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.

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.

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?

For years, friends have been asking me to narrate some of the memorable moments of my career. I have hesitated because there are far too many to write about and I would hate picking a few. Nonetheless, here's a beginning.

It took me four months to write in April 2006 a full page story on how our MLAs claim medical reimbursements. Using the Right to Information Act, I procured about 400 pages of material over several months. On perusal, I discovered some serious problems: an MLA and his family can claim medical expenses till the day they die, even if he is elected for only half a day, unlike government servants who are stripped of all medical cover the moment they quit or retire.
There is a ceiling prescribed in the rulebook to claim medical rembursements but the government has powers to approve higher amounts in special cases. I found most cases exceeded the ceiling and the government blissfully approved all of them as `special cases'.
I started working on the story after a tip-off from a honest officer who happened to hear the CM complaining once about the number of scamster MLAs claiming fictitious bills. ``He cannot afford to antagonise any of these fellows. So, he signs on the dotted line,'' the officer had told me about our head of government. In one case, he'd told me, one MLA or ex-MLA had claimed Rs 50 lakh though regrettably, I could not get any written proof of this particular claim.
What I did get was a scandal. Many ex-MLAs, particularly from Vidarbha, claimed consistent amounts every month, just well below the prescribed limit. So, each month, they had one family member falling sick and spending approximately the same amount as the other family member next month.
Even the documentation was unbelievably pathetic. The bills were sent to the pay and accounts office which simply paid up. This department had no details of the particulars of the health problems such as the name of the patient, hospital, disease, etc. These details were not consolidated by anybody. The actual submissions were simply stocked up at the accountant-general's office, I was told.
So, there was no way of figuring out whether the claims and amounts were genuine unless you were game to spending a year in the accountant-general's office, poring over each claim and pondering over its veracity.
On the basis of my story, an activist, Bhagwanji Raiyani, filed a PIL in the Bombay high court. The high court recently issued summons to all parties concerned. The case is on. For more, watch this space.

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Talking of PILs, an amusing experience followed a story I'd done in 2004 on the electronic voting machines. I'd learnt that EVMs made it possible for a political party to find out the pattern of voting in a particular area. Each EVM has a code that makes identification of the area in which it was used easy. Since EVMs cannot be mixed like voting slips, it was easy to tell how each area--as small as a street-- voted.
After my story, an `enthusiastic' young lawyer got in touch with me to file a PIL about the EVMs being an invasion of a person's right to privacy. He largely produced printouts from government websites of the way EVMs work. The judges frowned and dismissed his PIL.
Throughout his earnest endeavour which I suspect was to get publicity, the lawyer had harangued me so much and had eventually used so little of my work that I'd begun hoping the PIL would fail. When it did get thrown out, I was actually tickled! We journos are human too..

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Another PIL I recollect --with some satisfaction though-- followed a story I'd done on the misuse of grants by the Siddhivinayak Temple Trust. The story was relatively easy-- I was looking up the audit report of the trust and found some large sums were granted to institutions run by politicians like Narayan Rane.
A little bit of research on who owned which institution and some investigation into the previous years and I had my story. The high court appointed an inquiry committee which uncovered more hanky panky; some checks and balances are now built into the process of issuing grants.

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A recent story I did on the first water authority that has been formed in the country made me realise what a reputation I'd built for myself. I met a retired top bureaucrat for this story who discussed the issue with me at length. He had actually taken down some notes for me in his own hand and seemed a bit on edge. I was surprised at his nervousness.
Twice, during our talk, he asked me what my news peg was. I told him I was planning an informative story talking about the fact that the state now has a water regulator as well, apart from a power regulator. He didn't seem convinced but kept his counsel, as they say.
When I called him the next day to fix a time for the photographer, he demanded again, ``But what are you planning to write?'' ``Oh, just about the authority,'' I repeated patiently in what I thought was a sweet tone, wishing he would stop asking me that. ``We like to have faces in our paper and since you are associated with this initiative, we'd like to take your picture if you don't mind.'' Hesitantly, he asked, ``Nothing negative, I hope?'' Puzzled, I said, ``No of course not.''
After the photographer left, he called me. ``Seema, I just wanted to make one request since you've taken our pictures.'' I frowned and waited. ``Please don't write a negative story!'' he said. What! After all my explanations and a completely non-controversial line of questioning, why on earth did he think I would paint him in black? I then wondered if there was indeed a negative story that had escaped me. This time, I merely told him, ``No, I am not writing anything negative. Yet!''
After some rigorous memory-jogging, I figured why he was so apprehensive of me. The man hadn't got a key post after his retirement because of me. Two years ago, he was all set to occupy a hot seat at a quasi-judicial authority, with the backing of all the powerful people of the state including one extra-constitutional power who operates from Delhi as a minister. At that time, I had written about how he couldn't be posted there as he was an involved party in a controversial project which would come up before the authority. Said bureaucrat had been the secretary of the department which had cleared that project. The project was later in a shambles and many of its unsavoury aspects were expected to unfold before this authority. So, I had argued in my story, he shouldnt judge his own case.
Next, I heard there was a heated discussion in Mantralaya and my story was flaunted as the reason his appointment could not be made. The man had found himself out of the saddle before he'd got in. Reason enough to get uncomfortable at my sight, I suppose.

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It's not always that stories make your day and unmake somebody else's. There have been many disheartening moments in my life when stories I've gone out on a limb for fall by the wayside either for want of proof or are killed by the editor.
One such story was about a popular banquet hall facing the sea that violated CRZ rules. The suave owner was contacted for his version after I did my bit of research. He was smooth and sugary. He met me at my time and presented his case beautifully. Anybody else is my place would have converted. But I knew these types. He insisted on dropping me to my office--they usually do when they have something to fear! When I asked him for some documentation, he promptly had the tomes sent over to my office.
Throughout my research, he cooperated and kept telling me that he would try to convince me that he was right even though he knew the owners of my paper well. I wondered the purpose of this mention and realised that he was confident I would drop the story.
When I didn't and told him that I'd give him a fair say, he dropped the veneer and went incommunicado. He wouldn't take my calls nor call back. I shrugged and wrote out my story. After a couple of days, I learned from a colleague that the editor has killed the story because of a call from the owner. It transpired the banquet hall owner had tapped someone my newspaper owner knew well. My editor relegated the dirty job of telling me this to a colleague.
I was naturally livid and called up the banquet hall owner. When I started and till I stopped, I ensured he didn't get a word in edgeways. I told him that if he had wanted to do this in the first place, why was he wasting my time and energy?
What got me hopping mad was when this snake wailed, ``I don't know what you are talking about, Seema. I--I wouldn't do something like this.'' In that case, I asked him, how on earth did my owner come to know about this story at all! And pray, why would he want to stop it?
I could almost sense the creep sniggering behind the phone, which made me resolve to have the story out somehow. In a matter of days, another daily had hit the man where it hurts most with a front page banner story.

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Another story which never saw the light of day was about the narrowing of a road by the owner of a well-known bar. He managed to wrangle more space out of a planned road for his slum redevelopment project. The civic body and the government both merrily went along with him, and actually issued a government resolution giving him more space and cutting the breadth of the proposed road legally!
I got information through the Right to Information Act. The bar owner was very powerful but straight with me. He gave me his facts; I got mine but my story on this legal plunder is still in cold storage, no reasons given (though one has asked).

