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.

the world's most pointless debate

A childhood passion- of listening to music- has been revived now that I have been gifted an MP3 player. Some great songs in the player as well.
And as I listen to them, I realise why it is so futile to get into any debate on who is the greatest when it comes to artistic and individual pursuits.
Let me give an example. For years we have been mesmerized by the orchestration of the songs composed by AR Rahman. Take some time out to listen to Laxmikant Pyarelal?
I personally believe with the exception of an Illaiyaraaja, no composer has tried to include so many instruments into the same song as LP. And the instruments vary from the Indian ones like the dafli or dholak to the very-soulless sounding synthesizers of that time. And more often than not, LP will manage to take you over the moon as these instruments play out one by one or sometimes in a cacophony backed by poor technology (think Hero).
Which brings me to my point. Genius and its exhibition remains the same, time and technology change and in the process making the exhibition of genius look better with every new installment.
Simply put, an AR Rahman will look better than an Illaiyaraaja or an LP because of the better technology that is at the disposal of Rahman. The brain that sorts out the different sounds, aligns and arranges them, will remain the same for every genius. Listen to SD Burman for that matter. He too tries small riffs with obscure instruments and pulls it off brilliantly. But the quality of the sound is what is a problem. Nothing that the legend could have done about since that is in the realm of technology.

But listen to the purity of the instrumentation when it comes to Rahman. Because the maestro is as much adept with sound technology as he is with music itself. But that does not make him a bigger genius than the names I have mentioned above.

A friend, who apart from holding a doctorate in astrophysics is also a fairly good Mohan veena player, likes to play futurologist. Of all the things that he used to come up with from what is a very fertile brain, the most wonderful was asking us to listen to the silence. It always has a rhythm.

Actually try it. Choose a noisy place like a railway station or a traffic junction. Sit there just listening to what will appear to be a cacophony of disparate sounds. Slowly you will realise that each of these sounds- horns, tyres, vehicles- actually keep to a fixed time. Same with trains crossing over tracks that have slight fractures.

The point is that someday technology- computers, sequencers, synthesizers whatever- would be capable of deciphering the timing and pattern of disparate sounds. Or be able to pick up tunes in the rustling of leaves, howling of wind and chirping of birds.

Then someone will come in with the ability to use these patterns to create music and the tunes to make songs. And as is the case with every genius, we will be mesmerized. Since the medium of communication would be better than what it is today, this man would be called a genius and phenomenon many times over.But the question is would he be better than Rahman? No because Rahman is doing much the same. Trying new sounds and tunes as much as technology allows him to. Something that SD Burman, Salil Chowdhury, LP, Illaiyaraaja did before him.

As I said, genius remains constant, times and technology change. We might think Sachin is better than Bradman because of the better reach of the media, but just imagine if we saw an inning of the Don with a curtain of cameras all around as is the case with the IPL? Would we still say the same? It is always pointless this debate.

Bharat Ratna for Madam Mayawati

My suggestion to give Mayawati a Bharat Ratna has not been liked by the miniscule number of people who read it. Now let me explain why I think no lady ever in the history of this great nation deserved it more.

Let me tell you a story of a remarkable man born in 1921 into an unremarkable family in Equatorial Africa, then colonized by the French.

Bokassa of Central Africa was born to village chief Mindogon Mgboundoulou in a small part of Central Africa. The French killed his father when he refused to pay the taxes that his village had run up under the tyrannical French system. Bokassa went to a small Christian mission school in his village and soon excelled in his studies especially in French grammar, developing a love for a book written by grammarian Jean Bedel. His white teachers at the mission lovingly started calling him Jean Bedel Bokassa.

The man joined the army, took part in missions, earned the praise of the French and his native Africans and along with some cousins made himself handy to the then president of the Central African Republic, one unremarkable Dacko. In 1966 he took over as president when Dacko was abroad. The French thought that a man so steeped in the love of France should not be much of a problem so did not interfere. Bokassa continued to be President till 1976. He had made himself the President for Life.

He married 17 times and had 50-odd children from them. His reign was so brutal that once when impoverished school children protested against an expensive set of uniforms they had to purchase from one of his wives’ companies, he personally led a battalion on the road to cane the kids. A whopping 103 children died, their brains lying on the streets which had turned a shade of deep crimson. In his decade long rule, it is estimated that almost a million people were killed and very brutally at that since he loved each and every death to be a warning to future dissidents.

In 1977, knowing that the French were loving his gifts of diamonds for its president and his wife and uranium for its nuclear reactors, Bokassa declared that he was a incarnation of the French general Napolean and so was taking over as king of the Central African Republic (CAR) which would henceforth be called the Great Central African Empire.

So excessive was the coronation ceremony that France had to send troops and aircrafts to protect the nation because every CAR soldier was on leave getting himself fitted into costumes like the ones worn during the coronation of Napoleon. Bokassa used all the gold reserves available in his country to make a massive eagle-headed throne of almost 20 tonnes of solid gold.

His Napoleonic attire took away the entire budget for the capital city Bangui for over a year what with its real diamonds and gold weaves. The coronation ceremony, a huge affair with hundreds of limousines, chariots, people in Napoleonic costumes, diamond tiaras, crowns of gold cost the CAR almost five years of every penny the nation earned and got as grants from countries like the French. Every single penny that the republic had taken as loans from countries far and wide was used up in a single day. Statues of Bokassa were ordered across every village in CAR. People were asked to work at parks that would recreate his greatness and how the Lord- Bokassa was a devout Catholic- ensured that the great Napoleon was re-born in the Great Central African Empire.

Kids were dying by the thousands every month but parents were not allowed to take leave from working at the huge parks and farms Bokassa had created and named after himself. All he told the people was to ensure that the Europeans would one day leave their nations and come to become subjects of the great Central African Empire. A mixture of religion, propaganda, and amazing sense of ego propelled Bokassa till the French could take it no more and invaded the nation and forced Bokassa to run away from the country.

He died in 1996 in the CAR- he was allowed to return since- but not before claiming to foreign newspapers that he was the 13th apostle and Pope John Paul II was regularly asking his advise on matters of religion.

