer need to go to the dreary polling booth to cast our votes; we may simply thumb our choice in. It's another matter that in the new version, a single vote won't do. You need to keep voting furiously till your favoured contestant reaches her destination. It's a small matter if you get bankrupt in the process and gray in the hair. What about the poor, did you say? Huh, where are they? Are there any BPL (below poverty line) wallahs without a cellphone? If there are, nobody's heard of them, darling. What are you if you can't afford to SMS? It's nice for the aam janta to be playing God. Only, one small voice keep buzzing at the back of my head: why us, pray? Are we all equally equipped to judge voice quality, sur, rhythm, dancing or the so-called `X' factor? Yeh public hain, yeh sab nahi jaanti. I am also a bit confused about the point sought to be made: if you really meant to empower us, why allow us to cast any number of votes? Surely, my opinion is as important as everybody else's and vice versa. Why, then, should my 1,000 votes eclipse your single vote? This discrimination makes nonsense of our democratic fundamentals, but also devalues the product in the bargain, with money muscling in to crown the winner. Last year, a couple participating in Nach Baliye, Shweta Kawatra and Manav Gohil, were said to be buying mobile phones for their relatives to vote them into the next round. Of course, they dutifully refused committing such blasphemy but, is anyone surprised? A certain Ms Lata Mangeshkar had gently snubbed these arbitrary talent contests and suggested that real talent is in singing new compositions. But her voice is drowned in the clutter of currency raining down every minute. The SMS has the hypnotic sway of the Pied Piper. Have money? please sms. I am hugely sceptical whether SMSes are really counted by anyone except the telecom companies. I remember `Indian Idol', which started this mayhem two years ago with its first instalment, categorically refused to share any data on the number of votes polled by each participant, citing exclusivity and contract conditions. A lot of us back then were curious about this novel format and wanted to know how many were taken in by this pattern of selection. So, we asked them about the votes polled by the two finalists on that contest but were turned away. VoI shares the margin by which one loses or wins but I'm not sure if they will open up their ledgers for public scrutiny. It's strange how all winners are male, how the north-eastern states seems to be the flavour of the season (remember the threats held out in case Debojit Saha didn't win `Sa Re Ga Ma Pa' contest last year-- he did), and most importantly, how the judges' favourites' always get top billing. Toshi, a participant who lost out early on VoI, was brought back through a veto vote by a select panel of judges. The next thing we know is that he is not only back, he has scored the maximum number of votes in the next round. Sure, there were local protests over his exit; but I dont know if all of India saw this as an emergency and sat up to vote him back with a vengeance. I suspect a lot of drama on the screen is the handiwork of TRP-starved producers. Should we be losing money so that our favourite participants makes it big and rich? As it is, they are a wee bit over-priced. Most of the Indian Idol contestants left me, with my unabashedly pedestrian tastes, cold. There should be more to reality TV than a phone line that is open certain days every week. If an alien were to land in India, and land plumb in front of a TV studio, he is likely to be launched into an over-heated SMS market: ``Is he an alien or not? SMS your answer to alpha beta gamma delta. Sorry, we have run out of English numerals and will henceforth be using the Greek alphabet for all SMS communication. Rest assured, we are in the process of booking the Chinese alphabet for future use so that neither you nor we run out of work. Keep watching.''
P.S. If you have any comments to offer, pl SMS. Send as many as you like, in keeping with the spirit of things.
Have a voice and want to sing? Want to dance with two left feet? Aspire to be a leader? There is an easy road to the hall of fame (and fortune, for the unnamed beneficiaries in the fray). All you need is a healthy bank balance or a wealthy family/ friends who can SMS-power your way to glory. There is a mini-revolution happening out there in which, it seems, everyone has a stake.. you either participate or you SMS. It's another matter that each SMS can set you back by Rs 5 to Rs 7, depending on the deal the producers have worked out with the telecom companies. Every channel and her aunt is prospering on the newly discovered virtues of the Short Message Service. If you think there are only three talent shows showcasing the nation's vocal virtuosity, you are obviously not keeping count. Forget Zee TV's `Sa Re Ga Ma Pa', Sony's `Indian Idol', or Star's `Voice of India', there is the `Bathroom Singer' and at least a dozen more on the regional channels on the SMS spree. Flick up and down the remote and each time, as if by magic, the screen morphs into a new singer, a new set and a new show, channel after channel, language after language. Just when you thought you simply have to wait out these contests to get some meaning back into TV, there comes one more: `Nach Baliye-3'. Aha! This one expects you to cast your SMS vote right from the start. No elementary elimination by the judges. You simply vote and vote after every single episode for your favourite celeb. Celeb? You mean Rakhi Sawant, Kashmera Shah, and someone called Vikas Something. So what if you have never heard of them, or heard of them in wrong contexts? They have partners and will dance. On the time-tested principle of no-one-can-have-his-cake-alone-on-TV comes `Jhalak Dikhla Ja'. Another SMS war that scales up and up in concentric circles to dizzying heights as the competition screams its way to a crescendo. Surf at your peril, there is simply no escape from them. Everyone has risen to the SMS challenge, so to speak and mastered the art of appeal. ``Please, please mujhe vote kijiye,'' they go, moving many a hard-hearted viewer towards his cell. I should know; I have fallen for the bait. Once. Television has utterly and abjectly surrendered to this loathsome technological innovation. Several lakhs of notes... oops... votes change hands and before you know it, some -- not necessarily a contestant -- have become millionaires. The SMS is like a rocket that jet-propels its payload of participants (and several others) into a new orbit. Inevitably, the new orbit enables further movement only through SMS-derived oxygen. Television being the prodigal kin of the print media, I used to arch a brow and scoff at the mindlessness of it all. Dumbed down it may be, perhaps heavily so, but print would never fall prey to such low brow gimmckry. Nah! The print, alas, proved to be dumber -- or, the lure of the lucre proved to be stronger, depending on which side of the fence you're on. A top-of-the-line newspaper is today scrambling for those SMS votes for a `deserving' leader. Yeah, leader, as in `leader of the country'. Go ahead, cast your vote freely. Election Commission, move over, the telecom companies are here. We will no longer need to go to the dreary polling booth to cast our votes; we may simply thumb our choice in. It's another matter that in the new version, a single vote won't do. You need to keep voting furiously till your favoured contestant reaches her destination. It's a small matter if you get bankrupt in the process and gray in the hair. What about the poor, did you say? Huh, where are they? Are there any BPL (below poverty line) wallahs without a cellphone? If there are, nobody's heard of them, darling. What are you if you can't afford to SMS? It's nice for the aam janta to be playing God. Only, one small voice keep buzzing at the back of my head: why us, pray? Are we all equally equipped to judge voice quality, sur, rhythm, dancing or the so-called `X' factor? Yeh public hain, yeh sab nahi jaanti. I am also a bit confused about the point sought to be made: if you really meant to empower us, why allow us to cast any number of votes? Surely, my opinion is as important as everybody else's and vice versa. Why, then, should my 1,000 votes eclipse your single vote? This discrimination makes nonsense of our democratic fundamentals, but also devalues the product in the bargain, with money muscling in to crown the winner. Last year, a couple participating in Nach Baliye, Shweta Kawatra and Manav Gohil, were said to be buying mobile phones for their relatives to vote them into the next round. Of course, they dutifully refused committing such blasphemy but, is anyone surprised? A certain Ms Lata Mangeshkar had gently snubbed these arbitrary talent contests and suggested that real talent is in singing new compositions. But her voice is drowned in the clutter of currency raining down every minute. The SMS has the hypnotic sway of the Pied Piper. Have money? please sms. I am hugely sceptical whether SMSes are really counted by anyone except the telecom companies. I remember `Indian Idol', which started this mayhem two years ago with its first instalment, categorically refused to share any data on the number of votes polled by each participant, citing exclusivity and contract conditions. A lot of us back then were curious about this novel format and wanted to know how many were taken in by this pattern of selection. So, we asked them about the votes polled by the two finalists on that contest but were turned away. VoI shares the margin by which one loses or wins but I'm not sure if they will open up their ledgers for public scrutiny. It's strange how all winners are male, how the north-eastern states seems to be the flavour of the season (remember the threats held out in case Debojit Saha didn't win `Sa Re Ga Ma Pa' contest last year-- he did), and most importantly, how the judges' favourites' always get top billing. Toshi, a participant who lost out early on VoI, was brought back through a veto vote by a select panel of judges. The next thing we know is that he is not only back, he has scored the maximum number of votes in the next round. Sure, there were local protests over his exit; but I dont know if all of India saw this as an emergency and sat up to vote him back with a vengeance. I suspect a lot of drama on the screen is the handiwork of TRP-starved producers. Should we be losing money so that our favourite participants makes it big and rich? As it is, they are a wee bit over-priced. Most of the Indian Idol contestants left me, with my unabashedly pedestrian tastes, cold. There should be more to reality TV than a phone line that is open certain days every week. If an alien were to land in India, and land plumb in front of a TV studio, he is likely to be launched into an over-heated SMS market: ``Is he an alien or not? SMS your answer to alpha beta gamma delta. Sorry, we have run out of English numerals and will henceforth be using the Greek alphabet for all SMS communication. Rest assured, we are in the process of booking the Chinese alphabet for future use so that neither you nor we run out of work. Keep watching.''
P.S. If you have any comments to offer, pl SMS. Send as many as you like, in keeping with the spirit of things.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Modi and his nine lives (in the media)
The nail has hit on the head. So, the communal riots of 2002 in Gujarat had the unofficial backing of chief minister Narendra Modi, no less. Aha! It's that time of the year again. Tehelka has stung. Only, this time, it has stung at the same place. Ever since 2002 happened, the world and its media have been shouting from the rooftops about the role of the Gujarat government in engineering the communal carnage. There were quotes, victim accounts, eye-witness stories, etc. etc. filling page after page to prove how Modi's gang of operatives killed in broad daylight.
What Tehelka has achieved therefore is a far cry from a tehelka. It is a meow. What's new, sir? If Modi has been painted communal in this story, Tehelka's fantastic sense of timing has got itself tainted as well in a.... huh, what's the colour of the Congress? Why now, Mr Tejpal, bang on the cusp of yet another stirring election?
Make no mistake. What Babu Bajrangi and his goons allegedly did is unacceptable, unpardonable, and grossly perverse. There can be no two ways about it; there can be NO justification or tolerance for stabbing a pregnant woman who has done no harm except to belong to a certain community. One cannot condone such subversive acts in a civilised society. If, after doing what he allegedly did, he thinks nothing of it, there's something seriously wrong not only with this person but also with society at large which nurtures such evil. An act of violence, committed in a moment of insanity, should drown the perpetrator in remorse. But a flagrant flaunting of such a heinous act strips him of the veneer of humanity.
It's therefore not about whether what happened was right or wrong. It wasn't right. But then, the other side looks equally bad. What kind of person gets into a compartment, sets fire to it so that all the innocent men, women and children get burnt? Why is it that the Godhra goondas are still at large? No one in their right mind will buy the conspiracy theory. It has much too many holes. What kind of society allows such mindless violence to go unpunished? That's particularly strange considering it happened in Modi's Gujarat. It's also an important sidelight that such a carnage on a majority community can happen only in India.
And, if we condone the first phase of the communal riots of 1992-93 in Mumbai started by Muslims as the outcome of the demolition of Babri Masjid -- which incidentally is different from burning or killing people, why cannot we accept that the post-Godhra riots were a backlash from the Hindus? If the demolition of a non-functional mosque in the distant north can spark a conflagration in Mumbai, can't the burning of innocents cause a flare-up in the immediate neighbourhood? It's such double standards of pious Hindus that I find baffling. There's no question of justifying either. Both are wrong -- the razing of Babri and the Godhra tragedy. But if we are logical and `unbiased,' the aftermath of each incident is as reprehensible or justified as the aftermath of the other.
I find it self-contradictory when we accept the communal riots of 1992-93 in Mumbai as an empathisable offshoot of the Babri Masjid demolition but find the Gujarat rioting unacceptable. Yes, the official backing, if any, by the Modi regime is something we need to get alarmed at but the fact remains that Modi did not stir up the mass hysteria overnight nor did he actively seek out people to go on a rampage. His role, if there was any, was allegedly that of a caretaker who is believed to have looked the other way. He was, by no means, the perpetrator. And, from one account cited below, he didn't entirely look the other way
In both riots, one critical fact has been overlooked by all sides-- the saffron, Muslim and secular hate-mongers. Many Hindus too lost their lives in both Mumbai and Gujarat riots. The much-revered Srikrishna Commission, which probed the riots of 1992-93, has religiously documented the casualties in both communities-- the stats speak louder than all the newsprint and footage. It is a travesty of truth to project or pretend that only Muslims have faced the wrath of a saffron backlash. The Hindu toll, too, was quite high. So, what saffron trishuls are we talking about, Mr Singhal? And, thank God they were not used.
In Gujarat, according to answers given in Parliament by the UPA home minister, 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed and 2500 were wounded. Certainly more Muslims paid for their lives for the Godhra carnage than Hindus in a land dominated by Hindus but it is clear they didn't take it lying down.Even as the media played out the misery of the hapless Muslims in relief camps, there were over 40,000 Hindus in relief camps by the end of the first week of riots.
As human beings in an ordered society, we need to tolerate. We should tolerate difference of opinion, religion, customs, practices and beliefs. But one has to draw the line at being doormatish. it's rather hypocritical to view ourselves and the world through different prisms. Few possess the art of self-criticism that Indian excel in; it is of great value but only so long as it doesn't peter out into masochistic self-loathing.
Even if you choose to be so, at least be factual. There are several inherent inequities that stand out in a sensible evaluation of both the situations-- 1992 and 2002. Let us look a little closely at some facts-- first, the impression that all of Gujarat was in flames. Officially, only 60 `locations', not necessarily villages but areas, were struck by rioting. You could argue the number is negotiable. Probably. But look at the fact that all the 200-odd industrial townships in Gujarat continued work as usual without a single day's loss. That takes care of the inflamed reportage.
While ruling parties usually have the wherewithal (read: clout) to get around the flak in the form of an increasingly coloured coverage of every communal or religious event, it's the police who haplessly carry a permanent scar on their credibility, time and again.Were both Mumbai and Gujarat state commandeered by a biased police? According to the Srikrishna Commission report which is certainly more secular than the secular, police opened fire 153 times in the first phase in which 30 Hindus, 133 Muslims and 11 others died. In the second phase, it opened fire 308 times in which 80 Hindus, 90 Muslims and one other person died. Two police officers, and five policemen were killed while controlling the riots, and about 500 policemen including officers injured. It certainly doesn't sound like a one-sided affair, and we are not counting the number of missing persons or unidentified bodies here.
Yet, bafflingly, the police were heavily upbraided by the Commission for its supposed bias. While failing to pinpoint a categorical, doubt-free incident in support of its tall claims, the commission records its appreciation of the sterling services rendered by the police at different places. It also bring out equitable inaction in some instances (!) as in the fact that the police did not act not only against the allegedly inflammatory writings in the `Saamna' and `Nava kaal,' but also kept silent on some ``communal Urdu writings'' circulating during this period.
In Gujarat, the police was derided for being a `biased' protector. Consider this factfile: On February 28, 10 Hindus had been shot dead and 16 Hindus had been wounded in police firing. On March 1 (the next day), another 24 Hindus were shot dead and 40 Hindus wounded in police firing. In the first three days alone, out of a total of 611 deaths, 101 were caused by police firing -- of whom 61 were Hindus and 40 were Muslims.