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The one story-that-was-not-to-be that has caused me considerable heartburn was about a popular chocolate manufacturer. Three years ago, the city was in the grip of diseased-chocolate epidemic--all day, one heard stories of melting chocolates, chocolates with worms, chocolates with fungus and so on. Most of these chocolates were made by this manufacturer.
(Admittedly, many of the calls we got from people about rotting chocolates were simply panic calls. I took the discretionary call and refused to publish many such stories after finding nothing wrong with the chocolate or after not being able to verify the allegation. Many other papers were simply happy to flash any half-eaten chocolate which looked like it might have had an identity crisis at some time.)
Because I had to call the manufacturing company time and again, I got to know a few people there. Around this time, I landed a brilliant story. I got a copy of an audit report of the company
certifying an atrocious incident that happened during the making of one chocolate batch.
The batch was in assembly when someone discovered a bird's leg, then a feather, then some meat and so on. The batch was then supposedly taken off the line but the horror of what had happened remained.
It was recorded, audited and signed by the auditor. I needed no further proof. I called up the MD whom I had come to know well by then. He first insisted such a thing had never happened. When I told him I had hard evidence, he tried hard to dissuade me from using the story. The pressure was persistent and stressful.
I gave the story, and went home, hoping to see the end of it the next morning. When I opened the paper the next day, I found some insipid story about the chocolate making process written by me but not the scoop. I called up the desk incharge of the night before who told me the story had been pulled out at the last minute by the editor.
When I met the editor the next day, she refused to even look me in the eye, forget offer any explanation. The story was simply throttled without the writer knowing why.
P.S. : The said MD was fidgeting whether the story was going to make it to the paper, even after his shenanigans. In order to confirm that he had hit bull's eye, he actually called me. ``Hi, how are you? what's happening, where are you...'' At that moment, I was in a second class ladies compartment having failed to run to the first class one and had approximately one thousand women yelling over my head.
I told myself he has asked for it, and with all the dignity I could muster in the midst of the mayhem, I let him have it, told him to watch out for bigger stories and ended the conversation grandly with `Sleep well today!' For, tomorrow is another day.
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I'm still waiting to work for that dream paper which will let journalists write the real stories.

Though it's a bit late in the day, please please let me say my piece on the Rang De Basanti versus Lage Raho Munnabhai saga. The dust has settled and each publisher--print and broadcast-- has bankrolled some serious surveys of about 100-odd persons each to let us know which is the better film. My problem is neither the surveys nor the air-headed reviews seem to make sense to me.
In my mind, there is no comparison. The choice is clear. Neither deserved to go to the Oscars. If someone put a gun to my head and asked me to choose between the two, I would go for the Munnabhai sequel. There is simply no question of choosing RDB, even if you shove that bullet into my head.
RDB is much like Rakeysh (is that right?) whatever's previous film, Aks, in the sense that you can't make any sense of it. I couldnt fathom why Amitabh kept swooning so articulately and Raveena Tandon's face kept booming back and forth in the aforementioned disaster. The story went zig-zag and you'd probably miss the story if you so much as blinked.
Ditto RDB. What the heck were these five kids doing? Can life be as simple as to permit verbatim replication of a brave act from the past? The idea itself is insane. The track seemed to run ok (ya, just ok) till the Amar Jawan Jyot scene. Then, it simply twirled, twisted and knocked you out of your senses. Suddenly, there was mayhem, cops went slanging and slamming everyone around and Saif's sister decided enough is enough, so murder the minister. The plot sickens and a new age Bhagat Singh is born. Ufff!! So much for ingenuity! And worse, all the kids die in what looked like an alien country but to help us all leave the cinema a little less heavy hearted, they recarnated themselves and sang songs. How can ANYONE identify with this gobbledygook? True, we have our atrocities, our excesses and gore. But this went beyond that. It was stupid, didn't help us feel sorry for the country or for ourselves. This was someone purging his hallucinations on an unwarned public.
I remember coming out of the movie feeling zapped. Whatever happened to common sense? There is something wild and bizarre about this man's movies, which is fine. What I can fathom much less is the crowd hysteria over this non-plussing movie.
Munnabhai is well-made, sensible and sweet. But certainly not Oscar material. Now, had they got someone else in place of the hero, maybe... ;-)

Hello!
One more `lift' , again from a email being circulated on www, and again anonymous. Am not taking the easy way out but can't help if they are so good that I want to share them with you!

An interesting reflection: Slow Down Culture

It's been 18 years since I joined Volvo, a Swedish company. Working forthem has proven to be an interesting experience. Any project here takes2 years to be finalized, even if the idea is simple and brilliant. It'sa rule.Globalize processes have caused in us (all over the world) a general sense of searching for immediate results. Therefore, we have come to posses a need to see immediate results.

This contrasts greatly with theslow movements of the Swedish. They, on the other hand, debate, debate, debate, hold x quantity of meetings and work with a slowdown scheme. At the end, this always yields better results.

Said in other words:
1. Sweden is about the size of San Pablo, a state in Brazil.
2. Sweden has 2 million inhabitants.
3. Stockholm, has 500,000 people.
4. Volvo, Escania, Ericsson, Electrolux, Nokia are some of its renowned companies.

Volvo supplies the NASA. The first time I was in Sweden, one of my colleagues picked me up atthe hotel every morning. It was September, bit cold and snowy. We would arrive early at the company and he would park far away from the entrance (2000 employees drive their car to work). The first day, I didn't say anything, either the second or third.

One morning I asked, "Do you have a fixed parking space? I've noticed we park far from the entrance even when there are no other cars in the lot." To which he replied, "Since we're here early we'll have time to walk, and whoever gets in late will be late and need a place closer to the door. Don't you think?" Imagine my face.

Nowadays, there's a movement in Europe name Slow Food. This movement establishes that people should eat and drink slowly, with enough time totaste their food, spend time with the family, friends, without rushing. It stands for a lifestyle.

Slow Food is the basis for a bigger movement called Slow Europe, as mentioned by Business Week. Basically, the movement questions the sense of "hurry" and "craziness"generated by globalization, fueled by the desire of "having in quantity" (life status) versus "having with quality", "life quality" or the "quality of being".

French people, even though they work 35 hours perweek, are more productive than Americans or British. Germans haveestablished 28.8 hour workweeks and have seen their productivity been driven up by 20%. This slow attitude has brought forth the US's attention, pupils of the fast and the "do it now!".

This no-rush attitude doesn't represent doing less or having a lower productivity. It means working and doing things with greater quality, productivity, perfection, with attention to detail and less stress. It means reestablishing family values, friends, free and leisure time. Taking the "now", present and concrete, versus the "global", undefined and anonymous. It means taking humans' essential values, the simplicity of living.

It stands for a less coercive work environment, more happy, lighter and more productive where humans enjoy doing what they know best how to do. It's time to stop and think on how companies need to develop serious quality with no-rush that will increase productivity and the quality of products and services, without losing the essence of spirit.

In the movie, Scent of a Woman, there's a scene where Al Pacino asks a girl to dance and she replies, "I can't, my boyfriend will be here any minute now". To which Pacino responds, "A life is lived in an instant". Then they dance to a tango.

Slow Food is against its counterpart: the spirit of Fast Food and what it stands for as a lifestyle. Others are so anxious of living the future that they forget to live the present, which is the only time that truly exists. We all have equal time throughout the world. No one has more or less. The difference lies in how each one of us does with our time. We need to live each moment.As John Lennon said, "Life is what happens to you while you're busymaking other plans".

Congratulations for reading till the end of this message. There are many who will have stopped in the middle so as not to waste time.