Coming back to Mayawati, Bokassa did all this in a nation the size of Texas with a population less than that from Churchgate to Andheri. It is such a sorry nation that the United Nations Development Index pegged it as the 179th poorest nation in a list of 182.

But Mayawati is doing a bit of Bokassa in Uttar Pradesh, and I really don’t think we have become a banana republic as yet.

Our judicial system is still fairly good, we do have elections, the parliament is not full of crooks, and one still can’t get away with murder in most cases than some.

In such a scenario, if Mayawati can manage to be a chief minister who spent a billion dollars on her own statues, and wear mutli-crore garlands in massive maha-rallies which are just sober versions of Bokassa’s coronation, then I believe the lady deserves the Bharat Ratna. And we should simply shut up and hang our head in shame and allow the lady to be one day crowned as the Queen Empress of India.

Mayawati, thank you for allowing us in

I don’t understand the fuss around Mayawati’s humungous Rs 1000-note mala. Is it because she is anti-Congress that the television channels have gone berserk? Maybe.
The lady is someone who has fought her way up through hardships. Such people along the way build up a sea of slights- real and imagined- so powerful that when they finally get power, they go completely insane in their quest to ‘up yours’ everybody.
But the moot question still remains one of whether the mala was as big a shocker as TV channels are claiming it to be.
Now this lady has spent over 2 billion dollars making monuments to who was at the end of the day a frustrated lost politician by the name Kanshiram. The case is in the Supreme Court but justice would be if people – and mind you they should be Dalits since they have gone most hungry in Maya’s reign- come forward in hordes armed with pickaxes and demolish each one of these monuments, parks and statues. Has that happened? No.

Praful Patel’s name is being thrown about as one of the bidders for the two new quarter-billion dollar IPL teams that are expected to join the IPL circus next year. Have their been any protests? Even despite the fact that his constituency Gondia in Maharashtra is one of the most acute hit by misery and is in the middle of the natural menace of drought and man-made menace of Maoism.

Kripashankar Singh apparently has two Pan Cards. There were stories of how some sundry police constable in Navi Mumbai has the power of attorney of several houses he owns in the city. These are not secrets I’m telling you. Just rehashing stories that have appeared in newspapers like Mumbai Mirror, Times of India, and Asian Age etc. Is Kripashankar Singh hauled over the coals? No. Last I know he has made his chair as Mumbai Congress head even more powerful thanks to the successful visits of Sonia and Rahul to the city.

Senior journalist MJ Akbar once wrote a fabulous cover page story in the Covert magazine headlined ‘The fabulous wealth of Pwar saheb’. Did it make one bit of a difference to Pawar? Did the people of Maharashtra burn his effigies or ensure that he lost his deposit? Not that I know of. From what I hear, Pawar is enjoying the ‘fully made to order but don’t tell the public’ tournament of cricket called IPL. Price rise? I’m sorry but that is surely not Pawar saheb’s main area of concern at this point of time.

Then there are the Pramod Mahajans, Mulayam Singh Yadavs, Jayalalithas, Karunanidhis. What has happened to them? Nothing much except that they are slowly moving into the zone of political legends once reserved for the saintly likes of Gandhi, Sardar, Babasaheb Ambedkar and JP.

I can give you a hundred more such examples. Madhu Koda, Shibu Soren and the likes. But what difference does it make.

So let us not waste a lot of time with Maya’s mala. Let us collectively promise ourselves that we will not be shocked by whatever expose’ any element of the media comes up with.
Corruption no longer shocks us. For any politician it is just a speed-breaker on the road, never the end of the journey.

Till then let us enjoy the magnificent spectacle of Mayawati trying to pull off a Jean Bedel Bokasa not in the impoverished lawless governance-neutral Central African Republic but in the world’s largest, most populous, wiaitng-in-line-to-be-superpower India.

No woman has ever tried anything this spectacular anywhere in the world ever I believe. Let us just be grateful we are part of the world that Mayawati chose to show up in. Probably no one deserves a Bharat Rtana more at this point of time that the lady of Lucknow.

The oil tank terror plot- the bad, ugly and the good

Every time I used to travel by taxi along the Indian Oil storage tanks close to Antop Hill, I used to think what would happen if one of them caught fire accidentally. The slums around are hardly a few hundred metres away and they are so closely set that it would be a disaster so unimaginable that almost every time the thought came to me, the monstrosity of it forced me involuntarily to abort even the thought. I would just say a muted ‘touchwood’ and move along.
Yesterday the horror was at the doorstep. The Anti-Terrorism Squad arrested two youngsters for planning to set on fire similar oil storage tanks at Sewri. Mind you the Sewri ones are bigger than the tanks at Antop Hill, are very close to the Harbour line railway station and a fire would have also shut most parts of the Mumbai port bordering Wadala-Sewri-Cotton Green.

Now what do you to say to such kind of madness? My Muslim friends keep telling me the religion is one of peace. I think it is about peace by a long mile but the community has not done enough to get the message across. Every time something like this happens, murmurs soon turn into full-fledged allegations that the Hindu police was being vengeful.

Idiotic journalists- I’m one so I know the kind- will soon publish stories of how the poor lad just spoke of work and his wives and never uttered anything about terrorism. As if a terrorist calls a seminar for the neighbourhood in order to announce he is now a Wahhabi and is adamant on blowing up anything that he did not see in Saudi Arabia around the time when the religion was set up. Since the Arabs of that time had no clue about oil and would have remained wretched goat and camel drivers if the Americans didn’t find them their oil, so the oil storage tanks have to go.

The problem is terrorism is now a monster that just cannot be tamed by normal laws. The time for TADA and the like are now. I’m sorry if I sound so harsh and dejected but I for one have always believed this country was set up on great ideals. The ideals which are mentioned prominently on a rusting iron board planted illegally in a garden outside the RCF headquarters Priyardarshini- on the eastern express highway, some distance from Suman Nagar.

