Stop the Bhopal spam

People who have been spamming each others mails sending petitions to sign to ensure that the ‘guilty’ in the Bhopal gas tragedy are brought to justice could do well to read an article in the foreign section of the Asian Age edition dated June 18.
It is about how several oil disasters of the type that has happened in the Gulf of Mexico are a weekly occurrence in the Niger Delta, an oil-rich swathe of land that allows both Nigeria and Niger to make tons of money while keeping the populace grounded in eye-popping poverty.
The big energy companies that operate in this area almost without fail manage to get away whenever there is a large oil spill or pipeline puncture, the types that kill almost 200 to 500 on an average. On rare occasions local engineers are hauled up and the case given a quite burial. Predominantly the spill/leak/puncture is blamed on the militants of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MRND) and the energy companies as well as the provincial and national government escape any liability.

The point here is that Nigeria or Niger aren’t important nations in the world scheme of things to go around fixing liability on big American and European companies. These are impoverished nations that are ruled by an elite class that knows that it is these companies that can help them steal from the resources of the land. If the energy companies are frightened away, then the oil remains underground and so does the loot that it could spawn.

The problem here in India is that a dreamy nation has anointed itself an important cog in the worldly wheel and so various commentators and analysts cutting across media houses and political affiliations are demanding that Warren Anderson be hauled back to India to stand trial for the Bhopal tragedy.

However are we in a position to frighten away the scores of companies who come to India to take advantage of its corrupt legal system and polity?

Is the political class ready to give away its divine right to loot? I don’t think so. Let me give an example. Former chief minister and Gandhi loyalist Arjun Singh is being hauled over the coals by his own partymen- only to eager to save Rajiv Gandhi- for letting Anderson go. What is the ailing Singh’s response?

Nothing. Why? Because he knows back home there are children who want to cling on to the political legacy he built. There are children who want to be part of the Congress so that they remain in the ruling elite. There are children who want to continue to gnaw away at the political flesh bitten off by their father.

Under these circumstances, it is best for Singh to keep shut, take the shit that is being thrown at him, so that his progeny continue to smell roses.

In such a situation, with such a ruling class, do you really think we have the required courage to take on large business interests centred in the US and Europe? I don’t think so.
So let us accept that we aren’t all that important a nation- just like Niger and Nigeria- and let us get on with our lives and stop spamming each others mail boxes.

A nation full of gas need not be so worked up over a simple leak.

welcome the khushboo of free thought: kudos SC

It is tough for anyone to have enough faith in the judiciary these days but the Supreme Court’s verdict on Wednesday on the assortment of cases against one time south siren Khushboo is a great one. The apex court has thrown out each and every of the 22 cases filed in various police stations of Tamil Nadu against Khushboo after she told a newsmagazine that she didn’t think pre-marital sex is taboo as long as the parties know what they were getting into and did it with mutual consent and protection. The magazine was carrying out a survey on the sex habits of the youth and it was in this context that Khushboo made the statement.
The apex court’s decision hopefully will be an eye-opener to a veritable army of morality-keepers this nation has, like centipedes during the monsoon, slow, smelly and totally disgusting.

Almost like a routine, after the New Year’s bash in some or the other hotel in some or the other small town with some or the other film starlet, we have these morality keepers coming out of the woodwork to file cases of obscenity against the starlets. Small town magistrates will then issue non-bailable warrants against these starlets as it is probably the only time these magistrates will get to see these starlets and earn a bit of name in their small town surroundings.
It is a win-win situation for everyone from the publicity seeking social activist and magistrate and to the starlet herself. The only loser is a small promise made by the founding fathers of this nation to the people who agreed to be part of it—the promise of freedom of thought and expression.

While someone like Khushboo gets pilloried for saying something perfectly sane, these same morality-keepers are nowhere in sight when shooting mouth syndrome (SMS) afflicted gentlemen like Baba Ramdev or Sri Sri Ravi Shankar or an army of chaps in the All Indian Muslim Personal Law Board come up with a gem.

Listen to the latest. An ayatollah from Iran –Kazim Sedhigi is his name- believes the increasing tendency of women to expose their cleavages is causing all the earthquakes in the world. If the genius ayatollah – I wonder if he got the degree on a fake marksheet- was right this time, then earthquake relief material should be a permanent fixture aboard every flight that Pamela Anderson takes.