As for the common myth happily perpetuated by the English media that Narendra Modi did not call in the army, B P Singhal, an ex-DGP who claims to have been continually intouch with the Gujarat state police, gave this chronology to a news channel (Aaj Tak): the Godhra carnage took place on February 27, the Hindu backlash started the next day and the army was doing a flag march on the ``forenoon of March 1''. This means, within a single day, the chief minister had summoned the army, as recorded by The Hindu as well. So, what was the channel's reaction to this revelation? `Why no action was taken on February 29, 30, 31?' it wanted to know! Even if 2002 had been a leap year, it appears our man in the TV studio would not have been appeased.
Similarly, the post-demolition pogroms were not all a play of passion. The commission says about the January 1993 rioting, ``a number of individual Muslims and Muslim criminal elements appear to have indulged in violence, arson and rioting.'' In Bainganwadi, for instance, the attacks on Hindus ``appear to have been masterminded by Gharya Aslam and Abdul Ghani Kamruddin Mulla, two notorious characters of the locality.'' There were instances of private firing by Muslims too. Some Muslim criminals like Aslam Koradia and his associates ``moved around the locality (Pydhonie) on motor bikes and fired indiscriminately at people on the streets.''
None of this exposition of facts is intended to imply a condonation of anything that happened. Rather, it is an attempt to point out the whole picture instead of a pick-and-choose reality that is daily projected on our TV screens and often, nowadays in the newspaper. I fail to comprehend how there is no similar outcry over the 1984 riot against the Sikhs-- the only pogrom that was more of a genocide than a riot. Are Sikhs less equal than the Muslims? Whatever happened to the secular sensibilities of the country?
The nail has hit on the head. So, the communal riots of 2002 in Gujarat had the unofficial backing of chief minister Narendra Modi, no less. Aha! It's that time of the year again. Tehelka has stung. Only, this time, it has stung at the same place. Ever since 2002 happened, the world and its media have been shouting from the rooftops about the role of the Gujarat government in engineering the communal carnage. There were quotes, victim accounts, eye-witness stories, etc. etc. filling page after page to prove how Modi's gang of operatives killed in broad daylight.
What Tehelka has achieved therefore is a far cry from a tehelka. It is a meow. What's new, sir? If Modi has been painted communal in this story, Tehelka's fantastic sense of timing has got itself tainted as well in a.... huh, what's the colour of the Congress? Why now, Mr Tejpal, bang on the cusp of yet another stirring election?
Make no mistake. What Babu Bajrangi and his goons allegedly did is unacceptable, unpardonable, and grossly perverse. There can be no two ways about it; there can be NO justification or tolerance for stabbing a pregnant woman who has done no harm except to belong to a certain community. One cannot condone such subversive acts in a civilised society. If, after doing what he allegedly did, he thinks nothing of it, there's something seriously wrong not only with this person but also with society at large which nurtures such evil. An act of violence, committed in a moment of insanity, should drown the perpetrator in remorse. But a flagrant flaunting of such a heinous act strips him of the veneer of humanity.
It's therefore not about whether what happened was right or wrong. It wasn't right. But then, the other side looks equally bad. What kind of person gets into a compartment, sets fire to it so that all the innocent men, women and children get burnt? Why is it that the Godhra goondas are still at large? No one in their right mind will buy the conspiracy theory. It has much too many holes. What kind of society allows such mindless violence to go unpunished? That's particularly strange considering it happened in Modi's Gujarat. It's also an important sidelight that such a carnage on a majority community can happen only in India.
And, if we condone the first phase of the communal riots of 1992-93 in Mumbai started by Muslims as the outcome of the demolition of Babri Masjid -- which incidentally is different from burning or killing people, why cannot we accept that the post-Godhra riots were a backlash from the Hindus? If the demolition of a non-functional mosque in the distant north can spark a conflagration in Mumbai, can't the burning of innocents cause a flare-up in the immediate neighbourhood? It's such double standards of pious Hindus that I find baffling. There's no question of justifying either. Both are wrong -- the razing of Babri and the Godhra tragedy. But if we are logical and `unbiased,' the aftermath of each incident is as reprehensible or justified as the aftermath of the other.
I find it self-contradictory when we accept the communal riots of 1992-93 in Mumbai as an empathisable offshoot of the Babri Masjid demolition but find the Gujarat rioting unacceptable. Yes, the official backing, if any, by the Modi regime is something we need to get alarmed at but the fact remains that Modi did not stir up the mass hysteria overnight nor did he actively seek out people to go on a rampage. His role, if there was any, was allegedly that of a caretaker who is believed to have looked the other way. He was, by no means, the perpetrator. And, from one account cited below, he didn't entirely look the other way
In both riots, one critical fact has been overlooked by all sides-- the saffron, Muslim and secular hate-mongers. Many Hindus too lost their lives in both Mumbai and Gujarat riots. The much-revered Srikrishna Commission, which probed the riots of 1992-93, has religiously documented the casualties in both communities-- the stats speak louder than all the newsprint and footage. It is a travesty of truth to project or pretend that only Muslims have faced the wrath of a saffron backlash. The Hindu toll, too, was quite high. So, what saffron trishuls are we talking about, Mr Singhal? And, thank God they were not used.
In Gujarat, according to answers given in Parliament by the UPA home minister, 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed and 2500 were wounded. Certainly more Muslims paid for their lives for the Godhra carnage than Hindus in a land dominated by Hindus but it is clear they didn't take it lying down.Even as the media played out the misery of the hapless Muslims in relief camps, there were over 40,000 Hindus in relief camps by the end of the first week of riots.
As human beings in an ordered society, we need to tolerate. We should tolerate difference of opinion, religion, customs, practices and beliefs. But one has to draw the line at being doormatish. it's rather hypocritical to view ourselves and the world through different prisms. Few possess the art of self-criticism that Indian excel in; it is of great value but only so long as it doesn't peter out into masochistic self-loathing.
Even if you choose to be so, at least be factual. There are several inherent inequities that stand out in a sensible evaluation of both the situations-- 1992 and 2002. Let us look a little closely at some facts-- first, the impression that all of Gujarat was in flames. Officially, only 60 `locations', not necessarily villages but areas, were struck by rioting. You could argue the number is negotiable. Probably. But look at the fact that all the 200-odd industrial townships in Gujarat continued work as usual without a single day's loss. That takes care of the inflamed reportage.
While ruling parties usually have the wherewithal (read: clout) to get around the flak in the form of an increasingly coloured coverage of every communal or religious event, it's the police who haplessly carry a permanent scar on their credibility, time and again.Were both Mumbai and Gujarat state commandeered by a biased police? According to the Srikrishna Commission report which is certainly more secular than the secular, police opened fire 153 times in the first phase in which 30 Hindus, 133 Muslims and 11 others died. In the second phase, it opened fire 308 times in which 80 Hindus, 90 Muslims and one other person died. Two police officers, and five policemen were killed while controlling the riots, and about 500 policemen including officers injured. It certainly doesn't sound like a one-sided affair, and we are not counting the number of missing persons or unidentified bodies here.
Yet, bafflingly, the police were heavily upbraided by the Commission for its supposed bias. While failing to pinpoint a categorical, doubt-free incident in support of its tall claims, the commission records its appreciation of the sterling services rendered by the police at different places. It also bring out equitable inaction in some instances (!) as in the fact that the police did not act not only against the allegedly inflammatory writings in the `Saamna' and `Nava kaal,' but also kept silent on some ``communal Urdu writings'' circulating during this period.
In Gujarat, the police was derided for being a `biased' protector. Consider this factfile: On February 28, 10 Hindus had been shot dead and 16 Hindus had been wounded in police firing. On March 1 (the next day), another 24 Hindus were shot dead and 40 Hindus wounded in police firing. In the first three days alone, out of a total of 611 deaths, 101 were caused by police firing -- of whom 61 were Hindus and 40 were Muslims.
As for the common myth happily perpetuated by the English media that Narendra Modi did not call in the army, B P Singhal, an ex-DGP who claims to have been continually intouch with the Gujarat state police, gave this chronology to a news channel (Aaj Tak): the Godhra carnage took place on February 27, the Hindu backlash started the next day and the army was doing a flag march on the ``forenoon of March 1''. This means, within a single day, the chief minister had summoned the army, as recorded by The Hindu as well. So, what was the channel's reaction to this revelation? `Why no action was taken on February 29, 30, 31?' it wanted to know! Even if 2002 had been a leap year, it appears our man in the TV studio would not have been appeased.
Similarly, the post-demolition pogroms were not all a play of passion. The commission says about the January 1993 rioting, ``a number of individual Muslims and Muslim criminal elements appear to have indulged in violence, arson and rioting.'' In Bainganwadi, for instance, the attacks on Hindus ``appear to have been masterminded by Gharya Aslam and Abdul Ghani Kamruddin Mulla, two notorious characters of the locality.'' There were instances of private firing by Muslims too. Some Muslim criminals like Aslam Koradia and his associates ``moved around the locality (Pydhonie) on motor bikes and fired indiscriminately at people on the streets.''
None of this exposition of facts is intended to imply a condonation of anything that happened. Rather, it is an attempt to point out the whole picture instead of a pick-and-choose reality that is daily projected on our TV screens and often, nowadays in the newspaper. I fail to comprehend how there is no similar outcry over the 1984 riot against the Sikhs-- the only pogrom that was more of a genocide than a riot. Are Sikhs less equal than the Muslims? Whatever happened to the secular sensibilities of the country?
The urbane Englishman generates 450 kgs of waste annually, according to a local UK report. Happily, a Mumbaikar generates 260 kgs. Nothing to pat your back about, but good enough to give us the advantage of sniggering at the whites.
Come to think of it, though we find it hard to believe, we are actually better off than our evolved cousins in the west in practically every department. We don't sit with our shoes on the table; we dont block all air out and switch on the AC (traditionally, that is. I can understand the English and other Europeans needing to shut the draught out but why do we do this in tropical India?), we take bath every day (well, many of us); we don't smother our flooring with carpets (I have never understood the need for these extremely unhygienic -almost filthy- practice. Even Gandhiji spoke out against them); we greet people better (with folded hands rather than a kiss, hug or a handshake which, again, are oh-so-unhygienic, apart from not being half as polite); our meals are far healthier; our clothing lets us breathe (research has shown the lungi and the dhoti are the best forms of apparel for the lower male part as it lets the organs breathe and stay cool. I dont understand the sari though, except for its sex appeal); we respect our elders (or are supposed to); we worship nature and abstain from killing animals or birds for food (quite a few of us); and our traditional educational system is far more holistic and professional (than the Macaulay brand of degree-totting that it has become today).
There is lots more we need to do: we need to understand women ARE equal (we don't need to be treated as such); we need to stop littering the streets, and most of all, we need to arrest the consumerist culture from spreading any further.
Wherever you go these days, you land at a mall or a multiplex. We have little need for either. either. The supermarkets have the best foreign or MNC brands but no local brand for cornflakes. They refuse to stock any soap produced by a cooperative or a small scale unit. Their fruit and vegetables are artificially coloured and cost 30 % more than the neighbourhood hawker. They survive on brands and therefore don't give a damn about the pathetic quality of wheat, rice or other essential fare they are forced to sell. By the time you are through with the mall, you're lugging two huge sacks in your hands, mostly full of unnecessary stuff.
You need to carry this home yourself whereas your neighbourhood grocer would have home-delivered the entire stuff had he only known.
Discouraging malls is of essence to protect our established system of commerce --the damn malls are wiping out the grocers everywhere. It is also critical for all-round economic progress in a growth model fuelled by local enterprise. Given the vast reach of khadi and the native Indian entrepreneurial skills, our cities, towns and villages are saturated with thriving small-scale units that produce everything from soaps to cornflakes, to clothes to phenyl to wooden furniture. If all consumer products and consummables go upscale (i.e., are slammed with a brand name), it will throw the well-established networks, and thereby the economics, out of gear. These units will be wiped out-- they already are getting wiped out in big numbers as HLL, and its like-minded rivals take over businesses after businesses that they know little about except that two principles work everywhere -- economies of scale and cutting costs at all costs. MNC success stories are jigged up by these simple tenets of MBA wisdom. Quality, as a result, take the first backseat in their scheme of things.
Now, for the multiplexes. How many of us really love these shut dens of misery that look bright but drive you blind simply by having the screen bang in front of you. So, you trade the larger cinematic experience -- the charm of sitting in a huge auditorium with attendant atmospherics of film-watching like the cheaper popcorn, the clapping, cheering and hooting -- for a supposedly better viewing in a small enclave with people who just about manage to stand up for the national anthem, stay politely non-committal throughout the movie except when their cellphone rings, and wiggle in their plush seats forever to give you way when there is none. That the popcorn comes for a princely Rs 50 and the pint-sized stale samosa sell for Rs 40 doesn't help matter much.
Sorry if I have hurt your sentiment, guys. I belong to the old school of thought which sees a movie as a mystique; and its stars as ethereal entities-- not to be touched, seen or even whispered about, and certainly not munchies to be devoured every day at the breakfast table. There was a halo around the older stars whether they deserved it or not; the newer lot believes in wooing reporters and editors through saam daam dand bhed. Any trick in the trade is fair to stay visible to beat the morning attack of insecurity/anxiety.
Isn't the way you see a Rajesh Khanna or a Raj Kapoor very different from the way you see Shah Rukh Khan (with the hideous ponytail and yucky six-packs)? It's no thrill to see those dimples in your paper every day, every single day. It certainly doesn't help that he can't act.
Now that we are done with the loathsome fellas, lets talk about the subject of the day. Ahem! How wasteful are we as metro citizens? First, look at our use of disposables: it has shot through the roof. We use plastic cups, glasses and bags for everything: liquids such as water, beverages and juice is served in paper/thermocol/plastic cups in all takeaways. We buy packaged juice, packaged cornflakes, packaged milk, packaged soft drinks. Our groceries, veggies, etc. come in plastic, whether from the grocer or the mall. Granny's old cloth bag is just too downmarket, never mind if our upmarket ways makes the world a nightmare to live in, bit by bit.
Offices everywhere use disposable cups with a vengeance. In the good old days, you had a simple steel glass placed atop an earthen matka. Today, the office dustbins are venomously cluttered with plastic.
Each house today has one PC, one laptop, one car, one or two TVs, three to four cell phones, a washing machine, with a home theatre or two thrown in. Consider the electronic waste (called e-waste) generated by a single family which will keep changing its cellphones, TVs, cars as and when newer models float in. The older models could get re-used once but then what? They are summarily consigned to the dustbin which sees more of inorganic and hazardous waste these days than the old-fashioned, and harmless, dudhi ka chilka.
There is a policy under way at the union level to dispose of e-waste but I'm not sure how it will work. In spite of having faced the problem long before us, the US and European Union, among others, are still grappling with their mountains of e-garbage, let alone the other forms.
For the environmentally conscious, let me remind you that while paper does degenerate and is organic, it is made from precious resources such as wood. So, it's not enough to say we use paper cups; these can be re-cycled only once or twice, with some waste built in each recycling.
The only answer, therefore, is to live a simple life, cut down our needs to the minimum, eat healthy, and walk instead of taking the car for a 10-minute drive to work. In other words, follow Gandhiji zealously!