Author Unknown

I am a bit tired of this relentless badgering of public offices—be it national, state or local governments—vis a-vis the hosannas for privatization. Call me a communist if you will, but in my two decades (ok, almost two decades!) of working as a journalist, I have naturally had the privilege of examining lots of public bodies and private bodies closely. Let me share with you my experience-driven understanding of these two superior phenomena off-the-cuff.
Bureaucratese, or red tape, as we all know, is a bad word. We have all faced the outrageous demand for money or for some obscure document to get that all-important certification from a public office -- for ration cards, driving licence, pension, passport, and what-have-you. In some states, a pensioner is required to get a certificate every month to prove he is alive.
Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that while many are indeed pointless and painful, some of these well-entrenched processes make sense. They are built in as checks and balances to ensure the system is not subverted by any one person or any one clique.
Hence the need to move a file from the desk officer to the undersecretary to the deputy secretary and so on, necessitating the insufferable delays. Hence the need for a seal on a pensioner’s living status to ensure someone doesn’t siphon off his money after he’s dead.
There is a great deal of inefficiency in the public system as well. When I last renewed my passport, the police drove me up the wall by first asking me to be at home at all times for their verification, rejecting documents that were listed by the passport office as acceptable, and actually expecting my neighbours to go to the police station to vouch for my clean character.
I smelt not just inefficiency but also greed. So I simply told them to sit on my file for as long as they desired, knowing well enough that they couldn’t do that for long. They have a stipulated deadline by which to clear their lot of passport applications.
After one month, they ate humble pie and called. They meekly visited my neighbours and cleared my file the day after my visit to the police station.
The point is, the system worked. Take the trains in Mumbai, take the buses. I have never comes across a single private bus in the city or outside that gives way to an ambulance. BEST drivers, running the public transport buses in Mumbai, always do. Besides, these buses are the pride of the city, the eternal cribs of a perennially disgruntled clientele notwithstanding.
I don’t know if you can ever get away by not taking a ticket on a BEST bus. The conductor is diligently all over the place. But I have actually managed to get a free ride on a private transport bus to Pune even after reminding the driver’s escort three times to take my fare. He would nod each time and the next thing I knew, he’d jumped off mid-way. The driver, sweet soul, refused to take any money from me because he had no receipt book!
I can bet that saved fare that you’ll find more rough and semi-trained drivers in the private sector than in the public sector where the training is rigorous.
True, there is frustrating corruption in the public office but if you know better, you realise it will stay that way in the private system too. One electricity company I know is run by a man who knows next to nothing about the business. He’s there for his skills as a wheeler-dealer and his dexterity in handling the politicians, the media and his own bosses, not necessarily in that order. Isn’t this true of any public sector office too?
The difference being that the public sector office is not overly obsessed with making money and doesn’t mind following the rulebook in matters such as keeping some buffer stock, etc. The company in question, though, wanted no overheads or extra baggage. With the result that during the July 26, 2005, deluge, they were caught napping and had to source spare stock and expertise from other electricity companies to restore power to its consumers.
Take our election process. It’s fascinating to see this gigantic exercise being rolled out so casually. The electoral rolls themselves are an impossible task, with great potential for errors in its multi-layered vetting system. Then, the logistics of the poll process is enough to drive a sane person away from the country forever. But our bureaucrats actually stick with it, deliver a largely fault-free election and get those horrible politicians to power.
I cannot imagine any private company having the wherewithal to pull off an election sensibly, even in a trouble-free state like Maharashtra.
Take Mumbai’s trains. There are times when I worry that the sleepers will slip away, that the fishplates will come undone, and I’ll be on the tracks. But how many times do we have any of this happening, regardless of the primitive state of our rail technology? Post 2006 blasts in Mumbai, the western railway was up and running in three hours flat, creating international history. And these guys are public servants who get paid according to the Fifth Pay Commission. No fat packages and pay hikes for them.
Now that I’ve said my piece, let me end with my pet grouse. Mantralaya, that last port of call for the faithful, is probably the only place where you matter more than your boss. It has this inexplicable practice of issuing entry slips to visitors which bear her name and a serial number. The visitor fills up the slip herself, gets some babu to initial it and walks in. She has access to any office she wishes thereafter, solely on the strength of that tiny scrap of paper. But dare she brandish an identity card issued by her office instead and she’s promptly shooed away.
It’s official. The government clearly means to empower you over your boss, who has issued the I-card.

P.S. In the best interests of democracy, I have been trying to amend this confounding practice for the past ten years. But several home secretaries have come and gone; that invincible slip of paper remains.

I don’t know the author of this email and I have no copyright. But I’m sure whoever she is, she will not mind me sharing her views which I wholeheartedly endorse. I have taken the liberty of editing the mail:

``By the time you read this news, the body of Major Manish Pitambare, who was shot dead at Anantnag, would have been cremated with full military honors.
The day he died, the news channels were swept off their feet by the critical newsbreak about a cinestar being acquitted of TADA. `'Sanjay Dutt relieved by court'. 'Sirf Munna not a bhai' '13 saal ka vanvaas khatam' screamed the channels.
Then came forth the eulogies: Salman Khan said, 'He is a good person. We knew he will come out clean'. Mr Big B said, `Dutt's family and our family have relations for years. He's a good kid. He is like elder brother to Abhishek.'
Etc. etc.
Among other news, Parliament was mad at the Indian crciket team; Greg Chappell said something; Shah Rukh Khan to replace Amitabh in KBC and blah blah. But most of the emphasis was on Sanjay Dutt's `phoenix-like’ comeback from the terrorist charges.
In the Dutt medley, there was one bit of news on BBC that startled me. It read `Hijbul Mujahideen's most wanted terrorist 'Sohel Faisal' killed in Anantnag, India . Indian Major leading the operation lost his life in the process. Four others are injured.'
It was past midnight, I started checking all Indian channels, but Sanjay Dutt continued to rule supreme. His arguments: `'I'm the sole bread earner for my family', 'I have a daughter who is studying in US' and so on.
Then the channels beamed trivia about how Sanjay was not wearing his lucky blue shirt while he was hearing the verdict and also how he went to every temple and prayed for the last few months. A suspect in Mumbai bomb blasts, convicted under the Arms Act, was being transformed into a hero.
Sure, Sanjay Dutt has a daughter. Sure, he did not commit any terrorist activity. Sure Sanjay Dutt went to all the temples. Sure he did a lot of Gandhigiri but then......
Major Manish H Pitambare got the information from his sources about the terrorists' whereabouts. Wasting no time, he attacked the camp, killed Hijbul Mujahideen's supremo and in the process lost his life to the bullets fired from an AK47. He is survived by a wife and daughter (just like Sanjay Dutt) who's only 18 months old.
Major Pitambare never said 'I have a daughter' before he took the decision to attack the terrorists in the darkest of nights. He never thought about his family and about him being the bread-earner.
But that mattered little to the channels which were too busy hyping up a former drug addict, a suspect who's linked to bomb blasts which killed hundreds. Their aim was to show how he defied the TADA charges and they were so successful that his conviction for possession of arms had no meaning. They also concluded that his parents in heaven must be happy and proud of him.
Major Manish’s parents have to live the rest of their lives without their beloved son. His daughter won't ever see her beloved father again.
To my generation, Major Manish Pitambare is a big hero, someone who laid down his life without our asking him, just so that Sohel Faisal did not claim any more victims in his motherland.
Let’s hang our heads in shame that the news about the army major's death was given by a foreign TV channel!!!''

Hi People!
Just one request. Please put your names to your comments. Many of the good comments i receive are without a name. That makes it somehow incomplete. Thanks.
This piece is courtesy sulekha. had written it for them in 2003....resurrecting it at a time when farmers suicides are becoming de rigeur...


