‘People only do the right things till the time their spirit is broken’. So says Heath Ledger as he plays the maniacal, diabolical, chaotic but an enduring Joker in the latest edition of the Batman franchise. The Joker, of course, is taunting the Caped Crusader, trying to poke him into a realization that when the stakes on the table get personal every man gambles for himself. The question then to be asked on this humid morning is whether the Joker’s remarks find resonance in the environment around us. Have we all really sacrificed our morals on the altar of opportunity? Have we finally decided to put self – interest over the much abused ‘longer term larger good’? Look around you and maybe you will find examples galore. We have a government that is scraping every crumb of political opportunity to ensure its survival. We have an opposition that is making every effort to outdo the incumbents in this game. Political beliefs have been conveniently side stepped for the ‘larger goal’ of saving/ toppling the government (depending on which camp you are in). You could also argue that short term political convenience has once again replaced long held (or supposedly professed!) political beliefs. And in between all this back door dealing and stealing going on in the Lutyen’s zone, we wonder whether those who had tread the path of political probity have too decided to jump and swim in the shark infested waters of this mud pool.

Both Manmohan Singh and Prakash Karat are men of principle. Neither has won an election but neither has given room to political opportunism. Right or wrong, both have stood steadfast on an issue of conviction. And now as both face a test of validation for their stand, they are both playing the same, though slightly unfamiliar, game. Karat has gone ahead and tied up with a chief minister accused of wealth accumulation and corruption and is ready to vote with his thus far biggest enemies, the ubiquitous ‘communal’ forces, with the sole intention to topple the government. The PM and his party too are now going all out to seduce fence sitters, many of whom are facing criminal cases or are already in jail, with cabinet berths and other promises. The backdoor talk of crores being exchanged to switch loyalties remains just that till now, backdoor talk…but it remains.

I wonder what would be going through the PM’s mind as he enters Parliament today and tomorrow and crosses the portraits of those two great founders of modern India – Gandhi and Nehru. Both of whom enacted their philosophies in a different but perhaps an equally complicated era. Would the PM’s eyes contain the look of son who stares at the face of his moralistic, straight and honest father? The look of a son expected to bear the burden of probity, morals and uprightness. A son who knows he must sacrifice honor to save the family silver. A son who must make peace with short term compulsions and antagonize long held beliefs.

Perhaps, the joker is right. The instinct of self-preservation is too powerful too ignore. It can manifest in either actions or non-actions. Actions where compromises are made – a bribe paid, a short cut taken, a rule bent, a terrorist released – all to preserve the present but perhaps knowingly or unknowingly to damage the future as well. And then there are non-actions – a crime ignored, a statement denied, a witness hostile – all of which enhance our preservation at the cost of the world we live in.

But is the past as clean as the present supposes it to be? Weren’t Nehru and Patel both accused of sacrificing a united but weak India in the favor of partition and an India controlled by the Congress? Didn’t Indira Gandhi permanently damage the Indian polity by introducing the ‘make and break’ culture just to save her government? The only two men who perhaps stood to their ideals stubbornly (rightly/ wrongly) in contemporary Indian history were Gandhi and JP. Both walked their last days in solitude. One received a bullet, the other ignorance from those very people whom he propelled to office.

So are we finally in a time of short term opportunism? And as I had queried in a post sometime ago (and got rapped on the knuckles for making that suggestion) does our self interest today conflict with our morality and ideals? And is the only path leading to moral uprightness ending in the destination of loneliness? Is it too much to ask for someone to drink the poison of convenience? Is none of us capable of swallowing the poison and holding it in our necks? Or are we all too scared that it will escape into our stomachs and burn our innards? Is Batman right when he says that his city deserves a vigilante because he can get away with making choices which others can’t? Because he can be what self preservation stops us all from being? Are our only saviors now lonely isolated men or dark knights? Has Heath Ledger said something in death which we are all too scared to recognize in the living?


P.S. - On a lighter note, this is my 51st post. Didnt realise i had touched fifty. Bat raised, i stand on twenty2 yards and wait for the appluase. Drumrolls!! :P

P.P.S. - Woops! Jumped the gun..the count of 51 includes 5 drafts...the drumrolls will have to wait :(

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It’s been a bit of a strange summer in Delhi this time. The weather has been freaky; in all the memories that I can summon of the previous years, I can’t recall a time when there was a summer where the number of days on which the temperature breached the 40C mark could be counted on your fingertips. And I can hardly recall such wet months of May and June. The monsoon came early, the heat vanished and while I am not complaining on this strange turn of the climate towards a cooler trend, one cant help but wonder what is amiss. It’s been a strange political summer in Delhi too. The momentum of inflation that began in spring (coming on the back of the gradual rise in oil prices and the stock market crash of January) seems to have been the only thing that picked up some steam this summer. And now it threatens to scald those that are desperately trying to calm the fires down. It’s been a pain of a different kind and relief from it seems as distant as the winter currently, maybe even more.