I haven't even begun talking about carbon emissions and depletion of fossil fuels.
P.S. I think the move by EU to impose a carbon tax is quite asinine; it blinks at the problem which, I fear, won't go away... And we still organise debates on whether Gandhism is relevant today. Sigh!
Come to think of it, though we find it hard to believe, we are actually better off than our evolved cousins in the west in practically every department. We don't sit with our shoes on the table; we dont block all air out and switch on the AC (traditionally, that is. I can understand the English and other Europeans needing to shut the draught out but why do we do this in tropical India?), we take bath every day (well, many of us); we don't smother our flooring with carpets (I have never understood the need for these extremely unhygienic -almost filthy- practice. Even Gandhiji spoke out against them); we greet people better (with folded hands rather than a kiss, hug or a handshake which, again, are oh-so-unhygienic, apart from not being half as polite); our meals are far healthier; our clothing lets us breathe (research has shown the lungi and the dhoti are the best forms of apparel for the lower male part as it lets the organs breathe and stay cool. I dont understand the sari though, except for its sex appeal); we respect our elders (or are supposed to); we worship nature and abstain from killing animals or birds for food (quite a few of us); and our traditional educational system is far more holistic and professional (than the Macaulay brand of degree-totting that it has become today).
There is lots more we need to do: we need to understand women ARE equal (we don't need to be treated as such); we need to stop littering the streets, and most of all, we need to arrest the consumerist culture from spreading any further.
Wherever you go these days, you land at a mall or a multiplex. We have little need for either. either. The supermarkets have the best foreign or MNC brands but no local brand for cornflakes. They refuse to stock any soap produced by a cooperative or a small scale unit. Their fruit and vegetables are artificially coloured and cost 30 % more than the neighbourhood hawker. They survive on brands and therefore don't give a damn about the pathetic quality of wheat, rice or other essential fare they are forced to sell. By the time you are through with the mall, you're lugging two huge sacks in your hands, mostly full of unnecessary stuff.
You need to carry this home yourself whereas your neighbourhood grocer would have home-delivered the entire stuff had he only known.
Discouraging malls is of essence to protect our established system of commerce --the damn malls are wiping out the grocers everywhere. It is also critical for all-round economic progress in a growth model fuelled by local enterprise. Given the vast reach of khadi and the native Indian entrepreneurial skills, our cities, towns and villages are saturated with thriving small-scale units that produce everything from soaps to cornflakes, to clothes to phenyl to wooden furniture. If all consumer products and consummables go upscale (i.e., are slammed with a brand name), it will throw the well-established networks, and thereby the economics, out of gear. These units will be wiped out-- they already are getting wiped out in big numbers as HLL, and its like-minded rivals take over businesses after businesses that they know little about except that two principles work everywhere -- economies of scale and cutting costs at all costs. MNC success stories are jigged up by these simple tenets of MBA wisdom. Quality, as a result, take the first backseat in their scheme of things.
Now, for the multiplexes. How many of us really love these shut dens of misery that look bright but drive you blind simply by having the screen bang in front of you. So, you trade the larger cinematic experience -- the charm of sitting in a huge auditorium with attendant atmospherics of film-watching like the cheaper popcorn, the clapping, cheering and hooting -- for a supposedly better viewing in a small enclave with people who just about manage to stand up for the national anthem, stay politely non-committal throughout the movie except when their cellphone rings, and wiggle in their plush seats forever to give you way when there is none. That the popcorn comes for a princely Rs 50 and the pint-sized stale samosa sell for Rs 40 doesn't help matter much.
Sorry if I have hurt your sentiment, guys. I belong to the old school of thought which sees a movie as a mystique; and its stars as ethereal entities-- not to be touched, seen or even whispered about, and certainly not munchies to be devoured every day at the breakfast table. There was a halo around the older stars whether they deserved it or not; the newer lot believes in wooing reporters and editors through saam daam dand bhed. Any trick in the trade is fair to stay visible to beat the morning attack of insecurity/anxiety.
Isn't the way you see a Rajesh Khanna or a Raj Kapoor very different from the way you see Shah Rukh Khan (with the hideous ponytail and yucky six-packs)? It's no thrill to see those dimples in your paper every day, every single day. It certainly doesn't help that he can't act.
Now that we are done with the loathsome fellas, lets talk about the subject of the day. Ahem! How wasteful are we as metro citizens? First, look at our use of disposables: it has shot through the roof. We use plastic cups, glasses and bags for everything: liquids such as water, beverages and juice is served in paper/thermocol/plastic cups in all takeaways. We buy packaged juice, packaged cornflakes, packaged milk, packaged soft drinks. Our groceries, veggies, etc. come in plastic, whether from the grocer or the mall. Granny's old cloth bag is just too downmarket, never mind if our upmarket ways makes the world a nightmare to live in, bit by bit.
Offices everywhere use disposable cups with a vengeance. In the good old days, you had a simple steel glass placed atop an earthen matka. Today, the office dustbins are venomously cluttered with plastic.
Each house today has one PC, one laptop, one car, one or two TVs, three to four cell phones, a washing machine, with a home theatre or two thrown in. Consider the electronic waste (called e-waste) generated by a single family which will keep changing its cellphones, TVs, cars as and when newer models float in. The older models could get re-used once but then what? They are summarily consigned to the dustbin which sees more of inorganic and hazardous waste these days than the old-fashioned, and harmless, dudhi ka chilka.
There is a policy under way at the union level to dispose of e-waste but I'm not sure how it will work. In spite of having faced the problem long before us, the US and European Union, among others, are still grappling with their mountains of e-garbage, let alone the other forms.
For the environmentally conscious, let me remind you that while paper does degenerate and is organic, it is made from precious resources such as wood. So, it's not enough to say we use paper cups; these can be re-cycled only once or twice, with some waste built in each recycling.
The only answer, therefore, is to live a simple life, cut down our needs to the minimum, eat healthy, and walk instead of taking the car for a 10-minute drive to work. In other words, follow Gandhiji zealously!
I haven't even begun talking about carbon emissions and depletion of fossil fuels.
P.S. I think the move by EU to impose a carbon tax is quite asinine; it blinks at the problem which, I fear, won't go away... And we still organise debates on whether Gandhism is relevant today. Sigh!
Monday, October 15, 2007
``Young people are more engaged with the Internet.'' ``TV and Internet would leave little time for newspapers everywhere.'' These are the prophetic words of Marcus Brauchli, managing editor, Wall Street Journal.
I dont know anyone who will disagree with this fundamental truth. Ever since TV invaded media turf in the early nineties, we were periodically warned to keep pace or fade out. ``We are competing with TV, dont forget,'' the editor would say gravely time and again.
That ended up being THE trigger behind the regrettable dumbing down of journalism in print. Most bosses fought shy of publishing a story/ article that was serious, long, academic, doomsaying, or, worse, all of the above. ``Readers want a quick read, they are now used to TV'' they would argue. Cut your marathon by half, I would always be told. `Say your thing in 250 words,' is the new mantra of new age journalism. And while at it, keep it light, fluffy and smart. If it also has any merit by the way, so be it.
No editor wants to play God and miss the bus. There were honourable exceptions like the late C R Irani, owner and editor of The Statesman, which at one time was a revered Bible for those who wanted to learn English. Amar Singh (ya, the same) once told me how he was advised to read The Statesman (the Junior Statesman was a hot draw) to improve his English. I dont know if it helped or being with the impeccable Amitabh Bachchan only brought home his lack even more. But at least a few dozen people told me the same thing about the paper.
Even today, there are a number of amazing Anglo-Indian journalists working with the Statesman. During my time, even their telephone operator sounded classy. Each time Willy (who has since retired) answered the call in his rich baritone, in the right accent and just the right inflection of pride, `Statesman,' my heart would do a flip-flop. A pity both of us were married. (If not Amitabh, Willy came a close second.)
Irani was a task master, a perfectionist and above all, a journalist to the core. The word `journalist' today does not inspire the same awe as it did when I started out. It implied an extremely knowledgeable mind, sharp intellect, uncompromisable integrity, unwavering commitment, raw guts, relentless drive, unbiased attitude and responsible reporting. I leave it to you to find out which parts have since fallen off its dictionary meaning.
Irani, though, had all of these and more. Ironically, he was the owner of the paper as well, which means he stood to personally gain from every ad placed in the paper. But unlike today's editors, he was first and foremost a journalist. I remember a highly controversial story a colleague and I had broken in The Statesman about a supposedly ``missing'' CBI report indicting one of the biggest Indian companies. We dug out the report and showed the world it was not missing. The next thing we knew, the company concerned had pulled out of a huge ad campaign (and not a one-off ad) it had planned with The Statesman space selling team.
As I was pretty new in the paper, I got a bit nervous when I learned of this. A month later, Irani walked into the Mumbai office, and called for me. As he had never met me, I panicked. ``There goes my job,'' I muttered to myself and braced for the battering ram. He'll holler at me for daring to write so brazenly and throw me out.
I knocked and entered his imposing cabin with sweaty palms. He looked up, grinned when I introduced myself and gestured to sit down. Very warmly then, he told me we had done a great job and that he was proud of the story. ``You must follow it up, keep an eye on it,'' he told me passionately. Still not sure this was happening, I said I would. Then, he launched into a long session about his pet peeve: Bofors. How the Gandhis and Quattrochi are bullshitting everyone, etc. etc.
During the hour-long chat, not once did he mention the word, ``ad''.
He couldnt care, explained my bureau chief. He cares only for news, and journalism of the old order. Personal profiteering over professional integrity was for the lesser mortals.
I have still to met someone with an intellect as sharp as his. Once he called to convey an extremely complicated story about an airline booking racket. After communicating the brief in three lucid lines, he asked me if I had any questions. I had none. It was only when I began working on the story, I understood how difficult it was to explain the story to people. Even after laborious explanations, most people I approached would still have queries. Each time, I tried, sighed and mentally invoked Irani's clarity of speech.
Over time, I grew to understand that Irani not only cared about news, he was extremely disgusted with the pettiness he saw all around him. He never let personal likes and dislikes come in his way. It was fine by him if he lost a few lakhs or crores of rupees in the process of chasing a good story. In his eyes, it was a good deal.
Though reputed to be tough as nails, he softened before people whom he valued.
I dont remember a single occasion he came down hard on me; he kept encouraging me at every opportunity and sought me out a couple of times he thought a good story was waiting to be told.
When I hesitatingly wrote to his personal email ID (which was taboo) proposing to write for the Edit page, (I was already bombarding the Op-Ed page regularly), he wrote back saying I should. I wrote one on a Harshad Mehta development and it was carried by the hawk-eyed editors practically without any change.
On his next trip to Mumbai, Irani walked into office and first called for me. When I entered, he beamed, jumped out of his chair, and actually came around to hug me. The peon serving him tea stared open-mouthed. Soon, word spread and I felt like a heroine. What did he say? Well, he was simply happy at my enthusiasm and with my first piece.
Irani was a rare editor who took personal pride in his employees. To him, we were not fulfilling a contractual obligation, but serving the larger cause of journalism as his flanks. Even after an illness restricted his movements, at 74, he continued to be driven as ever, more than any one I know or have heard of. Newspapers were a form of crusade for him, not en enterprise as it has become for everyone else I know.
When I quit Statesman, it was only because I felt I should also look at the material side of things. After all, I was no Irani-an. The one memory that still disturbs me to this day is his bitter response to my resignation. I never got in touch with him thereafter.
Today, The Statesman may not be the same but in my heart, it embodies the ethics of journalism as no other paper does because of a single man who lived by his values and died by them.
To me, Irani will forever be the true Statesman. May his soul rest in peace.
I dont know anyone who will disagree with this fundamental truth. Ever since TV invaded media turf in the early nineties, we were periodically warned to keep pace or fade out. ``We are competing with TV, dont forget,'' the editor would say gravely time and again.
That ended up being THE trigger behind the regrettable dumbing down of journalism in print. Most bosses fought shy of publishing a story/ article that was serious, long, academic, doomsaying, or, worse, all of the above. ``Readers want a quick read, they are now used to TV'' they would argue. Cut your marathon by half, I would always be told. `Say your thing in 250 words,' is the new mantra of new age journalism. And while at it, keep it light, fluffy and smart. If it also has any merit by the way, so be it.
No editor wants to play God and miss the bus. There were honourable exceptions like the late C R Irani, owner and editor of The Statesman, which at one time was a revered Bible for those who wanted to learn English. Amar Singh (ya, the same) once told me how he was advised to read The Statesman (the Junior Statesman was a hot draw) to improve his English. I dont know if it helped or being with the impeccable Amitabh Bachchan only brought home his lack even more. But at least a few dozen people told me the same thing about the paper.
Even today, there are a number of amazing Anglo-Indian journalists working with the Statesman. During my time, even their telephone operator sounded classy. Each time Willy (who has since retired) answered the call in his rich baritone, in the right accent and just the right inflection of pride, `Statesman,' my heart would do a flip-flop. A pity both of us were married. (If not Amitabh, Willy came a close second.)
Irani was a task master, a perfectionist and above all, a journalist to the core. The word `journalist' today does not inspire the same awe as it did when I started out. It implied an extremely knowledgeable mind, sharp intellect, uncompromisable integrity, unwavering commitment, raw guts, relentless drive, unbiased attitude and responsible reporting. I leave it to you to find out which parts have since fallen off its dictionary meaning.
Irani, though, had all of these and more. Ironically, he was the owner of the paper as well, which means he stood to personally gain from every ad placed in the paper. But unlike today's editors, he was first and foremost a journalist. I remember a highly controversial story a colleague and I had broken in The Statesman about a supposedly ``missing'' CBI report indicting one of the biggest Indian companies. We dug out the report and showed the world it was not missing. The next thing we knew, the company concerned had pulled out of a huge ad campaign (and not a one-off ad) it had planned with The Statesman space selling team.
As I was pretty new in the paper, I got a bit nervous when I learned of this. A month later, Irani walked into the Mumbai office, and called for me. As he had never met me, I panicked. ``There goes my job,'' I muttered to myself and braced for the battering ram. He'll holler at me for daring to write so brazenly and throw me out.
I knocked and entered his imposing cabin with sweaty palms. He looked up, grinned when I introduced myself and gestured to sit down. Very warmly then, he told me we had done a great job and that he was proud of the story. ``You must follow it up, keep an eye on it,'' he told me passionately. Still not sure this was happening, I said I would. Then, he launched into a long session about his pet peeve: Bofors. How the Gandhis and Quattrochi are bullshitting everyone, etc. etc.
During the hour-long chat, not once did he mention the word, ``ad''.
He couldnt care, explained my bureau chief. He cares only for news, and journalism of the old order. Personal profiteering over professional integrity was for the lesser mortals.
I have still to met someone with an intellect as sharp as his. Once he called to convey an extremely complicated story about an airline booking racket. After communicating the brief in three lucid lines, he asked me if I had any questions. I had none. It was only when I began working on the story, I understood how difficult it was to explain the story to people. Even after laborious explanations, most people I approached would still have queries. Each time, I tried, sighed and mentally invoked Irani's clarity of speech.
Over time, I grew to understand that Irani not only cared about news, he was extremely disgusted with the pettiness he saw all around him. He never let personal likes and dislikes come in his way. It was fine by him if he lost a few lakhs or crores of rupees in the process of chasing a good story. In his eyes, it was a good deal.
