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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