The urbane Englishman generates 450 kgs of waste annually, according to a local UK report. Happily, a Mumbaikar generates 260 kgs. Nothing to pat your back about, but good enough to give us the advantage of sniggering at the whites.

Come to think of it, though we find it hard to believe, we are actually better off than our evolved cousins in the west in practically every department. We don't sit with our shoes on the table; we dont block all air out and switch on the AC (traditionally, that is. I can understand the English and other Europeans needing to shut the draught out but why do we do this in tropical India?), we take bath every day (well, many of us); we don't smother our flooring with carpets (I have never understood the need for these extremely unhygienic -almost filthy- practice. Even Gandhiji spoke out against them); we greet people better (with folded hands rather than a kiss, hug or a handshake which, again, are oh-so-unhygienic, apart from not being half as polite); our meals are far healthier; our clothing lets us breathe (research has shown the lungi and the dhoti are the best forms of apparel for the lower male part as it lets the organs breathe and stay cool. I dont understand the sari though, except for its sex appeal); we respect our elders (or are supposed to); we worship nature and abstain from killing animals or birds for food (quite a few of us); and our traditional educational system is far more holistic and professional (than the Macaulay brand of degree-totting that it has become today).

There is lots more we need to do: we need to understand women ARE equal (we don't need to be treated as such); we need to stop littering the streets, and most of all, we need to arrest the consumerist culture from spreading any further.

Wherever you go these days, you land at a mall or a multiplex. We have little need for either. either. The supermarkets have the best foreign or MNC brands but no local brand for cornflakes. They refuse to stock any soap produced by a cooperative or a small scale unit. Their fruit and vegetables are artificially coloured and cost 30 % more than the neighbourhood hawker. They survive on brands and therefore don't give a damn about the pathetic quality of wheat, rice or other essential fare they are forced to sell. By the time you are through with the mall, you're lugging two huge sacks in your hands, mostly full of unnecessary stuff.

You need to carry this home yourself whereas your neighbourhood grocer would have home-delivered the entire stuff had he only known.

Discouraging malls is of essence to protect our established system of commerce --the damn malls are wiping out the grocers everywhere. It is also critical for all-round economic progress in a growth model fuelled by local enterprise. Given the vast reach of khadi and the native Indian entrepreneurial skills, our cities, towns and villages are saturated with thriving small-scale units that produce everything from soaps to cornflakes, to clothes to phenyl to wooden furniture. If all consumer products and consummables go upscale (i.e., are slammed with a brand name), it will throw the well-established networks, and thereby the economics, out of gear. These units will be wiped out-- they already are getting wiped out in big numbers as HLL, and its like-minded rivals take over businesses after businesses that they know little about except that two principles work everywhere -- economies of scale and cutting costs at all costs. MNC success stories are jigged up by these simple tenets of MBA wisdom. Quality, as a result, take the first backseat in their scheme of things.

Now, for the multiplexes. How many of us really love these shut dens of misery that look bright but drive you blind simply by having the screen bang in front of you. So, you trade the larger cinematic experience -- the charm of sitting in a huge auditorium with attendant atmospherics of film-watching like the cheaper popcorn, the clapping, cheering and hooting -- for a supposedly better viewing in a small enclave with people who just about manage to stand up for the national anthem, stay politely non-committal throughout the movie except when their cellphone rings, and wiggle in their plush seats forever to give you way when there is none. That the popcorn comes for a princely Rs 50 and the pint-sized stale samosa sell for Rs 40 doesn't help matter much.

Sorry if I have hurt your sentiment, guys. I belong to the old school of thought which sees a movie as a mystique; and its stars as ethereal entities-- not to be touched, seen or even whispered about, and certainly not munchies to be devoured every day at the breakfast table. There was a halo around the older stars whether they deserved it or not; the newer lot believes in wooing reporters and editors through saam daam dand bhed. Any trick in the trade is fair to stay visible to beat the morning attack of insecurity/anxiety.

