There is something about the vanishing of a large global corporation that makes everyone sit up and take notice. It’s akin to the sinking of the Titanic – something that is considered huge, grand, unassailable and unsinkable. Not just because of its own size but more so because of the quality of minds powering it. But Titanics are mostly victims of their own inflated self, and in their high, long term, grand vision of their crownests often ignore that creeping iceberg that lies beneath the surface and inflicts unmitigated damage to their shells. Step into New York today and you will see a Titanic at every corner, some already confined to the waves of history, some struggling to stay afloat and hunting desperately for lifeboats. And sadly, these behemoths are not just confined to the Wall Street alone. Bigger, larger and grander Titanics across the globe are hearing that creaking sound in their hulls – a sound of metal breaking and a potential flood waiting to crash in.

The crisis, as everyone from Delhi to Dallas, tells you is one of liquidity and confidence. Or well a lack of them. In very crude layman terms, its about people borrowing huge sums of money and being not able to repay them. In a bid to stave off their hungry lenders, as they run around to borrow more, they are summarily dismissed by other lenders who now have no confidence in their ability to generate earnings from the money sought. I would add one more word to the description in the line above. In effect, this is a crisis of credibility. Credibility of banks, brokers, traders, speculators, merchant bankers and their ilk. And this sadly is a strong indictment on those running these institutions. Those ‘quality minds’ who exit the hallowed lawns of the brightest B-schools and then enter the bull ring of our financial markets. The knife twists further into the flesh when one realizes that the Balance Sheets that went broke were of those for which the ‘best and the brightest’ from these schools chose to work for. (TT Ram Mohan has provided an insight into how the hollowness of the so called intellect of these firms and the people who inhabit them in the Economic times a couple of days ago)

Not that there haven’t been crises in the economies before. But this one has a marked difference on two principal counts. Earlier crises have been closely driven by the real economy; the brick and mortar or the tangible elements – due to sectors, companies & currencies with weak fundamentals which you could see and their inability to drive promised earnings leading to a crash of over invested money put in them. ‘Fundamentals’ is a much used word in all that we read today. Simply put, it effectively means that if you take a housing loan of Rs 60 lacs and if you possess a full time job paying you even Rs 6-7 lacs minimum in a year, your fundamentals are strong at the time of borrowing; simply because you possess the means to repay the money, albeit slowly. The current crisis though is that of the unseen or more so that of the un-understood and difficult to comprehend instruments. Even those well versed with the financial markets are finding it hard to pin point where the trouble lies in the opaque Balance Sheets of the collapsing institutions. And the final defaulting debt lying on such Balance Sheets is distanced from the real economy (in this case the house sold on the mortgage) by a significant web of complex, inter woven and hard to unravel securitized assets.

The second major difference is that of risk appetite and its assessment. Economies pass through routine cycles of booms and recessions on account of heavy investments driven by a hunger to risk big for bigger returns. What is unraveling now is a risk appetite among major investment banks and other institutions that had gone beyond the roof. Continuing with our previous example, it’s a bit like you possessing an uncertain job (or no job) and your bank stilling willing to lend those 60 lacs to you. In what economists call the ‘rational human mind’, such business with no assurance of repayment and no collateral (another asset that will cover your risk of default) or bad collaterals will simply be labeled with one word – preposterous. And yes, this is pretty much the kind of thing that was going on in the US. The ‘best of the best’ rode this bandwagon and put more money in the hands of those who did not have the means to repay it, in the hope that if the borrower defaulted the underlying house for which the loan was given would be sold at a premium and money would be recovered.

But of course, you can realize premium on the sale of one house but not when all the houses are out for sale because everyone lent money in the same reckless way as you did. The prices crash (supply exceeds demand) and you simply have nothing to cover your backside. This kind of dealing is not an illegal act but bad and greedy investment. And bad investments, as we all know, yield no returns.

Some major home truths have emerged from this crisis which should guide the response of those in the thick of the action now. First, no matter how free and competitive a market may be, you still need a strong statutory/ government regulator to bail out collapsing institutions that can have a domino effect and derail a lot more than just their immediate neighborhood. Second, bad assets WILL NOT create good earnings no matter how much ‘smart analyses’ may justify it. Third, no corporation is above board or unsinkable. The moment the fountain of money runs dry even the largest giant will find it difficult to stand tall. And fourth, its time for all the regulators to pull up their socks. One cannot prevent an investment from taking place in a bad market but tighter solvency norms and higher provisioning requirements (effectively asking institutions to park enough money for the ‘rainy days’) need to be looked at anew to barricade future such spectacular implosions.

And all the players need to ask some serious questions. The ‘smart guys’ in the banks need to reflect how such bad investments were allowed a free run. The regulators need to question their norms and whether corporate governance fulfilled its role in preventing such a rush towards manic opportunities that have resulted in a zero gum game. The auditors need to ask themselves how they missed seeing that the assets reflecting against the loans taken were nothing but pieces of papers. And investors like you and me can do well to pay attention to the dissenters like Nassim Nicholas Taleb who argue that all those experts hypothesing over the market movements daily on our televisions, perhaps simply don’t know what they are talking about.

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Since my school days, when I started to develop an opinion on the happenings around me, I have always been critical of any attempts made to insult the intelligence of young children. I guess being adults, the distance that age puts between us and the children, makes us adopt this know-all, condescending attitude. The sophisticated name of course is ‘generation gap’. But my argument is not so much against this inevitable differing of viewpoints between two sets of people who stand at different co-ordinates of the time graph. My problem is with ignoring how the world has changed since the time we were in childhood and thinking that our kids are not smart enough. Two recent incidents reminded me of this belief and prompt these words.

My 12 year old cousin Karan lives and studies in Canada. An ice hockey and baseball freak, he isn’t too far away from his Indian roots as well. With relatives around, he takes sadistic pleasure in subjecting us all to his smattering of Hindi and Punjabi, often mixing up his tenses, phrases and expressions (‘I touch your feet’ becomes for him ‘Mein aapke pair khaata hoon’). Of course, all his Hindi is purely picked up from the television serials that his grandmother watches and which he is forced to watch as well as he waits for the commercials to catch his sports action. You might pass him off as any other North American Indian kid with his brown skin, accent and possessing knowledge of Indian customs that marriages, gurudwara trips or diwali gatherings have afforded him. But he possesses two qualities that would mark any kid out - inquisitiveness and observance. Out on a drive in the city with his parents, me and my mother, he started off on his usual trip of speaking broken, illogical Hindi. It was all fine before he suddenly turned towards my mother and asked her, ‘Aap Hindu ho yaan Punjabi?’