It seems a little odd to cite an old non-violence hero in the times of international stress, especially when Gandhism has been summarily dismissed as unviable and simplistic.
What is not understood is the fact that though simple, it is too profound to be ignored.
His philosophy is not a tangled maze of absolutes and probables. To me, it is the most pragmatic way of living for the body, mind and soul, for social, economic and spiritual salvation without creating a conflict of interests and by weaving each other's welfare into an all-facilitating formula of community living.
As a nation, it should concern us, especially post-WTO, that we have managed to ignore even his most practical of teachings, while showing an inexplicable eagerness to bear with the pitfalls of embracing a path nobody is clear about.
It is now more than ever that we need that one visionary who demonstrated a non-confrontationist charter of development that helped the individual, the family and the society grow separately and together. Gandhism is a ready reckoner on existence. But look at what we have done. We are disarrayed on all fronts.
Gandhiji told us to ostracize untouchability. We paid lip service, carved out seats for the backward classes, nows Dalits, in disputed sectors like education and sated our souls. Caste today works as the single largest pull factor in elections, from Parliament down to the zilla parishads. He told us to ensure equal status for women. We gave free education to the girl child but still managed to throttle her at birth.
Economically, we are a country with our distinctive needs and definitions of growth. But strangely, we have always tried to co-opt a growth charter not intended for us -- the socialist, the hesitatingly capitalist and now the rabidly opportunistic WTO. Though WTO bears the whip for many of our economic ills, the real picture is probably buried in something as sublime and yet as basic as our fundamentals as a nation.
Grounded in a rock-like conviction that agriculture feeds villages, the Gandhian model holds up the villages as the centrifugal kernel of our prosperity, and social and moral evolution. Not for nothing did British economist E. F. Schumacher call Gandhiji “the most important economic teacher today.”
The economy today is in a shambles, not so much because of the global economic meltdown but because we have failed to insulate ourselves from the self-destructing philosophy that preaches more power to the cities and let villages be damned.
While he said, “India lives in its villages,” we superimposed an economic monstrosity that preys on the villages and feeds cities to grow into outrageously obese, smoke-spouting, crime-festering dragons that kill as much as they survive -- with the result that our villages continue to starve, suffer droughts, are deprived of what urban life takes as a given: electricity, water, education and health care. Cities prosper while villages decay. A skewed paradigm of growth, entirely at variance with Gandhian thought and any serviceable model of socialism -- which Nehruvian socialism clearly was not -- has evolved over the years even as a neatly demarcated policy of growth, much like the line of control, remains elusive.
Sure, villages get subsidies but there is no clear understanding of their needs and concerns -- providing water and power, conserving both, ensuring crop rotation not to the detriment of soil but to enrich it. All the while, we have gone ahead with expanding our industrial base, eating up agricultural land wherever available on the periphery of cities. There is no concept of equitable or justiciable development.
Even today, three-fourths of India lives in its villages. Yet, agriculture has no place in the national sweepstakes. Any Finance Minister's budget is first dissected on the basis of its acceptability to the neatly profiled industrial interests.
Experts say profitability in Indian agriculture went down by 15 per cent in the nineties because of proliferating exploitation. But bumper crops seem to cloud academic judgment. The annual growth in agriculture and allied activities is about one per cent while that of industry is 4.5 per cent. The share of agriculture has shrunk in the GDP reckoning, and the WTO may finish the job of throttling the farmer.
The WTO promised farmers access to markets and support from government. This has not happened. Prof M. S. Swaminathan, the pioneer of the Green Revolution, has said as much. No additional markets have been thrown our way. “In fact, the market has even reduced in the OECD countries in the past six years,” he says.
Sure, the Green Revolution has done wonders for our ego by producing an enviable marketable surplus. But what about food rotting in the godowns of the almost defunct Food Corporation of India and the starving millions being bred on mango kernels. What about farmers committing suicides across the national map in Andhra, in Maharashtra, in Nagaland? Are we happy?
Some inevitable processes are already under way -- soil erosion, depletion of nutrient manure; even as cities expand, fertile lands get sold at throwaway prices to non-performing industrial units. Approximately, 57 per cent of our geographical area is under various degrees of soil degradation.
What's more, after 50 years, we don't have much to show in favor of our urban bias. Over 400 million live below the poverty line. About 300 million do not have access to safe drinking water. Around 700 million live without proper sanitation.
In the Gandhian scheme of things, a greater sensitivity to environment, forests and villages is inalienable in our growth plan. Especially because we are one-sixth of the world living on 2-4 per cent of the total land mass and contributing eight per cent of the world's bio-diversity. Because we are still a rural people. Even when our rural masses have shrunk from 80 per cent during Independence to about 60 per cent today, our growth should necessarily be propelled from within our fields.
By following the western script blindly, we have fostered unhealthy competitiveness, excessive consumerism and wanton living -- the symptomatic outgrowth of a grievously shortsighted development model that the west is now grappling with.
Gandhiji said Britain's prosperity and industrialization were due to the exploitative utilization of half of the planet's resources. India cannot afford this decadent growth, particularly when we don't even have their wherewithal in the first place. Our main resources are our people and the natural bounty in the form of forests, soil, water, air, minerals and trees.
Journalist Mark Shepard observed, “India's leaders have done their best to imitate the western countries by building an economy based on large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture. Gandhi fought this kind of development. He warned it would ruin India's villages.” Gandhiji was one of the greatest advocates of decentralism. But when we did disband the licence raj, it was in deference to the WTO juggernaut and not as a farseeing policy.
The Amul model of growth where participants are their own future-tellers is the only one that practices what the old man envisaged. And the results are stark. An economy of peace and permanence. If we depend for our food on the farmer, wealth should first flow to the farmer, Gandhiji postured. Riches cannot flow from cities to the villages. What flows are only second-hand TVs, audio systems and automobiles, all of which generates more stress than they hope to offer comfort.
The economic chain of supply and demand begins and ends with the villages, the cities being merely supplementary instruments of facilitation. The farmer grows crops, sells it to buy his child a good education, better health and fuels ancillary growth in entertainment, services etc.
When his land is taken away, or when repetitive use depletes his soil and his yield drops, or his crop value shrinks or when the omnipotent landlord flexes his muscles, his purchasing power weakens and that sets the ball rolling back.
Gandhiji said the path to Sarvodaya is antyodaya -- attention to the poorest person. Until this person is brought up on an equitable scale, rational growth is not possible. Until he is neglected, we shall continue pulling the cities up growth paths indexed by material prosperity and suborning the villages to our residual benefits.
Apart from being non-justiciable, this pattern is non-serviceable. It cannot last. The cities cannot spout Harvard English and wean on palmtops while the villages drag on walking miles for water and fighting exploitation. We have to take them along. For their sake and ours. Each year, around one million migrate to the cities in search of employment and better life. What if we had empowered them in the first place?
Gandhism is not a dispensable dogma or a one-day wear. After all, the man who brought the sun to set on the British Empire without fingering a pistol could not have been a moron.

Now it can be told.
The two women killed in Khairlanji--the infamous incident that caused delayed riots in the state including Mumbai-- were not raped, according to the two post-mortem reports. I wrote about this in my paper after confirming it from government sources.
One could now dispute the PM report itself but the fact remains that this is an official document, belonging to the government and if this report says it's not rape or even sexual behaviour of any kind, it's the government's duty to point this out in the better interests of society. The murders are gross enough but if there's a supposed untruth, they owe it to the people to out with it.
The media has written about how there was an economic aspect to the Khairlanji murders but thre is no real understanding ot what happened. Government and intelligence reports indicate a farmhand was not paid Rs 500-600 and went to the Dalit boss to demand his money. That was the flashpoint of the flare-up.

Saddam, the supposed harbinger of doom for mankind, is gone. And he leaves behind an unflattering mass of no-gooders. Topping the list is Bush-part II. It was extremely distressing to see Saddam go to the gallows while Bush was peacably holidaying on his good old Texan ranch. His cowboy living becomes him much more than his role as the head of the American state. ranch .
No, Saddam is no God. But surely, he has killed fewer people than his arch-enemy. In Iraq alone, the US troops have OFFICIALLY killed around 3,000 people - mostly innocent civilians or protestors - since their masterful takeover. The total toll including the civil war and the bombings it unleashed touches a million or two.
Saddam, at least, did not pretend to be fair and just nor did he mask his dictatorial brutality under the guise of ``cause of freedom.''
Besides, Saddam was different from many others of his ilk. Like it or hate it, he had an incredible self-belief. What I appreciate about him is not just that he was India's friend and not an Islamic fanatic as he was painted out to be but also the fact that he never minced words, stood his ground and stood by his beliefs -whatever they be- till the end. Here's a man who withstood the scorching fire of the US and allies but never displayed even a momentary weakening of either his will or his emotions -not after his arrest, not after his torture of a trial and not before his death.
Somehow, when I read his profile, I don't get the impression of a man who wronged all his neighbours and ALL his countrymen but as a man who had some extreme and irrational ideas, was extremely ambitious and brooked no dissent. I find that most who stood in his way or betrayed him got ruthlessly crushed but those who did not betray him were appreciated and treated with respect. He was not the cruel tyrant to everybody.
More than a decade ago, I was reporting on a high-profile meeting on Iraq in a five-star hotel. If I recall right, it was on forging trade partnerships with India. Posters of Saddam were hung all over the huge room-- The Ballroom at the Taj, I think-- and the sophisticated Iraqi men and women I met were full of glowing praise for their leader even though they knew I would quote none of it. They called him by an appellation and not by his name though I forget what.
It's ironic that Saddam is dead while his tormentor who has unleashed a reign of terror in his homeland that's certainly no less horrendous than Saddam's is moving around freely, and babbling about free will.