On the board is a giant portrait of Babasaheb Ambedkar and the words- in Marathi- that the society he stands for is one of equal opportunities and justice for all, brotherhood among all. More intelligent words have not been spoken, I think.

In that scenario, accept my harsh tone when I say the Islam you care to create here is not welcome. The Islam that talks of brotherhood is welcome, but as is the case of any religion worth following, the obeisance has to be a personal affair. Politics, statesmanship, governance, administration, the commonality of community have nothing to do with the true following of a religion. So if you think all women must be in burqas and the country has to go from being one of kafirs to believers, then sorry, but I think the security apparatus of this nation needs to take you out. If it is without mercy, then just your luck.

If that is sounding morose, let me cheer you up with a small bit of conversation that I overheard when I went for my morning tea at the roadside tea stall near my house.

The conversation centered around four youth particularly unhappy with the events of yesterday and the arrest of the two youths for the aborted oil storage tank terror act.

The words ‘madar#$%d’ and its behen and beti varieties punctuated almost every word. I sneaked in closer to the group to hear what they were talking about. After all, two of the youngsters were wearing pathanis with the increasingly mandatory looking skull cap.

Then I managed to catch the direction of their talks completely. One of them lighted his cigarette in style and spat out ‘ab yeh hum logo ko batayenge Khhwaja saheb kaise Musalman the?”

The topic of discussion of course was the one that has divided the Muslim community in the city right through the middle. A Wahhabi preacher during a sermon in Ghatkopar last month ranted against the predominance of dargahs in the process of worship for a large part of the community in India. Just take a look. Islam in the city- even in its film versions- is predominantly about Haji Ali, Mahim Dargah, Haji Malang in Kalyan, one big one whose name I forget in Antop Hill and some smaller ones atop hills in Kurla.

Now this Wahhabi gentleman who spoke at Ghatkopar- following the strict doctrine laid down by another medieval Arab gentleman by the name Abdul Wahab- had uttered a lot of nonsense and violence about what best to do with the dargah of Khwaja Garib Nawaz – or KGN- at Ajmer. The original Wahab maintained that all mausoleums, dargahs etc are to be razed to the ground since God alone is to be worshipped. Note how in August 2005 the Islamic world was stunned when Saudi Arabi- long ruled by Kings who toe the Wahhabi line- agreed to the demolition of Prophet Mohammad’ house in Mecca to make way for the Jabal Omar Scheme, a project consisting of a parking lot, two 50-story hotel towers and seven 35-storey apartment blocks.

Coming back to my original line of thought- where I had promised you I will give you cheerful news- the boys who were having the discussion near the tea stall had come on bikes with KGN emblazoned in bright green on the piece of fibre protecting the headlights of their bikes, The youngster who spoke last- while lighting his cigarette- was livid that gentlemen like the kind who follow Wahab will now teach them- the boys that is- probably Barelvis but most definitely followers of the pious Khwaja of Ajmer- what or who is a true Muslim.

What is the cheerful part? Well Wahhabism and its ultra-orthodox interpretation of Islam further powered by billions of dollars for its propagation by the Saudi royal family, is spreading among Muslims like wildfire. However with Wahhabis now aiming their guns at fellow Muslims as well- the kind of ‘deviants’ who go to dargahs and sing qawwalis- apart from confirmed kafirs like Hindus, Jews and Christians, the fight is going to get interesting. The youngsters like the group at the tea stall are the ones who will help solve the riddle for us. When the monolith of militant Islam is broken, it will pave the way for the eventual defeat of the Islamists and a return to democratic values of peace and brotherhood among people and equality among sexes. Something I believe the original Islam propagated.

The Buddha and the Women's Bill

So I am in a huge minority here with no one for company except Lalu, Mulayam and Sharad- the three Yadavs. Just about everyone I speak to about the Women’s Reservation Bill is all in support of the historic piece of legislation.

However let me start of with a story I have heard but have no clue whether it is true or not.

Gautama Buddha was sitting deep in thought beneath a huge tree in a very forested part of ancient Bihar. Seeing the serenity on his face, a tribal came close to him and waited with folded hands for the Enlightened One to open his eyes and come out of the meditational pause. The One soon did, looked at the tribal and smiled.

The tribal asked the One if he could join him. The One asked why?

Tribal: I find an amazing peace in your presence. I have seen animals walk past you almost in reverence. I fear the animals in the forest that I stay in. I too want that serenity.

The One: Are you happy with your family?

Tribal: Yes I am. I have a wonderful wife who cooks for my children and me. My children love to play with me. I love to bring in food for them from the forest.

Even as the tribal and the Enlightened One were talking, a wild boar sauntered through the thick undergrowth. The tribal, for the first time, saw his concentration break as he eyed the boar and slowly found his arm reaching for the arrows in his quiver. Buddha smiled.

The One: You like hunting?

Tribal: Yes. I love to see the joy with which my children crowd around the pot when my wife is cooking the meat.

The One: But that boar might also be out to replenish itself so that it can feed the piglets back in its cave? What about them?

The tribal started thinking and said: But what about my children? Don’t they need food?

The One: Do you grow trees?
Tribal: No

The One: Do you cut them?
Tribal: Yes

The One: Do trees bear fruits?
Tribal: Yes

The One: Do your children love fruits?
Tribal: Yes

The One: Then plant trees. Let the trees bear fruits. Eat that. Let the boar live. The lack of ways is not because there is no other way but because of the lack of thought, the lack of search.

The tribal was deeply touched. But he still wanted to go along with the Enlightened One. The Buddha told him that he wills that no one covet anything, desire anything, harm anything, and injure anything.

The One: Would you be able to follow it without hurting your wife and your children dependent on you?

Tribal: No my Lord.

The One: Then you would be unhappy following my law, isn’t it?
Tribal: Yes my Lord.

The One then told the tribal the core of every law that was ever made by powers divine or by humankind.

One: No law that makes another unhappy is ever a just law. Law is for the happiness of everybody. My laws cannot change you but your change can make my laws. That is the essence.

Well coming back to the Women’s Bill. I think the last sentence is what it is all about.
We need to change because the law- the Bill- cannot change us.