His mother wasn’t exactly enthused with the question and quickly responded with a ‘Karan, you don’t ask such questions.’ She turned to me and explained how schools in Canada discourage students from asking about the religious identities of those around them. At first glance, you would perfectly understand this dilemma of a newly multicultural and multi religious society. A society in which public display of religion is not common and not stressed. A secular state that would want religion to be confined only in the homes and places of worship of those who follow it. A state which perhaps believes that asking a person’s religion and acknowledging its difference from your own in the first step in societal segregation.

I must admit that at first I felt a degree of understanding towards this approach; till of course Karan came up with his response,

‘No! I am asking because agar aap Hindu ho to why don’t you have a bindi here (pointing to my mother’s forehead) and red colour (now pointing at her hair above the forehead) like all other Hindu women’

For a moment, we were all silent in the car. Karan’s dad, not exactly sympathizing earlier with his mother’s admonishment, announced triumphantly
‘See! He has a logic for his question’ And indeed he did. None of us knew where this kid had picked up concepts of vermillion and bindis. And how he had come to know its significance for a Hindu woman. His probing of religious identity was not to place a mark of segregation or assert affirmation with those around him, but simply an attempt to obtain cultural understanding. And in that sense we were all wrong to assume that his mind, even in today’s religiously charged and to an extent divided world, would function only on one dimension – a dimension of creating and not breaking walls.
I wondered later whether that tiny episode had a lesson for all us. Is denial of identity and closing of mouths to discuss it another form of segregation? Are we creating walls or breaking them when we seek to create a society where school kids are ignorant of the diversity of the cultures that they inhabit? And as liberals are we correct in being so squeamish about discussing religion with our children? Is it so hard for us to educate them and then set them on the path of moderation and tolerance? Why are we allowing Osama bin Laden and not our school teachers to introduce our children to their religion?

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The second episode relates to a 14 year old boy Siddharth, the son of one of my mother’s old friends from office. I recently visited him and by chance my curiosity forced me to have a look at his school textbooks. I was sort of making impromptu comparisons on the extent of change in the NCERT textbooks from 11 years ago when I was in the same class in which Siddharth studies today. In the middle of my exploration I chanced to lay my hands on a colorful and deftly prepared paper folder which had his details written on the face of it with some skillful crayon work.
‘My holiday homework’, informed Siddharth. ‘I had to do two book reports’. Inside were two pages of a A4 size containing his ‘book report’. I read the first one. It was on ‘Life of Pi’ by Yann Martel. As I read those five hundred odd words that he had written. I was a little amazed at the quality of the language as well at the abrupt nature of the presentation of the report. Siddharth probably sensed it,
‘I copied it from the internet’. That explained it. Schoolboy level detailing mixed with book review level kind of passages. When I asked why, he responded laconically that ‘who had the time to write so much’ and that he had done his report in the last week of his vacations. Now I am someone who really isn’t enthused about people substituting originality with Google, but I carried on as Siddharth next placed in my hands his holiday homework list. It was a bunch of 4 pages photocopied and stapled together (just the way it used to happen in my time – it seems the idea of mass computer prints is yet to strike any one in our schools). The contents of that homework did not carry any surprises for me. The only addition in the quality of the work required from the students, in the space of a decade, has come in the form of a Disaster Management project mandated by the CBSE. The holiday homework had a section for each subject. The sciences & mathematics required students to answer a set of questions which were nothing but a revision of either what they had studied before leave or would study out after leave. The social sciences and grammar subjects too could not think beyond the realms of the textbooks. In fact I was shocked to see that the Hindi homework required students to write a letter inviting their friend over to their birthday party! I remember writing such a letter when I was in class 3 and that was a good 17 years ago! Of course, in the world of CBSE, our schools and Indian education they still believe that a kid writes and posts letters to all his friends asking them to attend his birthday celebrations. The concepts of telephone and emails are as far away as the third millennium.

In short there was nothing in that bunch of papers that could have challenged Siddharth’s imagination and creativity. Perhaps the only thing that he would have enjoyed doing was preparing the cover of his book review.

What is wrong with our teachers and our schools? Why can’t we leave textbooks and courses aside for a month and a half in the year and let our kids THINK? Is it so hard to ask them to chuck their books and prepare a 5-6 page project on something that they have interest in? (Siddharth has an active liking for cars. In a brief span of twenty minutes he had given me all the gyaan about the new models hitting the Indian market). Why can’t we allow our children to be creative for once and escape the drudgery of ‘Answer the following in your own words’? I am not proposing that every kid has a fountain of creativity bubbling inside him but then is it so hard to assume that when faced with acting around a topical interest not just kids but even elder men find hidden reserves of imagination and creativity? And is it so difficult for schools to see that a diversified range of interests in their students will automatically lead to an enhancement of knowledge sharing between the kids themselves? Why are we allowing the unimaginative to recklessly suppress the imagination of our kids?

But of course these are vain questions; because from what I saw with Siddharth I was certain of one fact. Dinosaurs can reappear on our planet but to expect changes in the manner in which we teach our kids is asking for a little too much. On this teacher’s day, sample this thought.

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People got a little riled with all my camera antics on the vacation. Most of the family that was around couldn't comprehend why i was so obsessed with my Canon powershot (AS710). In the 12 days that i stayed in Toronto, i clicked close to about 1100 photographs...staggering you might think....it took a cousin to put matters into perspective - 'he lives by the camera'...for some of those days, i actually did

below are some pics that did not make it to the facebook and web albums...random shots...some which were noticed, some which werent by those who saw them


The name of the park was 'Maddil Common'. It was nearby the house where i was putting up...and on a quiet Friday evening (yes it was about 6 when i went there) it was absolutely desolate....quiet, windy and desolate

I took a myriad pictures from the top of the CN tower...this one was perhaps the best...447m above the ground (apprx 114 storeys)...it captures the skyline, the shadow of the clouds, a city strechting itself limitlessly and half clear half filled sky...

Taken from the 22nd floor apartment balcony, it isnt the cleanest picture...the balcony railings intrude in a significant part of it...but dnt make a mistake, the light is not camera induced sepia but natural...there was a slight drizzle and a setting sun when i took this snap...and the interplay of water (notice the drops on the glass of the railing) and light was something that i could not get on any other evening...

A picture that can almost pass off for a painting...a view of the east bank of the ottawa river from the river cruise boat

A quiet patch of woods....on the river bank of the ottawa river...