Mantralay, the Maharashtra government headquarters, may be the seat of power but its common impression is that of an extremely boring place stuffed with boring people in a bleak, dank environment.
This is largely true but that is only if you are a chance visitor. To a regular, Mantralay is a veritable pit of colourful stories – scandals, affairs, intrigue, politics, and of course the quirks of sundry officers. Each visit peels forth a new character, a new experience and you go home with a richer understanding of human psychology.
Often, it’s difficult for a woman journalist to hang out with the officers. They are as wary of you as you are. But if you make the equation clear in the first few meetings, many get comfortable enough to share some of their official secrets with you.
Last year, I wrote a series of stories for a leading English daily on how the chief minister was targeting a senior IAS officer because the officer refused to help the CM’s son get a piece of land at a concessional rate. The editor egged me on to drive a virtual campaign, prompting many a disgruntled colleague to decide that it was the officer who was leaking out these investigative stories to me.
O for life to be so simple! The officer was out of the job and had no access to any files. More pertinently, wouldn’t he have leaked out these stories to other journalists he knew rather than me, who he came to know only after I wrote the big stories?
Some day, I should be able to talk about it. My calling often makes life exciting. For one sensitive story I was working on, the source was in another town. He didn't want to leave any trail. So, we created a fictitious email ID and he shared official secrets through this ID. The password was funny too and made our target very clear. Each time he or I had something important to say, we would use this ID to which both of us had access.
In another instance, when a source suspected his phone line was being tapped, I changed my name—only for him. Each time I called him, I would identify myself as X, a name he was familiar with but his family wasn’t, so they would want to know who I am and what I wanted. Thankfully, he took his family into confidence soon enough.
Once a colleague heard me calling this person and got highly suspicious when she heard me identifying myself as X. She gave me curious looks for a long time after that. It is another matter that my husband, who should be more concerned, was least ruffled when he heard me announcing my new name on the home phone to the source.
Even the people we meet would make great copy if we were allowed to write about them. One senior bureaucrat, who was sidelined for all important posts, had this reflective air about him. He would speak in clipped tones, be very proper but dwell mostly in a dream world of his own making. Ask him a question and he was most likely to ponder politely and tell you very purposefully that he would not be able to answer it. The man has just retired.
I have a peculiar relationship with another one. Each meeting of ours starts with fireworks but by the time I leave, we are best pals. Till we meet again.
A serving officer, he is high strung as hell. Self-important with an air of smugness that tears out a mile to irritate you, he occupies a crucial seat of power. So meeting him is sometimes inevitable. If you are given an august audience with him at all, you are accosted first with his grim face bearing this look of if-it-wasn’t-for-me-the-world-would-collapse and you-better-look-grateful. Crisply, he arches one eyebrow and mouths, ``Yes?’’ with pursed lips and some contempt laced with exaggerated politeness.
I offer a faint smile (after fighting a kiddish impulse to stick out my tongue at him and turn heel), valiantly sit across his table and breathe (rather, exhale). The first time I met him, I told him I wanted to see for myself whether certain measures they had promised the high court were in place. That set him off. ``What do you mean, you want permission to see? Nobody is permitted to enter that place,’’ he snapped.
Each time, he dismisses any query summarily like a court of law deciding my fate. And each time, our progress report reads like a painstakingly well-set regimen. First, he embarks on a long session of media bashing, how he doesn’t care for the media and how he doesn’t need them and how he need not have entertained the media – all different ways of saying the same thing and telling me he craves attention.
Then, he informs me how he is a man of his own making and how he was once a media person himself but how things have now changed and how we are all a bunch of morons (no, he doesn’t quite say the word) -- all through which you keep your lips pursed because he gives you no room to interrupt. There’s no point looking offended because he is so taken up with his own speech he is not looking. At some point, I feel like pleading for mercy or fleeing but my professional dedication keeps me rooted.
The third stage: I face the brunt of every single media misdeed of the past 15 years (or maybe 20). At last, at weary last, when I can’t keep up the pretence any more, professional interests be damned, I tell him off too. Each time he utters a syllable, I snap at him with all the dignity I can muster, and this goes on for a merry five or ten whole minutes. At some point, I am struck by the bizarreness of the situation: Here I am, sitting across my host of the moment, with a glass of water offered by him in my hand and yelling away at him but refusing to budge.
The last stage: Providence takes pity and he gets gentler. Almost as if someone had knocked him on this head, M'lord turns Mr Hyde, decides to relent and give me my information. ``Here’s the information. You can use what you like.’’ Now, why couldn’t he have done this half an hour ago and saved us both this wear and tear?
Relieved, I smile, ask a couple of questions which he readily replies and we part grinning and beaming, putting the ugly past behind us like true sportsmen.
I naturally assume this friendship is for keeps but come the next time and he is back to his dour self. I am getting old and can’t keep up. So now, I just tip-toe my way past his chamber with a lot of reverence, and decide to miss a story rather than face one more unseasonal blast.

I have been pondering over life (and death consequently) the past few months. Though I nurse a tendency to plunge into such deliberations often, my chaotic life largely keeps me away from any serious ascetic pursuit.
A recent illness and an enforced two-month home stay, with some help from those awful drugs, got me into researching the meaning of life. And inevitably, as it always happens, my mental gymnastics-- extrapolating the theory of relativity to the theory of life and so on -- dragged me into the forbidden territory of the philosophy of karma.
During my graduation, I had done a paper on Bhagvad Gita which has karma -- specifically nishkaamkarma -- as its central theme. Right from those days, I have had a healthy disbelief for karma as we are taught today.
While I never cease to wonder at nature and its laws, karma escapes me completely. My sisters, steeped into spirituality, try to convince me it is as scientific as everything else. But somehow, karma fails to impress me when I look around and think. I know I am not qualified but let me still present my agony.
If karma is taken as the simplistic theory of `as you sow, so shall you reap', why are the baddies of the world so happy in life? I know very few people who are good and have not suffered immeasurably. One sterling example would be a Gandhian who virtually ran the Mahavir International Centre near Dahanu. I got to know Manibhai Patel thanks to my social worker mother. The man was a gem of a person and epitomised nishkaamkarma in every way. All his life, he toiled for the tribals, took care of the ashram and radiated a peace and calm that I have yet to sense in anybody else. Having left his home at a tender age to work for society, he had the ashram as his family.
Blessed with a robust, hard-working body and an equanimous mind, he enjoyed good health till his late eighties. When Manidada fell sick, my faith in humanity, and later nature, was shattered beyond redemption. The man who held the place together for 50-60 years suddenly became an outcaste. He couldnt move nor talk clearly. This made it impossible for him to communicate. Each time he attempted to express himself, he would weep tears of frustration. For the next two years, I watched him shrink into a shadow of his former self. My heart sank each time I saw him. But he suffered silently and offered a smile whenever he was asked about his health. ``Saaru chhe,'' he would mumble valiantly.
The ashram took care of him as they would an inmate at a hospital. I could see he was aching for homely care and warmth as there was little else one could do for him. When he died five years ago, I received the news with tears and a sense of relief that he was now past the torture of living.
I want to know why should someone who has never hurt a fly suffer so much? I have seen my maternal grandparents, who were literally worshipped in their erstwhile village and were known for their angelic nature and austere lifestyle, face a similar fate. Both of them suffered the agony of ill-health for over a decade before giving in. These are but a few examples.
The believers tell me the good suffer so that they can achieve moksha -- or salvation. No more rebirths for them. They say they exhaust all their leftover karma in this birth.
But, salvation at what cost? What about the others who don't live so pure a life. Why do they get easy lives and easier deaths? So that they pay for ALL their karma in the next life? Why won't they suffer their karma, at least some, in this birth?
Each time I wrong someone, am I paying him back for what he did to me in one of my previous births or am I creating fresh karma?
If karma is as simplistic as this, how do you explain the positive and negative energies that charge the universe? You may have noticed sometimes you curse someone, the curse actually lands. Or, when someone wishes you ill, you do suffer. I have experienced the latter several times (though sadly, not the former!)
How come all the good people are paying for their sins of past births and the bad people are usually an arm's length away even from bad breath?
You may have seen people who pray to gods and godmen, people who wear healing stones, do pujas and yagnas, benefit. So, what happens to their retribution? Where do their bad karmas vanish? If gods get appeased and forgive you so easily, karma loses its sanctity. If bad karma can be absorbed by incense sticks and pujas, why bother to be good?
I have no answers but lots more questions. For some other time.