Ramdev of course had a problem when the courts repealed the abominable Section 377 that had been used all these years to make homosexuals in this country readymade fodder for extortion by cops who without ever looking into the mirror believed that homosexuals are first rate signs of moral turpitude on an epic scale.

Now I have a few friends who are gay and have found them to be far better than us heterosexuals in many ways. The best part about them is a total negation of all things religious. In a nation like India, there can’t be a better start for any individual than by letting go off the religion that provides the sunshine that allows gentlemen like those mentioned above to make hay.

Hope in the coming years our courts come down so heavily on such self-styled morality keepers that it opens up this nation into an era when the only thing that would be a crime would be to have a closed mind.

death, IPL, naxals, corruption, confusedsystem,

I am a bit confused about the naxal problem in this country. Just when you think that these are people who want to forcibly take for the tribals and other deprived communities what is rightfully theirs, you come across news that the naxals played willing accomplices to scum like Madhu Koda in Jharkhand.

Then you come across news that the Dantewada massacre- where 75 CRPF jawans were killed- was carried out by local tribals led by armed naxal members. This kind of hatred among the tribals for the uniformed soldiers of the law makes you think again about whether naxals are actually the bad men in the drama or whether it is the system that needs to be buried for eternity.

Or are the naxals just a force that is following nature’s principle of how it abhors a vacuum. That when a system is well and truly over, or whose death certificate is about to be signed, another one will rush to replace it. Probably as we see the death of parliamentary, free, multi-party democracy, we are looking at the advent of parliament-free, single party autocracy of a deep red hue.

Sometimes you feel sad about it. After all no system that does not allow the natural rules of competition can ever be a just one. So expecting the naxals to come up with a system where everyone gets a chance is a very faint hope.

But then you come across the IPL. And every notion of what is right, who is not, whether we really need to save this system, whether the naxals are terrorists, and a huge number of similar questions seem more confusing than ever.

Why? Well now we know that the daughter of our civil aviation minister can get a flight taken off public service, get it privately chartered all over one telephone call. This at a time when volcanic ash from distant Iceland has thrown air traffic haywire. Does Praful Patel have to resign? No he needn’t.

In a year when farmers in our country are killing themselves- more so in our agriculture minister’s home state- we come to know that the minister- himself head of the BCCI- also has a daughter- an MP- whose husband has several fingers in the IPL pie. Does the minister have to put in his papers? Not really.

A minister mentors the Kochi team and then sets out the bribe as sweat equity for his girlfriend. Did he have to resign? Yes but then Shashi Tharoor is no Praful Patel or Sharad Pawar so he gets the deserved kick on his mundu-ed posterior.

At a time when recession is rife in the country, food inflation is at its worst in several years, thousands of crores are being pumped into a cricket tournament which looked fishy from day one. Film stars who haven’t had a hit to their names or business investments in years suddenly appear out of the woodwork to own teams. Most of the money is channeled through tax havens and by companies whose dealings are top secret. Late night parties after the games are full of foreigners who might be models, tourist visa-holding pretty things or former Soviet bloc prostitutes. The cricketers, the young ones, look lustful in the pictures papers are publishing of these post-game parties so probably the third option might be the correct one.

Now an Income Tax report says some senior cricketers might have forced the younger ones to fix the games. Does it make any difference? No almost every game of the tournament is a sell-out. At bars, in trains, offices and malls, the average Indian is gripped by IPL mania.

IPL is probably a reflection of our national system. Corrupt, moneyed for a few, fixed, aspirational, glamorous in parts, and almost wholly without checks and balances. But still revered by a populace too lazy or too indifferent to change it.

Someone the other day suggested that the IPL should be better off repackaged with the skeleton being that of the Ranji trophy set up. Industrial houses bidding for state teams, some of the smaller states merging into one unified team, foreigners as before, compulsory ploughing back of some money into the sports system in the state etc etc.

So do we suggest just another radical makeover for our national system of governance? Probably the red rascals of Dantewada?

Tharoor, please fall on feet of Koda saheb right now

I am very happy today. I was laughed all the way out of a room when I had once suggested that Shashi Tharoor is no better than my favourite politician Madhu Koda. The English-thinking and speaking crowd around me had all agreed universally that I had one drink too many and had lost my senses at the start of the evening itself.