This is how small some of the islands actually were on the 'thousand islands' cruise that happens in a small town called Gananoque on the shore of Lake Ontario


The serenity of the lake front at Gananoque was only matched by that of the town itself....

In the background is the Canadian parliament house....as seen from behind a fountain at the ottawa museum


And finally the national symbol...the maple leaf...just beginning to dry from the summer

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Well its an experience in itself to watch a ball game in a North American town...though the crowds are not as raucous as the ones in our IPL games, the level of involvement is still the same. The marked difference of course though is with respect to spectator comfort; getting in the stadium, finding your seat, having food and beverages...is all a comfortable experience....and so even though the home team lost, i didnt really mind cause, one i got a hang of baseball and two i had a good time clicking away...here are some of the better ones :)
P.S. Kudos to Abhinav Bindra...champions stuff!!


a neat sports pic....the bases were loaded and the cleveland indians scored a run of the hit that followed..

The Rogers centre with the game in progress...and the roof closed due to rain

a foul hit...notice the ball flying away at the back

a decent sports pic....the pitcher throws...the ball's mid air

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9th August: Coming to you somewhere from North America
Believe me when i say this, Gettting out of India aint easy...literally or metaphorically. They say outside that you cant take the India out of an Indian. Well, if your trying to catch a plane from the Indira Gandhi airport at New Delhi you can see a perfect demonstration of that state sponsored hospitality. No i did not miss my flight, in fact i reached the port a good two hours before the flight time. But on the way and till the time you actually board the plane, you heart wouldnt really be at rest. Thank god for we dont have asylum seekers running away from this nation...they would probably just collapse at the airport entrance.
So my airport misadventure began when i was a good 15 kms and 6 hours away from my flight time. As i left office that evening, the heavens decided it was the perfect time to open up and grace us with good weather. As yours truly had played weatherman in the morning and predicted that there wudnt be any rain (and thus consequently left his umbrella in the back of the car), he had to run half a kilometer in blinding rain. And voila, the moment i hit my car...yes yes the heavens stopped...so there was i, wet all over sitting in my car and driving like craxy back home..no wait, i wasnt going home..i was stopping at a sweet shop, cause sweets were needed at my destination for a wedding function. and i stopped at a grocery store to pick up 4 kgs (!) of rice cause you see, rice is still a lot cheaper in India despite all the inflation and all that nonsense spoken by Condi Rice and her President about Indians and the Chnese eating all the rice of the world up. So i dashed more and picked up the rice and the sweets, stacked them in the suitcase, saw myself being forcefed dinner by my neighbours (it was their grandson's birthday) and finally sat in the cab at 8.15 for a midnight flight just in time to see the heavens open again.

Now i wudnt have been cribbing here had i got to the airport all easy...but frankly fate chose that evening to make my tryst with every red light on the way to the airport (dont ask me the number, i gave up count after the 11th). It wudnt still have been bad if it hadnt been raining with vehicles crawling all along the floor. it would have all been forgivable if the cabbie hadnt committed that worst sin..despite my insistence, he took me from a construction site called Vasant Kunj instead of the slick and open Dhaula Kuan. Result - stuck for 45 mins trying to cross...ya you guessed it, a red light...i swear i cud have clubbed the cabbie right then and there, but i had an airport to go to and to be fair to him he picked up the pace and had me at the port within 15 minutes of crossing that light.
But that aint where the misery ends. Despite all the slickness inside the renovated airport, two things still make it unpleasant to leave India. Firstly, the approach roads are all jammed. Why we cant figure out a solution to that is beyond me...maybe we can have an underground car park where people get dropped...maybe wider roads..i dont know, but it kills when you see that it takes 20 mins to cross 800 mtrs and reach the point of drop from the main entrance.
And the second are the CISF people standing on the gates. Now i appreaciate the security concerns in the subcontinent, but does the guy have to read everything written on our passports and tickets? why dont they just match your name on the ticket and passport and let you in and let the check in guys from the airlines handle the rest? 15 mins to clear the line for the CISF check after you have taken the trolley. Which is all a shame, cause really once you are in, there really arent any pain points. Check in, immigration and security is smooth - it took me only 20 mins....and too at peak hour...
well i cud stop here but you wud accuse me of being anti-indian and enamoured by all the stuff that the goras put up. So let me speak of Paris, my stopover. The airport is huge and it takes 15mins just to go from one terminal to another. What helps are the multi-lingual directions and the courteous staff. Sadly, the coffee sucks. And yes even there, people dont queue up to board the aircraft, they have to be told to let the kids and the wheelchair passengers in first.

Courtesy was in short supply at Toronto. The security staff just at the exit of the aircraft cudnt believe i had come for a wedding; i then had to give my job credentials to her and explain what a Chartereted Account and Accenture meant. Heck, at Toronto even the immigration does not smile at you and for some reason they all wear police like uniforms. And for all their sophisitication, they took 45 minutes to get out baggage out - apparently because it was raining with the threat of lightening and all vehicular movement in the open was stopped!! And when the baggage came, many of the bags were wet!

The flights themselves i may not crib about much - guess there isnt much to when you watch two movies, an episode of friends and get to drink chardonnay and champagne...now only if they allowed to sneak some of those wine bottles out....

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‘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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Let it never be said that when the world was caught in the grip of a raging fuel crisis, our government sat on its haunches twiddling its thumbs waiting for Mother Nature to relieve itself….er… I mean relieve the agony…of the fuel prices of course!! To prove that we are responsible organization indulging in responsible journalism, today along with an exclusive interview on Page 1 with Rakhi Sawant’s new boyfriend, we bring to you the full details of the proceedings of a high powered meeting of the government, opposition, industry leaders and other prominent celebrities chaired by the Prime Minister to find a solution to the oil crisis. Our editor, Digdeep Sardesai, showing extra-ordinary courage and presence of mind, managed to sneak into this meeting by dressing as one of the canteen boys supplying tea and biscuits at this meeting. He was carrying a tape recorder with him (brought to you by Sony, our Page 1 sponsors for today!) and recorded the transcript of the meeting. (We have already decided to recommend Digdeep for a Padma Vibhushan for this amazing scoop.)

Note - Please excuse the slight interruptions and incoherence in the transcript below – Digdeep was directed at times out of the room to bring the beverages and because he drank some of them on the way (who can blame the poor soul in this hot and muggy weather?) he had to relieve himself and thus miss some portions of the meeting.