PS: Posting a comment by a friend, Durgesh Kasbekar from Canada, through my login as he couldnt get through. Some others too have written saying they dont have a blog but do have a comment. As Durgesh's comment seemed to add value, thought it needs to be posted.

For a country known for its seamless acceptance and tolerance (in these stressful times) of its multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-dimensional societal fabric, the burning of Deccan Queen by Dalit `protestors' bodes ill.
The systematic protests all over Maharashtra over the Khairlanji episode (in which Dalit women belonging to one family were allegedly gangraped by some casteist villagers) are a big mystery. Intelligence agencies are trying to figure out the whodunit but have no answers yet. They point out wisely that no Dalit leader commands that kind of a following which will wreak havoc on notice.. and adequate notice was clearly given. The incidents spelt the antithesis of spontaneity and of course, came a bit late in the day.
The bigger surprise, to me, was the media. I am told the local media in Nagpur played up images of the dead women's naked bodies (yes, actually!) for days on end, playing on public sentiment and effectively stoking the fire of casteist resentment. The English media, forever haughty, lost little time in tut-tuting and condemning the incident but refused to probe any further. For God's sake, the incident was in a back-of-the-beyond place which no Mumbaikar could possibly care about, could they? Why waste too much newsprint and newsgathering effort on such matters?

There cannot be two opinions about the fact that the crime was gross beyond words but I have a different worry. The media has been less than accurate on some aspects of its reporting. And that makes it guilty of having fuelled a partly non-existent fire.
I'm trying to get documentary evidence of how we could have been misled about one brutal part of the Khairlanji incident. If I don't get the evidence, I promise to hint about it here. If do, I'll write about it here too but only after my paper publishes it. So, watch this space..

I continue to be amazed at the emotional outpouring over Sanjay Dutt's sentencing... For days, a starved media ran feverish campaigns collecting the opinion of the man and woman on the street about whether Sanju baba (Baba?!) was a criminal/terrorist or not. And quintessentially, many a man and woman on the street offered that he was not... how could he after spouting all the Gandhian wisdom in a movie and after all the good that happened in the world after the movie was released.
So, said one of the teens into a mike thrust in his face, ``In my view, he should be forgiven.'' Thank god the judiciary is not yet governed by arbit mush but the law as laid out in black and white. It's a different matter that the law of the land does not apply uniformly for all. When Sanjubaba was imprisoned as an undertrial over a decade ago, he was suitably lodged in the JJ hospital's ICU after he complained of chest pain or some such. (I forget the details now). When he continued to enjoy his stay in the air-conditioned and private comforts of the ICU without reason, a good-willed doctor brought it to my notice and got me his case papers which said the man was fit.
I wrote about it in the daily, `The Independent,' where I worked back then. The then TADA judge, J N Patel, took cognisance of the piece and ordered that Sanjubaba be shofted to the general ward IF necessary instead of depriving a needy patient.
If I recall right, the actor stayed in the general ward for long thereafter without reason and mostly remained ``under observation.''

Take his sentence. Mumbai Mirror has rendered a sterling service to Mumbaikind by highlighting how two other accused in similar circumstances have been convicted under TADA but not Dutt. Why would a court, following the thumb rule of law, follow two different sets of parameters for similar cases?

Milking the farmers dry..

Ok guys. I get the message.
Now that I have opened up comments, I have got some nice ``vicious'' ones, the ones I had specifically requested you fine people, with folded hands, NOT to send my way!!!
But guess what? what I didnt tell you in my mail was that your `dor' is very much in my hands. So, I will decide whether your comment makes it to the blog or not. Aha!
Thanks for the nice ones that have come so far, Anshu, Shammi and Arun (i.e. Dr Bhatt!).
Yes, do email me as you always do, if you don't have a blog here or cannot post a comment.

Sorry for behaving like a homing pigeon. But I can't help feeling amazed at this portly man we in the media indulgently call the `Maratha strongman. ' For those outside the state, I am talking about Sharad Pawar, the union agriculture minister and the BCCI chief. Should it be the other way round, going by his grading for each of these masks?
Last evening, the ticker on one news channel flashed, ``Eight more farmers commit suicide in Vidarbha'', (a region covering Nagpur, Amravati, Akola and all of central Maharashtra). On the screen was Pawar beaming over some Significant Moment of his life as BCCI chief.
The man sucks! Since this January, an average of three farmers have been committing suicide in Vidarbha region every day. The issue is multi-faceted and complex-- difficulty in getting seeds for organic farming, ignorance about multi-cropping, irrigation, loans going at 25 - 50% interest and so on. (have written a little more about this earlier on, for those who are interested.)
And what has this man, who has the gall to call himself an agriculturist, done in the past nine months? As far as I know, he has not bothered to pay more than one whistlestop visit to this region. Of course that visit boomeranged and most anguished farmers justifiably wanted to throw their vegetating produce at his face.
So what does our man do? He promptly drops the show, flies back to Delhi and plays boss at more welcoming places like BCCI. Any other self-respecting person in his place would have sworn not to look in any other direction until the farmers' lives got back on track. But here's a man who couldnt care less about the farmers or about Sonia Gandhi becoming prime minister so long as his kursi is firmly tethered to power. Someone needs to load-shed him.
It's India's misfortune that it's a democracy. Our skewed voting system enables us to vote in anyone who makes or promises to make a modicum of difference to our living space. So someone like Pawar can get away with this brazen callousness simply because he has improved life for himself and, in the process, for others, in his home town, Baramati, which religiously votes him to power poll after poll for 25 years. It's ironic that one region of Maharashtra (the farmers) can't do a thing because another region gives him a leg-up to Delhi.
Last heard, he was shuffling his feet in front of Sonia Gandhi to save his skin. The Sphinx was to address a Congress-I CMs' conclave at which the farmers' plight was expected to come up for discussion. It worked. The S commended his work at the conclave which mainly comprises packages and packages and promises of easier credit.
More on why he is so critical in this business of saving lives and agriculture (in that order) and why his packages are a sham. One, he is the agriculture minister. One expects him to deliver, and not the finance minister whose job it is NOT to fund cosmetic rescue efforts by his colleagues.
Two, Pawar is from Maharashtra, has been CM thrice, and continues to expect the state to fuel his ambition of becoming PM.
Three, in a brilliant perspective piece in DNA, food analyst Devinder Sharma gives a perfect insight into the crisis plaguing wheat cultivation today. The entire story can be safely co-opted for other crops as well.
The gist: Ever since the government began permitting private parties to buy wheat directly from farmers, India has become net importer of wheat from being an exporter--from 0.5 million tonnes, we now import 5.5 million tonnes (two million additional tonnes thanks to Pawar's honourable anxiety to prevent a `food scarcity') at the cost of Rs 5,500 crore. As private purchases created an artificial shortfall in public godowns, the government imports wheat. The price of imported wheat is Rs 1,100 per quintal, twice that of the government's procurement price of Rs 650. Why not pay this amount to the ailing Indian farmer instead of his American counterpart who already enjoys huge subsidies from his government?
Next, the government comes out with a Rs 2,480 crore saviour package purportedly to boost productivity in the 138 Indian districts producing wheat, but which actually helps the agribusiness lobby. So, we have generous hand-outs for sprinkler sets, gympsum supply and such. The sarkar mai baap is also actively discouraging higher yields by threatening to get out of procurement.
Yet, we had a wheat harvest of 72 million tonnes in 2004-05, enough to feed the country for a year. But does it matter?