Let me give an example:
In a very prosperous industrial town in Jharkhand, an honest, benevolent and hugely successful manager stood for elections against a woman who had got the ticket because her husband was caught taking a bribe to support the ruling party during a vote of confidence in Parliament. Everyone thought the manager- a legend for running a 72000-people strong company superbly for almost half a century- would win hands down. When the results were counted, the manager had been trounced by the largest margin ever for that industrial town. The woman spent the next five years in Parliament never ever having raised any question or taken part in any debate. Russi Mody never stood for elections ever again. Abha Mahato never ever got a ticket again.

In Pune, a bureaucrat who fearlessly fought the land mafia, nipped corruption in the municipality, stood for elections against an old timer, a typical politician if you understand what I mean by that. The result? The bureaucrat lost his deposit. The politician continues to run his constituency and several sports associations he is associated like his personal fiefdom.
Moral of the story: If we vote for the right persons, for the right values, for the right principles, we would never ever need reservations. To say that a particular piece of work can be done best by men or by women is a fallacy. It can only be done best by those who want to do it well. No law can ever change that fundamental truth. If our system remains the way it is, instead of a corrupt Parliament with an overwhelming majority of men, we will have a corrupt Parliament with a third of it women. Is that the difference we seek?

To hell with the Women's Bill

Now that the Women’s Reservation Bill has been passed in the Rajya Sabha, we are left with a feeling of having undone a major part of the wrongs our culture has perpetrated on women. But the moot question is this. Has a top-down approach ever been beneficial to any sector, nation or company?
Let me give an example. What if there was a rule in your firm which said that all directors of the form or the chairperson has to be a woman? Do you think it would make the firm you’re working in a better one?

But if the same rule were to be amended and now the equation would be that thirty percent of all management trainees in your firm would be women, do you believe it would make a more positive impact?

Probably because then, the ladies who join you as management trainees start on an equal footing and from there on whoever reaches the post of director, it has to be through fair competition and hardwork.

What is the point reserving a third of our Parliament- the highest seat of law and governance of our land- for women when the chance to attain it is restricted to such a small number that the whole process looks like a sham.

Some wonderful cartoons in our daily newspapers have summed it up well. All of them have some or the other neta beaming that now he can reward his wives, daughters and bahus with coveted MP election tickets.

Even at the moment, with probably the exception of Sushma Swaraj, Brinda Karat and Maywati, name me one woman who has reached the upper echelons of governance because she is not somebody’s wife, daughter or bahu.

Till internal democracy comes to parties, all this is hogwash and while I completely oppose the reason why Mulayam or Lalu opposed the Bill, I’ll side with them if I had a vote.

Did you hear what Priya Dutt had to say when she came out after filing her nominations for the Lok Sabha elections in 2009? Someone asked her what her priorities would be- a very clichéd question. The answer was betterment of infrastructure, making Mumbai a better place to live, equality for all sexes, blah blah. You could be forgiven if you thought the question was posed at the Miss World competition since the answer was the kind that would have done and bust-and-bum beauty brigade proud.

But what do you know? Priya Dutt won with a record margin and is a second time MP though she can be seen only on the pages of Bombay Times or Midday in parties hosted by cronies.

Come 2014, it will not just be Poonam Mahajan but just about everybody who is a lady in the Munde-Mahajan household who will be getting tickets.

If true democracy has to bring about equality, then our mindsets have to change. The day Irom Sharmila wins from Manipur, or a lady whose name I forgot- I’m also a hypocrite you see- who started a mosque exclusively for women wins, that’s when you can say democracy has come in and has brought equality as its partner. Or Shah Bano or Mahasveta Devi.

No point rejoicing over the Bill when you know every seat in that reserved circle would be taken up by docile biwis and bahus and betis who cling on to regressive families because of the legacies they would inherit some day.

Just go home one day, sit doing nothing, observe your mother multi-task with the dexterity of a Harvard Business School bright spark, and listen carefully to the philosophy that she spouts. And you will find a woman who puts in a lot of work being a wife, a mother, raises kids, reads to be able to converse with her children, tries to acquire a thought process to beat the generation gap with her daughter and does it without much of a fuss. And you will find that probably she is the kind of woman you want in Parliament.

Wikipedia: Stephanie "Stephie" D'Souza, nee Sequeira

Stephanie "Stephie" D'Souza, nee Sequeira (December 26, 1936- September 11, 1998) was a sportsperson who represented India in athletics and women's hockey.

D'Souza was part of the Indian team that won the gold in the 4x100 m relay in the 1954 Asian Games and a bronze in 1958. She won a silver in the 200 m, creating an Asian record in the semifinal, and finished fourth in the 100 m in the latter competition. At one point, she held the national records in 100 m, 200 m, 400 m and 800 m.

She was eliminated in the first round of the 400 m in the 1964 Summer Olympics after finishing sixth in 58.0 seconds. She took part in the 100 yards and 220 yards sprints in the 1958 Commonwealth Games. D'Souza represented India in the first international women's hockey tournament in London in 1953 and captained the side in 1961.

Stephie D'Souza was the first woman to win the Arjuna Award presented by the Government of India. She died in Jamshedpur(Jharkhand) at the age of 61.

Sorry, ma'am. Hockey is dead, you live

Ok so now we all know that India plays a game called Hockey. Also that it is the kind of sport that would make ‘superfit’ players like Yuvraj Singh and Suresh Raina – not to say the other cricketers- throw up in the first five minutes because of the sheer speed. At my office, you would almost believe hockey is our national passion. Inside the train, some college chaps were talking about how India could have played better against Australia. Of course they also added that with India beating Pakistan four-nil, our tournament is over and we have emerged victorious.

I really believe that India will never regain its hockey glory ever again. I hope I am wrong. Let me begin by telling you a small story. Nothing very dramatic.