Though reputed to be tough as nails, he softened before people whom he valued.
I dont remember a single occasion he came down hard on me; he kept encouraging me at every opportunity and sought me out a couple of times he thought a good story was waiting to be told.
When I hesitatingly wrote to his personal email ID (which was taboo) proposing to write for the Edit page, (I was already bombarding the Op-Ed page regularly), he wrote back saying I should. I wrote one on a Harshad Mehta development and it was carried by the hawk-eyed editors practically without any change.
On his next trip to Mumbai, Irani walked into office and first called for me. When I entered, he beamed, jumped out of his chair, and actually came around to hug me. The peon serving him tea stared open-mouthed. Soon, word spread and I felt like a heroine. What did he say? Well, he was simply happy at my enthusiasm and with my first piece.
Irani was a rare editor who took personal pride in his employees. To him, we were not fulfilling a contractual obligation, but serving the larger cause of journalism as his flanks. Even after an illness restricted his movements, at 74, he continued to be driven as ever, more than any one I know or have heard of. Newspapers were a form of crusade for him, not en enterprise as it has become for everyone else I know.
When I quit Statesman, it was only because I felt I should also look at the material side of things. After all, I was no Irani-an. The one memory that still disturbs me to this day is his bitter response to my resignation. I never got in touch with him thereafter.
Today, The Statesman may not be the same but in my heart, it embodies the ethics of journalism as no other paper does because of a single man who lived by his values and died by them.
To me, Irani will forever be the true Statesman. May his soul rest in peace.
Friday, October 05, 2007
Here's a powerful address by the indefatigable Vandana Shiva which addresses some issues very close to my heart. Please, ppllllease read it. Will post my comments later.
How to Address Humanity's Global Crises? Challenge Corporate Power, Embrace True Democracy
By Vandana Shiva, AlterNet
Posted on October 1, 2007, Printed on October 1, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/63541/
Editor's note: the following remarks were made this September at a conference on "Confronting the Global Triple Crisis -- Climate Change, Peak Oil, Global Resource Depletion & Extinction," in Washington DC. For more information, visit the International Forum on Globalization's website.
Before I came here I was very fortunate to join the group of scientists and religious leaders who made a trip to the Arctic to witness the melting of the icecaps. An entire way of life is being destroyed. You've seen the polar bears losing their ecological space, but the highest mobility in that part of the world is the dog sledge. And they can't use it. They're locked into their villages because the ice is now too thin to travel on it. But it's still there and therefore not good enough for them to use boats.
The same melting is making the Himalayan glaciers in my region, the Ganges glacier, recede by 30 meters a year. In twenty years time, the Himalayan glaciers will have reduced from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers. And given our rainfall patterns, in the hot summer season when we have a drought, it's only the melting of the glaciers that brings us water. So we're talking about one-fifth of humanity, twenty to thirty years from now, having no water in the grand rivers around which the grand civilizations of Asia have been built.
And where did this start? All this feels so timeless, but it started with humanity getting at the fossil fuel, which was never supposed to be touched… But that model carries on. And globalization now is industrializing every activity of every human being's life across the planet. For me, globalization is really expanding the use of fossil fuel.
And so while on the one hand, when we talk climate change, we're talking about reducing emissions, the entire economic model is based on increasing emissions. It is based on increasing emissions by destroying small-scale peasant farming and introducing large-scale industrial agriculture. It's increasing emissions by making every one of us dependent on our everyday needs to come from China.
Everything today is being made where it can be made most cheaply, which means where sources can be exploited the fastest and workers can be exploited the highest. And at one level, that's what's being reflected in China's double-digit growth and India's nine percent growth. It's basically converting our resources into commodities, to be sold around the world.
But that conversion requires the wastage of human beings on a scale we've never seen. In India right now, the relocation of industry for example; industry like steel that's shutting down in Europe and America, is relocating to India. Automobile companies that are shutting down in the West are moving to India; they're talking about making 50 million cars in India annually. Only four percent of India will ever own them. The rest will either be exported or that four percent will have eight cars rather than two. Already my landlord has five in a family of three. Those cars need minerals, they need steel, they need iron ore mining, they need aluminum, they need bauxite mining. And every inch of the land in India is today serving a global, fossil fuel economy that's on fast forward.
It needs land; land grab is the biggest resource crisis. Land you can't create, you can only exhaust. But peasants are saying we will not move. That's what they said in Nandigram, 25 were shot dead and they refuse to move. In Dhandri, where women were raped and attacked and refused to move. In place after place, the tribals, the peasants in India are saying this our land, this is our mother, and this is where we will be. And when the money for compensation becomes bigger and bigger-- I love this action-- the Nandigram peasants sent a letter to the chief ministers to say, "How much is your mother for sale. How much will you take for her? Because this land is our mother."
And the globalization of agriculture has really become genocidal. It's hugely responsible for increasing greenhouse gases, whether it's from the nitrogen fertilizers of the fossil fuel in the mechanical energy that's used, or in the long distance transport and food miles. But on the ground it's killing people. Long before it will kill us through climate change, it's killing people, physically killing people.
150,000 farmers have been pushed to end their lives in India because of Monsanto seed monopolies. Monsanto was collecting 2,400 rupees as royalty for a kilogram of Bt cotton seed that they were selling for 3,200 rupees. They're in the courts right now; we've challenged them, we've joined one of the state governments. They're saying we have a right to this monopoly and we're saying our country has never given you this right. They assume they got it in the United States and therefore they have it everywhere, whether the law allows it or not.
Or Cargill, wanting to grab India's wheat market, having signed an agreement through the Bush Administration with…Right here in this city, decisions about agriculture are being made here, in Washington. A two-year old agriculture agreement. So Cargill eventually got India's wheat markets opened up. And the international wheat price is $400; Indian farmers are getting $200. And this double price is ultimately a subsidy that we are giving in addition to the subsidy your farm bill is providing to these corporations.
Retail: India is a huge, huge land of bazaars, of huts, of markets. Every street is a market. Hawkers come down in the morning, get us our vegetables to our doorstep. Of course, that's not very good for Wal-Mart so they're manipulating zoning laws, shutting down hawkers, shutting down businesses in town, so that we will have a Wal-Mart model. But that means 100 million people out of retail and we don't know how much more carbon emissions, while Wal-Mart talks about going green…
So here you have globalization adding to emissions and it needs to be a continued part of our work. And you've got false solutions that were laid out by Jerry [Mander]. But the false solution that I think we need to pay particular attention to is the dominant solution in terms of carbon trading. Because at the philosophical level, at the world-view level, it's the second privatization of the atmospheric commons. The first privatization was putting the pollution into the atmosphere beyond the earth's recycling capacity. Now with carbon trading, the rights to the earth's carbon cycling capacity are gravitating exactly into the arms of the polluters. The environmental principal used to be the polluter must pay. Carbon trading is transforming that into the polluter gets paid.
[Sir Nicholas] Stern, who did the Stern Review, has clearly said it is an allocation of a full set of property rights to the atmosphere. And PricewaterhouseCoopers -- who was very notorious in trying to privatize, with the World Bank's help, Delhi's water supply, and we defeated them two years ago in that project -- has said that trade in carbon emissions is equated with the transfer of similar rights such as copyrights, patents, licensing rights, commercial and industrial standards.
One of the things we have always said in [the International Forum on Globalization] is that the enclosures of the commons is one of the deep crises of resource depletion. Once resources move out of common management and public care, they will get further degraded. And if you really look at the clean development mechanism, it's all about dirty industry; it's about HCFC plants being accelerated, new plants being set up in China and India. The biggest recipients of CDM credits in China and India are plants that are depleting the ozone layer. Sponge iron plants coming up in the tribal belts of India, in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Orissa. And clean seems to have become such a confusing word. We would have thought that we know what clean is. And suddenly, everything dirty is clean.
Including nuclear. Nuclear, not just as nuclear power, but nuclear as strategic use of nuclear power. I don't know how many of you have followed that the United States signed an agreement with India. Now it isn't really that United States signed an agreement with India because you did not sign that agreement and I did not sign that agreement. Our Prime Minister came at the same time that they handed over our agriculture. Monsanto, Cargill, and Wal-Mart, who sit on the board of the agriculture agreement, they also signed this nuclear agreement.
Which has led to the Hyde Act; section 103 of the Hyde Act calls for securing India's full and active participation in U.S. efforts to dissuade, isolate, and if necessary, sanction and contain Iran if it proceeds with its nuclear program. Iran has been mentioned 15 times in a bilateral agreement.
So the nuclear agreement with India is definitely not about clean energy; it is about something bigger. And in India, right now while I'm here, we are having the biggest democratic mobilization against this agreement. First of all because Parliament did not clear it and second, because we don't want to be a client state of the empire -- we want our non-alignment defended -- and thirdly we don't want $100 billion market created for the defense industry in the United States. After all, you are going to have a big mobilization tomorrow against the war. And we don't want to be a part of U.S.'s wars without end. We are, after all, the land of Gandhi, the land of nonviolence, the land of peace, the land of ahimsa.
We have to begin with solutions where we are, while we defend our democratic rights. I work primarily on agriculture. The globalized, industrialized agriculture is a very big part of the pollution that we are dealing with, a very big part of the crisis we are facing. But ecological, bio-diverse, local agriculture is part of the solution. Both in reducing emissions, in increasing absorption of carbon, and most importantly, providing the adaptive capacity to deal with climate chaos. This year in Navdanya, the movement I started for seed saving, we started saving seeds that can deal with the drought, that can deal with the floods. We've been saving seeds that can deal with the cyclones and hurricanes and distributed those seeds after the tsunami. Those seeds are available, they merely have to be saved and distributed rapidly enough before Monsanto comes up with yet another false solution; that without genetic engineering and seed patents we will not be able to respond to climate change ...
I just want to end by saying that we have basically two options. We have the option of letting the remaining resources of the planet be fought over viciously through militarized power or we can move rapidly to the ability to rebuild our ecosystems, share the limited resources the planet can provide us, and create good lives while doing it. But to do that, we'll have to get out of many reductionisms.
The first reductionism being the reductionism of energy. We've suddenly moved to thinking of energy as something we can consume, not as something we generate. And I think that generative concept of energy -- we call it shakti in India -- is something we have to reclaim, because the solution to pollution and wasted people is bringing people back -- deep into the equation of how we produce things, how we work the land, how we shape community, and how we exercise our democratic rights and rebuild our freedoms.
And of course, we'll have to get out of the mindsets that treat the laws manufactured by the market as immutable and unchanging. And the three concepts that are constantly referred to as something that can't be touched are: economic growth. You can't make any change that will touch the nine percent growth in India, the ten percent growth in China. You cannot interfere in the unregulated market -- even though every step of trade liberalization is an interference in the market, every step of creating an opportunity for Cargill and Monsanto, is an interference in the market. And the third false sacred, is unbridled consumerism ..
The problem of climate chaos to me and the problem of appropriating the resources of those who need those resources for ecological security and economic security, is ultimately a question of ethics and justice. And that issue of ethics and justice can only be addressed if we recognize some very basic facts and reorient our practices of what we eat, what we do on our farms, our homes, our towns, our planet.
We need to reinvent our eating and drinking, our moving and working, in our local ecosystems and local cultures. Enriching our lives by lowering our consumption, without impoverishing others. And above all, we need to subject the laws that govern production and consumption to the laws of Gaia; the laws of the planet. The laws of a planet that can give forever in abundance for our needs if we do not allow the narrow minded, mechanistic, reductionist, greed based system of industrialism, capitalism, globalization to make us imagine that to be inhuman is the definition of being human.
Activist and physicist Vandana Shiva is founder and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi. She is author of more than three hundred papers in leading journals and numerous books, including "Monocultures of the Mind: Biodiversity, Biotechnology, and the Third World and Earth Democracy." Shiva is a founding director of International Forum on Globalization.
How to Address Humanity's Global Crises? Challenge Corporate Power, Embrace True Democracy
By Vandana Shiva, AlterNet
Posted on October 1, 2007, Printed on October 1, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/63541/
Editor's note: the following remarks were made this September at a conference on "Confronting the Global Triple Crisis -- Climate Change, Peak Oil, Global Resource Depletion & Extinction," in Washington DC. For more information, visit the International Forum on Globalization's website.
Before I came here I was very fortunate to join the group of scientists and religious leaders who made a trip to the Arctic to witness the melting of the icecaps. An entire way of life is being destroyed. You've seen the polar bears losing their ecological space, but the highest mobility in that part of the world is the dog sledge. And they can't use it. They're locked into their villages because the ice is now too thin to travel on it. But it's still there and therefore not good enough for them to use boats.
The same melting is making the Himalayan glaciers in my region, the Ganges glacier, recede by 30 meters a year. In twenty years time, the Himalayan glaciers will have reduced from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers. And given our rainfall patterns, in the hot summer season when we have a drought, it's only the melting of the glaciers that brings us water. So we're talking about one-fifth of humanity, twenty to thirty years from now, having no water in the grand rivers around which the grand civilizations of Asia have been built.
And where did this start? All this feels so timeless, but it started with humanity getting at the fossil fuel, which was never supposed to be touched… But that model carries on. And globalization now is industrializing every activity of every human being's life across the planet. For me, globalization is really expanding the use of fossil fuel.
And so while on the one hand, when we talk climate change, we're talking about reducing emissions, the entire economic model is based on increasing emissions. It is based on increasing emissions by destroying small-scale peasant farming and introducing large-scale industrial agriculture. It's increasing emissions by making every one of us dependent on our everyday needs to come from China.
Everything today is being made where it can be made most cheaply, which means where sources can be exploited the fastest and workers can be exploited the highest. And at one level, that's what's being reflected in China's double-digit growth and India's nine percent growth. It's basically converting our resources into commodities, to be sold around the world.
But that conversion requires the wastage of human beings on a scale we've never seen. In India right now, the relocation of industry for example; industry like steel that's shutting down in Europe and America, is relocating to India. Automobile companies that are shutting down in the West are moving to India; they're talking about making 50 million cars in India annually. Only four percent of India will ever own them. The rest will either be exported or that four percent will have eight cars rather than two. Already my landlord has five in a family of three. Those cars need minerals, they need steel, they need iron ore mining, they need aluminum, they need bauxite mining. And every inch of the land in India is today serving a global, fossil fuel economy that's on fast forward.
It needs land; land grab is the biggest resource crisis. Land you can't create, you can only exhaust. But peasants are saying we will not move. That's what they said in Nandigram, 25 were shot dead and they refuse to move. In Dhandri, where women were raped and attacked and refused to move. In place after place, the tribals, the peasants in India are saying this our land, this is our mother, and this is where we will be. And when the money for compensation becomes bigger and bigger-- I love this action-- the Nandigram peasants sent a letter to the chief ministers to say, "How much is your mother for sale. How much will you take for her? Because this land is our mother."
And the globalization of agriculture has really become genocidal. It's hugely responsible for increasing greenhouse gases, whether it's from the nitrogen fertilizers of the fossil fuel in the mechanical energy that's used, or in the long distance transport and food miles. But on the ground it's killing people. Long before it will kill us through climate change, it's killing people, physically killing people.