Meeting – Everyone is seated. Prime Minister Moneymohan Singh is sitting at the head of the round table with The Oracle sitting in a sphinx like silence next to him. All around the PM sit members from his government, the oppositions and other famous people. It is a gathering which will put King Henry’s (was it him only??) round table of knights to shame!!

Moneymohan Singh: Friends, Romans and …
The Oracle: (A groan of admonishment)
Moneymohan Singh: Sorry madamji, very sorry…Friends, Indians and…
Mycash Ambani: Yes, yes…Mumbai Indians…my team, very good team. We played very good cricket with very efficient turnarounds and accountable performance. But alas, those foreigners let my Indians down….
Moneymohan Singh: Oye hoye! O I do not mean those Indians!….I meant the citizens of India…
Aala Loo Yadav: Arre Moneymohan ji, this is not address to nation bhai. This is a meeting….arre why calling all other friends…arre we are also your friends na…all allies are friends, except these people sitting on the left…hehehe
C.Dumberam: Please, please! Lets not digress. We need to address this issue. Lets come to the main point. Globally oil prices have risen. Crude oil is now set to go to $150/ barrel. These opposition walas had it so good, in their time it was only $30/barrel. Now all our oil marketing companies are losing money because they are selling at old prices. If we don’t raise prices we shall run out of money to buy oil and then….
Mytake Ahluwalia: Then no more cars, scooters, buses and no more fuel…
C.Dumberam: For my annual trip to Davos!!
Prakash ‘Only sticks, No Carrots’: We shall not sign the nuclear deal with the imperialists Americans!!
Moneymohan Singh: Oho Carrot ji! You are mistaken, We are not discussing the nuclear deal! We are discussing a rise in oil price.
Aala Loo Yadav: Eh….who is this Davos bhai?? Anyway, Moneymohanji, if no buses then it s good for your party only na bhai…all these BRT buses and corridor problem come to end and Shiela Fixit ji winning elections easy…hehehe. Oh by the way, hum excuse chahta hoon…abhi aaya..
(Door closing and Aala Loo going out of room)
Moneymohan Singh: (sounding worried) Arre meeting has only begun and Aala Loo ji has already walked out in protest.
C.Dumberam: Not to worry sir, he has only gone for a Loo break.
Moneymohan Singh: Okay okay…coming back to the rise in oil price, we propose a rise in price of petrol and diesel and …
Prakash ‘Only sticks, No Carrots’: We shall not sign the nuclear deal with the imperialists Americans!!
Moneymohan Singh: No No Carrot ji!! You are mistaken again…we are not discussing the deal!
Pahalwaan Singh Yadav: Arre bhai, why all this noise about rising petrol prices? Who uses petrol here bhai? Arre bahi Summer Singhji, do you use petrol ji?
Summer Singh: (Flustered and embarrassed) No No Pahalwaan ji…we all use petrol only in our cars no...And all the bus wallas use only diesel.
Pahalwaan Singh Yadav: Petrol in my car?? Arre I never knew bhai… (Laughing) Payment hee nahin kiyaa kabhi…hehehe…Driver gets it filled and bill comes to sarkar…
Moneymohan Singh: Oho! Can we please discuss raising the prices??
Prakash ‘Only sticks, No Carrots’: We shall not sign the nuclear deal with the imperialists Americans!!
(Moneymohan Singh slams a hand on his forehead)
Pahalwaan Singh Yadav: Arre Moneymohan ji, why bother…let petrol run out…to all the car wallas your sarkar can gift one free cycle. The cycle drives the hand and the hand drives the cycle….Let people ride the Samajwaadi cycle and also stop all this pollution.
Summer Singh: Oho! What an idea!! This is toh like that only….
Petrol hua mehnga, car mat chalaana
Ghar se office tum, samajwaadi cycle par hee jaanaa!!

Wah Wah!! Wah Wah!! Aadab aarz hai!!

Moneymohan Singh has his head in his hands in desperation.

Mahamaya Bhenji: Oye honorable Summer and Pahalwan Singh!….why should people ride your bicycle?? Promoting your party symbol so blatantly! Shame on you! Oye if people have to travel pollution free then they should travel in my symbol- the elephant! Oye Honorable Moneymohan! I demand that you provide an elephant to every car owner and yes I want for 50% of elephants should be of lower caste…er... I mean they should be owned by lower castes!
C.Dumberam: Davos on elephants!! They would think I have landed out of a tropical jungle! And how would I climb that animal with my dhoti??
Alaa Loo re-enters the room.
Aala Loo Yadav: Arre kahe shorwa macha rahein hai? Raise the price bhai…let everybody travel by humra rail! Hum apna rail diesel ka place main steam engine se chalaunga!
Shared Power (Maharastrian Ally): Moneymohan ji, the solution is very simple. As President of the Board for Making Money from Cricket in India (BMMCI) I propose we have another IPL 20-20 tournament where all money collected from TV, sponsor and public shall be handed over to our oil companies. Arre such is the power of the BMMCI that the next seven generations of the oil companies will not need to make money! And the public will be so entertained!!
Aala Loo Yadav: Arre humra bitwa bhi kirkeet khelta hai Powerji…This time he will be the star. In the last IPL, he played for the…arre bhai kaa naam thaa uska team ka..yes..Delhi Devil May Care.
C.Dumberam: Delhi Daredevils!!
Aala Loo Yadav: Yes, yes that too…
Moneymohan Singh: (now thoroughly exasperated) Oho! Stop all this cricket-shiket nonsense…we have to discuss oil!!...lets get some views of the opposition parties…
Prakash ‘Only sticks, No Carrots’: We shall not sign the nuclear deal with the imperialists Americans!!
Moneymohan Singh: Oho Carrot ji! I meant the dejure opposition and not the defacto opposition. Settledji…what are your opinions?
Settled Bihari Bagpayee: (snoring) Zzzzzzz….
Moneymohan Singh: Settledji!!!
Settled Bihari Bagpayee: (waking with a start) Tel ke daam badhaana……………………………………………………..yeh achi baat nahin hai……..
Moneymohan Singh: Oho that doesn’t help one bit…Akashvaniji , what about you?
LK Akashvani: Moneymohanji! All the answers to your questions can be found in my autobiography released recently…’My Country, Your wife’…I have given a free copy to Madam Oracle (who turns her head coldly to the other side)….I urgently insist that the entire Union Cabinet read my book to find a solution. I remember, in the 1970s when the OPEC raised oil prices, our Janata sarkar combatted the price rise by raising duties, lowering taxes, raising prices, providing subsidies to the poor….
C.Dumberam: Arre wat all contradictory nonsense you are saying Akashvani ji!!
LK Akashvani: Arre arre listen me, listen me!
Aala Loo Yadav: Arre chup rahiye burbak…kuch jante nahin hain..want to be PM...huh!
Mytake Ahluwalia: Can we please agree to raise prices??
Prakash ‘Only sticks, No Carrots’: We shall not sign the nuclear deal with the imperialists Americans!!
Moneymohan Singh: Oho…rest assured Carrotji we shall not….Can somebody offer a way out…Our esteemed guests from the entertainment industry…what do you think sirs??
Dukh Sukh Khan: In my adopted city of Kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk………Kolkata….
Bigger than everyone else B: Arre my dear Dukh Sukh, you are already stuttering like a car that has run out of petrol. Moneymohan ji, I am honoured that you have solicited my opinion. I am a small man, a humble farmer and a modest actor. Please do not raise any prices….Jaya has a lot of difficulty in managing the household expenses and Abhi-Ash have not been doing to well in their films lately….
Summer Singh: Arre wah bade bhaiya! Kya baat kahi!! Wah Wah! Wah Wah!
Moneymohan Singh: (about to collapse from weariness) I understand your compulsions Mr.B….Can anyone here please suggest a solution?? (Pleading now)
Aala Loo Yadav: Arre kahe na worry karte hain….drink tea and eat biskoot....i say make a committee, let them decide which price to raise and which not…and by the time the report comes...it shall be elections and the headache of Akashvani ji….he will find all solutions from that encyclopedia of his….hehehehe!!
Moneymohan Singh: And who do you propose should head this committee Aala Loo ji??!
Aala Loo Yadav: Arre that new boy has come na..ka naam hai uska….ummm…yes! Bullocks Osama!
Prakash ‘Only sticks, No Carrots’: We shall not sign the nuclear deal with the imperialists Americans!!
Transcript ends, Moneymohan faints….