Come on, one of these English thinkers told me, how could I ever compare Tharoor with Koda. Tharoor looks like a film star- something like Mukul Sharma in the Bengali classic Paroma that got all the girls in Jadhavpur University drooling- speaks like one- he could shame Prannoy Roy with the command and ease with which he faces the studio cameras- and lastly looks rich. Or as the Maharashtrian will look at some people and say’ srimant dikhta hai’. The kind of chap who never gets stopped by the ticket-checker at any railway station. If you have any doubt about it, please stand below the indicators at the south-end of Churchgate station and you will see how hordes of KC, Jai Hind and Sydenham collegians- hair gelled, clothes coolly casual and skin Parsi fair- get ignored by the TC who is busy looking for guys who look like me.

Coming back to Koda. Just think of Koda and doff your hat. In dirt poor Jharkhand, the man becomes a chief minister despite being an independent - can you beat that- ends up buying mines in Liberia- did you know where it was- and still manages to get his wife and whole set of cronies elected in the elections that followed his unraveling as one of the most corrupt people this country has ever seen. And everyone from Lalu Prasad Yadav to the Congress- who propped him- and the BJP- which loathes him- know Koda is a phenomenon that will just never cease to amaze. Even the all-conquering naxals of the Jharkhand belt were on his payroll.

Now just take a look at Tharoor. He plays mentor to the Kochi IPL bid. His PR machinery gets the story to the front pages of every paper. Tharror might have thought that Malayalis who consider themselves to be slightly more brainy than the rest of the country- idiots- would have been impressed with the way the non-Malu looking Tharoor was doing so much for the state. But one slight problem. Now when it comes to money and a minister sitting a ‘mentor’s distance’ away from the pile of money – Rs 1500 blooming crores-, did Tharoor or his PR machinery even for a second think that the people wouldn’t have guessed why the neta was in it for?

Then comes the whole news about the Kochi IPL chaps offering a friendly gift of Rs 70 good heavens crores to a woman who is apparently a beautician but according to her Linkedin status is sales manager with Dubai investments and real estate company Tecom (thought Tecom says Pushkar left employment in March 2010). By the way please check out the photograph this lady has pasted on her Linkedin account. Hmmm. I rest my case.

Then comes the news that the lady in question and Tharoor are great friends. Now we know what that word means after all. Haven’t we read film gossip magazines? Rs 70 crores for a friend? Come on, Tharoor that was clumsy. Please leave your ego aside, go to my favourite superstar Madhu Koda and learn some tricks of the trade.

All the fragrances and riffraff of the United Nations have made you a clumsy idiot. Let Koda sir teach you never to think you are more intelligent than the system that tracks you, binds you.

Let Koda sir teach you, - actually all of us Indians- never ever to judge a book by its cover.

Bollywood, Late 80s; IPL, anytime now

Wow, the Indian Premier League stands at exactly the same place where the Hindi film industry stood in the late 1980s. In Bollywood, the old stars had started fading (think Amitabh, Dharmendra and Shatrughan), the big cat producers had started losing their touch (think Manmohan Desai, Yash Chopra and Subhash Ghai) and music composers had gone out of tune (think Laxmikant Pyarelal and RD Burman).
Something was about to give. Films were such a passion that everybody knew it was not going to die out anytime soon. But as the traditional financiers started telling the Chopras and the Ghais and the Kapoors that they genuinely didn’t have money (genuinely they didn’t because think of it would any financier today tell a Karan Johar or Rajkumar Hirani he doesn’t have money for their films with Aamir Khan?), a new phenomenon had started unravelling.
Suddenly a spate of films got announced by producers who no one had ever heard of before. The money was good. The Bollywood buzz was ‘full cash’. These new producers never worked in terms of cheques or banks. They paid in cash. A whole set of new actors were making their way into tinseltown as well.
These producers also came with the promise that when they sunk a bit of money in a film, everything better fall in place like clockwork or else there is something called a telephone, there is something called Dubai and Karachi, there is something called a bhai- a wonderful word that jumped out of the world of relationships from being one that we wanted to one absolutely unwanted- and there is something called ‘thok daalna’.

The cops never realised when the industry got taken over by the cronies of Dawood and when stars went from being regal people to those who danced at the don’s daughter’s wedding.