Isn't the way you see a Rajesh Khanna or a Raj Kapoor very different from the way you see Shah Rukh Khan (with the hideous ponytail and yucky six-packs)? It's no thrill to see those dimples in your paper every day, every single day. It certainly doesn't help that he can't act.

Now that we are done with the loathsome fellas, lets talk about the subject of the day. Ahem! How wasteful are we as metro citizens? First, look at our use of disposables: it has shot through the roof. We use plastic cups, glasses and bags for everything: liquids such as water, beverages and juice is served in paper/thermocol/plastic cups in all takeaways. We buy packaged juice, packaged cornflakes, packaged milk, packaged soft drinks. Our groceries, veggies, etc. come in plastic, whether from the grocer or the mall. Granny's old cloth bag is just too downmarket, never mind if our upmarket ways makes the world a nightmare to live in, bit by bit.

Offices everywhere use disposable cups with a vengeance. In the good old days, you had a simple steel glass placed atop an earthen matka. Today, the office dustbins are venomously cluttered with plastic.

Each house today has one PC, one laptop, one car, one or two TVs, three to four cell phones, a washing machine, with a home theatre or two thrown in. Consider the electronic waste (called e-waste) generated by a single family which will keep changing its cellphones, TVs, cars as and when newer models float in. The older models could get re-used once but then what? They are summarily consigned to the dustbin which sees more of inorganic and hazardous waste these days than the old-fashioned, and harmless, dudhi ka chilka.

There is a policy under way at the union level to dispose of e-waste but I'm not sure how it will work. In spite of having faced the problem long before us, the US and European Union, among others, are still grappling with their mountains of e-garbage, let alone the other forms.

For the environmentally conscious, let me remind you that while paper does degenerate and is organic, it is made from precious resources such as wood. So, it's not enough to say we use paper cups; these can be re-cycled only once or twice, with some waste built in each recycling.

The only answer, therefore, is to live a simple life, cut down our needs to the minimum, eat healthy, and walk instead of taking the car for a 10-minute drive to work. In other words, follow Gandhiji zealously!

I haven't even begun talking about carbon emissions and depletion of fossil fuels.

P.S. I think the move by EU to impose a carbon tax is quite asinine; it blinks at the problem which, I fear, won't go away... And we still organise debates on whether Gandhism is relevant today. Sigh!