In a large and reputed school in Jamshedpur, every Saturday groups of students assembled in a well-appointed classroom to take part in what was called ‘the School Quiz Club’.
The routine was that the moderator- a stern and strict teacher by the name Jimmy Munro- would make teams and then play quizmaster.
Jamshedpur had a fairly robust school quizzing scene and so doing well as a team at the Quiz Club meant that you got the chance to represent your school in these events and be the toast of school if you won. The ultimate of course was the Bournvita School Quiz hosted by Derek o Brien and telecast across the country. Incidentally two students from this school- Little Flower School- went on to win the Bournvita School Quiz.

Coming back to the story. As the competition on that Saturday morning started getting close, sir Munro threw in a question. Name the first Indian woman to get an Arjuna Award.

The faces of every participant in that class lit up. Now this was easy. Pat came the answer- PT Usha.

Surprise. Surprise. Wrong answer. It was my turn next. I offered this very long guess and said Shiny Abraham-Wilson. Nope as well.

Someone made a better try and threw in Diana Eduljee. Negative again.

Mr Munro took this long pause, looked at all of us. Smiled. Then dropped his heavy voice for a bit and said, “Do you all have any clue about a lady called Steffi D’Souza?”

The faces were blank. Mr Munro threw in another clue. “Steffi Sequeira?”

The class let out the kind of sigh that could have been heard a mile away. ‘Don’t tell me’, ‘come on’ ‘oh gosh’ rented the dull air in that spacious classroom.

“Ya my friends, we in this country have no idea about anything of our own”, Mr Munro said in a tone that betrayed a bit of arrogance over his white skin and Australian ancestry. Later I realised it was not arrogance, just plain hurt.

Because Mrs Sequeira for years now was our physical training teacher at Little Flower School. Clad in her trademark shirts and knee-length skirt, it was not difficult to guess that she must have done a fair bit of sports in her time.

Some physical problems had made her put on weight but the strength of a sportswoman came to the fore every time she gave us a tight one on our thighs if we made a mistake. Like what cricket commentators would say- when she hit, it stayed hit.

Across the city, young students- me included several times- called her ‘handi’ because of the massive weight that she had put on. She disliked it, sometimes got angry but the students always managed to run away before she could catch hold of any one of them.

She tried starting a hockey league in the city, ran around for it. Forget the league, Little Flower School hockey team itself never got off the ground. Some of the students felt their wrists paining, some threw up and some had the ball cracking into their shins with enough force to put them out of all work for one whole week.
We called hockey a stupid sport. Cricket is the real deal, man, we told each other.

One rainy day, when it was not possible for us to practice our physical training routine outside, we all sat in the school pavilion. Mrs Sequeira- married and having moved from native Pune to Jamshedpur- brought out a hockey stick and a shining white ball from the sports room.

Then she kept the ball on the ground and slowly started caressing the ball with the hockey stick. It was not a performance for any one of us. It was not to show who she was or what she was capable of. It was just trying to snatch a part of the world that for her had gone past.

The caress got quicker, her muscled forearms developing a grid of veins as the seconds ticked by. It must have been less that a minute later when every student sitting cross-legged in that pavilion realised that even their perfect eyesight at that age could not see anything better than the stick shivering into a brown blur and the ball looking like a whirling mass of soft white cotton.

I don’t remember if I saw any tears in her eyes that moment. But some of us had moist eyes that day. A sports legend having to bring out her skill before a set of unworthy students to tell them that in the world she once inhabited, they respected her for her skills is a very sad sight.

Steffi D’ Souza was the first woman to get an Arjuna award. And the only woman who has represented India and probably the only instance in the world of any athlete who has participated in athletics and hockey at Olympics. She captained Indian women’s hockey team for a long time and is still considered the greatest woman hockey player this nation has ever seen. She was called Flying Rani for the massive surge of speed she could generate with the ball and for her sprints.

She passed away in 1998. Hockey died in Jamshedpur and the adjoining Jharkhand towns- the cradle of Indian hockey- almost two decades before that. Ma’am, if you are looking at us from there above, please forgive us. We are sorry.

Taslima, you may be wrong, but you're welcome

So Taslima has done it again. An article of hers in a Kannada daily has caused a riot that has killed two already and injured several more at Shimoga, Karnataka. At the newsroom that I work in, there was quite a lot of discontent over the fact that the government allows a troublemaker like Taslima back into the country time and again despite she being up to no good.

About the troublemaker part, well I agree. After all her writings cause riots so you’d have to give it to her.

But the problem is not as much with her writing as it is about the gradual destruction of a culture we have nourished over the centuries. The ability to be brash about our religions, our ways of praying and our general outlook towards our Gods.

We have been taught that wonderful poem by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar in our schools about how the man who conquered Lanka would be called God, but the powers that made the bridge to Lanka would remain monkeys.
I have not known of any problem that poem has caused anywhere in the country. It still remains in the Hindi textbooks of all ICSE schools in Bihar and Jharkhand.

Kancha Illiah, that cerebrally-gifted bureaucrat turned Dalit ideologue can get any religious Hindu’s blood boiling every time he gives an interview to the Times or any other publication for that matter.

His hatred for Hinduism and everything that it stands for is so acute that you can feel singed when his blood boils and takes the shape of vitriolic words.

But have there been riots ever after any of interviews are published? I don’t think so.

So why poor Taslima. Jut because she writes about a community and religion that since inception did not allow freedom of thought to the individual. A religion where the process of thought-creation was handed over to a cabal of people called mullahs and maulvis who set about decoding Arabic texts to their advantage and ended up building a homogenous mass of non-thinking people who surrender their weapons of reasoning and insight the moment someone utters that what has been written in the holy book must be followed in detail, by rote.

But should that allow us to forget our culture? The one where on Holi people drink to death and then tell jokes that involve everyone from the pantheons of Gods to saints to godmen.

And the same people who have a problem when Taslima writes about that horrible cage called the burqa find it absolutely secular to support MF Hussain when he draws gods and goddesses in the nude.

Creative freedom should be absolute. It is for the individual to control his temper and concentrate on something better. If I tell you that your religion sucks, then you have the right to tell me too that my religion sucks. Once that is out of the way, we can probably sit and agree with each other that both our jobs suck.