But more critical political events have overshadowed all the heat generated by the rising prices. The government is now battling for survival after the Congress party, in an unusual and perhaps accidental show of spunk, thumbed its nose at the communists and called their bluff. It seems all the energies of the climatic heat have been manifested not from the sky but from the inhabitants below. Rarely did the UPA show such political frenzy in the last four years as they have shown over the course of the last three months. Whether by design, through the resistance of the Prime Minister or simply by the force of events, the Left parties now find themselves out of the ruling coalition and face to face with some hard political realities that they chose to ignore during the term of this government thus far, screened as their eyes were by a combination of power of veto without responsibility and outdated idealism befitting the political climate of the 1950s.
Since the day the government decided to go ahead with the safeguards agreement and approach the IAEA, the Left has been… well, sort of Left out. They have been lurching from one confused step to another, all the time tearing away the political fabric which they so diligently stitched for themselves as they sat out and observed the Manmohan Singh dispensation with a godly gaze. The commissars first asked the PM when the government would go to the IAEA so that they could withdraw support then. They then decided to wait till the PM arrived back from the G-8 summit so as not to cause him the embarrassment of the government being toppled while he was meeting the world leadership (small mercy after four years!!). Then when it was clear that the PM would announce a go-ahead on the deal after his meeting with Dubya Bush, a divided Left pre-poned the pulling of the trigger. Now as the government readies for a trust vote in Parliament where every MP is worth his bunch of crores (apologies but the going rate in the market was not available at the time of writing this piece), the commissars are pushing the Speaker of the house, who is one of their MPs, to put in his papers and vote against the government. Somnath Chatterjee, for his part is reluctant, not wanting to relinquish the post simply to spite the government. The politburo has forgotten that in case he goes, the Deputy Speaker would preside over the house and he is an NDA MP. So one additional vote against the deal gets offset by another. And now comes the latest gambit in the form of an understanding with Mayawati. And in doing so the Left leaders have compromised the one asset they had, compared to all their political peers – a spotless white image. Mayawati may or may not be more corrupt than Mulayam and Amar Singh with whom the Left was tangoing earlier but so brazen is her disregard for the process of law when it works against her that the idealistic politburo seems slightly incongruous standing next to her. And only now after four years in the government have the commissars woken up and realized that Madam Maya is being witch hunted down by the CBI.

And in between of all their confusion, they have been politically checkmated and routed by the ever opportunistic Amar Singh who has displayed far more political savvy than what Prakash Karat has possibly summoned all his life. And while the UPA finds new partners, the commissars are now head deep into the monsoon muck of Delhi’s political akhada – hunting for allies, negotiating with all and sundry, counting each and every MP, mouthing invective at the government and even going to the extent of saying that they are ready to join hands on an issue with the ‘communal’ BJP. Their starched white plain handloom house kurtas sullied by the recent efforts, the Left has abandoned the idealistic high ground and stepped down into the opportunistic playground of Indian politics where the likes of Lalu, Maya and Amar Singh rule. The Left has finally woken up to some hard political realities…pity it couldn’t do so when it was supporting the government.

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‘We the People’ had its second Aarushi episode last night in the aftermath of Dr.Talwar’s release. The theme was whether the media and police should now apologize to the Talwars. No, said Ashutosh from IBN 7 flatly (he is the guy with the white mop who heads their Hindi channel). More restrained but equally unapologetic was Punya Vajpayee from Aaj Tak (which on the day of the CBI’s press conference ran a story where a woman did a voice over for Aarushi and described to the viewers how ‘she’ was murdered.) At this defiance a bristling hot Harish Salve launched a tirade against the two comparing their coverage with Ekta Kapoor’s soaps. And between all the hungama , one of Aarushi’s aunts broke down and begged the media to take their cameras away from their home and let them grieve in peace. As I have pointed out in an earlier post, none of the three parties (the police, the media and us the viewers) are over board in this episode. We all have contributed to this circus; the police through their innuendos and leaks, the channels with their Sherlock Holmes meets Ekta Kapoor kind of coverage and we viewers who simply refused to believe that the parents slept through as their daughter was murdered and kept lapping each and every straw thrown at us.

So should the media apologize? In any other matter I would have been as adamant on a no as Ashutosh. But somehow in this case, some of the invisible lines of decency have been crossed. MMS clips were shown which were attributed (wrongly) to the slain girl, her Orkut profile and SMSes were flashed to the public, her telephone records shown on TV with one network even going to extent of redialing all the last made calls and asking pesky questions from the receivers. The thin line between reportage, investigative journalism and playing detective has been breached. Even worse some of the coverage has landed in the zone of sleaze and indecency which no matter what the justification is simply unacceptable.

The Times of India took the lead and carried an apology the day CBI announced that Dr.Talwar would be released. And compared to the vernacular channels (and I am sorry to sound so class biased but they really have plumbed the depths barring a couple) their coverage was an epitome of softness. My concern is that the more brazenness we see from the media the more it will wean away the public from them. My bet is that the public opinion is against them as far the Aarushi coverage goes. And tomorrow if another such case happens and another family is traumatized, the government might just let the Broadcast Bill genie out of the bag and the public might well just side with it.

Six months back as a citizen the idea of the bill itself was abhorrent and against the spirit of democracy for me. Six months later I might just well be willing to listen to the government’s view. Another Aarushi and I might just agree with the government. That is a scary thought. And all those political editors running our news networks must wake up to the possibility of such a shift taking place. They might get away in the case of Aarushi because it was the police that outran them in the race of indecency by maligning a dead girl without a shred of evidence, but sadly it seems, the media is showing all the enthusiasm and zealousness of an Olympic runner to win the race the next time an opportunity comes along.

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I once met a man who said he could erase time
go back in the past and remove those memories of mine
my pain and my sorrow
that never coming tomorrow
my days filled with delight
that vision without a sight
the darkness of despair
my loneliness in betrayal
that false dawn that i saw
the cliff that i had to claw
i want to forget those hours, those days, those years
can you fulfill this one wish of mine...
find me the man who said he could erase time....

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Field Marshal Sam 'Bahadur' Manekshaw
(1914 - 2008)
One of the greatest to ever don the Olive Greens

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