``Young people are more engaged with the Internet.'' ``TV and Internet would leave little time for newspapers everywhere.'' These are the prophetic words of Marcus Brauchli, managing editor, Wall Street Journal.
I dont know anyone who will disagree with this fundamental truth. Ever since TV invaded media turf in the early nineties, we were periodically warned to keep pace or fade out. ``We are competing with TV, dont forget,'' the editor would say gravely time and again.
That ended up being THE trigger behind the regrettable dumbing down of journalism in print. Most bosses fought shy of publishing a story/ article that was serious, long, academic, doomsaying, or, worse, all of the above. ``Readers want a quick read, they are now used to TV'' they would argue. Cut your marathon by half, I would always be told. `Say your thing in 250 words,' is the new mantra of new age journalism. And while at it, keep it light, fluffy and smart. If it also has any merit by the way, so be it.
No editor wants to play God and miss the bus. There were honourable exceptions like the late C R Irani, owner and editor of The Statesman, which at one time was a revered Bible for those who wanted to learn English. Amar Singh (ya, the same) once told me how he was advised to read The Statesman (the Junior Statesman was a hot draw) to improve his English. I dont know if it helped or being with the impeccable Amitabh Bachchan only brought home his lack even more. But at least a few dozen people told me the same thing about the paper.
Even today, there are a number of amazing Anglo-Indian journalists working with the Statesman. During my time, even their telephone operator sounded classy. Each time Willy (who has since retired) answered the call in his rich baritone, in the right accent and just the right inflection of pride, `Statesman,' my heart would do a flip-flop. A pity both of us were married. (If not Amitabh, Willy came a close second.)
Irani was a task master, a perfectionist and above all, a journalist to the core. The word `journalist' today does not inspire the same awe as it did when I started out. It implied an extremely knowledgeable mind, sharp intellect, uncompromisable integrity, unwavering commitment, raw guts, relentless drive, unbiased attitude and responsible reporting. I leave it to you to find out which parts have since fallen off its dictionary meaning.
Irani, though, had all of these and more. Ironically, he was the owner of the paper as well, which means he stood to personally gain from every ad placed in the paper. But unlike today's editors, he was first and foremost a journalist. I remember a highly controversial story a colleague and I had broken in The Statesman about a supposedly ``missing'' CBI report indicting one of the biggest Indian companies. We dug out the report and showed the world it was not missing. The next thing we knew, the company concerned had pulled out of a huge ad campaign (and not a one-off ad) it had planned with The Statesman space selling team.
As I was pretty new in the paper, I got a bit nervous when I learned of this. A month later, Irani walked into the Mumbai office, and called for me. As he had never met me, I panicked. ``There goes my job,'' I muttered to myself and braced for the battering ram. He'll holler at me for daring to write so brazenly and throw me out.
I knocked and entered his imposing cabin with sweaty palms. He looked up, grinned when I introduced myself and gestured to sit down. Very warmly then, he told me we had done a great job and that he was proud of the story. ``You must follow it up, keep an eye on it,'' he told me passionately. Still not sure this was happening, I said I would. Then, he launched into a long session about his pet peeve: Bofors. How the Gandhis and Quattrochi are bullshitting everyone, etc. etc.
During the hour-long chat, not once did he mention the word, ``ad''.
He couldnt care, explained my bureau chief. He cares only for news, and journalism of the old order. Personal profiteering over professional integrity was for the lesser mortals.
I have still to met someone with an intellect as sharp as his. Once he called to convey an extremely complicated story about an airline booking racket. After communicating the brief in three lucid lines, he asked me if I had any questions. I had none. It was only when I began working on the story, I understood how difficult it was to explain the story to people. Even after laborious explanations, most people I approached would still have queries. Each time, I tried, sighed and mentally invoked Irani's clarity of speech.
Over time, I grew to understand that Irani not only cared about news, he was extremely disgusted with the pettiness he saw all around him. He never let personal likes and dislikes come in his way. It was fine by him if he lost a few lakhs or crores of rupees in the process of chasing a good story. In his eyes, it was a good deal.
Though reputed to be tough as nails, he softened before people whom he valued.
I dont remember a single occasion he came down hard on me; he kept encouraging me at every opportunity and sought me out a couple of times he thought a good story was waiting to be told.
When I hesitatingly wrote to his personal email ID (which was taboo) proposing to write for the Edit page, (I was already bombarding the Op-Ed page regularly), he wrote back saying I should. I wrote one on a Harshad Mehta development and it was carried by the hawk-eyed editors practically without any change.
On his next trip to Mumbai, Irani walked into office and first called for me. When I entered, he beamed, jumped out of his chair, and actually came around to hug me. The peon serving him tea stared open-mouthed. Soon, word spread and I felt like a heroine. What did he say? Well, he was simply happy at my enthusiasm and with my first piece.
Irani was a rare editor who took personal pride in his employees. To him, we were not fulfilling a contractual obligation, but serving the larger cause of journalism as his flanks. Even after an illness restricted his movements, at 74, he continued to be driven as ever, more than any one I know or have heard of. Newspapers were a form of crusade for him, not en enterprise as it has become for everyone else I know.
When I quit Statesman, it was only because I felt I should also look at the material side of things. After all, I was no Irani-an. The one memory that still disturbs me to this day is his bitter response to my resignation. I never got in touch with him thereafter.
Today, The Statesman may not be the same but in my heart, it embodies the ethics of journalism as no other paper does because of a single man who lived by his values and died by them.
To me, Irani will forever be the true Statesman. May his soul rest in peace.

Here's a powerful address by the indefatigable Vandana Shiva which addresses some issues very close to my heart. Please, ppllllease read it. Will post my comments later.