That is secularism, my friend, not digging out the wounds of old riots and Satanic Verses and Taslima’s Lajja and disallowing a community to move forward. Because the way forward is the only way we were taught. Let the memories of the past subside, move on to better thoughts, better times.

All that all the saints did over the centuries, good for them. All that we will do, may it be good for us.

Find the bra-burning gal in the Taliban

Some papers have hinted the Pune blasts might be the handiwork of some extreme-right wing Hindu organisations. I don’t know how much of it is true. It could be the old game of ‘when you can’t convince, then confuse’.

We all know the Pune police is grappling in the dark about who could have planted the bomb that ripped through German Bakery. Infact the joke was that a few days after the blasts, its police commissioner was addressing students citywide to take part in the fight against terror under a programme very ambitiously called ‘Operation Mrityunjay’.

I really don’t know what the students are supposed to do here. I’m sure most of the guys the commissioner addressed would love the opportunity of playing ‘terror checkers to female suicide bombers’. Imagine the fun when you have the right to ask women to disrobe to check whether they have strapped anything sinister beneath their clothes. Besides that I have no clue how students can fight against terror.
Because do what you may, I think spotting a terrorist as part of a citywide programme like ‘Operation Mrityunjay’ is a concept as laughable as going out to Afghanistan to find a bra-burning female libber in the Taliban.
A terrorist as far as my finite knowledge tells me is a brainwashed man who willingly builds up prejudices against oneself and one’s religious beliefs by imagining them acutely.
A reverse of the same kind of imagination that motivational authors like Wallace Wattle, Napolean Hill, Clement Stone or Rhona Bryne want us to do. Imagine it and it shall be true kind of concept.
I say this because I see perfectly sane people suddenly talking like chicken-hearted jehadis- the kind who’s piss if they ever saw a bomb, let alone plant one- despite growing up in a perfectly secular surroundings comprising happy-go-lucky friends who cared more for the fun that playing together brought than praying together ever brought.

The kinds who’d without blinking an eyelid say it is because they are from a particular community that they didn’t get a good enough raise or they missed out on a promotion. The kinds who study in secular ICSE/CBSE/SSC schools and then suddenly reach office in long beards, shaved moustaches, and pajamas five inches above their ankles. Or ask for leave from office on days when there is some problem with the alignment of Rahu and Ketu and when the moon goes into that horrible position in the sky our learned saints termed as ‘amaavas’.

The kind of man who willingly turns into a hate-filled weirdo despite nestling amidst the best and positive of circumstances is a jehadi and you really don’t expect students- awash with thoughts of books, porn, facebook, orkut, dating, films- to nab them after one slumber-inducing lecture from the Pune police commissioner or any other man in khakhi for that matter.

I think the Pune police would do better by bringing to life their informer network and increasing the rewards for them the same way as the sponsors of terror do to get the hate-filled weirdo in their fold.

Coming back to whether some Hindu organisation did it, if it is true, I sincerely hope the cops catch hold of them, slit their veins all over their body and leave them to dry out in the Pune sun. If there is any life left in them still, then probably running a road roller over them shouldn’t be a bad idea at all.

Religion has never taught us to live and no bastard of any hue has the right to kill another this miserably to keep religion alive.

so very emasculate sozzled republic

Former IPS officer Prakash Singh, who once headed Uttar Pradesh police and also the Border Security Force. In an interview to the Asian Age on Sunday used a very telling word for the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). The word he used was ‘emasculated’.
Prakash Singh knows what he is talking about or atleast we should believe him because unlike scores of police officers who after joining the IPS become as docile as the bahu of some chauvinistic thakur in interior Bihar, Prakash Singh took the government all the way to the Supreme Court over some technical issues afflicting the police.

The men responsible for this emasculation, Singh says, is a whole range of Prime Ministers starting with that absolute joker IK Gujral. Now Gujral is a bit like that Pakistani minister-turned-human rights campaigner Ansar Burney. He gets more positive reportage in Indian papers than probably any other Pakistani politician but does it change anything about him except that he is a first rate joker.

IK Gujral is the kind who completely forgets Chanakya’s sane counsel that respect for nations/states/ kings come when the benevolence they exhibit or want to is backed by ruthlessness unmatched to set things right.

As a journalist, I think the RAW is an organisation that gets a lot of its teeth because of the things written about it rather than the things they do on the field. Even officers in the police force will talk about the RAW as if they are some vicious cousin of the Mossad. Then we hear that a host of Indian terrorists are ensconced in safe havens in nations within our reach and years pass by even before as much as a stone is thrown in the direction of their well-fortified residences. Picture that with what the Mossad did to one of the scum of the Hezbollah in Dubai?

I think at the end of the day we are just a sorry nation in the mould of some Central African republics or Bangladesh closer home. And we seriously need to get less worked up after every blast because there isn’t much we can do about them.

After every blast, my colleagues from the newspaper world throw up the same names, the cops, unofficially agree, and then we move on with our stories till some idiot sitting somewhere rips open our heart once again with a bit of RDX, a bit of nails, and lot of guts and hate.

I think when Prakash Singh said the RAW has been emasculated, he probably meant the country.

rants of an ungrateful bastard

I think there must be some rule which says that people cannot keep status lines which are open to interpretation. It must be very clear ones like –I hate you so and so- or –I want to kill my boss for denying me a hike- and not something like –oh so now you are happy- or –will bite head off.

Now ever since some bastards ripped open the German Bakery at Pune, I am feeling sick and miserable. I felt the same after 26/11 and the previous bomb blasts that shook our country. When I read stories about some budding footballer losing both his legs or siblings dying clinging to each other, I boil with rage. And since people like me cannot do much apart from boiling with rage, I boil with rage.

A natural progression of this anger that wells up in my heart is that I get agitated at small things and on small mistakes of colleagues and myself. A very dangerous progression still is that I start imagining slights and insults in harmless words or status taglines when there might be none.

Now a day after the blasts, a colleague had her tagline as ‘some people are showing their true colours’. Now my mind started imagining and then convincing myself that the tagline was meant for me. Why? Well you see I was offered this job when I had none and my competence in all matters journalistic was deeply suspect.

