Write back after being left out

Okay, long time no write.
So, on the second day of the new year as per my calendar (and yours), I am back.
Yup, same day as you or I see (or don’t see -- depends on the state of fogginess outside. No, not because of still-lingering hangover, but the ‘thick blanket of fog enveloping the skyline’, as weather reporters love to put it.)
Yes, the very same day fog has been playing truant with visibility and trains (again, colliding with fellow train at Kanpur; Gorakhdham Express hit a “stationary” Prayagraj Express).

Yes, I am a day late, but here’s my wishlist for 2010. You keep your rear side on the chair and your hands off the ESCAPE key, and read on:

1. I shall not lie and say I am not lying.

2. I shall not tell a reporter that he’s a lousy writer, and a lousier reporter.

3. I shall not tell a deskie that he should quit journalism and try a call centre or airline calldesk job.

4. I shall try and cut down on the number of packs (cigarettes, I mean, so Shahid Kapur, Hrithik Roshan and all the filmi types can get their salary cheques).

5. I shall genuinely, genuinely, and honest-to-my-heart genuinely, try and reduce my dates with Bacchus.

6. I shall love all human beings and not tell them that they shouldn’t have tried to outlive the Neanderthal Age.

7. I shall even try and love all the dogs of this world (their population seemingly split between Vaishali, Ghaziabad, where I live; and Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, where I work).

8. I shall not tap-dance my way to the DELETE button on the keyboard the moment I see a mail from the HR guys (admission: I might just slow-waltz my way to it, whatever the difference is).

9. I shall try and do an honest day’s work every day (but, maybe, for the Sundays, when wife dear expects more out of human specimens in a day than is humanly possible in a week).

10. I shall try and keep this blog a little less spaced-out than six months, when I last wrote on it, as I just saw while logging in.

That’s it. Goodbye and good day. Now hit the ESCAPE key

In Delhi, Metro kills. (Or is it Killer Metro?)

LONG before cassettes, compact discs and other hi-tech sources of music invaded our lives, there was the humble LP – or long play records.

Now, played over and over again for every guest and her uncle’s relative who came home, the records often got scratched beyond repair, leading to the needle going all over the place. It also got stuck quite often, playing in a loop like a broken record.

Example: like India’s health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, who, plagued even as the country is with swine flu and a world of other health issues, is stuck on controlling India’s population with ideas of late marriages and late-night TV programming to deter sex.

Which brings us to the issue we might as well discuss. Population. Azad is right, in a roundabout way: India’s population is way too much for our political, civil, social and anti-social societies to care too much about a few lives gone here, and a few gone there. A few lives snuffed out by a pillar falling at a Metro construction site in South Delhi, for instance.

Or more lives that could have been snuffed out barely 30 hours later at the same site, when cranes pulling out the crashed debris crashed themselves.

The reaction: inquiry commissions galore, and the obligatory few lakhs of ‘compensations’ announced for families of the ‘victims’.

Question: Can you compensate for a life? That, too, life of the lone earning member of a family, most likely steeped in debt back in the village? For, that precisely is the state of the families of Anshuman Pratihar, Pappu Yadav, Amit Yadav and Niranjan Yadav, as reported by Delhi Newsline over the last two days.

What, pray, were they doing? Following the government’s ever-ambitious dreams of basking in its own glory, come October 2010 with the Commonwealth Games, and putting one more project on an even more ambitious track.

‘See, what we have done!’ the political class would say next October, and you can bet that your October 2010 salary on that. ‘If there’s a will, there’s a way,’ they would gleam on.

Sure, but as every smoker knows the poor-taste joke: if there’s too much of Wills, there always is a smoke.

You can’t of course blame the authorities, for within hours after six men turned ‘victims’, the Metro railway chief took ‘moral responsibility’ and resigned. But realpolitic and exigency counts more than morality these days, so he took back the resignation within a day.

Question: who will take the physical, material and corporal responsibility for turning men into photos on wall?

After all, somebody made a mess of the project. A big mess. Somebody had also made a mess at all the earlier messes on different lines of the same project.

The political class has an answer: inquiry commissions have been set up. The truth will come out soon and “action” then will be initiated against the guilty, as Urban Development Minister S Jaipal Reddy told the nation through Parliament.

Question: who will the action be initiated against? No one has been booked, after all. The police have registered cases of culpable homicide (or murder, as I prefer to out it, shorn of the cover that the pretentious word seems to offer) against ‘unknown persons’.

There you are then: somebody messed up for sure but bet your salary of October 2009 that no name will ever come out.

If it was homicide, or murder, of six young men, sure. But there are no murderers. No one is culpable.

Who needs culpability anyway? After all, there are too many of us in this country. A few funerals do not matter, but for the immediate family members.

Damages, after all, have been paid for those funeral services.

May be Azad in his stuck-LP mode is right: bring down the population and we might start caring for each other.