How to Address Humanity's Global Crises? Challenge Corporate Power, Embrace True Democracy


By Vandana Shiva, AlterNet
Posted on October 1, 2007, Printed on October 1, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/63541/


Editor's note: the following remarks were made this September at a conference on "Confronting the Global Triple Crisis -- Climate Change, Peak Oil, Global Resource Depletion & Extinction," in Washington DC. For more information, visit the International Forum on Globalization's website.



Before I came here I was very fortunate to join the group of scientists and religious leaders who made a trip to the Arctic to witness the melting of the icecaps. An entire way of life is being destroyed. You've seen the polar bears losing their ecological space, but the highest mobility in that part of the world is the dog sledge. And they can't use it. They're locked into their villages because the ice is now too thin to travel on it. But it's still there and therefore not good enough for them to use boats.



The same melting is making the Himalayan glaciers in my region, the Ganges glacier, recede by 30 meters a year. In twenty years time, the Himalayan glaciers will have reduced from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers. And given our rainfall patterns, in the hot summer season when we have a drought, it's only the melting of the glaciers that brings us water. So we're talking about one-fifth of humanity, twenty to thirty years from now, having no water in the grand rivers around which the grand civilizations of Asia have been built.



And where did this start? All this feels so timeless, but it started with humanity getting at the fossil fuel, which was never supposed to be touched… But that model carries on. And globalization now is industrializing every activity of every human being's life across the planet. For me, globalization is really expanding the use of fossil fuel.



And so while on the one hand, when we talk climate change, we're talking about reducing emissions, the entire economic model is based on increasing emissions. It is based on increasing emissions by destroying small-scale peasant farming and introducing large-scale industrial agriculture. It's increasing emissions by making every one of us dependent on our everyday needs to come from China.



Everything today is being made where it can be made most cheaply, which means where sources can be exploited the fastest and workers can be exploited the highest. And at one level, that's what's being reflected in China's double-digit growth and India's nine percent growth. It's basically converting our resources into commodities, to be sold around the world.



But that conversion requires the wastage of human beings on a scale we've never seen. In India right now, the relocation of industry for example; industry like steel that's shutting down in Europe and America, is relocating to India. Automobile companies that are shutting down in the West are moving to India; they're talking about making 50 million cars in India annually. Only four percent of India will ever own them. The rest will either be exported or that four percent will have eight cars rather than two. Already my landlord has five in a family of three. Those cars need minerals, they need steel, they need iron ore mining, they need aluminum, they need bauxite mining. And every inch of the land in India is today serving a global, fossil fuel economy that's on fast forward.



It needs land; land grab is the biggest resource crisis. Land you can't create, you can only exhaust. But peasants are saying we will not move. That's what they said in Nandigram, 25 were shot dead and they refuse to move. In Dhandri, where women were raped and attacked and refused to move. In place after place, the tribals, the peasants in India are saying this our land, this is our mother, and this is where we will be. And when the money for compensation becomes bigger and bigger-- I love this action-- the Nandigram peasants sent a letter to the chief ministers to say, "How much is your mother for sale. How much will you take for her? Because this land is our mother."



And the globalization of agriculture has really become genocidal. It's hugely responsible for increasing greenhouse gases, whether it's from the nitrogen fertilizers of the fossil fuel in the mechanical energy that's used, or in the long distance transport and food miles. But on the ground it's killing people. Long before it will kill us through climate change, it's killing people, physically killing people.



150,000 farmers have been pushed to end their lives in India because of Monsanto seed monopolies. Monsanto was collecting 2,400 rupees as royalty for a kilogram of Bt cotton seed that they were selling for 3,200 rupees. They're in the courts right now; we've challenged them, we've joined one of the state governments. They're saying we have a right to this monopoly and we're saying our country has never given you this right. They assume they got it in the United States and therefore they have it everywhere, whether the law allows it or not.