Saw Lage Raho Munnabhai recently. Wasnt too sure whether it will do justice to Gandhiji but Tushar Gandhi, great-grandson of the Mahatma, reassured me.
And of course, many were surprised that I, a self-professed Gandhi fan, hadnt seen it.
To keep my reputation intact, I marched into the multiplex (do they have any single screens left?!) with a dupatta and a muffler tightly drawn over my head (I had a huge cold and was on sick leave). As it turned out, the AC was smartly turned off midway and I was soon sweating.
The movie was sweet, of course, with not one politically incorrect word or glance. It was nice to see someone resurrecting Gandhiji in this manner, and the effect the movie had on people.
One small quibble.. it did not bring out the import of Gandhiji's superhuman persona, which is fine. But, on the contrary, it made him look a trifle sorry at least in one scene in which Sanjay Dutt shows the other cheek to the assaulter. Here, a casual reference to the fact that Gandhiji did not only believe in getting beaten up all the time would have helped. All his life, he protested violence. But he believed that violence is better than non-violence if someone is turning to non-violence out of fear of the opponent. As far as he was concerned, cowardice was a worse vice. And, I may be wrong, but this scene left me with the feeling that Gandhiji was preaching cowardice.
I am amazed at what this movie is doing to people. There are quizzes on the Mahatma, Gandhigiri problem-solving and so on. What I find ironic is that when the media needed to know whether the movie does justice to Gandhiji, it turned to his immediate family-- Tushar Gandhi and his aunts, etc. And to think, Gandhiji hardly got any time for his immediate family, caught up as he was in tending to his country-wide brethren. For a man who considered his family as just any other Indian family, it's a sad comment on how we have treated him by deciding that his legacy is limited to his family alone. Why on earth is he called Father of the Nation?
P.S. To me, Gandhiji's family is the real Gandhi family-- the first family of India but we choose to bequeath that title to the Nehrus who for reasons unknown (or probably well known) decided to adopt the surname, `Gandhi'.

I have been reading a biography of Albert Einstein, one of my favourites along with Isaac Newton since my childhood. Even he had to pay the price for being a Jew in pre-Nazi Germany and could therefore appreciate the virtue of non-violence and Gandhiji.
One of Einstein's comments that gripped me as a kid has been about his own relativity. He would stroll down the beach and often wonder at the universe (or space?) before him, and ponder over his own insignificance in the larger scheme of things. Like a speck of sand on the beach, he said.
If a genius of his order thinks this way, what are we? It is this humility that makes Gandhiji and him just so admirable.

Now, for a few good laughs:

My Mallu husband was born and brought up in Kerala. One fine day, he decided to up and study in Baroda, least daunted by the fact that he knew no Hindi, let alone Gujarati. There, he ganged up with a few fellow Mallu students to give us the benefit of some hilarious moments:

He bought a pair of slippers at a shop. The bill was in Gujarati. So, he asked the shop-keeper the price. The shop-keeper said something in Gujarati. My man thought he said 75. So, remembering someone's this-worldly advice about bargaining being the key to happiness in Gujarat, he said, ``No, give it to me for Rs 70.''
The shop-keeper stuck to the amount. After much head-banging, the shop keeper took out some currency notes and showed him Rs 45! ``It's only Rs 45,'' he said exasperatedly. ``Why should I take more?!''
Some sincerity this! And they still say Gujjus are money-minded.

After a few months, his Mallu friends grew confident of handling small talk themselves. So, at a restaurant, when they were served two plates of unda bhurji and they wanted to swap one for a curry, one friend bravely called the waiter, and brandishing the plates, said, ``ek unda bhurji jao, ek egg curry aao.''

The funniest is the anecdote about a friend who would go to the bus stop and, unable to read bus numbers in Gujarati, ask people around, ``Ye bus kiska hain?'' Not surprisingly, he got only funny stares and no answers.

One of his Mallu friends was left home alone one day. He was taught two Hindi words to tell the maid: ``Idhar saaf karo,'' pointing to the kitchen platform. When the maid came, the friend did as told. The bai nodded and told him, `` Ok. you need to take away all the stuff stacked on it first.'' To which he said, ``Idhar saaf.'' She said, ``Yes, but how do I clean with this mess around?'' To which he repeated, ``Idhar saaf.''
This apparently went on for a respectable amount of time after which the maid shook her head, slammed all the paraphernalia on the floor and went at it.

A softcore Mallu (as opposed to hardcore, because he thought he understood Gujjus well) had to see the doctor. But the clinic was closed. So, he asked some people nearby about the doc's whereabouts. He was told, ``Woh off ho gaya.'' ``Oh,'' said the friend, and went back home. The next day, he dutifully trudged to the clinic and heard the same story. And the third day too. After some reflection, he asked a friend, ``Does `off' mean a long holiday?'' The Gujju enlightened him, ``It means the doc is dead.''

Another Mallu had a funny experience with his doctor. He told the doctor, ``Kuch bhi khao shardi hota hai.'' The doc was foxed. How come? he asked. How can all foods cause a cold? After some decoding, each figured they were misinterpreting the other. The matrubhakt mallu meant vomitting and not cold, as `Shardi' in Malayalam is vomiting!

Here, I partly reproduce a mail sent to a friend abroad with some additional writing. Thought some of you might be interested:

The other day, I was speaking to a bureaucrat, who offers me a very typical take of the farmers' problem. Over the years, I have been watching thousands of acres of farmland disappear to make way for industrial, commercial and residential constructions.
I was asking him if he has any idea how much land has thus been sacrificed to so-called progress. He said urbanisation is an inevitable process and one must not resent it if villages disappear. I told him the farmers take the lumpsum money given for their fields and then have no steady source of income.
But he was on to bigger things. Even if villages dont exist in Maharashtra, he told me, it doesn’t matter because we the people don’t depend on the state for grains or pulses. We only get our fruits and veggies from our neighbourhood.
So what's the big deal? he said. Most farmers grow jowar and bajri for local consumption. That shouldnt bother us city slickers, he argued. When I pointed out the state’s popular crop, sugarcane, to him, he said only cash crops grow in Maharashtra for real sales and they don’t suffer. So it's perfectly alright if they die or sell their fields.
I remembered cotton but i decided to stop this silly conversation before it got more inane. When I told him Punjab and Haryana, the wheat bowl of India, too were seeing farmer suicides every day, he said, oh yes, but that should not concern us because Maharastra cannot do anything about it.
He implied thus that our concerns should be limited to what we can do something about. How callous and self-absorbed can we get?
If you look at how these dead farmers' families get relief, it's even more pathetic. Some junior official peeps into his home, asks his family questions. If he finds a family problem, there is no way the family gets any money; the suicide is promptly attributed to internal problems even if he has a huge outstanding debt staring in everyone’s face. If the land is not his name, he is doomed, and so on. And, just how much does this dead farmer get anyway if he kills himself? All of one lakh rupees, which comes, if it does, after six whole months or more. Some of these process have now been streamlined. But again, as someone said, one cannot take pride in giving prompt `compensation’ (such a disgusting term!) when we couldnt prevent the farmer from killing himself in the first place.
I seriously cannot understand what's wrong with us as people that we cant see the suicides clearly as something very wrong, unethical, unequal and outrageous.
The world over, the pattern of development is skewed. Urban agglomerates thrive at the cost of villages which ironically provide the feed for this parasitical growth.
India being agrarian (soon, we will saying this in the past tense), it cannot afford to blink at the problems facing its villagers. The entire community fabric of the village –its culture, spirit, and self-reliance, -- is coming apart. The crafts are dying, there is no colour left in the green belts, and the fields are starved of water, power.
The way I see it, we are paying the price for ignoring Gandhiji. India lives in its villages, he said, implying thereby and saying it loudly on too many occasions as well, take care of the farmer and his village and you will have taken India on the road to prosperity. Today, India lives in two halves—one half is upwardly mobile, prosperous and a go-getting wannabe while the second is a stark picture of poverty, deprivation and hunger. We depend on the villages instead of the other way round. So, shouldn’t wealth too flow from there instead of the other way round?
Even if you don’t agree with this argument, we urbanites are directly affected by this neglect of our rural countrymen. Thanks to ceaseless migration, life in cities has become difficult for each one of us. At least for that reason, lets speak up and stem the rot.