150,000 farmers have been pushed to end their lives in India because of Monsanto seed monopolies. Monsanto was collecting 2,400 rupees as royalty for a kilogram of Bt cotton seed that they were selling for 3,200 rupees. They're in the courts right now; we've challenged them, we've joined one of the state governments. They're saying we have a right to this monopoly and we're saying our country has never given you this right. They assume they got it in the United States and therefore they have it everywhere, whether the law allows it or not.
Or Cargill, wanting to grab India's wheat market, having signed an agreement through the Bush Administration with…Right here in this city, decisions about agriculture are being made here, in Washington. A two-year old agriculture agreement. So Cargill eventually got India's wheat markets opened up. And the international wheat price is $400; Indian farmers are getting $200. And this double price is ultimately a subsidy that we are giving in addition to the subsidy your farm bill is providing to these corporations.
Retail: India is a huge, huge land of bazaars, of huts, of markets. Every street is a market. Hawkers come down in the morning, get us our vegetables to our doorstep. Of course, that's not very good for Wal-Mart so they're manipulating zoning laws, shutting down hawkers, shutting down businesses in town, so that we will have a Wal-Mart model. But that means 100 million people out of retail and we don't know how much more carbon emissions, while Wal-Mart talks about going green…
So here you have globalization adding to emissions and it needs to be a continued part of our work. And you've got false solutions that were laid out by Jerry [Mander]. But the false solution that I think we need to pay particular attention to is the dominant solution in terms of carbon trading. Because at the philosophical level, at the world-view level, it's the second privatization of the atmospheric commons. The first privatization was putting the pollution into the atmosphere beyond the earth's recycling capacity. Now with carbon trading, the rights to the earth's carbon cycling capacity are gravitating exactly into the arms of the polluters. The environmental principal used to be the polluter must pay. Carbon trading is transforming that into the polluter gets paid.
[Sir Nicholas] Stern, who did the Stern Review, has clearly said it is an allocation of a full set of property rights to the atmosphere. And PricewaterhouseCoopers -- who was very notorious in trying to privatize, with the World Bank's help, Delhi's water supply, and we defeated them two years ago in that project -- has said that trade in carbon emissions is equated with the transfer of similar rights such as copyrights, patents, licensing rights, commercial and industrial standards.
One of the things we have always said in [the International Forum on Globalization] is that the enclosures of the commons is one of the deep crises of resource depletion. Once resources move out of common management and public care, they will get further degraded. And if you really look at the clean development mechanism, it's all about dirty industry; it's about HCFC plants being accelerated, new plants being set up in China and India. The biggest recipients of CDM credits in China and India are plants that are depleting the ozone layer. Sponge iron plants coming up in the tribal belts of India, in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Orissa. And clean seems to have become such a confusing word. We would have thought that we know what clean is. And suddenly, everything dirty is clean.
Including nuclear. Nuclear, not just as nuclear power, but nuclear as strategic use of nuclear power. I don't know how many of you have followed that the United States signed an agreement with India. Now it isn't really that United States signed an agreement with India because you did not sign that agreement and I did not sign that agreement. Our Prime Minister came at the same time that they handed over our agriculture. Monsanto, Cargill, and Wal-Mart, who sit on the board of the agriculture agreement, they also signed this nuclear agreement.
Which has led to the Hyde Act; section 103 of the Hyde Act calls for securing India's full and active participation in U.S. efforts to dissuade, isolate, and if necessary, sanction and contain Iran if it proceeds with its nuclear program. Iran has been mentioned 15 times in a bilateral agreement.
So the nuclear agreement with India is definitely not about clean energy; it is about something bigger. And in India, right now while I'm here, we are having the biggest democratic mobilization against this agreement. First of all because Parliament did not clear it and second, because we don't want to be a client state of the empire -- we want our non-alignment defended -- and thirdly we don't want $100 billion market created for the defense industry in the United States. After all, you are going to have a big mobilization tomorrow against the war. And we don't want to be a part of U.S.'s wars without end. We are, after all, the land of Gandhi, the land of nonviolence, the land of peace, the land of ahimsa.
We have to begin with solutions where we are, while we defend our democratic rights. I work primarily on agriculture. The globalized, industrialized agriculture is a very big part of the pollution that we are dealing with, a very big part of the crisis we are facing. But ecological, bio-diverse, local agriculture is part of the solution. Both in reducing emissions, in increasing absorption of carbon, and most importantly, providing the adaptive capacity to deal with climate chaos. This year in Navdanya, the movement I started for seed saving, we started saving seeds that can deal with the drought, that can deal with the floods. We've been saving seeds that can deal with the cyclones and hurricanes and distributed those seeds after the tsunami. Those seeds are available, they merely have to be saved and distributed rapidly enough before Monsanto comes up with yet another false solution; that without genetic engineering and seed patents we will not be able to respond to climate change ...
I just want to end by saying that we have basically two options. We have the option of letting the remaining resources of the planet be fought over viciously through militarized power or we can move rapidly to the ability to rebuild our ecosystems, share the limited resources the planet can provide us, and create good lives while doing it. But to do that, we'll have to get out of many reductionisms.
The first reductionism being the reductionism of energy. We've suddenly moved to thinking of energy as something we can consume, not as something we generate. And I think that generative concept of energy -- we call it shakti in India -- is something we have to reclaim, because the solution to pollution and wasted people is bringing people back -- deep into the equation of how we produce things, how we work the land, how we shape community, and how we exercise our democratic rights and rebuild our freedoms.
And of course, we'll have to get out of the mindsets that treat the laws manufactured by the market as immutable and unchanging. And the three concepts that are constantly referred to as something that can't be touched are: economic growth. You can't make any change that will touch the nine percent growth in India, the ten percent growth in China. You cannot interfere in the unregulated market -- even though every step of trade liberalization is an interference in the market, every step of creating an opportunity for Cargill and Monsanto, is an interference in the market. And the third false sacred, is unbridled consumerism ..
The problem of climate chaos to me and the problem of appropriating the resources of those who need those resources for ecological security and economic security, is ultimately a question of ethics and justice. And that issue of ethics and justice can only be addressed if we recognize some very basic facts and reorient our practices of what we eat, what we do on our farms, our homes, our towns, our planet.
We need to reinvent our eating and drinking, our moving and working, in our local ecosystems and local cultures. Enriching our lives by lowering our consumption, without impoverishing others. And above all, we need to subject the laws that govern production and consumption to the laws of Gaia; the laws of the planet. The laws of a planet that can give forever in abundance for our needs if we do not allow the narrow minded, mechanistic, reductionist, greed based system of industrialism, capitalism, globalization to make us imagine that to be inhuman is the definition of being human.
Activist and physicist Vandana Shiva is founder and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi. She is author of more than three hundred papers in leading journals and numerous books, including "Monocultures of the Mind: Biodiversity, Biotechnology, and the Third World and Earth Democracy." Shiva is a founding director of International Forum on Globalization.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
India has won the TT Cup. Yeah!
To me, TT spells table tennis. That's as much as I understand of cricket. But honestly, Twenty 20 doesn't look like cricket (it's typically decided in the last over or even the last ball) and the TT Cup doesnt look like a Cup. But then, neither does Team India look Indian.
What happened to all that cowering under pressure--nervous fielding, dropped catches, drooping jaws, fumbling at the wicket, confused running, and endless wides? I cant recognise this team. I am more used to a team that incredibly snatches defeat from the jaws of victory!
Surely, this is an outsourced version. Take MSD. Rarely do you see a man with more style. He is a natural. No posing for the camera, no playing to the gallery, no throwing attitude, no mouthing platitudes, no synthetic smiles.
This man has serious attitude. Real attitude, not airs. I think Ganguly too has real sttitude but Dhoni also has class. Not being much of a cricket fan, I hardly take in any of the games. The Indo-Pak match was the first I have watched in the TT series. And I was completely bowled over by Dhoni. He is just sooo composed, smart and incredibly stylish. It's quite hard to believe this is his first series as a captain.
And what does he say when asked about his advice to his teammates? He simply said go, enjoy the game; ``it doesnt matter whether we win or lose''. Imagine! Now that we've won the war, all's fair. But had we lost, I dread to think what would have happened to a captain making such a cool but nationally blasphemous pronouncement.
But for now, it's your moment. Go live it.
To me, TT spells table tennis. That's as much as I understand of cricket. But honestly, Twenty 20 doesn't look like cricket (it's typically decided in the last over or even the last ball) and the TT Cup doesnt look like a Cup. But then, neither does Team India look Indian.
What happened to all that cowering under pressure--nervous fielding, dropped catches, drooping jaws, fumbling at the wicket, confused running, and endless wides? I cant recognise this team. I am more used to a team that incredibly snatches defeat from the jaws of victory!
Surely, this is an outsourced version. Take MSD. Rarely do you see a man with more style. He is a natural. No posing for the camera, no playing to the gallery, no throwing attitude, no mouthing platitudes, no synthetic smiles.
This man has serious attitude. Real attitude, not airs. I think Ganguly too has real sttitude but Dhoni also has class. Not being much of a cricket fan, I hardly take in any of the games. The Indo-Pak match was the first I have watched in the TT series. And I was completely bowled over by Dhoni. He is just sooo composed, smart and incredibly stylish. It's quite hard to believe this is his first series as a captain.
And what does he say when asked about his advice to his teammates? He simply said go, enjoy the game; ``it doesnt matter whether we win or lose''. Imagine! Now that we've won the war, all's fair. But had we lost, I dread to think what would have happened to a captain making such a cool but nationally blasphemous pronouncement.
But for now, it's your moment. Go live it.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Nach Baliye or Sach Beliye?
I dunno if you are watching Nach Baliye 3. I have watched a few episodes of the first Nach Baliye. (Wasnt that the one with Sachin and wife and Rajeshwari Sachdev and husband?) Whatever little I saw of the latest version wasn't up to scratch. The couples are all oh-so-boring.
It' high time someone put out a dictionary meaning of celeb for the Indian audience. Does celeb mean anyone who acts and/or anyone who is in the news for whatever reason? How else do you justify Kashmera Shah and Rakhi Sawant, who has even featured on Koffee with Karan, I'm told. The dynamics of TRPs!
Big money obviously rides on this show which prods terrible dancers to rehearse for up to 12 hours. But what really jars is the use of a petty squabble among the participants to push up the viewership. The promos featured Rakhi and Kashmera bitching about one another. Why should their personal war get such prominence on a dance show?!
All reality shows have devalued their own USPs. They are taking the easiest way out by peddling Bollywood and TV as they sell. The two will be milked in whichever fashion and to the extent affordable by the producers. Thus, you have stars and starlets being feted as guest judges on singing contests even though they are patently there to sell their upcoming films.
The nonsense of SMS voting makes complete mockery not just of talent but also of a gullible voting public which spends money to `save' a contestant. So, is it all about who has more money to spare? At Rs 5-7 an SMS (so I have heard), it's a joke to think people actually vote so that the channel, producers, telecom companies and the contestants benefit. Does any `voter' give it a thought?
Indeed, TV sets new standards every day. News channels, the only saving grace till three years ago, trivialise shamelessly. One exclusive by the high-brow NDTV some time ago had some police official outside his office caught on camera saying, ``We are looking into the case,'' `It wont be right to comment at this juncture,'' ``We will explore all possibilities.'' The reporter excitedly repeated this in indirect speech ad nauseaum even as a red strip running `EXCLUSIVE' streamed all through the path-breaking item. Et tu?
Trivialisation is one thing. But exploitation and debasement of standards cannot be condoned. Our lives are anyway dictated by the standards set by the celeb set. They may soon mimic their onscreen depravation. Draw the line somewhere, guys.
I dunno if you are watching Nach Baliye 3. I have watched a few episodes of the first Nach Baliye. (Wasnt that the one with Sachin and wife and Rajeshwari Sachdev and husband?) Whatever little I saw of the latest version wasn't up to scratch. The couples are all oh-so-boring.
It' high time someone put out a dictionary meaning of celeb for the Indian audience. Does celeb mean anyone who acts and/or anyone who is in the news for whatever reason? How else do you justify Kashmera Shah and Rakhi Sawant, who has even featured on Koffee with Karan, I'm told. The dynamics of TRPs!
Big money obviously rides on this show which prods terrible dancers to rehearse for up to 12 hours. But what really jars is the use of a petty squabble among the participants to push up the viewership. The promos featured Rakhi and Kashmera bitching about one another. Why should their personal war get such prominence on a dance show?!
All reality shows have devalued their own USPs. They are taking the easiest way out by peddling Bollywood and TV as they sell. The two will be milked in whichever fashion and to the extent affordable by the producers. Thus, you have stars and starlets being feted as guest judges on singing contests even though they are patently there to sell their upcoming films.
The nonsense of SMS voting makes complete mockery not just of talent but also of a gullible voting public which spends money to `save' a contestant. So, is it all about who has more money to spare? At Rs 5-7 an SMS (so I have heard), it's a joke to think people actually vote so that the channel, producers, telecom companies and the contestants benefit. Does any `voter' give it a thought?
Indeed, TV sets new standards every day. News channels, the only saving grace till three years ago, trivialise shamelessly. One exclusive by the high-brow NDTV some time ago had some police official outside his office caught on camera saying, ``We are looking into the case,'' `It wont be right to comment at this juncture,'' ``We will explore all possibilities.'' The reporter excitedly repeated this in indirect speech ad nauseaum even as a red strip running `EXCLUSIVE' streamed all through the path-breaking item. Et tu?
Trivialisation is one thing. But exploitation and debasement of standards cannot be condoned. Our lives are anyway dictated by the standards set by the celeb set. They may soon mimic their onscreen depravation. Draw the line somewhere, guys.
Life in a zoo!!
Hi.. apologise for being away for sooo long. I have recently shifted to a place that, for a pucca Mumbaikar like me, can be mildly termed as eye-popping.
The place is actually a huge thicket in the middle of which some unlikely structures have cropped up and people like us appear to have encroached, just the way slums have the city. Except that ours is a legit encroachment. We were much-sought-after inhabitants of this tree-festooned marshland.
On declaring my intention to move here, I received commiserating calls from the outside world asking me if it was indeed necessary, to beware of snakes and tiger and whatever else is at large here. The inside world--people who live here-- had lots of practical advice such as keep a light on at the porch, dont walk in the dark; many offered gems of experential wisdom such as snakes can be smelt and poisonous snakes have different-looking hoods. All I had to do was to first figure what is a normal-looking hood, and when said snake materialises, request him to please bare his fangs and hoods for me to get a measure of his poison levels.
The first two weeks were spent amiably but soon enough, I came to imbibe the true meaning of community living. Hubby and I were on a walk with friend when he said casually, ``Ah, there is a snake nearby.'' Nobody seemed to have heard. When I asked him how he knew, he said, ``They emit a peculiar smell.'' Next, the birds fluttered restlessly and raised a din. Said knowledgeable H, ``That's a surefire sign. The birds always do this when a snake is around.'' The friends nodded and walked on. I seemed to be the only one blessed with the insight that snakes could bite and the bite could kill. A thin, small branch-like thing emerged on a side street just then. It was an apology of a snake and was actually being harassed by all the birds who kept hovering over him to get him out of their reach, probably to protect their nests.
I was rooted at my first sighting of a free snake. And not impressed. No self-respecting snake would be so tiny and allow himself to be dominated like this. Thereafter, having snakes for company became a fortnightly affair.