Or Cargill, wanting to grab India's wheat market, having signed an agreement through the Bush Administration with…Right here in this city, decisions about agriculture are being made here, in Washington. A two-year old agriculture agreement. So Cargill eventually got India's wheat markets opened up. And the international wheat price is $400; Indian farmers are getting $200. And this double price is ultimately a subsidy that we are giving in addition to the subsidy your farm bill is providing to these corporations.



Retail: India is a huge, huge land of bazaars, of huts, of markets. Every street is a market. Hawkers come down in the morning, get us our vegetables to our doorstep. Of course, that's not very good for Wal-Mart so they're manipulating zoning laws, shutting down hawkers, shutting down businesses in town, so that we will have a Wal-Mart model. But that means 100 million people out of retail and we don't know how much more carbon emissions, while Wal-Mart talks about going green…



So here you have globalization adding to emissions and it needs to be a continued part of our work. And you've got false solutions that were laid out by Jerry [Mander]. But the false solution that I think we need to pay particular attention to is the dominant solution in terms of carbon trading. Because at the philosophical level, at the world-view level, it's the second privatization of the atmospheric commons. The first privatization was putting the pollution into the atmosphere beyond the earth's recycling capacity. Now with carbon trading, the rights to the earth's carbon cycling capacity are gravitating exactly into the arms of the polluters. The environmental principal used to be the polluter must pay. Carbon trading is transforming that into the polluter gets paid.



[Sir Nicholas] Stern, who did the Stern Review, has clearly said it is an allocation of a full set of property rights to the atmosphere. And PricewaterhouseCoopers -- who was very notorious in trying to privatize, with the World Bank's help, Delhi's water supply, and we defeated them two years ago in that project -- has said that trade in carbon emissions is equated with the transfer of similar rights such as copyrights, patents, licensing rights, commercial and industrial standards.



One of the things we have always said in [the International Forum on Globalization] is that the enclosures of the commons is one of the deep crises of resource depletion. Once resources move out of common management and public care, they will get further degraded. And if you really look at the clean development mechanism, it's all about dirty industry; it's about HCFC plants being accelerated, new plants being set up in China and India. The biggest recipients of CDM credits in China and India are plants that are depleting the ozone layer. Sponge iron plants coming up in the tribal belts of India, in Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, and Orissa. And clean seems to have become such a confusing word. We would have thought that we know what clean is. And suddenly, everything dirty is clean.



Including nuclear. Nuclear, not just as nuclear power, but nuclear as strategic use of nuclear power. I don't know how many of you have followed that the United States signed an agreement with India. Now it isn't really that United States signed an agreement with India because you did not sign that agreement and I did not sign that agreement. Our Prime Minister came at the same time that they handed over our agriculture. Monsanto, Cargill, and Wal-Mart, who sit on the board of the agriculture agreement, they also signed this nuclear agreement.



Which has led to the Hyde Act; section 103 of the Hyde Act calls for securing India's full and active participation in U.S. efforts to dissuade, isolate, and if necessary, sanction and contain Iran if it proceeds with its nuclear program. Iran has been mentioned 15 times in a bilateral agreement.



So the nuclear agreement with India is definitely not about clean energy; it is about something bigger. And in India, right now while I'm here, we are having the biggest democratic mobilization against this agreement. First of all because Parliament did not clear it and second, because we don't want to be a client state of the empire -- we want our non-alignment defended -- and thirdly we don't want $100 billion market created for the defense industry in the United States. After all, you are going to have a big mobilization tomorrow against the war. And we don't want to be a part of U.S.'s wars without end. We are, after all, the land of Gandhi, the land of nonviolence, the land of peace, the land of ahimsa.



We have to begin with solutions where we are, while we defend our democratic rights. I work primarily on agriculture. The globalized, industrialized agriculture is a very big part of the pollution that we are dealing with, a very big part of the crisis we are facing. But ecological, bio-diverse, local agriculture is part of the solution. Both in reducing emissions, in increasing absorption of carbon, and most importantly, providing the adaptive capacity to deal with climate chaos. This year in Navdanya, the movement I started for seed saving, we started saving seeds that can deal with the drought, that can deal with the floods. We've been saving seeds that can deal with the cyclones and hurricanes and distributed those seeds after the tsunami. Those seeds are available, they merely have to be saved and distributed rapidly enough before Monsanto comes up with yet another false solution; that without genetic engineering and seed patents we will not be able to respond to climate change ...