So like a dutiful and loyal employee, I went about trying to build up a team comprising people far more talented and successful than me. I used to take most of their transgressions as if nothing much happened because I was deeply convinced that I was here because of the team that works with me. So it was all fun, frolic, sugar and honey.

So now when things start getting a bit hot under the collar for the team as a whole and me in particular, I am supposed to keep quiet, take all the stress and go about my day. And have a drink or smoke at the end of the day to bring the stress levels back to normalcy.

So I with certainty took it that the ‘some people who had started showing their true colours’ was yours truly. What it meant was that I had got a little too big for my boots and my inherent nature of deceit and cunningness had come to the fore. That I had become the ungrateful bastard- you see my boss had picked me up from obscurity and given me a job- I always was, is what the tagline meant.

The only problem with all this is that it completely negates the little bit of work that I have put in here as an ordinary worker.
But then the thing about loyalty is if you want a loyal dog that never snaps, get a pug, never a Doberman.

There is another chap who has a problem with some of the taglines I keep. Like all unsuccessful people who have crossed 30, my taglines are bitter and general rants. After every blast in any part of the country, they become a bit- ok make that a lot- insensitive towards the Muslims.

Now the problem with a large majority of Muslims- like this chap- is that they can wear their designer jeans half way down their underwear and sport glares that would be half my salary and be ‘modern’ in all other ways – like saying having ten girlfriends at the same time- but when it comes to religion, my boy they are still in the Arabia of camel caravans.

So he shot me a few chats about how I am doing nothing to foster harmony among different religions. My boy, when I have done nothing to foster harmony between my dreams, aspirations and my wallet, where is the bloody question of my doing any harmony shit about something as stupid as religion.

I know all this isn’t going to win me too many friends but then someone intelligent told me long time ago that when it is time to give it, it is time to give it.

So till such time as a law comes in about taglines and their clarity, it is best to ignore this harmless trite that goes by the name ‘chat status’.

You don’t like my chat taglines, you block me out. Because life at 24 hours a day is sometimes too little for slow movers like me to make them count. So please do not giver me any additional baggage to load, when forget my seat, I’m not even sure of my train.

the chengez of our times

I would really like to know who exactly advises Bal Thackeray on political matters these days. Just so that I can help my adopted state with some peace and tranquility by wringing the necks of those so-called advisors. Because as much as I might have a problem with the man’s politics, you cannot deny the fact that inside that head ticks a very good and capable brain. And all the buffoonery we saw in the name of one nonsensical film – that too directed by Karan Johar- cannot be a product of Bal Thackeray’s brains.

Having known Maharashtrians quite intimately for a host of reasons including having been in a relationship with one for them for several years, I know them as remarkably intelligent people. The kind who dearly want to up their stations in life with the help of white-collared jobs.

Precisely the reason why despite Kolkata, Chennai and several other cities being by the sea, the elements chose Mumbai- Bombay then- as the magnet of riches in India. A lot of that credit has to go to Mumbaikars and their essentially Marathi ethos. Just look at the mess the bhadralok and their love for culture has got Kolkata into.

In such a place, building up a political party, a thought process and a following as fanatical as the Sainik is nothing short of the kind of genius that we have read of in conquerors in history. I have seen the reverence the man evokes even among politicians who have left the Sena fold and have hopped onto other parties. It is always Balasaheb, never Bal Thackeray. One of them still addresses the old man as ‘saheb’ though he was rather unceremoniously booted out of the party some years ago.

The legend is that Bal Thackeray revolted because he was given a lesser raise than several of his ‘outsider’ colleagues. I don’t know how true this legend is but if someone can make a movement out of something this miniscule and convert the theatre of Maharashtra politics into ‘him’ and the ‘rest’, then I would believe the man has the same capabilities and qualities as another fabled hero of yore- for more information please access Chengez Khan on Wikipedia. From fatherless in a patriarchal Mongol society with an impoverished mother and brothers to feed to the man who shook up history of the times in such a magnificent way that the Arab custodians of the fastest-growing religion of the time had to mutilate history down to the last grave to deny the great Khan his due as a conqueror-statesman-prophet.

But as My Name is Khan plays in the theatres- I’m being bombarded by news that it is houseful- we all know the Sena romance is in its last reels. And probably like Sholay, it is a film that was brilliant in every reel save the last. Now don’t tell me you didn’t want Thakur or Dharmendra to kill Gabbar.

But as Sholay was just too good for a bad ending to kill its place in our minds forever, the Sena too would evoke the same nostalgia among millions of Marathis long after it is gone.

Mighty prince, your bucephalus waits

More than two thousand years ago, King Philips of Macedonia was having trouble with a horse that had made up its mind that just no ordinary donkey would ride him. Horsemen from far and wide climbed and fell off the horse in almost one action. Till a young prince moved in. Philips was a bit apprehensive to throw his beloved son to the lions- in this case Bucephalus the horse- but beneath that soft face, the prince hid a resolve stronger than the surrounding mountains.
Five minutes later, the prince astride, the horse appeared to be as calm as when he slept standing. He stood looking into the horizon, wanting to gallop into it with his new master holding the reins. An arrogant smile escaped King Philips’ lips and as he looked at the court jesters- somewhat like our Congress Working Committee- one of them came forward with a verse that earned him a few gold coins. The verse was something to the effect of the earth being too small for the prince standing proud and tall. And how the prince and his stead would want more when they had overrun it all.
The jester-poet wasn’t wrong. The stead and the prince overran almost half the known world at the time and came knocking at the doors of the biggest civilisation at the time- India- and only went back when his soldiers said that thus far and no further.

A couple of days ago that legend of the taming of the horse was played out in India’s richest city. Of course this horse likes to call itself a tiger.
Our prince, under the able guidance of its Angel Mother who plays fairy to the meek and benevolent ruler of India, arrived with a glint in his eye and belief in his heart that the horse/tiger that refused to be tamed did so because Bucephalus had not met its Alexander as yet.