We have two religions in India. I described one in the paragraphs above. The other is cricket. Then came the IPL. Now IPL is bigger than cricket, the ICC and all the cricketers put together. And probably why some papers have said going by current growth rates, the IPL could soon overtake even the English Premier League.
The problem as in filmdom remains the same. Any place where there is passion and money but no rules, it doesn’t take long for crime to step into the room.

The IPL is a place where there are massive amounts of money, humungous amounts of passion but sadly no rules. Remember how Lalit Modi and Co cancelled the first round of the bidding for the two new IPL teams without assigning any reason?

That is where crime steps in. Can you believe that a team that paid a whopping 400 million dollars for an IPL team from Kochi did not reveal who held 25 percent of its shares? Which world are we living in? That money could have been anybody’s? The Underworld? Arms dealers? Drug peddlers?

Of course Modi has blown the lid on what is going on and Congress poster boy and bogus Malu Shashi Tharoor is caught with his pants down. But it is a close shave. Tomorrow when the big stars exit IPL- the Sachins, Kumbles, Dravids, Gangulys- when the gigglers like Preity and Shilpa move out, when more teams come in, when IPL becomes bigger than all of ICC combined, like in the late 80s, as it happened in the film industry- far more sinister people might barge into the world of IPL. And some small time cricketers -as it happened in the film industry- would play ball with these sinister forces. And the cops like in the late 80s would be too late to realise when the term underworld and cricket became synonymous.

Shoaib beats Gandhi, Nehru, India. Hats off man

So finally the Shonia (Shoaib-Sania for the uninitiated) drama is over. Sania can wed Shoaib without any hurdles now that Ms Ayesha Siddiqui is out of the way. Alls well that ends well you can say.

But wait a minute. Has anyone any clue what a bloody trailblazer Shoaib is? Any clue how this man has rubbed the nose of all our founding fathers in the dirt in such a sweet way that I’m sure up there in the skies, people like Gandhi and Patel and Nehru and the likes might be looking for a good scrub.

What is the connection, you’re asking me? Well you see when these chaps made this nation, they said that let the damn thing be equal and impartial to all. They said that be it man or woman, let the damn nation give each one equality in going after their dreams.

Now Nehru was so good with it that he had just one kid- a daughter and this almost a century ago- ensured that she got a good education and when it came to sharing the spoils of the political loot, the man said my daughter Priyadarshini shall stand next to none for her due.

Our Constitution maker Dr Ambedkar too was a liberal man who said that laws have to be such that women get the last penny that is due to them, tradition be damned. So we came up with laws which gave women equal inheritance, equal rights to divorce, marry, now they can even be natural guardians in case they are single parents.

So far so good. Of course you might think that the ground reality is different. I agree, it is. But only when we have ideal laws that we can strive towards an ideal society one day. If the laws are crooked, that is the end of the journey actually. So let us doff our hats to people like Dr Ambedkar and whole set of visionaries who said let us take the tough road but let us build a country which will be as good as any other when it comes to equality for all sexes. Actually come to think of the repealing of Section 377 last year is also part of that same process.

Now if you are wondering where does a small Punjabi-speaking Muslim idiot about to marry a giggly Hyderabadi Muslim idiot come into the picture crowded by these greats, I’ll come straight to the point.

Shoaib marries Ayesha. Then we hear nothing more about it. Two years later Shoaib wants to marry Sania Mirza. Now the Siddiquis- Ayesha’s family- cry foul and launch a media blitz that would have made Shoaib wish he were in Taliban’s Afghanistan where there are no papers to TV channels.

Semen-stained wedding dress, telephonic nikahnama, fat woman allegations, photo wedding and a hundred tamashas later, Shoaib was told by some very intelligent and prominent Muslims from Hyderabad that his game is definitely over. It is best he admit to the wedding with Ayesha since that is the only way out. Then they threw in the hukum ka ikka. (I think it is called in gambling parlance). They asked him to take a look at the laws of his religion. Hahaha.

So smilingly Shoaib came out to face the cameras, agreed that he had indeed married Ayesha- a bloody stupid mistake- and that he was ready to divorce her. So he picked up the phone, spat talaq three times into it and got his neck out of the first wedding that he was denying till the other day.
Everyone clapped, Sania giggled, prominent and intelligent Muslims in Hyderabad let out a sigh of relief that the religion did not get a bad name (?) and all moved on.