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It is every writer’s dream plot. Blood, mystery, murder, illicit relationships and the unsaid. Two dead bodies in one small house. No one having any clue as to what happened on the fateful night. A father in prison, an unconvinced mother and a set of bungling cops. And, as much of the public now believes, a killer at large. You could write these words on the back on a book jacket and expect the thriller to fly off the shelves. The only problem is that this is not a plot or a story. In the middle of this all, Arushi Talwar and her servant Hemraj (have we all forgotten him in this ‘Arushi murder case’?) are dead and no one including the police it seems, even after two weeks of the murder, has any clue as to who killed them.

It is a murder that has captured media space like no other, which has held us in a thrall and made couch detectives out of all us. We have all heard the police, some of us believed them, some didn’t. We have all had our theories; have had our explanations for the actions and the events of the dramatis personae as described to us by an ever ready media. We have speculated on the unsaid, pondered the said and gone over and over again with the sequence of events, Arushi’s mails and messages and her and the parents’ profiles as described by those who know them. And at the end of the day all of us are still where we were when the young girl’s body was first discovered on the morning of May 16th.

So why does the ‘Arushi murder case’ refuse to go away from our newspapers and television screens? And why are we engaged now in such a huge debate over the ethics of the way we all have conducted ourselves over the past two weeks? My guess is that a combination of factors have all come together to place the Talwar family in a centre of a media and police circus (and I hate to use this word but no better synonym comes to the mind straightway) that no other family has been subjected to in 24 hour news channel history. I wonder whether this case would have received so much attention had Hemraj’s body not been discovered on the roof of the Talwar residence the very next day after the police had announced him their prime suspect. Had Hemraj actually murdered the girl, robbed the house and ran away with the booty this case would have died a natural death…just like so many other cases of murders of senior citizens by their servants appear and vanish in a flash from our media networks. But the moment Hemraj’s body was discovered that morning, Arushi’ case was granted a boon of immortality. An immortality that would last perhaps till the time the court convicts a killer. And even then I wonder, many of us shall still keep speculating over the questions, the instances and the acts that would remain unanswered or unexplained.

As I said in the beginning it has all the ingredients of a potboiler ready to be served on instant television. A middle class family of professionals, a servant, a residence in a well off colony of a suburb and a young school going teenager who, as now appears from her private details being flashed in public, loved hanging around her friends and was the only child of her parents. This then is the perfect archetypical middle class urban Indian setting. A family, a servant, a girl next door. The sense of identity of a large section of the television and newspaper audiences with the Talwars is complete. Above that there is the compelling curiosity of an unsolved murder. But perhaps the biggest turn on of the entire saga is the role of the parents and till date none of us is convinced as to their actions and intentions of that fateful night. Some suspect the father; some question the total ignorance of the mother. Some of us were even surprised and shocked as to how calm the mother appeared on television channels when she finally spoke to the media. Could the parents have slept through a double murder in a small flat? Did the father actually kill the daughter because she knew of his illicit relationship as the police claim? Somewhere deep down all of us fear that Arushi’s murder might well be the first instance of cold blooded killing of a yuppie teenager by her educated and professional parents in urban India. And not all of us who harbor that suspicion believe that honor killing is the motive behind that. So there it is; you and I neither know the killer nor the motive. We are still on square one. And that is the most compelling factor drawing us voyeuristically towards this case everyday.

And what about the media? The bunch of people who have been painted as nosy intruding private Sherlocks on the one hand and skeptical journalists busting the police theories on the other. The media has fed our hunger, has been spurred on by the mysteries and inconsistencies of the entire episode and has splashed the Talwars all across the front and the city pages and the news bulletins. Infact the murder made it on the front page of the city magazine of one of Delhi’s leading dailies yesterday under the title of ‘Whodunit?’ a first perhaps for such city magazines. In a vigorous and lively debate on ‘We the People’ last night Barkha Dutt (playing the devil’s advocate as the anchor) and Deepak Chaurasia of Aaj Tak made a spirited defense for the role of the media in the entire case. Their basic lines of defense went as follows – a) The media’s job is to report and that is all it did, whether it was when the police first declared Hemraj the suspect or when they later trained their guns on Dr.Talwar. b) The media (at least Deepak’s channel as he claimed on the show) quizzed the police as to why a dead young girl’s character was being questioned when there was no concrete evidence to support their ‘objectionable but not compromising position’ theory. c) The media have covered the case in an unbiased manner and have focused on the servant as much on the girl and did not exercise the bias of access (portraying Dr.Talwar as guilty initially and immediately turning in his favor the moment his wife started granting television interviews).