The belligerent tiger/horse told his minions that they were all to appear on both sides of the road with black flags to greet the invading prince. The minions told their master that the city would look like a sea of black flags.
The prince landed, took a ride in the sweaty-rust-smelling chariots meant for the common man, touched the commoners, smiled his dimpled smile, stole hearts, longed for the sight of some black flags but failed to see any.

The horse/tiger next day told the world that his people had failed him and henceforth he would not ask his minions to carry out any idiotic command that came to his mind first thing in the day.
As for the prince, like the Greek one of yore, he gave out a warning loud and clear to every kingdom on the way that come 2014, standing in front of the storm he would create would be similar to standing in front of the Rajdhani at top speed.

The prince’s main rival- a Gujarati bachelor ruling his province with an iron fist for a decade now- looks a good bet but the problem is that the Muslim populace of the kingdom would rebel, gang up against the bachelor and hand the prince a sweeping win. In the 2009 elections, the Muslims have shown that they are the most intelligent community when it comes to voting. In Uttar Pradesh they gave the Samajwadi party a resounding slap on the face when it became clear that the Congress was the only one that could checkmate the BJP. In Kerala they have been voting for Gujarati Banatwala for ages now.
In Guwahati they elected an Uttar Pradesh-born Muslim who made his millions in Mumbai.
The sweep of Wahabism across the world means slowly but surely the difference between a Tamil Muslim and a Kashmiri Muslim is diminishing by the day.

So 2014 would be the year of the prince. The tigers can make space between their legs for their tails. His cubs will shiver and hide under the bed when the prince visits. When they want to gnaw on meat, the cubs can take on lesser mortals like Azmi or Bachchan and the benevolent prince- dimpled smile, calm demeanour ---would allow it. Like Alexander did when mighty Pururava- Porus- told him how he wanted to be treated like a king.

Rejoice. Because Alexander is going to ride once again. Bucephalus/ India can now look into the horizon and like that jester-poet said, say-

O heavens, for this time you have erred:
Why did you make this world so small?
Our prince, standing proud and tall:
Will want more when he has overrun it all:

forsake religion, make heaven on earth

A devoutly atheist relative of mine once told me that for heaven to be built on earth, the first thing that we need to forsake is religion. It gives nothing except a false sense of piousness to the follower and acute disturbance to the one who isn’t following your herd on that particular day.
Today is a holy day for the Shias. Probably a remembrance day of somebody’s martyrdom or some such thing that I have not bothered to find out. But what I did find out is that when these black-clad gangs –for want of any better word- get into trains to get to the place where the collective sigh of remembrance will be let out, they are a pain in the neck.
For youngsters it is a day of going out and behaving like the goons many want to be but cannot because becoming a goon requires large parts of the heart to be free of the fear of law. Most of us overstuff our hearts with fear anyway.
So taking the energy derived from the strength of numbers, these gangs will block the gangways and doors of trains, spit profusely into the wind unmindful of whether the blob of spit falls smack on the face of some passenger hanging perilously on the door simply because there isn’t enough space to go in. Of course once they reach the spot where they will meet several more of their ilk, they will pull down a façade of piousness and sorrow over their faces, mouth time-tested hollow chants and go home.
I think in 1947 we made a promise of building a nation where your religion will be as private and comfortable as your underwear.
But thanks to Nehru and his massive urge to appropriate the nation for his brood, we lost our way. Today we are caste Hindus, Dalits, Shias, Sunnis, Wahabis, Tablighis, Catholics, Protestants, Jains, Biddhists. Any bloody damn denomination but Indians.
One nation, one people can go up the anal openings of all of us if anyone cares enough.
Oh by the way which reminds me, a small sect of Sikhs, who follow the preaching of Sant Ravidass, have announced that they are no longer a sect of Sikhism but a full-fledged religion. They will be called Ravidassis, their symbol would be the ‘Har’ and their chant would be ‘Jai Gurudev’.Fantastic. So now we have started on the path where religions will change as you hop from street to street. We well and truly have begun the process of putting the last log on India’s pyre. Till then enjoy the warmth.

Rahul Azmi zindabad

So finally Rahul baba has said something that brings him down to the level of the Uddhavs and the Raj Thackerays of the world. The cousins were really having a problem sparring all the while with Abu Asim Azmi. Now Azmi might be an MLA but he is not exactly the cream that the upmarket newspapers would want to milk for saleable news. So the wholly empty buffoonery that had come to signify the debates on who owns Mumbai between the Thackeray cousins and Azmi was in serious danger of making it to the bottom heap of media room trash.
The kind of fate that has befallen the blabbering of some of the Republican Party of India leaders in Mumbai. Now how many cared as much as a rat piss when Athavale said that he had been booted out of the Big Boss in favour of Sanjay Nirupam because Nirupam had a more elitist personality?
But Rahul Gandhi is just something else. Even if he does something rank Azmi-ish by trying to give a swarthy north Indian colour to a fighting machine like the National Security Guards, the media really can’t throw the press release into the dust bin.
Now that Rahul has said it, the Thackeray cousins are happy. Over the past two days every branch of Rahul’s hallowed family tree is being shaken down to the roots by the two big-mouthed tiger cubs.
Jawaharlal, Indira, Motilal, Rajiv, Sonia you name it and Rahul has got it.
Of course the debate will never end because it will be impossible to stop migrants from making the journey to dream-infested Mumbai. It will be impossible to stop the caravan out of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. It will be impossible for Biharis and Uttar Pradeshis to fully integrate with the Marathi Mumbaikar. It will be impossible for the Mee Mumbaikar gangs to fully accept the bhaiyya.
But what is very worrying in all this ‘national mouth shooting off competition’ is to see the real mettle of a young man who is arrogant enough to believe that the only job that this wretched nation can give him that is worthy of him is the Prime Minister’s chair.
Rahul is no different from politicians like Amar Singh or Azmi or even the Thackerays. It is just the carefully-illuminated halo- built up meticulously by media and party sycophants who are nothing but royalists in the garb of democrats- that makes Rahul Gandhi different. That halo is slowly giving itself up to a load-shedding of ideas.For India it is a pity. Another one bites the dust.