I just want to end by saying that we have basically two options. We have the option of letting the remaining resources of the planet be fought over viciously through militarized power or we can move rapidly to the ability to rebuild our ecosystems, share the limited resources the planet can provide us, and create good lives while doing it. But to do that, we'll have to get out of many reductionisms.



The first reductionism being the reductionism of energy. We've suddenly moved to thinking of energy as something we can consume, not as something we generate. And I think that generative concept of energy -- we call it shakti in India -- is something we have to reclaim, because the solution to pollution and wasted people is bringing people back -- deep into the equation of how we produce things, how we work the land, how we shape community, and how we exercise our democratic rights and rebuild our freedoms.



And of course, we'll have to get out of the mindsets that treat the laws manufactured by the market as immutable and unchanging. And the three concepts that are constantly referred to as something that can't be touched are: economic growth. You can't make any change that will touch the nine percent growth in India, the ten percent growth in China. You cannot interfere in the unregulated market -- even though every step of trade liberalization is an interference in the market, every step of creating an opportunity for Cargill and Monsanto, is an interference in the market. And the third false sacred, is unbridled consumerism ..



The problem of climate chaos to me and the problem of appropriating the resources of those who need those resources for ecological security and economic security, is ultimately a question of ethics and justice. And that issue of ethics and justice can only be addressed if we recognize some very basic facts and reorient our practices of what we eat, what we do on our farms, our homes, our towns, our planet.



We need to reinvent our eating and drinking, our moving and working, in our local ecosystems and local cultures. Enriching our lives by lowering our consumption, without impoverishing others. And above all, we need to subject the laws that govern production and consumption to the laws of Gaia; the laws of the planet. The laws of a planet that can give forever in abundance for our needs if we do not allow the narrow minded, mechanistic, reductionist, greed based system of industrialism, capitalism, globalization to make us imagine that to be inhuman is the definition of being human.



Activist and physicist Vandana Shiva is founder and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi. She is author of more than three hundred papers in leading journals and numerous books, including "Monocultures of the Mind: Biodiversity, Biotechnology, and the Third World and Earth Democracy." Shiva is a founding director of International Forum on Globalization.

India has won the TT Cup. Yeah!

To me, TT spells table tennis. That's as much as I understand of cricket. But honestly, Twenty 20 doesn't look like cricket (it's typically decided in the last over or even the last ball) and the TT Cup doesnt look like a Cup. But then, neither does Team India look Indian.
What happened to all that cowering under pressure--nervous fielding, dropped catches, drooping jaws, fumbling at the wicket, confused running, and endless wides? I cant recognise this team. I am more used to a team that incredibly snatches defeat from the jaws of victory!
Surely, this is an outsourced version. Take MSD. Rarely do you see a man with more style. He is a natural. No posing for the camera, no playing to the gallery, no throwing attitude, no mouthing platitudes, no synthetic smiles.
This man has serious attitude. Real attitude, not airs. I think Ganguly too has real sttitude but Dhoni also has class. Not being much of a cricket fan, I hardly take in any of the games. The Indo-Pak match was the first I have watched in the TT series. And I was completely bowled over by Dhoni. He is just sooo composed, smart and incredibly stylish. It's quite hard to believe this is his first series as a captain.
And what does he say when asked about his advice to his teammates? He simply said go, enjoy the game; ``it doesnt matter whether we win or lose''. Imagine! Now that we've won the war, all's fair. But had we lost, I dread to think what would have happened to a captain making such a cool but nationally blasphemous pronouncement.
But for now, it's your moment. Go live it.

Nach Baliye or Sach Beliye?