To be fair to both Barkha and Deepak, no one is questioning their right to report the event or for that matter even to quote the policemen and pronounce the servant or Dr.Talwar as the prime accused if the police has announced them to be so. It is not the media’s primary job to discover bodies, clues and killers. They are there to report. But a concoction of police callousness, middle class anxiety and media overzealousness has lead to some distasteful consequences in this entire affair. Principally the objections towards the actions of the journalists’ tribe are based on the following counts.

One – A young girl’s life, her private messages, social networking profiles and emails have all been laid bare open in front of the entire nation. When the television channels had reached a conclusion that there was nothing incriminating in Arushi’s messages and mails to her father then was there a need to splash them across out television screens and newspapers? More than the journalists the blame for this crass treatment of a deceased young girl and her servant must lie on the police. Charges of sexual intimacy between the two victims, extra marital affairs of Dr.Talwar and innuendoes of wife swapping between the Talwars and the Durranis have been made on and off the record without a shred of evidence. The police have been hungry to come on camera, eager to tell the people that they know all when the reality is that even now they know hardly anything. And a hungry pack of journalists, camped outside the victim’s residence and the Noida police offices has lapped up every crumb thrown at it and flashed it before us without assessing its worth.

Two – No matter how smart you, me, Barkha or Deepak may be, at the end of the day we are NOT detectives. It is not our job to sit in our studios and couches and speculate on who was the murderer. The attempt by the vernacular media to play Sherlock, reenact the drama, claim secret sources and arouse viewer curiosity by tantalizing titles such as ‘Arushi ka kaatil kaun?’ have simply been attempts at shooting darts in the dark with a blindfold.

And finally there has been this entire matter of crime shows and news programs where reporters have posed as the victim, mouthed dialogues such as ‘Papa aapne mujhe kyon mara?’ (so the father is assumed guilty?) and ‘Main Arushi hoon…suniye meri daastaan’. The vernacular media as always has found it difficult to maintain a distinction between coverage of a murder and the dramatics of an Ekta Kapoor serial and have tended to be swayed towards the latter. A Hindi channel showed an explicit MMS claiming it to be of Arushi. Eventually it was not, but there has been no trace of apology coming from the channel top bosses.

In a case which keeps getting complicated by the day, the media has tied itself up in knots and shown both its halos and its warts. It has been the watchdog as well as the scoop hunting bloodhound. It’s an act inherently full of contradictions and hence I guess the discomfort of us all as we see this playing out in front of us. So who killed Arushi Talwar and Hemraj? Sitting on my computer I cannot find out. Maybe the CBI will answer that question for all us. As for the Noida police, there can be only one word to describe them – irresponsible. The sack was the least they deserved.

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What you and I suspected (and perhaps believed) for long has now been confirmed by a court of law. Vikas Yadav and a brother of his have been convicted for the abduction and murder of Nitish Katara. And today’s verdict brings to an end the saga of three high profile murder cases each of which was uniquely different but each of which shared an intangible common thread. The shooting of Jessica Lall, the rape and murder of Priyadarshini Mattoo and the abduction and consequent murder of Nitish Katara – each a crime of a different nature committed by unrelated protagonists; yet each a crime which represented the catharsis of a rapidly changing urban India and which more importantly shook, tested and finally to a certain degree vindicated the faith of the urban middle class in the country’s judicial system. Each case involved a cold blooded crime, each had an accused with powerful police and political links and in each case the process of justice was tried to be subverted through every possible way. In two of them, the defense actually succeeded at the trial stage before the prosecution was redeemed by the Delhi High Court. It is to the credit of Neelam Katara and the prosecution lawyers that Nitish Katara’s case did not suffer the same fate in the trial court. In spite of a six year long trial, repeated witness absences and hostilities, the court managed to pass the only logical verdict possible in the litigation.

Do I seem biased? Had I made my mind even before the trial about the guilt of an accused man? Am I as guilty as the media of pre-judging a case and passing a verdict even before the trial has been completed? Perhaps I am. But consider the Nitish Katara episode – a young man in the prime of his life is murdered on the outskirts of Delhi. His head is split open by being bashed with a heavy object and his body set on fire to avoid identification. Eyewitnesses see him last being escorted out of a social function by two heavily built men. One of them is the goonda and criminal son of a goonda, muscleman and criminal Member of Parliament (all in that order of achievement). The father son due are the acknowledged bahubalis of a Delhi suburb and have a range of criminal cases pending against them. The son is considered the prime suspect by the police. The motive is established when the victim’s mother discloses the intimate letters and cards sent by the accused’s sister to the victim. There is photographic evidence of the two (batch mates from a MBA program) together and the sister post the murder is packed off to the UK for further studies. The big picture – Just because Vikas Yadav did not like Nitish Katara dating his sister, he abducted him along with a couple of like minded goons and killed him in cold blood. The still bigger picture – A Jessica Lall was bumped off by a Manu Sharma, the son of Congress MLA with powerful contacts in the administration and police, in the presence of a page three crowd just because she refused to serve him a drink as the bar at a private party was closing. A Priyadarshini Mattoo was stalked by a fellow law student (son of top ranking cop in Delhi Police) who finally decided to enter her house, rape her and go on to murder her brutally.

The bottom line – In urban India, you can shoot, rape, abduct and kill someone whom you do not like (Vikas Yadav) or whom you do like (Santosh Singh in the Mattoo case) or someone who just annoys you with a refusal (Manu Sharma) at the drop of a hat and then walk away as if nothing happened. You can care two hoots for the law and sit back and relax because your Daddy dearest has contacts in the police who will subvert the investigation for you, he has the money that will allow you to hire expensive defense lawyers who have sold their conscience and morality to money (Ram Jethmalani) and also arrange for your defense to buy out/ threaten prime witnesses who decide to depose against you. And voila! In no time are you back at home declared a free and wrongly condemned man.

Is it any surprise then for you to see where the sympathies of the media and the general public lay in each of these cases? You might argue that for the media it made a David vs. Goliath, the corruption of the lower judiciary, subversion of justice and such other kind of juicy stories. But what of the general public? We were not in it for the stories and we certainly did not wish convictions in each of these cases because we had something to sell. We identified and sympathized with the victims because deep down we realized that it affected us. That instead of Jessica Lall it could have been one of us at that party, that instead of Priyadarshini it could have happened to one of us in our Delhi University days and that instead of Nitish Katara we could find ourselves being butchered by a non-approving brother with his musclemen. In each of these instances, the victims were young middle class educated urban Indians trying to make a life for themselves in an honest way. And in each of these cases, they found themselves slain by those who thought they could get away with anything. Is it any surprise for you then why we sympathize with the Lalls, Mattoos and Kataras of this world?