There is this clan of huge-looking cows and her brood in our multi-species community. The cows refuse to budge when you ask. I am positive they have been indoctrinated by animal rights activists that they have the priority in this jungle at least, if not in the urban jungle.
One fine morning, my domestic help screamed for me outside the balcony. A huge cow parked right outside my front door was blocking her path. She heckled the Thing from about half a km away while I peeped through the peep-hole, gingerly opened the door a bit, gently booed her tail (the part I could see). When I got no response (ditto maid), I got brave, pushed the door wider and addressed the face. Thing kept her eyes firmly ahead, refusing to so much as blink in my direction. Clearly someone with a huge sense of self-worth, she must have been told to sock it to 'em humans when she got the chance. The maid had to be told to go home. Needless to say, I swept and swabbed and washed.
My door has served as resting place for many a deprived soul. While coming home lost in thought one day, reality struck in the form of raucous barking outside my home. A she-dog (`bitches' has acquired a terrible connotation) and her litter of six pups had sealed all entry points in case I thought I could squeeze in through half-an-inch at the porch. As I stood transfixed, the mother took that as a challenge and stepped forward threateningly, scaling up the barks. I retracted, took refuge at a friend's place and came back only when she agreed to escort me and play martyr by going first.
The windows are not spared either. One morning, Hubby jumped out of bed, began shutting all windows frantically. The hurricane speed got me foxed. ``A family of monkeys is frolicking outside. Stay in,'' he ordered grandly. I scoffed and grumbled about paranoia being the bane of good sleep. As I rubbed my eyes and wobbled towards the balcony, he yelled, `Don't open it, they are right there.'' What! Monkeys in my balcony! Get real, I said. At the same time, I knew better than to test the waters. Anyway, a peep through the glass bore out the truth. Three tiny fellas with mom and dad were on their daily outing, hopping from branch to branch, tree to tree and occasionally landing in my neighbour's balcony two floors above so that they don't feel left out. All the while, they communicated their joy loudly to one another, my palpitations providing the perfect beat to every shrill shriek.
The mother of all lessons in community living happened last week. A security guy banged on the door, and, darting sharp looks at someone 90 degrees away, told me to keep the door open. ``There is a snake on the stairway. In case he comes near me, I need a place to escape.'' Huh? A snake right in the building? Sure, have a look, he said. I did. It was a big, grey-brown beauty, sprawled leisurely across all steps.
How can I keep the door open when a snake is around, I hollered. Rather, you should tell me NOT to keep the door open, I said indignantly. A friend who had come visiting, dutifully jumped on the divan and stayed put. The security guy assured me the snake wont come in. ``I'll make sure,'' he said. He got into action with a bucket of phenyl and water which he threw at the fellow. The scales lazily uncoiled, the guy ran and I did not wait to watch. It landed right outside my hall, climbed up a tree and dangled precariously close to my balcony, which has slats for it to come in uninivited. Content at having got him out of the stairway, the security man left. ``There is no point removing him from the tree; where will I put him? The place is full of snakes anyway,'' he shrugged philosophically and walked off.
The friend, who could not stop raving about the beauty of my place of residence, diplomatically kept mum, and fled at first opportunity.
A week later, my neighbour who leaves home at 5.30 am everyday, told me the snake has been residing in the meter room and comes out for a morning and evening stroll. She is also sure it's poisonous.
My sister has one sweet remark to make about my community living programme: ``Congrats! You're finally living where you belong: the zoo.'' And I still havent told her about the baby lizards, rats and squirrels who live off my kitchen. They're nothing to complain about.
Hi.. apologise for being away for sooo long. I have recently shifted to a place that, for a pucca Mumbaikar like me, can be mildly termed as eye-popping.
The place is actually a huge thicket in the middle of which some unlikely structures have cropped up and people like us appear to have encroached, just the way slums have the city. Except that ours is a legit encroachment. We were much-sought-after inhabitants of this tree-festooned marshland.
On declaring my intention to move here, I received commiserating calls from the outside world asking me if it was indeed necessary, to beware of snakes and tiger and whatever else is at large here. The inside world--people who live here-- had lots of practical advice such as keep a light on at the porch, dont walk in the dark; many offered gems of experential wisdom such as snakes can be smelt and poisonous snakes have different-looking hoods. All I had to do was to first figure what is a normal-looking hood, and when said snake materialises, request him to please bare his fangs and hoods for me to get a measure of his poison levels.
The first two weeks were spent amiably but soon enough, I came to imbibe the true meaning of community living. Hubby and I were on a walk with friend when he said casually, ``Ah, there is a snake nearby.'' Nobody seemed to have heard. When I asked him how he knew, he said, ``They emit a peculiar smell.'' Next, the birds fluttered restlessly and raised a din. Said knowledgeable H, ``That's a surefire sign. The birds always do this when a snake is around.'' The friends nodded and walked on. I seemed to be the only one blessed with the insight that snakes could bite and the bite could kill. A thin, small branch-like thing emerged on a side street just then. It was an apology of a snake and was actually being harassed by all the birds who kept hovering over him to get him out of their reach, probably to protect their nests.
I was rooted at my first sighting of a free snake. And not impressed. No self-respecting snake would be so tiny and allow himself to be dominated like this. Thereafter, having snakes for company became a fortnightly affair.
There is this clan of huge-looking cows and her brood in our multi-species community. The cows refuse to budge when you ask. I am positive they have been indoctrinated by animal rights activists that they have the priority in this jungle at least, if not in the urban jungle.
One fine morning, my domestic help screamed for me outside the balcony. A huge cow parked right outside my front door was blocking her path. She heckled the Thing from about half a km away while I peeped through the peep-hole, gingerly opened the door a bit, gently booed her tail (the part I could see). When I got no response (ditto maid), I got brave, pushed the door wider and addressed the face. Thing kept her eyes firmly ahead, refusing to so much as blink in my direction. Clearly someone with a huge sense of self-worth, she must have been told to sock it to 'em humans when she got the chance. The maid had to be told to go home. Needless to say, I swept and swabbed and washed.
My door has served as resting place for many a deprived soul. While coming home lost in thought one day, reality struck in the form of raucous barking outside my home. A she-dog (`bitches' has acquired a terrible connotation) and her litter of six pups had sealed all entry points in case I thought I could squeeze in through half-an-inch at the porch. As I stood transfixed, the mother took that as a challenge and stepped forward threateningly, scaling up the barks. I retracted, took refuge at a friend's place and came back only when she agreed to escort me and play martyr by going first.
The windows are not spared either. One morning, Hubby jumped out of bed, began shutting all windows frantically. The hurricane speed got me foxed. ``A family of monkeys is frolicking outside. Stay in,'' he ordered grandly. I scoffed and grumbled about paranoia being the bane of good sleep. As I rubbed my eyes and wobbled towards the balcony, he yelled, `Don't open it, they are right there.'' What! Monkeys in my balcony! Get real, I said. At the same time, I knew better than to test the waters. Anyway, a peep through the glass bore out the truth. Three tiny fellas with mom and dad were on their daily outing, hopping from branch to branch, tree to tree and occasionally landing in my neighbour's balcony two floors above so that they don't feel left out. All the while, they communicated their joy loudly to one another, my palpitations providing the perfect beat to every shrill shriek.
The mother of all lessons in community living happened last week. A security guy banged on the door, and, darting sharp looks at someone 90 degrees away, told me to keep the door open. ``There is a snake on the stairway. In case he comes near me, I need a place to escape.'' Huh? A snake right in the building? Sure, have a look, he said. I did. It was a big, grey-brown beauty, sprawled leisurely across all steps.
How can I keep the door open when a snake is around, I hollered. Rather, you should tell me NOT to keep the door open, I said indignantly. A friend who had come visiting, dutifully jumped on the divan and stayed put. The security guy assured me the snake wont come in. ``I'll make sure,'' he said. He got into action with a bucket of phenyl and water which he threw at the fellow. The scales lazily uncoiled, the guy ran and I did not wait to watch. It landed right outside my hall, climbed up a tree and dangled precariously close to my balcony, which has slats for it to come in uninivited. Content at having got him out of the stairway, the security man left. ``There is no point removing him from the tree; where will I put him? The place is full of snakes anyway,'' he shrugged philosophically and walked off.
The friend, who could not stop raving about the beauty of my place of residence, diplomatically kept mum, and fled at first opportunity.
A week later, my neighbour who leaves home at 5.30 am everyday, told me the snake has been residing in the meter room and comes out for a morning and evening stroll. She is also sure it's poisonous.
My sister has one sweet remark to make about my community living programme: ``Congrats! You're finally living where you belong: the zoo.'' And I still havent told her about the baby lizards, rats and squirrels who live off my kitchen. They're nothing to complain about.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Please check your link (and facts), you!
Someone has posted a comment on my blog asking me to check out a link about some `con artist'. The link leads to a general page on a blog and has nothing at all as promised on the `con artist'. Since the person has chosen to remain anonymous (Honestly, I am a bit tired of these anonymous comments. Fellas, if you don't have the guts to be yourself, why exist?), will s/he kindly elaborate what this was all about?
And may I add that my dear comment-er, you may be prone to believing the worst of everybody. So please suit yourself; but kindly leave my impressions alone. I don't base my opinions on hearsay or something someone once said. If you are a good reporter, you too will wait till you get the other side.
At the end of the day, if you seriously plan to convert me, at least show me your face, sweetie! I just might believe you more than myself :-)
Someone has posted a comment on my blog asking me to check out a link about some `con artist'. The link leads to a general page on a blog and has nothing at all as promised on the `con artist'. Since the person has chosen to remain anonymous (Honestly, I am a bit tired of these anonymous comments. Fellas, if you don't have the guts to be yourself, why exist?), will s/he kindly elaborate what this was all about?
And may I add that my dear comment-er, you may be prone to believing the worst of everybody. So please suit yourself; but kindly leave my impressions alone. I don't base my opinions on hearsay or something someone once said. If you are a good reporter, you too will wait till you get the other side.
At the end of the day, if you seriously plan to convert me, at least show me your face, sweetie! I just might believe you more than myself :-)
Friday, July 27, 2007
Unlike most people who fuss over kids, I have this huge soft corner for oldies. My heart goes out to the aged on the planet, especially India and especially my parents (Ok, I'm in confession mode).
I hate to see old men toiling on the roads or their privileged brethren living in denial after retirement. I hate to see old arthritic women being womanhandled by daughters-in-law AFTER they have been rendered feeble.
I feel perpetually guilty about not being able to spend enough time with my parents and more each time I read these emotional accounts about how somebody did not find the time for them and how we should pay heed to them lest we regret.
I don't know about other parents but let me tell you about mine. My mother was a homemaker who devoted her entire life to her three headstrong children, me being the most difficult. She was no whine baby though, having carved out an independent identity through her phenomenal social work. A huge fan of Mahatma Gandhi-- which explains my inclination too, she has a very strong sense of right and wrong-- which, I tell myself, explains my behaviour on this blog too! :-)
During the milliseconds she got to spare, she participated actively against all kinds of unfair practices -- animal slaughter, injustice to women, care for the elderly, poor kids, exploitation of labour; wrote copiously and intelligently on Gandhi, Jainism and other issues. Her abridged version of one of the most complicated texts on Jainism is highly recommended by Jain scholars, no less.
Hers was not reactionary activism (no `anti-dam till I die'); she always proposed a constructive way out of issues by spreading awareness, collecting public opinion, and was forever striving for a more human existence for the underprivileged. It could mean serving water, and sometimes snacks, to the thirsty municipal kids near our school at an inconvenient 10 am and a highly inconvenient 3 pm everyday; it could mean buying and carrying rations to her home for a poor, old lady who was ill-treated by her bahu; it could mean worrying the night away about a bird trapped in a jammed window or caring for the neighbour who has recently lost her son.
Iraq distressed her a lot. The day US attacked that country, she would update herself every hour on that ghastly assertion of power. She spent nights listlessly, mourning for the dead and feeling agitated at the mounting toll. ``Who is the terrorist here,'' she wanted to know.
To some measure, the three of us have inherited her compassion and a highly evolved sense of justice (Or so we happily believe.) but I cannot see myself going to her lengths to ease someone's pain. The other day I found her sitting on the bed after a bath looking pensive and staring into space. I asked her what the matter was. With a pained look, she told me, ``Look at those workers in the building compound (redoing the flooring). They have to work so hard. It's terrible.''
From then on, I would see each of these five workers peeling a mango at lunchtime and fiddling with a Rs 5 coin given for `tea'. I did not ask about their donor. No, we were not crorepatis. But my parents have always had this idea that what we had, we had to share.
With the result that though we were reasonably well-off (my dad was the first in our large extended family to go abroad in the 1960s) , we never over-indulged. We were given everything in pairs so that we could not want more, but as we grew up, we imbibed simplicity and did not covet material pleasures-- first, because we knew we could afford them and second, because we did not need them.
Her simplicity startled everyone. ``A Gujju and doesn't deck up or want to flaunt?'' everyone wanted to know. She was more into thought and effective action than appearance, I would tell them then (and tell them now about myself hoping they believe me). If the world saw a stunner in her, the fact was coincidental and incidental.
For a woman whose world was confined to running around her children, she is not just bright but extremely sharp. I have never been able to defeat her at chess, or beat her at multiplication even with a calculator. I have seen philanthropists scratching their heads over accounts and my mum giving them the answer in a blink. Her wit still has most of us rolling on the side for days.
So, what kind of a mum is she? As independent as her personality is, she is a world class care giver. Our friends were totally floored by her-they admired her intellect, flawless looks--classical beauty, glowing skin, and a disarming smile, her unassuming nature and humaneness. In the seventies, she was the first to introduce the world we knew to Chinese and Italian dishes much before they became a household name. She baked eggless cakes and biscuits that became a rage at a time nobody baked at home
She suffers me gladly. I don't remember a single occasion when she hollered at me or beat the hell out of me though I have given and give her ample occasions to. She taught by setting an example.
Each day, you'd find her waiting at the door at 10 am when I came home during school break. If I was late by five whole minutes, you'd find her at my neighbour's place inquiring if I'd been there. Ditto for 1 pm, when I arrived home.
Instead of forbidding us from eating outside food, she patiently explained to us the merits of home-cooked food and demerits of rekdis and stalls. Unlike other friends therefore, I was rarely tempted to eat out. It's the unattainable that has an irresistible lure, remember? It helped that she was a great cook and took serious pains to indulge us all --cooking potato poha for me and watana poha for my sister as one wouldn't have the other. Just for the record, she cooked four times a day, never recycling the morning breakfast for lunch and so on. What was left over was simply given away.
On the single occasion, I'd borrowed money from a friend for a rotten rasta ka kulfi, I was plagued by guilt. More so, because I repaid the friend after taking money from my mum's cupboard which was always unlocked. The same afternoon, I confessed. What did she do? She smiled, patted my head, hugged me and simply said, ``It's ok,'' aware that the message had gone home. No `why did you do that? you don't know what's good for you.'
She's always encouraged us to make our own decisions- even at the cost of going against her judgment. And for some baffling reason, she's always right even on trivia -- like pressure cooking is not good for health as research is NOW showing, like til oil is a a better cooking medium than groundnut as we all know NOW, or that allopathic drugs can have strong side effects which we have grown wiser about.