I dunno if you are watching Nach Baliye 3. I have watched a few episodes of the first Nach Baliye. (Wasnt that the one with Sachin and wife and Rajeshwari Sachdev and husband?) Whatever little I saw of the latest version wasn't up to scratch. The couples are all oh-so-boring.
It' high time someone put out a dictionary meaning of celeb for the Indian audience. Does celeb mean anyone who acts and/or anyone who is in the news for whatever reason? How else do you justify Kashmera Shah and Rakhi Sawant, who has even featured on Koffee with Karan, I'm told. The dynamics of TRPs!
Big money obviously rides on this show which prods terrible dancers to rehearse for up to 12 hours. But what really jars is the use of a petty squabble among the participants to push up the viewership. The promos featured Rakhi and Kashmera bitching about one another. Why should their personal war get such prominence on a dance show?!
All reality shows have devalued their own USPs. They are taking the easiest way out by peddling Bollywood and TV as they sell. The two will be milked in whichever fashion and to the extent affordable by the producers. Thus, you have stars and starlets being feted as guest judges on singing contests even though they are patently there to sell their upcoming films.
The nonsense of SMS voting makes complete mockery not just of talent but also of a gullible voting public which spends money to `save' a contestant. So, is it all about who has more money to spare? At Rs 5-7 an SMS (so I have heard), it's a joke to think people actually vote so that the channel, producers, telecom companies and the contestants benefit. Does any `voter' give it a thought?
Indeed, TV sets new standards every day. News channels, the only saving grace till three years ago, trivialise shamelessly. One exclusive by the high-brow NDTV some time ago had some police official outside his office caught on camera saying, ``We are looking into the case,'' `It wont be right to comment at this juncture,'' ``We will explore all possibilities.'' The reporter excitedly repeated this in indirect speech ad nauseaum even as a red strip running `EXCLUSIVE' streamed all through the path-breaking item. Et tu?
Trivialisation is one thing. But exploitation and debasement of standards cannot be condoned. Our lives are anyway dictated by the standards set by the celeb set. They may soon mimic their onscreen depravation. Draw the line somewhere, guys.

Life in a zoo!!