The only question that remains is that six decades after we started this journey, a woman in India can be married, used, impregnated, and divorced at the will of a man simply because his religion allows him to do that. And parties that ask for a common civil code are communal mind you.

There are hundreds of such women at our railway stations who have been thrown out because the man either takes a fancy for another woman or because the first wife has lost it between the sheets in bed or quite simply because she cannot give birth to offspring. Talaq, talaq, talaq, thank you ma’am. No questions asked.

I never thought Shoaib Malik was any good at cricket. But with this drama, my respect for him has gone up several notches. Taking on the likes of Gandhi, Nehru, Sardar and coming out trumps this way is just too good. Shoaib just remember that there are other women in this wretched nation as well waiting to be ensnared and enslaved. So when you had you fill you know what exactly to do. Just read the books, brother.

the WAG circus awaits its Lalit Modi

The WAG era in cricket is about to dawn. A small beginning has been made. Today some papers carried a report on how Michael Clarke’s ex-girlfriend Lara Bingle is busy tying up a new romance with ex-New Zealand wicketkeeper Adam Parore. The speculation is that they would arrive together at former Kiwi cricket all-rounder Chris Cairns’ wedding. Going by the bitter-sweet relationship the small island shares with its gigantic trans-Tasman neighbour Australia, the Aussie team is also expected to be present at the wedding which would obviously mean Clarke and Bingle would at least be in the same frame long enough for the paparazzi to splash it all over the papers.

Now what do we know about cricket? That anything that ever begins in this game anywhere reaches fever pitch only when it hits Indian shores. We Indians are to cricket what say the US is to world politics.
You need proof. Well Rose Bowl might be where the world first saw Twenty20 cricket or Adam Sanford might have pumped in millions to get the version going in the West Indies, it still took the Indian Premier League to take it to a level where the money is at par with that of Major League Baseball or the NBA. Well I’m not saying this, several front-paged articles in the Times of India have.

Coming back the Wives and Girlfriends (WAG) club, just imagine what it would be like once India hijacks the concept and enslaves everyone to its juicy tidbits like we have done with the IPL.

I really don’t see any reason why. We have a glut of television channels so obsessed with TRPs and eyeballs that they have forsaken normal principles of journalism almost a decade ago.

Secondly we have a huge film industry but too few names who make it to the big bad world of eyeball journalism. It is the same Kareenas, Katrinas, Asins, Vidyas, Priyankas and the like. Now the WAG concept gives all these girls competition. Just about anybody willing to play the game can grab eyeballs. She who wants to go the farthest will go the farthest.

Thirdly the county is opening up like never before. Not in the sense our founding fathers would have liked it to but in the way that every one wants to have his share of the meat in a nation becoming a dog-eat-dog circus by the minute. For proof I will present to you the girls who went about ‘displaying’ their ‘assets’ so that Rahul Mahajan would marry one of them. These girls have balls not in the literal but figurative sense mind you. They know there is a world of princes out there and if that means you have to kiss the toad for an entry pass, so be it. Now these are the kind of girls- small town, big dreams, bigger talk, massive drive- who will readily take part in the WAG circus in India.

Fourthly there is a spate of movie stars who get desperate once the limelight starts going away from them, in India generally when they start hitting thirty and when they start appearing in ponytails like Sridevi and Madhuri. These limelight-delaying women are going to be dynamite. Imagine a Sunset Boulevard sort of heroin suddenly all over the place because her bikini-clad picture is outed on the net with say a Yuvraj.
Fifthly have you seen the pictures Mid-day splashes about the post-match IPL parties? Have you seen the young turks like Suresh Raina, Manish Pandey, Virat Kohli and the likes in those pix? We have an army of players now who know what style is, who know it is a sweet jungle full of prey out there, and who know the fame to be had is far more when you wield your charm rather than just the willow.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed as to which television channel makes the first move on it. Whoever does can expect the kind of eyeballs that even 26/11 live coverage wouldn’t have got them. It is going to be tough making a system out of it. But then even hosting the IPL would have been tough if we had allowed logic to get in the way. Now who would have ever thought that a cricket team from the backwaters of Kochi would start off with a higher valuation in dollar terms than the mighty Chelsea?

We have the tabloids, we the televisions, we have the hunters, and we have the prey. Now who moves first to build the system? India waits for that PR genius who will bring a Yuvi and his private life right into our drawing rooms night after night. And make cricket as irrelevant as ever.