At last, the truth: Maoists led Mamata in Singur, Nandigram

Finally, the media has begun reading traces into what has seemingly been evident for long in West Bengal: that the Maoists have backed Mamata Banerjee and her Trinamool Congress in her agitations in the past couple of years.
Nandigram. Singur. Two of Mamata's singular achievements as a politician for over two decades now. Cut out the two, and Didi becomes just another four-letter word: Zero.
In Nowhereland, and with a one-way ticket into further reaches of Nowhereland, she was hurtling from one platform to another in political vacuum when the Singur issue came up, followed by Nandigram. Till then, Mamata and her band of men (for there were hardly any woman in Trinamool till even two or three years ago) could, at best, organise a hartal in Kolkata. And even that would have been an unsuccessful one, leading to clashes between her men and the CPI(M)'s. So much for her organisational skills!
Then came the twin issues, and suddenly Mamata and Trinamool were seen by the Indian media as beacons of virtue, a born-agaon Mother Teresa, with skill sets in organisaing protests equalling that of Mahatma Gandhi's. It was a joke, of course, for all the groundwork was done by the Maoists, and frustrated, rebellious and kicked-out CPM members.
Only, the men and women who should have seen through the joke and called the bluff -- the journalists -- never saw it. Perhaps they did not want to. The hatred against the Left was so deep-rooted that they failed to see the bigger picture. And the far bigger menace: bloody lawlessness like Chhattisgarh or Jharkhand.
The monster's out of the bag now; some of the Maoist leaders have been quoted by the media seeking their pound of flesh from Didi now -- in return for the favour in Singur or Nandigram.
Having half-turned West Bengal into another Naxal-hit area, will The Lady see sense now?
Good question, but going by her antics over the past two decades and more, seems unlilely.
So, burn my beloved Bengal.

Heart wave in Delhi: Even Manmohan ‘loves’ the Left (smiley)

Politics, Manmohan Singh says today, is “an art of the possible”. What he perhaps missed out saying is it is also the art of lying.
Otherwise, how do you change your views 360 degrees in less than 24 hours?
On Friday (May 1), Singh had addressed a rally in Howrah, in the suburbs of Kolkata, and launched a Bofors missile of an attack on Buddhadeb Bhattacharya’s Left Front government in West Bengal. He had blamed the Left for all the under-development and joblessness in the state, apart, of course, from criticising them for nearly scuttling his deal with the United States -- aka the “n-deal”.
Today (May 2), he tells CNN-IBN: “We have worked with the Left parties before... I have enjoyed working with the Left.”
Really, Mr Outgoing Prime Minister? Or is it the heat stroke effect?

Why Mumbai didn't vote, and why it's good

A day after The Big Polls in Mumbai, it was a shock this morning to see newspapers toe the news channels, their imbecile yet upmarket country cousins, in blaming poor Mumbaikars for not turning out in droves and jam all roads leading to polling booths.
Barkha Dutt to Kiron (writer unsure about the number of Rs or Ks in her same, so seeks pardon) Kher in The Buck Stops Here on NDTV: Why do you think Bollywood’s appeal to Mumbai to come out and vote failed?
Poor Dutt! As if we Indians listen to even our own conscience, let alone our parents, forget about some filmstars showing us the finger! Get some brains, Ms Dutt.

Hindustan Times (Delhi edition) headline, with some seriously high-blown 72-points (that’s an inch in size): “All talk, no vote”
The shoulder strap, in mercifully smaller size, says: “Despite 26/11, candle-light vigils and voter campaigns, Mumbai stays home”
I believe the guys at HT thought the poor readers in the Capital would have gone insane and would miss the issue after all this emotional atyachar, so they put the ‘Mumbai stays home’ bit in red for effect.
Now, now, why did those Mumbaikars take out candle-light vigils and talk loudly against everyone and his/her uncle? Because they felt the rage literally come out in smoke from their noses, and they felt threatened after being targetted like only poor (not economically but generally, meaning everyone and her uncle) Indians have ever been. So what is the connection between talking about your right to safety after you have paid all dues, taxes etc and been good citizens, and going to the pooling booth and vote?
Simple answer: Nothing. Not for the media, though.
Give me a break, even I would have floundered for a choice given the options. A filmstar’s daughter who perhaps never brought up an issue of importance in five years in Parliament (Priya Dutt); a goonda from a goondas’ party (Ram Naik), a chor and a turncoat, among other things (Sanjay Nirupam); a rich man sporting good clothes and shades with no clue about the basic issues of a Mumbaikar (Milind Deora).
And these are just four candidates from across the spectrum. I would have given the polling a skip had I been living in any part of Mumbai, as I would do even on May 7 when Ghaziabad goes to polls.
Let us please not confuse the Good Citizen bit with voting, which, as the Constitution puts it, is a right that I may or MAY NOT opt to use. I, and I believe most of the “57% voters (who) skip the ballots” in Mumbai (headline in DNA newspaper), are good citizens and ‘nationalists’ to the core: we pay taxes on time, we pay all our dues, we pay power water and all other bills (sometimes a little late, but with a penalty!), we do not bribe or accept bribe, we genuinely try to be nice folks and not harass, abuse or slaughter people in riots…
That last one was a 69-worder of a sentence, and Microsoft Word is showing a green line -- for a “long sentence”. It’s time to pause. Take a deep breath. And go on living with pride, as it always has been.
Let the imbecile mediamen/women do their imbecile things in spare moments. We Indians are a forgiving, and forgetting, lot.

Mumbai shows the middle finger to polls. Really?

Why are they marking the middle finger in mumbai, and the index finger (as we have all known since ages) in other parts, say lucknow?

Manmohan: Rahul-baba zindabad

Manmohan Singh: "Rahul Gandhi has all the qualities to be a good Prime Minister."

Question: What does Manmohan Singh know about good premiership?