For if the young and the educated have to seek a future in this country then its courts must guarantee them protection from the wolves like Vikas Yadav who roam our streets with impunity, who drive in their tinted glasses SUVs, run people over under their luxury cars, threaten those around them on the hollow strength of their musclemen and believe that money and power can protect them from anything. The Indian state needs to show these illegitimate sons of illegitimate and corrupt power their true place. And the only way to that is through indiscriminate policing and judicial enforcement of laws.

The natural process of law enforcement requires us to presume a man innocent till he is proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That is the only moral obligation that our courts cast upon us. We are not obliged to feel for them or extend any benefits of doubts to them. If they are found guilty at the end of a fair trial they deserve their dues. And you and I can argue whether they would have got away with their subversive and manipulative tactics in our courts had not their every move been scrutinized by an intrusive, aggressive, perhaps pre-determined but certainly a vigilant media. For once a witness turning hostile or forensic report being fudged gained more prominence than a female actor’s evening gown. For once this aggression made you and me believe that something fishy was going on and we all stood vindicated as the courts delivered their verdicts.
The wheels of justice turned, albeit slowly, but surely. And at the end of it I have only three words for the three convicts who thought their fathers could get them through anything – rot in hell. They may rest assured that Indian prisons would be much worse off than that.

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In a pose that would do any politician proud. This is after the win...and the excitement was palpable. At one stage Delhi seemed in trouble, but Dinesh Karthick played an uncharacteristically aggressive knock to guide his team home. I am wearing the Daredevils jersey which i had bought just before the game for a thousand bucks (!). Worth the money, as the team won. And now they are in the semis, so i have another day to wear the jersey. :)

A delirious crowd after the Daredevils had completed the victory.....

Sachin Tendulkar is clean bowled and the crowd at Kotla erupts. Uptil then we a chant of 'Sachin! Sachin!' was rverberating all around me (and i was joining in as well). The moment his leg stump went for a toss, i instinctively found myself jumping out of my seat. Something that has never happened before in the 19 years of my watching Tendulkar play. Mr.Modi, you can count me amoungst those who have taken to city based loyalties.

The view from where i was seated. First innings, Jayasuriya has just started to open up his arms against the Delhi bowlers.

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There is a certain sense of identification associated with a tragedy. It is popularly said that every American alive on that date remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first heard of the Japanese bombing of the Pearl Harbour and the assassination of President Kennedy. Tragedies, particularly the sudden, unforeseen, irregular and unexpected ones have a shaking up effect. One might think that natural disasters like cyclones and earthquakes occur so frequently that we have become numb to their havoc, but the fact is that it is not the extent and the magnitude of the damage but the complacency which it shatters that makes a tragic event leave a scar. Sometimes, for the unfortunate ones, on the body and almost permanently on the mind. Independent America never thought an enemy would reach its shores and bomb its naval base or smash its proudest towers into dust with such impunity. In those heady days of hope in the early 60s no one ever thought that a President so loved by his people would be so brutally killed on the street. When traders stepped into the Bombay Stock Exchange on a sunny morning in March of 1993, nothing unusual was expected. It was business as usual. Stock exchanges never had been targeted through an act of violence and on that spring morning too there was nothing to defy the belief. Nothing to indicate that the Sarojini Nagar market where one picked such nice bargains would ever be abandoned all alone with a bomb. No reason or historical fact to presume or believe that when people walked in for a laser show at the Lumbini park in Hyderabad, some of them would not be returning home.

We never believe that tragedy can strike – either at us or a few feet away from us or for that matter at those spots where we frequently dine, shop or eat or in that city in which unhindered movement we take for granted. And it is because we do not expect it to happen to us, to our places, to our town and to our city that when it actually does happen, it leaves us numb.

Tonight, another Indian city has had its first brush with terror. Jaipur has withstood seven bomb blasts one after the other. Each timed to perfection, placed meticulously and each kept to go off in places where ordinary people like you and me would go on ordinary days to perform ordinary activities thinking nothing extraordinary could ever happen. Well, tonight it did. 60 people are dead and more than a 150 are injured. And a vibrant, bustling and busy city has lost what it can never regain – innocence. More than 200 families spend this night in anxiety, pain, agony and despair. Men, women and children – all out on daily routines of life have been punished for just that – living. Not for committing murders or looting or demolishing mosques or temples but simply because they did that one simple thing that all of us strive to do – live our daily lives. To say that their death is a waste of human life is an understatement. The answer to the ‘Why’ behind their death is even more eluding and frightening. Why did men so upset and angry about what is happening with their religion in the bloody streets of the middle - east turn towards innocent people thousands of miles away to express that anger? Expect no simple answers.

My only brush with terror, if I may call it that, came when three serial bomb blasts shook Delhi in late October of 2005. It was a couple of days before Diwali and I was on my way home looking to a week long break when the radio broke the news. One of the blasts took place at a chaat stall in the Sarojini Nagar market. An innocuous eatery at a busy market, crowded with hungry Diwali shoppers. Everytime I now go to Chandni Chowk and stand near the Town Hall to eat the Dahi Bhallas, my heart invariably skips a beat of awareness. A busy eatery at the corner of a congested lane. Shoppers, customers, cyclists and rickshaw pullers all milling around. Electric wires hanging overhead and a footpath with hardly any space to walk in the normal course, let alone run in case of a need. A perfect setting I say to myself everytime I stand outside that lane to eat. A perfect setting I say to myself whenever I am at the railway stations. Crowded platforms, unmanned metal detectors that do not work, no screening of baggage and no CCTVs. One can walk into a train with a bag of explosives without even being touched or stopped.

In a country where the value of life is so cheap, such blasts as those borne by Jaipur will not blow the wax out of our ears. Unfortunately the death and the injuries of those 200 odd citizens will not force the Indian state to sit up and acknowledge that it does not have an anti-terror policy and that it needs to urgently draft one. That’s its Intelligence set up needs drastic streamlining and restructuring. That’s its police needs reforming and should be out patrolling our streets rather than being holed up in the VIP zones of our cities. We are a soft state not because we do not have the resolve to act against terror but because we are not able to instill a fear of law in them and play the game with as much single mindedness and brutality as they do.