Her intuition is fine-tuned to our frequencies so much so that she can tell from our voice if we are feeling low, ill or plain bored. A fiercely independent person, at the age of 70, she ensures we are kept in the dark when she falls ill. She would rather struggle with the help of a paid nurse rather than call us to nurse her to health. But God forbid if any of her children fall ill. She paces the floor day and night, frets and fusses over us and ensures she's got rid of everything that dares to come between us and out well-being. She treated me for typhoid when doctors' prescriptions did not work.
My father is this unassuming person whom one's tempted to underestimate because he's so easy-going. All my childhood, I've helped myself to his umbrella when it rains, and lost it. On average, I have lost about two of HIS umbrellas every season. Usually, he comes to know when he hunts for it and doesn't find it. On his inquiry, I casually let on that I had taken it the previous day and forgot it in the train, cab or college. He nods and walks out in the pouring rain without any shield without so much as a ``Why?''. And, I wait till he buys a new one.
A wiz at biz, his extended family of grandkids call him, conceding his superiority. As for his tech skills, he surpasses all I know. I can decode routine SMSes from this 76-year-old man with stuff like, ``Rlx. m fine. tmrw going to off.'' But some fox me with their exaggeratedly abbreviated lingo and I need to call for help from my teenage neighbour who gasps,``He is too good!'' and rushes off to use it on others.
Like my mum, Dad is a man of few needs and an extremely pleasant temperament. His wardrobe comprises about five shirts and kurtas in all. But tell him about a needy soul, and he digs into his wallet generously. At a puja held at our home the other day, he realised that the soft drinks that had been ordered may not be enough to serve two of the carpenters at work. He promptly put on his cap, walked out to the store and came back hugging five bottles to his chest. I asked why. So he said, ``Let's them enjoy two each. Poor guys! They have been hard at work!''
Clearly, there is some discreet contest between man and wife who've spent 50 years together on who's a better sharer.
I hate to see old men toiling on the roads or their privileged brethren living in denial after retirement. I hate to see old arthritic women being womanhandled by daughters-in-law AFTER they have been rendered feeble.
I feel perpetually guilty about not being able to spend enough time with my parents and more each time I read these emotional accounts about how somebody did not find the time for them and how we should pay heed to them lest we regret.
I don't know about other parents but let me tell you about mine. My mother was a homemaker who devoted her entire life to her three headstrong children, me being the most difficult. She was no whine baby though, having carved out an independent identity through her phenomenal social work. A huge fan of Mahatma Gandhi-- which explains my inclination too, she has a very strong sense of right and wrong-- which, I tell myself, explains my behaviour on this blog too! :-)
During the milliseconds she got to spare, she participated actively against all kinds of unfair practices -- animal slaughter, injustice to women, care for the elderly, poor kids, exploitation of labour; wrote copiously and intelligently on Gandhi, Jainism and other issues. Her abridged version of one of the most complicated texts on Jainism is highly recommended by Jain scholars, no less.
Hers was not reactionary activism (no `anti-dam till I die'); she always proposed a constructive way out of issues by spreading awareness, collecting public opinion, and was forever striving for a more human existence for the underprivileged. It could mean serving water, and sometimes snacks, to the thirsty municipal kids near our school at an inconvenient 10 am and a highly inconvenient 3 pm everyday; it could mean buying and carrying rations to her home for a poor, old lady who was ill-treated by her bahu; it could mean worrying the night away about a bird trapped in a jammed window or caring for the neighbour who has recently lost her son.
Iraq distressed her a lot. The day US attacked that country, she would update herself every hour on that ghastly assertion of power. She spent nights listlessly, mourning for the dead and feeling agitated at the mounting toll. ``Who is the terrorist here,'' she wanted to know.
To some measure, the three of us have inherited her compassion and a highly evolved sense of justice (Or so we happily believe.) but I cannot see myself going to her lengths to ease someone's pain. The other day I found her sitting on the bed after a bath looking pensive and staring into space. I asked her what the matter was. With a pained look, she told me, ``Look at those workers in the building compound (redoing the flooring). They have to work so hard. It's terrible.''
From then on, I would see each of these five workers peeling a mango at lunchtime and fiddling with a Rs 5 coin given for `tea'. I did not ask about their donor. No, we were not crorepatis. But my parents have always had this idea that what we had, we had to share.
With the result that though we were reasonably well-off (my dad was the first in our large extended family to go abroad in the 1960s) , we never over-indulged. We were given everything in pairs so that we could not want more, but as we grew up, we imbibed simplicity and did not covet material pleasures-- first, because we knew we could afford them and second, because we did not need them.
Her simplicity startled everyone. ``A Gujju and doesn't deck up or want to flaunt?'' everyone wanted to know. She was more into thought and effective action than appearance, I would tell them then (and tell them now about myself hoping they believe me). If the world saw a stunner in her, the fact was coincidental and incidental.
For a woman whose world was confined to running around her children, she is not just bright but extremely sharp. I have never been able to defeat her at chess, or beat her at multiplication even with a calculator. I have seen philanthropists scratching their heads over accounts and my mum giving them the answer in a blink. Her wit still has most of us rolling on the side for days.
So, what kind of a mum is she? As independent as her personality is, she is a world class care giver. Our friends were totally floored by her-they admired her intellect, flawless looks--classical beauty, glowing skin, and a disarming smile, her unassuming nature and humaneness. In the seventies, she was the first to introduce the world we knew to Chinese and Italian dishes much before they became a household name. She baked eggless cakes and biscuits that became a rage at a time nobody baked at home
She suffers me gladly. I don't remember a single occasion when she hollered at me or beat the hell out of me though I have given and give her ample occasions to. She taught by setting an example.
Each day, you'd find her waiting at the door at 10 am when I came home during school break. If I was late by five whole minutes, you'd find her at my neighbour's place inquiring if I'd been there. Ditto for 1 pm, when I arrived home.
Instead of forbidding us from eating outside food, she patiently explained to us the merits of home-cooked food and demerits of rekdis and stalls. Unlike other friends therefore, I was rarely tempted to eat out. It's the unattainable that has an irresistible lure, remember? It helped that she was a great cook and took serious pains to indulge us all --cooking potato poha for me and watana poha for my sister as one wouldn't have the other. Just for the record, she cooked four times a day, never recycling the morning breakfast for lunch and so on. What was left over was simply given away.
On the single occasion, I'd borrowed money from a friend for a rotten rasta ka kulfi, I was plagued by guilt. More so, because I repaid the friend after taking money from my mum's cupboard which was always unlocked. The same afternoon, I confessed. What did she do? She smiled, patted my head, hugged me and simply said, ``It's ok,'' aware that the message had gone home. No `why did you do that? you don't know what's good for you.'
She's always encouraged us to make our own decisions- even at the cost of going against her judgment. And for some baffling reason, she's always right even on trivia -- like pressure cooking is not good for health as research is NOW showing, like til oil is a a better cooking medium than groundnut as we all know NOW, or that allopathic drugs can have strong side effects which we have grown wiser about.
Her intuition is fine-tuned to our frequencies so much so that she can tell from our voice if we are feeling low, ill or plain bored. A fiercely independent person, at the age of 70, she ensures we are kept in the dark when she falls ill. She would rather struggle with the help of a paid nurse rather than call us to nurse her to health. But God forbid if any of her children fall ill. She paces the floor day and night, frets and fusses over us and ensures she's got rid of everything that dares to come between us and out well-being. She treated me for typhoid when doctors' prescriptions did not work.
My father is this unassuming person whom one's tempted to underestimate because he's so easy-going. All my childhood, I've helped myself to his umbrella when it rains, and lost it. On average, I have lost about two of HIS umbrellas every season. Usually, he comes to know when he hunts for it and doesn't find it. On his inquiry, I casually let on that I had taken it the previous day and forgot it in the train, cab or college. He nods and walks out in the pouring rain without any shield without so much as a ``Why?''. And, I wait till he buys a new one.
A wiz at biz, his extended family of grandkids call him, conceding his superiority. As for his tech skills, he surpasses all I know. I can decode routine SMSes from this 76-year-old man with stuff like, ``Rlx. m fine. tmrw going to off.'' But some fox me with their exaggeratedly abbreviated lingo and I need to call for help from my teenage neighbour who gasps,``He is too good!'' and rushes off to use it on others.
Like my mum, Dad is a man of few needs and an extremely pleasant temperament. His wardrobe comprises about five shirts and kurtas in all. But tell him about a needy soul, and he digs into his wallet generously. At a puja held at our home the other day, he realised that the soft drinks that had been ordered may not be enough to serve two of the carpenters at work. He promptly put on his cap, walked out to the store and came back hugging five bottles to his chest. I asked why. So he said, ``Let's them enjoy two each. Poor guys! They have been hard at work!''
Clearly, there is some discreet contest between man and wife who've spent 50 years together on who's a better sharer.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
This message is from and about Arun Bhatia, the well-known IAS officer who took on the system and was shunted out year after year. Because he spent about a decade on UN assignments, his transfers number only 26 (in 26 years spent in the country).
He has uncovered various scams in Mumbai and elsewhere: the urban land ceiling, corruption in malnutrition, etc. He paid the price for each scam with a transfer and a growing unpopularity within the IAS cadre itself.
He has the controversial distinction of probably being the only officer to have been unanimously voted out of office when he was Pune municipal commissioner. Such was the fear of him continuing.
I have known him since 1993, when he was the FDA commissioner. He is as well-mannered as he is articulate. There was a time when Pune was caught by the Arun Bhatia bug and couldnt do without him. Mr Bhatia is now retired and settled in Pune.
I have taken the liberty to pare this down a bit. Do share your thoughts, all
FORGIVE THOSE WHO CAN'T "WORK" WITHIN OUR SYSTEM
Said a distraught mother to her twelve year old daughter in a boarding school: "Why do you cry all the time, my baby? Look at the other children enjoying themselves."
The girl wiped her tears and looked at her mother, not without surprise. "Because, Mama, I miss you all the time. The others cry for a few days but I cry till the time comes for going home again."
It was then the mother's turn to cry.
Through all her years of schooling the girl was never reconciled to the separation from her family. Teachers, students and other parents said she was odd. But her mother understood and never questioned her girl again. And nor did she ever point to the other children. For she loved her child for the very reasons that others thought were strange.
Think now of the odd people in the bureaucracy who don't merge with the traffic but continue to struggle against the organisation. After three long decades in harness they have not been able to make peace with corruption and sycophancy. They remain agitated, rebellious and stuffed with criticism that comes gushing out at every turn in the conversation. They are the odd ones who will never settle down in the system. The mad ones who have to be transferred from place to place because they create conflict wherever they go.
The difference is that the school was not a corrupt bureaucracy. The similarity is that some people can never become acclimatized to their environment. And such people are not judged as quite normal.
It is not these people who are odd; it is the system. If children have to stay away from parents it is odd. If honest people have to smile in a corrupt organization it is even more absurd. The girl's mother did understand her child but who has the perception to understand the odd bureaucrat.
The context
Arun was posted as the Commissioner of the Pune Municipal Corporation and transferred by the government after a week. There was a public protest and some citizens went to court, defeated the government and had the transfer cancelled. However after a few weeks Arun was voted out of the corporation by the elected councilors and this time nobody approached the court. A section of opinion believed that Arun was too radical and should have been able to work within the system to improve the city.
The story
Arun was an old horse, now retired from a putrifying third world civil service in India (the corrupted IAS). The bones creak now and then but he still has the trained mind of a racer. There are many stories he could tell – one worse than the other. How money is made; how public treasuries are drained; how a country has been ruined. After a while you will cease to be alarmed and will become like the rest of us – self-centered, insensitive, afraid and, above all, useless.
So why is Arun writing this?
Because one day, in perfect harmony with the drowsy afternoon, while he was watching the fishing boats from the sands of Alibag, after three decades in the bureaucracy, after losing his promotion, after being transferred 26 times in 26 years, after being assessed as "mentally imbalanced" by corrupt but empowered superiors, after numerous notices and enquiries for bad and "un-officer like conduct", he justifiably believed the worst to be over. Till two men walked up to him. They were from Pune. One was a university teacher, grey and knowledgeable; the other, a young member of an NGO dealing with human rights. Both were exceedingly courteous and well informed about governance theory.
He was therefore horrified to hear the older one admonish him with the words, "Mr. Bhatia, you have let us down. The citizens of Pune poured into the streets to support you, they defeated the government in the High Court and brought you back into the Pune Corporation. But you just fought with everyone and had yourself thrown out again. Our effort in bringing you back achieved nothing."
The younger one continued, "We had empowered you. You could have done something for the city. But you were like a bull in a China shop. You smashed everything and didn't build any relationships to improve the administration."
The words stung. "Then why have you walked up to this bull?" he asked. "Just leave him to his bullish ways," he shot back in anger.
"No," they said, "we are your supporters. Don't get us wrong. We criticize your methods because we want you to be effective. We want men like you to win and not get pounded by the system."
That did make him feel better but he realized that the academic and the young rebel knew not too much about how the country was being run, how the "system" worked from within. He looked at the cloth pouch the young man carried and wondered what books he had read on the subject. It was necessary to inform people about the rot.
One shouldn't make too many enemies they said. So how does one do this if one wants to improve the system? If it is found that road surfacing is poor and money has been claimed on the basis of false measurements should one inspect only two roads and leave the rest? Prosecute only one engineer and ignore the remaining eight? If there is harassment in the passing of building plans should one instruct that the first five plans every month should be passed soon without bribes and the rest can be delayed so that enemies are not created in the building department? If builders violate rules and helpless purchasers face problems should corporation officials be told not to take action in more than ten cases every month so that they can be paid for their silence in the remaining cases? When vulnerable sections (single women, widows, elderly people whose children are not in Pune to defend them etc.) living in the high population density areas of the old city are bullied by neighbours who encroach, block ventilation or build toilets near kitchens and entrances of weaker neighbours, should the corporation officials be told to let sleeping dogs lie (for a fee) and turn a blind eye to the hundreds of complaints of this type that come pouring in?
The crucial question was, does one address all complaints and help all citizens or only some? Should some matters and victims be left as they are to allow the corporation to feed upon them?
Once the news spread that Arun's doors were open, the number of persons with complainants and problems that started arriving at his office rose to 120 per day, going up on some days to 300. It would have gone much higher. This is not surprising, given a population of three million and a corrupt administration. Arun had come to the Pune Corporation to help these people. Should he have told them that he would attend to no more than five complaints a day and the remaining applications would be destroyed? "You shouldn't have rocked the boat so much. You should have worked with the system; tried to muster support within the system," they insisted.
It became obvious that they had no idea of the real working of the system. If you aim at reform or change, the boat will always be rocked because there are strong vested interests (councilors, contractors, staff/officials, favoured suppliers of materials etc.). So by keeping the peace, by keeping everyone happy in the system one could stay in the post of Commissioner, PMC, for two or three years but nothing else would be achieved. "If you wanted me to do this you shouldn't have brought me back to this city," he retorted.
"On the contrary," he said, ``the citizens didn't sustain their support to me. They left my side just when I needed them most, just when I had developed a small core team of good men in the municipal administration, just when I was beginning to become effective. True, citizens did come out on the streets and a group went to court and had my transfer cancelled. I respect them and am grateful. But what happened just a few weeks later when the corporators threw (voted) me out? "
This was an old syndrome; it had happened before with Arun and with others. Protest against the transfer of good officers is seldom sustained by the middle class in India, too complacent and preoccupied with its own small world to see the rot around it. Too scared to try to do anything about it.