Today, I want to share with you an experience that gnaws at me...
Last week, I was on my way home by train when a eunuch jumped into the ladies first class compartment at Kurla. Slim, athletic build, bright red lipstick standing out in a made-up face. She squatted on the footboard, and started crying silently. No sobbing but I could see the tears kept streaming down her cheeks.
Not knowing what to do, I buried myself in the paper. We have been conditioned by society to fear eunuchs. But though I dont fear them much, I felt awkward about approaching her probably because of the others around and because I didnt know how she would react.
After 15 minutes of this should-i-should i-not, I decided to talk to her. I tapped her knees which were thrust protectively in front of her and asked her, ``kya hua?'' She ignored me. Again, I asked her, Kya hua? She continued looking down.
I turned to the door, and stood there. Suddenly, she looked up at me with a tear-stained face and said in perfect English, ``I am suffering from AIDS.'' I was stunned. She continued, ``I don't want to die. I love my mother very much. I dont want to leave her.''
I swallowed that with some difficulty. I had thought it would be a more manageable problem of abuse by cops and clients or some such thing, and I could help. Recovering, I asked her if she was taking medication-- the anti-retroviral therapy prescribed for AIDS patients. She nodded and started sobbing now. I told her not to worry, that many AIDS lived for 15 to 20 years and as she didn't seem to have any apparent health problem, she too would live. ``Nothing will happen to you,'' I told her uncertainly, not knowing what else to say. As we were nearing my station, I patted her shoulder, gave her some money and was about to jump off when she suddenly knelt down and kissed my dirty big toe. ``God bless you!'' she said with big teardrops shining in her eyes.
The lipstick took some removing...
Why do we shun eunuchs? Why can't they earn a decent living, like the rest of us? Instead of sympathising with them, we condemn her to a contemptible existence because of one organ gone wrong. And then, we condemn her again because she is forced to sell herself to eat.
We seem to accept all those men who torture, burn and murder their wives or rape other women much more easily. Isn't this too inequality of the sexes?
The thought keeps nagging me: what exactly was her fault? Do we shun people who have a hole in their hearts or don't have a limb? Do we throw them out of our homes and ban any civilised living for them? Gender profiling, what?

The past two days have been spent panicking over the next terror target. The fear was always in the air but it's now verily palpable. And while Britain and the US grind their teeth and rub their noses to the ground to ferret out potential terrorists, we in India are coping with a bigger crisis: The Government.
What was India's first reaction after 11/7 (isn't that how WE write our dates instead of 7/11 as most newspapers have been obligingly calling it?) ? None. On the third day, when the whole world was wondering what we are waiting for and when the country was agonising over the deafening silence, PM Manmohan Singh took a ``hard stand''. He said the talks between India and Pakistan ``may'' suffer. Wow!
All dailies lapped up his tough talk and nodded grimly in appreciation. What else did we expect? A complete freeze on all talk of talks with Pakistan? A crackdown on terrorist factories in Pakistan, and mass detention of the trouble-makers from SIMI and allied forces? Pressure on the US to bring Pakistan to book? A complete stop to all those friendly buses plying between the two countries and legitimising the transfer of terrorists and their lethal wares?
Nah! This is what right-thinking countries do. The US and the UK would do. We know what the US did post 9/11. We also know what the UK did after the 7/7 train bombings. Actually, we should leave the US out of this. It went too far. The Bush brand of terrorism which destroys countries is much, much worse than 9/11, by any standards. Many, like my mother, couldnt sleep for days after his attack onIraq, feeling for all the innocents being bombed. I actually began hoping Saddam wont be caught and was positively depressed when he was.
Just a few days ago, Tony Blair branded all subversive acts in Kashmir as terror acts. A big step that finally got India some kind of international recognition that the violence of Kashmir was not a local concern. Something we couldnt achieve with all our coaxing and tomes of proofs for decades, one single act of terroism on his home ground has managed.
Leaving aside its terror act in Iraq, the US too has done some hard sniffing and hard talk. A few days ago, Hafeez Mohammed Sayeed, founder of al Qaida’s political wing, Jammat ul-Dawa, was about to enter Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, to make some pre-Independence Day speeches when US pressure forced Pakistan to detain him in Islamabad. Sayeed’s right-hand man, Jia ur-Rehman Lukhvi, heads the operations in India and operates from Anantnag in Jammu and Kashmir.
I dont know why we are so diffident. India has been very firmly yanked into the terror dragnet of late. But even as terror knocks at our doors every now and then, we are still unprepared to cope. It is still grappling with archaic policing methods, weak intelligence and political will – all of which erode its prevention and detection capabilities.
In May, when 13 kgs of RDX and a cache of AK-47 rifles were seized in Aurangabad, three key terror operatives – Fayyaz Kagzi, Rahil Sheikh and Zabiuddin Ansari – managed to flee in good time. Had they been nabbed, many believe 7/11 would not have happened.
If the police don’t err, the political bosses do. Every time, the cops grab a suspect, they are told to back off. The US and the UK, on the other hand, are known to be brutal in their treatment of suspects so much so that a Muslim constable in the Scotland Yard was stripped of sensitive duties after the 7/7 bombings last year. While that amounts to discrimination, what we have in India is reverse discrimination.
Nobody had heard of Raju Khan until he got a summons from a local police station inquiring about his recent visit to Dubai. The next day, Khan, who we now know is the son of choreographer Saroj Khan, was all over the papers. Some more Muslims were detained for questioning in different parts of the state, causing a first mention on byte-starved TV channels and then a full-fledged outcry in Asian Age. How dare they? fumed Seema Mustafa. (Only namesakeness, nothing more here!) Feeling left out, other papers including Times of India joined the chorus. Soon, police chief A N Roy was defending himself before the media and his political bosses, in that order for acts of omission he hadnt quite committed. ``We are questioning 3000 persons out of whom 800 are Hindus,'' he said plaintively.
What gives? Why can't he simply say yes, we are questioning everyone we think is suspect. If you don't want us to, dont complain when you get bombed. We could be wrong but then, we could be right too. We havent quite killed or tortured anyone yet. We are damned if we dont get a lead on the blasts, and we are damned if we question someone for a lead. How can this approach work?
Look at Australia. It has told the hardline Islamic radicals to buzz off if they want to crib about the country. Not very kindly too. Nobody found anything amiss. Imagine anyone even whispering something like that. They would be roundly packed off to oblivion.

In Mumbai at least, the police force is in a sorry state, thanks to weak will. A senior officer such as Hemant Karkare came back from a useful stint with central intelligence agencies to the Anti-Corruption Bureau instead of being lapped up by an intelligence wing—and that, after a three-month neglectful wait.
Similarly, many feel that the crime branch, which was once an elite force, should have been asked to lend its might to the Anti-Terrorism Squad in busting the blasts. As somebody told me, the line between terrorism and underworld is very thin and sometimes, not quite there. The crime branch’s inputs would have been invaluable, had it been pushed into service. The only hitch: who will tell the cat, our politicians?

Indian agencies has a long way to go before they achieve the wizardry and sophistication of their US counterparts. The book `The true face of Jehadis,’ by Pakistani journalist Amir Mir quotes from Gerald Posner’s book, `Why America slept..the Failure to prevent 9/11’ to narrate the skills used by the US to make a top al Qaida operative sing.
Pakistan was forced to hand over Abu Zubaydah, captured from Rawalpindi in March 2002, to the US. According to Posner’s book, the man was taken blind-folded to Afghanistan to a simulated Saudi jail with a created Saudi environment that made Zubaydah comfortable. He is alleged to have then told all about terror’s political patronage and Pakistani military sympathizers. This degree of conception, planning and execution is still unthinkable for us.
But if we aim there, we might manage a little better than we do now.

I am vehemently anti-quota having suffered because of such systemic ills myself. And I am all for this who-blinks-first between the students and the spent force-with-nothing-to-lose, Arjun Singh. In fact, I am puzzled at the way everybody is behaving as if it's only the students' nightmare. We have decided to stay mute outsiders. Each one of us gets directly affected by this nonsense. You will have more students with a substandard education-- he will pick only what he can understand-- treating us in hospitals.
The production quality all round -- whether it is a building, a newspaper, or a handbag, will suffer. And then, we'll all put a hand to our heavy heads to complain that we, as a nation, are never going to make it.
There must be something seriously wrong with this democratic system that allows everybody to prey on the aam aadmi. Doesn't he too have any fundamental rights? we pay for the so-called sins of our ancestors -- and for how long? Will someone please tell me what kind of payment/retribution is this that lets someone who didn't make the grade to get into a college leaving behind someone who did. Isn't it far better to let that someone be funded for his education but that he try for the seat on merit?
what message are we sending out to all, as my father says? That the backward classes, SCs, STs, Vimukta Jatis, Nomadic Tribes, OBCs are all no good with their brains? That they need a concession in marks rather than money? What exactly are they weak in-- brains?
Let's all spare a thought for the future and take our lives in our hands!!