And while the Indian state ‘reflects’ on another set of lives lost and damaged, you and I can only do what we do everyday. Get out on the street and live our lives. Walk the roads, travel the footpaths, shop at the markets, eat at the roadside eateries, and venture out on Diwalis at crowded and potentially unsafe markets. You and I must continue to live our lives even though on days such as today we may never be able to trace our steps back home, even though on days such as today events may not leave us with the bodily resources to walk back home, even though on days such as today we may be facing the prospects of funeral pyres. You and I must walk the roads, for the right to live is a right greater than any enshrined even in our Constitution. It’s a right granted by humanity. And you and I must not allow any person to browbeat us into mortgaging it away.

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Ferozshah Kotla from the top tier stand under floodlights as Delhi take on Banglore

CP gets blocked as the cops watch...it would be another 15 mins in the sun before the road was cleared

Medicos are out on the streets chanting slogans against Arjun Singh....again

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I begin by putting forward a simple question to you. Which Indian state in the recent past has witnessed that maximum political agitation over the most trivial, divisive and inconsequential issues? You would not have to be a ‘paanchvi paas’ to reach the correct answer. It is Maharashtra of course. Trace the course of Maharashtra politics over the last few years and you would traverse such glorious and nationally relevant milestones such as digging up of the pitch to protest Pakistan’s cricket tour, renaming Bombay into Mumbai, agitation over disenfranchising of Bal Thackeray for vituperative writings, Mee Mumbaikar campaign, a lot of song and dance (pun intended) over the dance bars and the girls who perform there, the whole anti-North Indian protests on the road and now this fresh political initiative to curb the skin displays of cheerleaders at the IPL games. For a nation that revels in trivializing its political debates, Maharashtra sets the benchmark. You could scarcely imagine, following the course of the above events, that this is a state whose capital was sunk under water for two days a couple of years back, that the security of the sate capital is constantly under threat, that its farmlands are dry and farmers eating pesticides to end their lives as crops routinely fail and that its status as the prime industrial state of the nation in the last decade has now been taken over by Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. As Maharashtra has decayed and declined, so have its opportunist politicians. In a game characterizing the most crass form of competitive reactionary politics, the parties involved have routinely stirred up the pot and tried to grab media space through non-issues.

Perhaps Maharashtra’s problem stems from the multi-polarity of its political landscape and that, unlike the cow belt states in the north, its political parties have seen their dedicated vote banks being shaken over the past few years. The Shiv Sena has been on the far right of the political space for four decades, yet has not been able to establish itself as the most dominant party of the state simply because of its reactionary agenda, propensity of violence and inability to offer a mainstream developmental platform. The one time when Uddhav Thackeray tried to adopt a more centrist position, he found himself being jostled out of the far right by an even more reactionary and narrow minded cousin Raj. As both the Thackeray cubs (or pussy cats as we may call them more deservingly), fight for the same space, each shall try to outdo the other by engaging in similar tactics of targeting outsiders, minorities and anyone else whom they can paint as a devil for all the problems of Maharashtra.

What surprises one in all this is that in the recent past, it has been the NCP and the Congress who have been at the forefront of pursuing mindless and irrelevant. The Home Minister RR Patil went after the bar dancers with a missionary zeal and it is the NCP itself that has now assumed the BJP and RSS’s mantle of guardians of the Indian culture and protested against the IPL cheerleaders. And while one may grudgingly grant the Home Minister the leverage of his ideological and cultural affiliations, it is clear that the NCP is clearly trying to expand its space and be a milder version of what the Shiv Sena used to be. The idea of course is clear, push the Sena into a further corner and marginalize it more as it grapples with dipping popularity, a revived Raj Thackeray and a new leader who can’t replace the old and aging patriarch. The Congress instead of the occupying the Centre space and adopting a conciliatory position has backtracked, observed without any action, not made an effort to focus attention on more burning topics of the state and dilly dallied and prevaricated in its response to everything. In all the Congress position has been to bury its head in the sand and wait till the storm passes or plead helplessness in the face of a hostile opposition and alliance partner.

The central issue is not whether cheerleaders in skimpy costumes are an offence to Indian sensibilities or whether cricket has been trivialized by having them around (basketball and American football wasn’t and T20 would also not be). NCP and Congress leaders frequently occupy front rows in Bollywood functions where actors in skimpier outfits perform on the stage and those who have performed on the screen are honored with awards. The moot point is whether the costumes of a few young women looking to make some money by doing a perfectly legitimate activity in public space is a matter worth debating in our assemblies and parliament when the nation grapples with a rising inflation, an impending slowdown in the economy and an agricultural slump. Are IPL cheerleaders more important for our politicians than these pressing concerns and if yes, then is there something wrong in the way we elect them or have we simply failed to get the message across to them that all that they need to do is govern and make our lives simpler and not pretend to govern and find helpless scapegoats to exercise their supposed moral assertions on?

A decade ago, in the context of its industrial development, it was said what Maharashtra is today India should aim to be tomorrow. Today, India would serve itself well to show Maharashtra the light.

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So the IPL is up and running and whatever the critics may say (Mukul Kesavan wrote a scathing article lambasting the concept on Cricinfo last week), the tournament has been a hit. Attendances may not have been full (it was close to 85% in the first game at Mohali that I witnessed myself) but the television ratings have been high, despite Sony’s shoddy production values. Like DD in the past, Sony too does not believe in showing you the activity after the last ball of the over or the replay immediately after a wicket falls.

My only concern with the format thus far - the boundaries are pulled in a little too much turning even mishits into sixes and fours. IPL can avoid shortening the dimensions of the grounds simply to broaden the egos of the batsmen. The talented ones will clear the ropes anyways. My picks thus far – Warne (for the way he has lead an unfancied team), Ravindra Jadeja (for all that he brings to his team), McGrath (still as sharp), Dhoni (he ain’t no fluke as a captain), Rohit Sharma (for reaffirming his talent) and all the Aussies who have demonstrated that they do remain the ultimate professionals in the game. On current form and player strength Chennai, Delhi & Kolkata look set to reach the semis while Mohali/ Jaipur/ Deccan might battle for the last spot. Mumbai have been the biggest disappointment. Sachin’s injury and Bhajji’s slapping have made more news than their actual performances. At $110 mn they seem to be the most expensive failure of the tournament. After retail, another example of Reliance getting a business wrong? Chotte bhai Anil must be laughing away in some corner. Mukesh’s team won’t last this marathon for sure.

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