How does one keep both sides happy – the citizens on the one hand and the PMC corporators and staff, on the other?
Take another aspect of bad municipal governance. Does one try and enforce some priorities in budget making or not? When raw sewage (untreated shit) is sent into a river that could be made beautiful, when mosquitoes and disease invade us every year, should one not divert funds to sewage treatment plants, sanitation, toilet construction, and public hospitals? But corporators and their contractors (who also manage elections) prefer large civil works like stadiums from where funds can be diverted to private pockets, party coffers and elections. Arun tried to divert just 48 crores out of a budget of 1,000 crores and was thrown out of the post.
Then Arun told them the story. Eleven corporators had met him and said they would definitely vote in his favour on the issue of removing him from the corporation. There were some politicians who were happy because people's grievances had been addressed by him and pending work started in their municipal wards (urban electoral constituencies). But, very surprisingly, when the day came, they voted in favour of his removal. Later, they told him they were compelled to do this because of stern directives from their political parties. The logic was that even a single vote going in his favour would jeopardize the credibility of the elected councilors and indicate that the Commissioner was not insane or incapable of working in an organization or with politicians. A unanimous vote against him would be clinching evidence and would convince the media and the citizens that he was utterly and totally unacceptable to everyone, that he was too harsh etc.
"Their strategy had worked. Their version was swallowed by people like you." He said this closing his eyes and surrendering himself to the breeze that had been patiently wooing them, sometimes gently, sometimes petulantly, blowing their words out of range.
He has uncovered various scams in Mumbai and elsewhere: the urban land ceiling, corruption in malnutrition, etc. He paid the price for each scam with a transfer and a growing unpopularity within the IAS cadre itself.
He has the controversial distinction of probably being the only officer to have been unanimously voted out of office when he was Pune municipal commissioner. Such was the fear of him continuing.
I have known him since 1993, when he was the FDA commissioner. He is as well-mannered as he is articulate. There was a time when Pune was caught by the Arun Bhatia bug and couldnt do without him. Mr Bhatia is now retired and settled in Pune.
I have taken the liberty to pare this down a bit. Do share your thoughts, all
FORGIVE THOSE WHO CAN'T "WORK" WITHIN OUR SYSTEM
Said a distraught mother to her twelve year old daughter in a boarding school: "Why do you cry all the time, my baby? Look at the other children enjoying themselves."
The girl wiped her tears and looked at her mother, not without surprise. "Because, Mama, I miss you all the time. The others cry for a few days but I cry till the time comes for going home again."
It was then the mother's turn to cry.
Through all her years of schooling the girl was never reconciled to the separation from her family. Teachers, students and other parents said she was odd. But her mother understood and never questioned her girl again. And nor did she ever point to the other children. For she loved her child for the very reasons that others thought were strange.
Think now of the odd people in the bureaucracy who don't merge with the traffic but continue to struggle against the organisation. After three long decades in harness they have not been able to make peace with corruption and sycophancy. They remain agitated, rebellious and stuffed with criticism that comes gushing out at every turn in the conversation. They are the odd ones who will never settle down in the system. The mad ones who have to be transferred from place to place because they create conflict wherever they go.
The difference is that the school was not a corrupt bureaucracy. The similarity is that some people can never become acclimatized to their environment. And such people are not judged as quite normal.
It is not these people who are odd; it is the system. If children have to stay away from parents it is odd. If honest people have to smile in a corrupt organization it is even more absurd. The girl's mother did understand her child but who has the perception to understand the odd bureaucrat.
The context
Arun was posted as the Commissioner of the Pune Municipal Corporation and transferred by the government after a week. There was a public protest and some citizens went to court, defeated the government and had the transfer cancelled. However after a few weeks Arun was voted out of the corporation by the elected councilors and this time nobody approached the court. A section of opinion believed that Arun was too radical and should have been able to work within the system to improve the city.
The story
Arun was an old horse, now retired from a putrifying third world civil service in India (the corrupted IAS). The bones creak now and then but he still has the trained mind of a racer. There are many stories he could tell – one worse than the other. How money is made; how public treasuries are drained; how a country has been ruined. After a while you will cease to be alarmed and will become like the rest of us – self-centered, insensitive, afraid and, above all, useless.
So why is Arun writing this?
Because one day, in perfect harmony with the drowsy afternoon, while he was watching the fishing boats from the sands of Alibag, after three decades in the bureaucracy, after losing his promotion, after being transferred 26 times in 26 years, after being assessed as "mentally imbalanced" by corrupt but empowered superiors, after numerous notices and enquiries for bad and "un-officer like conduct", he justifiably believed the worst to be over. Till two men walked up to him. They were from Pune. One was a university teacher, grey and knowledgeable; the other, a young member of an NGO dealing with human rights. Both were exceedingly courteous and well informed about governance theory.
He was therefore horrified to hear the older one admonish him with the words, "Mr. Bhatia, you have let us down. The citizens of Pune poured into the streets to support you, they defeated the government in the High Court and brought you back into the Pune Corporation. But you just fought with everyone and had yourself thrown out again. Our effort in bringing you back achieved nothing."
The younger one continued, "We had empowered you. You could have done something for the city. But you were like a bull in a China shop. You smashed everything and didn't build any relationships to improve the administration."
The words stung. "Then why have you walked up to this bull?" he asked. "Just leave him to his bullish ways," he shot back in anger.
"No," they said, "we are your supporters. Don't get us wrong. We criticize your methods because we want you to be effective. We want men like you to win and not get pounded by the system."
That did make him feel better but he realized that the academic and the young rebel knew not too much about how the country was being run, how the "system" worked from within. He looked at the cloth pouch the young man carried and wondered what books he had read on the subject. It was necessary to inform people about the rot.
One shouldn't make too many enemies they said. So how does one do this if one wants to improve the system? If it is found that road surfacing is poor and money has been claimed on the basis of false measurements should one inspect only two roads and leave the rest? Prosecute only one engineer and ignore the remaining eight? If there is harassment in the passing of building plans should one instruct that the first five plans every month should be passed soon without bribes and the rest can be delayed so that enemies are not created in the building department? If builders violate rules and helpless purchasers face problems should corporation officials be told not to take action in more than ten cases every month so that they can be paid for their silence in the remaining cases? When vulnerable sections (single women, widows, elderly people whose children are not in Pune to defend them etc.) living in the high population density areas of the old city are bullied by neighbours who encroach, block ventilation or build toilets near kitchens and entrances of weaker neighbours, should the corporation officials be told to let sleeping dogs lie (for a fee) and turn a blind eye to the hundreds of complaints of this type that come pouring in?
The crucial question was, does one address all complaints and help all citizens or only some? Should some matters and victims be left as they are to allow the corporation to feed upon them?
Once the news spread that Arun's doors were open, the number of persons with complainants and problems that started arriving at his office rose to 120 per day, going up on some days to 300. It would have gone much higher. This is not surprising, given a population of three million and a corrupt administration. Arun had come to the Pune Corporation to help these people. Should he have told them that he would attend to no more than five complaints a day and the remaining applications would be destroyed? "You shouldn't have rocked the boat so much. You should have worked with the system; tried to muster support within the system," they insisted.
It became obvious that they had no idea of the real working of the system. If you aim at reform or change, the boat will always be rocked because there are strong vested interests (councilors, contractors, staff/officials, favoured suppliers of materials etc.). So by keeping the peace, by keeping everyone happy in the system one could stay in the post of Commissioner, PMC, for two or three years but nothing else would be achieved. "If you wanted me to do this you shouldn't have brought me back to this city," he retorted.
"On the contrary," he said, ``the citizens didn't sustain their support to me. They left my side just when I needed them most, just when I had developed a small core team of good men in the municipal administration, just when I was beginning to become effective. True, citizens did come out on the streets and a group went to court and had my transfer cancelled. I respect them and am grateful. But what happened just a few weeks later when the corporators threw (voted) me out? "
This was an old syndrome; it had happened before with Arun and with others. Protest against the transfer of good officers is seldom sustained by the middle class in India, too complacent and preoccupied with its own small world to see the rot around it. Too scared to try to do anything about it.
How does one keep both sides happy – the citizens on the one hand and the PMC corporators and staff, on the other?
Take another aspect of bad municipal governance. Does one try and enforce some priorities in budget making or not? When raw sewage (untreated shit) is sent into a river that could be made beautiful, when mosquitoes and disease invade us every year, should one not divert funds to sewage treatment plants, sanitation, toilet construction, and public hospitals? But corporators and their contractors (who also manage elections) prefer large civil works like stadiums from where funds can be diverted to private pockets, party coffers and elections. Arun tried to divert just 48 crores out of a budget of 1,000 crores and was thrown out of the post.
Then Arun told them the story. Eleven corporators had met him and said they would definitely vote in his favour on the issue of removing him from the corporation. There were some politicians who were happy because people's grievances had been addressed by him and pending work started in their municipal wards (urban electoral constituencies). But, very surprisingly, when the day came, they voted in favour of his removal. Later, they told him they were compelled to do this because of stern directives from their political parties. The logic was that even a single vote going in his favour would jeopardize the credibility of the elected councilors and indicate that the Commissioner was not insane or incapable of working in an organization or with politicians. A unanimous vote against him would be clinching evidence and would convince the media and the citizens that he was utterly and totally unacceptable to everyone, that he was too harsh etc.
"Their strategy had worked. Their version was swallowed by people like you." He said this closing his eyes and surrendering himself to the breeze that had been patiently wooing them, sometimes gently, sometimes petulantly, blowing their words out of range.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Celebs, lay off the task of deciding innocents at least!
Let me do the P.S. first this once: Got tons of people writing to me about the fact that Nokia is a Finnish company, for a previous post of mine. Yes, true. My oversight, sorry and thanks. One particular person wrote the same comment twice and then, when both the comments got deleted by some systemic error before getting posted, wrote for the third time-- anonymously again. WHOEVER YOU ARE, THANK YOU. Your point is taken this time as you can see. :-)
Two days ago, I found this blind man struggling his way up the steps at a suburban railway station. When I offered a hand, he said eagerly, ``Ma'am, I would like to buy some mangoes outside if you can help me choose.'' Loaded with mangoes, we ambled to his bus stop.
On the way, he told me he'd lost his eyesight in the bomb blasts of 1993. He was in Satyam building at Worli when he was hit by a colossal cement slab of the building on his head. ``My skull cracked up and before I fell unconscious, I saw my colleague collapsing under a wall,'' he told me.
``Ma'am,'' he paused reflectively, ``these people (the culprits) are now being given five years, ten years in jail... what's that compared to what we've lost? We'll suffer all our lives, na?'' he said. He'd lost his job and his earnings were down to one-tenth.
Before I could ask him about his family or about what he did, a bus came along and he boarded.
That brought back memories of celebs giving the clean chit to Sanjay Dutt. He is innocent, his family and friends have declared. If they had to meet the blind man's family, would they feel as sympathetic about him?
Do these people know that a top cop had collected mounds of evidence against him and that he was just about to arrest him when he was sidelined? I know a lot of what happened that night when he came to be in possession of those arms but my lips are sealed. I cannot write in public what has not been produced in evidence before the court. But let it be said that he is not the doodh ka dhoola hua sant that he is being made out to be.
In any case, are they even aware that the court has held him guilty of at least the least possible charge-- that of possessing banned arms? Are they saying that there is some mistake, that the arms were planted on him or that the person possessing them was actually the duplicate but not the super hero (ugh!)?
Just for their information, even he is not saying that. Wish these vacuous men and women would stop talking through their hat... and a bigger wish for us media wallahs to stop treating their foot-in-the-mouths like the last word in divinity.
Check out all the protestations of innocence made on behalf of this man called Anand Jon. A lowly, nose-to-the-grind reporter like me would never have heard of this high society fashion designer like him had it not been for some celebs ganging up on a limp, pimply front-page pull-out appointing him as the soul of goodness and all things holy and vouching for how he could never have raped those half a dozen women he was alleged to have.
Well! Why not let the court decide, guys! Leave justice to the judiciary, what?
On second thoughts, walk along the street to see how the other half lives and you might find some people fumbling their way to bus stops, living on half a dole, and haggling for five-penny mangoes. All because they happened to step out on a day when some men had other plans. Yet, there's no one to speak for them. Their rights, I suppose, are not human enough for the zhollawallahs or those superior earthlings to worry about. They get their Rs 500 a dozen mangoes without having to set one pedicured foot out of the door, don't they?
Let me do the P.S. first this once: Got tons of people writing to me about the fact that Nokia is a Finnish company, for a previous post of mine. Yes, true. My oversight, sorry and thanks. One particular person wrote the same comment twice and then, when both the comments got deleted by some systemic error before getting posted, wrote for the third time-- anonymously again. WHOEVER YOU ARE, THANK YOU. Your point is taken this time as you can see. :-)
Two days ago, I found this blind man struggling his way up the steps at a suburban railway station. When I offered a hand, he said eagerly, ``Ma'am, I would like to buy some mangoes outside if you can help me choose.'' Loaded with mangoes, we ambled to his bus stop.
On the way, he told me he'd lost his eyesight in the bomb blasts of 1993. He was in Satyam building at Worli when he was hit by a colossal cement slab of the building on his head. ``My skull cracked up and before I fell unconscious, I saw my colleague collapsing under a wall,'' he told me.
``Ma'am,'' he paused reflectively, ``these people (the culprits) are now being given five years, ten years in jail... what's that compared to what we've lost? We'll suffer all our lives, na?'' he said. He'd lost his job and his earnings were down to one-tenth.
Before I could ask him about his family or about what he did, a bus came along and he boarded.
That brought back memories of celebs giving the clean chit to Sanjay Dutt. He is innocent, his family and friends have declared. If they had to meet the blind man's family, would they feel as sympathetic about him?
Do these people know that a top cop had collected mounds of evidence against him and that he was just about to arrest him when he was sidelined? I know a lot of what happened that night when he came to be in possession of those arms but my lips are sealed. I cannot write in public what has not been produced in evidence before the court. But let it be said that he is not the doodh ka dhoola hua sant that he is being made out to be.
In any case, are they even aware that the court has held him guilty of at least the least possible charge-- that of possessing banned arms? Are they saying that there is some mistake, that the arms were planted on him or that the person possessing them was actually the duplicate but not the super hero (ugh!)?
Just for their information, even he is not saying that. Wish these vacuous men and women would stop talking through their hat... and a bigger wish for us media wallahs to stop treating their foot-in-the-mouths like the last word in divinity.
Check out all the protestations of innocence made on behalf of this man called Anand Jon. A lowly, nose-to-the-grind reporter like me would never have heard of this high society fashion designer like him had it not been for some celebs ganging up on a limp, pimply front-page pull-out appointing him as the soul of goodness and all things holy and vouching for how he could never have raped those half a dozen women he was alleged to have.
Well! Why not let the court decide, guys! Leave justice to the judiciary, what?
On second thoughts, walk along the street to see how the other half lives and you might find some people fumbling their way to bus stops, living on half a dole, and haggling for five-penny mangoes. All because they happened to step out on a day when some men had other plans. Yet, there's no one to speak for them. Their rights, I suppose, are not human enough for the zhollawallahs or those superior earthlings to worry about. They get their Rs 500 a dozen mangoes without having to set one pedicured foot out of the door, don't they?
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