Hi.. apologise for being away for sooo long. I have recently shifted to a place that, for a pucca Mumbaikar like me, can be mildly termed as eye-popping.
The place is actually a huge thicket in the middle of which some unlikely structures have cropped up and people like us appear to have encroached, just the way slums have the city. Except that ours is a legit encroachment. We were much-sought-after inhabitants of this tree-festooned marshland.
On declaring my intention to move here, I received commiserating calls from the outside world asking me if it was indeed necessary, to beware of snakes and tiger and whatever else is at large here. The inside world--people who live here-- had lots of practical advice such as keep a light on at the porch, dont walk in the dark; many offered gems of experential wisdom such as snakes can be smelt and poisonous snakes have different-looking hoods. All I had to do was to first figure what is a normal-looking hood, and when said snake materialises, request him to please bare his fangs and hoods for me to get a measure of his poison levels.
The first two weeks were spent amiably but soon enough, I came to imbibe the true meaning of community living. Hubby and I were on a walk with friend when he said casually, ``Ah, there is a snake nearby.'' Nobody seemed to have heard. When I asked him how he knew, he said, ``They emit a peculiar smell.'' Next, the birds fluttered restlessly and raised a din. Said knowledgeable H, ``That's a surefire sign. The birds always do this when a snake is around.'' The friends nodded and walked on. I seemed to be the only one blessed with the insight that snakes could bite and the bite could kill. A thin, small branch-like thing emerged on a side street just then. It was an apology of a snake and was actually being harassed by all the birds who kept hovering over him to get him out of their reach, probably to protect their nests.
I was rooted at my first sighting of a free snake. And not impressed. No self-respecting snake would be so tiny and allow himself to be dominated like this. Thereafter, having snakes for company became a fortnightly affair.
There is this clan of huge-looking cows and her brood in our multi-species community. The cows refuse to budge when you ask. I am positive they have been indoctrinated by animal rights activists that they have the priority in this jungle at least, if not in the urban jungle.
One fine morning, my domestic help screamed for me outside the balcony. A huge cow parked right outside my front door was blocking her path. She heckled the Thing from about half a km away while I peeped through the peep-hole, gingerly opened the door a bit, gently booed her tail (the part I could see). When I got no response (ditto maid), I got brave, pushed the door wider and addressed the face. Thing kept her eyes firmly ahead, refusing to so much as blink in my direction. Clearly someone with a huge sense of self-worth, she must have been told to sock it to 'em humans when she got the chance. The maid had to be told to go home. Needless to say, I swept and swabbed and washed.
My door has served as resting place for many a deprived soul. While coming home lost in thought one day, reality struck in the form of raucous barking outside my home. A she-dog (`bitches' has acquired a terrible connotation) and her litter of six pups had sealed all entry points in case I thought I could squeeze in through half-an-inch at the porch. As I stood transfixed, the mother took that as a challenge and stepped forward threateningly, scaling up the barks. I retracted, took refuge at a friend's place and came back only when she agreed to escort me and play martyr by going first.
The windows are not spared either. One morning, Hubby jumped out of bed, began shutting all windows frantically. The hurricane speed got me foxed. ``A family of monkeys is frolicking outside. Stay in,'' he ordered grandly. I scoffed and grumbled about paranoia being the bane of good sleep. As I rubbed my eyes and wobbled towards the balcony, he yelled, `Don't open it, they are right there.'' What! Monkeys in my balcony! Get real, I said. At the same time, I knew better than to test the waters. Anyway, a peep through the glass bore out the truth. Three tiny fellas with mom and dad were on their daily outing, hopping from branch to branch, tree to tree and occasionally landing in my neighbour's balcony two floors above so that they don't feel left out. All the while, they communicated their joy loudly to one another, my palpitations providing the perfect beat to every shrill shriek.
The mother of all lessons in community living happened last week. A security guy banged on the door, and, darting sharp looks at someone 90 degrees away, told me to keep the door open. ``There is a snake on the stairway. In case he comes near me, I need a place to escape.'' Huh? A snake right in the building? Sure, have a look, he said. I did. It was a big, grey-brown beauty, sprawled leisurely across all steps.
How can I keep the door open when a snake is around, I hollered. Rather, you should tell me NOT to keep the door open, I said indignantly. A friend who had come visiting, dutifully jumped on the divan and stayed put. The security guy assured me the snake wont come in. ``I'll make sure,'' he said. He got into action with a bucket of phenyl and water which he threw at the fellow. The scales lazily uncoiled, the guy ran and I did not wait to watch. It landed right outside my hall, climbed up a tree and dangled precariously close to my balcony, which has slats for it to come in uninivited. Content at having got him out of the stairway, the security man left. ``There is no point removing him from the tree; where will I put him? The place is full of snakes anyway,'' he shrugged philosophically and walked off.
The friend, who could not stop raving about the beauty of my place of residence, diplomatically kept mum, and fled at first opportunity.
A week later, my neighbour who leaves home at 5.30 am everyday, told me the snake has been residing in the meter room and comes out for a morning and evening stroll. She is also sure it's poisonous.
My sister has one sweet remark to make about my community living programme: ``Congrats! You're finally living where you belong: the zoo.'' And I still havent told her about the baby lizards, rats and squirrels who live off my kitchen. They're nothing to complain about.

Please check your link (and facts), you!

Someone has posted a comment on my blog asking me to check out a link about some `con artist'. The link leads to a general page on a blog and has nothing at all as promised on the `con artist'. Since the person has chosen to remain anonymous (Honestly, I am a bit tired of these anonymous comments. Fellas, if you don't have the guts to be yourself, why exist?), will s/he kindly elaborate what this was all about?

And may I add that my dear comment-er, you may be prone to believing the worst of everybody. So please suit yourself; but kindly leave my impressions alone. I don't base my opinions on hearsay or something someone once said. If you are a good reporter, you too will wait till you get the other side.

At the end of the day, if you seriously plan to convert me, at least show me your face, sweetie! I just might believe you more than myself :-)

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.

--------------------------
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.